The Hanging Shed

FIVE

Hugh Donovan kept his hat on and his collar up in all weathers. Even in pubs; no, especially in pubs. He didn’t want to put off his fellow drinkers. It was a habit he’d started the day he left the hospital at East Grinstead and took the train north. Donovan was terrified. He’d spent nearly two years cloistered in Professor Archie McIndoe’s revolutionary burns unit. Nineteen operations on his hands and face and he still looked like something stitched together by a one-handed seamstress. This wasn’t to malign McIndoe’s now legendary skills. It was a recognition of the starting point.

Hugh should have got off at Kilmarnock but he took one look at the familiar smoke-black sandstone of the station and kept going, kept right on the extra twenty minutes to Glasgow. No one was expecting him in Kilmarnock. His father was dead and his mother had stopped visiting East Grinstead months ago, too stressing, all those poor boys wi’ ruined faces. She’d gone a bit doolally lately, Hugh had thought. He had five older siblings but they’d scattered to the winds in search of work or husbands.

He’d turned south as he came out of the St Enoch’s and walked over Jamaica Bridge spanning the Clyde. Hugh knew little of Glasgow, but enough to know that the Gorbals was an area where a man could lose himself and not stand out too much among the other ill-favoured folk crowded into the four-storey tenement blocks. It had always been Hugh’s experience that the people at the bottom of the heap were the most forgiving and accepting.

He found digs in Florence Street; a one-room single-end next to the room and kitchen of a family of five, four kids and a widow whose wage-earner had died in a shipyard accident. The ‘houses’ shared a toilet on the outside landing on the second floor of the sandstone tenement.

Hugh checked into the local post office and began collecting his army pension. He found Doyle’s pub on his second day and it became, through convenience and its anonymous cubbyholes, his evening haunt. Sometimes his lunchtime haunt too. He had no further thought to his future than to lie low, not bother anyone, see how it went, maybe get a wee job. The wee job that turned up became the heart of all Hugh’s future problems.

Hugh could ignore the looks. He could hide in quiet corners. He might have been happy enough to drift through his days like a wraith. But the physical pain was often beyond bearing. As the flesh had healed – haphazardly and multi-hued – the nerve ends too came back to life, back to haunt him. Instead of being cauterised by the ravening flames, his nervous system kept telling his brain to move away from the terrible heat. Kept sending waves of invisible fire over his face and limbs.

It had been expected and McIndoe had lined him up with a letter to take to the Glasgow Royal Infirmary to ensure that Donovan would have a steady supply of painkillers. But bureaucracy had stood in the way. The National Health Service existed only in newspaper reports forecasting the effect of the Beveridge proposals. If they were to be believed, in another couple of years Hugh would receive all the pain relief he needed from a free, national medical system. It seemed unlikely. And as of today he lacked a local sponsor to have him taken on the books of the dispensary. But an ex-army doctor took pity on him and agreed to give him morphine injections once a week on a Monday. Tuesdays were bliss for Hugh. Wednesdays were bearable. All the other days were nightmares waiting for Monday to come round.

He added Scotch. It brought temporary oblivion, but soon the sawing at his frayed and burnt nerve ends cut through and jolted him awake to a pain-filled hangover. Sometimes his moans woke the folk in the next flat and they banged on his wall till he quietened.

So the man he met in Doyle’s one night was as much a saviour as Christ himself. He sold dirty brown lumps of chemicals that you heated till liquid and then injected into a vein. The relief was instant. Like a balm administered by God himself. Stronger than the hospital version, it helped Hugh bridge the gap from Wednesday to the following Monday. Indeed, for an hour or two Hugh Donovan was transported, beyond pain, into a land of utter bliss. It was unsurprising that he began taking it daily. Unsurprising that his entire paltry war pension went on the heroin salve. Inevitable that the daily fix wasn’t enough. His body demanded more than he could afford. His saviour helpfully explained a solution. Hugh began to sell the stuff and take his commission in kind.

‘You became a junkie? And you sold the stuff! For Christ’s sake, Shug!’

He gazed at me with his tortured eyes. ‘I saw your limp. Wounded?’

I nodded. ‘Sicily. It’s fine mostly. Just when I get tired.’

‘Did they give you morphine?’

I remembered with all the warmth of a love affair, the blissful floating feeling of the first shot from the medic as they hauled me into the ambulance. I scarcely felt the bumping and crashing as we swayed down the pitted roads. There were many more injections, each taking me off into a wonderland of sweet comfort and happiness. It took a while to do without it.

‘Sorry, Hugh. It’s just… Selling the stuff?’

He shrugged. ‘I thought I’d go mad with the pain.’

‘What about the boy then? What about Fiona?’

It was pure chance. He glimpsed her coming out of the Co-op in Cumberland Street. It was her familiar walk that caught his eye. But she had a child by her side, a lad of maybe six or seven. Celtic-dark like his mother. A sweet wee face too. He pulled back into a shop doorway as she went past. He heard her tell the boy to pick up his feet, and he knew her voice. As unobtrusively as he could, he followed her along the cobbled streets to a close in Kidston Street which ran at 90 degrees to his own Florence Street. He watched her vanish inside and wondered what her husband was like. He wondered if I had kept in touch.

He took to hovering between Cumberland Street and Kidston Street. Over the coming weeks he must have seen her four or five times, usually with the boy, never with a man. Once he followed them to the benches under the trees in Hutcheson Square. He sat on the other side and pretended to read a newspaper. But his talent as a scout was soon laid bare. He’d waited till she walked round a corner before crossing over and peeking round it. She was waiting for him, two yards away.

‘Mister, Ah don’t know who you are but if you don’t stop following me ah’m getting the polis.’

Hugh slumped against the wall. ‘Sorry, missus. Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew.’

‘Oh aye, and who would that be?’ She folded her arms.

Hugh turned and made to walk away. But she took two steps and grabbed his arm. He turned and faced her and said, ‘Fiona MacAuslan.’

Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘That was my maiden name. How did you ken? Who are you, mister?’ He lifted his head a little. She could see his eyes under the hat. ‘Oh dear God, is that you, Hugh Donovan? Is that you?’

‘Aye, Fiona. Sorry to have frightened you. Ah’ll no bother you again. Sorry.’

‘You’ll do nae such thing, Hugh Donovan.’ She reached out and held his elbow again, stopped his retreat. Tears were already running down her face. ‘You’ll take some tea.’

They met once or twice a week after that. Fiona’s husband had died in the push through the Ardennes. She got a small war widow’s pension. She lived near her mother and had a parttime job at Miss Cranston’s tearoom in Buchanan Street. Her mother picked up the boy, Rory, after school. At first Hugh’s face made the boy hide behind his mother’s skirts, but soon, with the capacity all children have for absorbing change, Rory accepted him and ignored his blistered skin. Hugh taught the boy card games and made him giggle. Hugh clung to these moments like a rope in a gale. It helped him reduce the intake of heroin, even lessened the amount he would push. Until the world crashed around him.

She was in the street calling Rory’s name when he turned the corner. She was wild with fear, storming this way and that. There was already talk of this being the third or fourth child that had gone missing. The neighbours were out and soon there were little groups of women combing the closes and the washing-filled greens round the back. Rory had been out playing. His pals said a man with a hat and a coat had called him over. Rory had taken his hand and walked off. They hadn’t seen his face. Could have been anyone. Could have been him, they said, pointing at Hugh in his buttoned-up coat and hat. Fiona looked at him in a funny way for a second and then went back to her raging worry.

The police came and took notes and tried to calm the now hysterical Fiona. Her panic was infecting the whole neighbourhood. The press was ramping it up too. Headlines about the ‘Gorbals Ghoul’ were selling newspapers like the announcement of D-Day. A day passed, then another, then nearly a week had gone by and there was no sign of the boy or of the two others. The police interviewed everyone, including Hugh, in the first couple of days. They spent longer with him than anyone. He didn’t have much of an alibi for his time. How could he? They searched his room; it didn’t take them long. They found nothing.

Until the morning they burst down his door and found Hugh Donovan unconscious from a drug overdose. He was still dressed but his clothes were caked with coal dust. Under the sink was a bucket full of evidence. They dragged him from his bed and gave him a good kicking to wake him up. They called him an animal, a child molester, a murdering bastard who would rot in hell. They handcuffed him and dragged him out of the flat on to the landing. As an afterthought they read him his rights and arrested him for the kidnap and murder of Rory Hutchinson, and the kidnap and disappearance of four other missing boys.