clothes. It said “Cpl H. Donovan, RAF”.’
Of course. They’d done it with mine when I was convalescing in Alex.
She went on, ‘He says one of his shirts was stolen.’
We both raised our eyebrows. ‘What else?’
She sighed and pressed down a second finger. ‘The murder weapon. A knife wrapped up in the same bucket. It had the boy’s blood on it too. A bread knife, so the serrations held the stains very nicely thank you.’
‘Prints?’
‘A smudged set of Hugh’s on the handle.’
I winced. ‘You’ve seen his hands. He couldn’t hold a knife.’
‘The prosecution implied he could if he wanted to. The jury seemed to agree.’
‘Anything else? Witnesses swearing they saw him killing the boy?’
‘Nearly.’ She lowered a third finger. ‘Knowledge of the crime scene. Hugh knew a couple of things that only the murderer or his accomplice could know. The number of stab wounds: seven. That the body was naked. And that there were signs of strangulation.’
‘Christ.’
A fourth finger dropped. ‘There were also traces of heroin in the boy’s body.’
‘Dear God! But that doesn’t tie the murder to Hugh,’ I said desperately.
She raised one eyebrow. ‘But you can imagine what a meal the prosecution made of it. This junkie forcing himself on an innocent child. Turning him into a ravening dope fiend like himself. The jury’s eyes were rolling around like a game of bools.’
‘Did they know that Hugh used to go out with her?’ I choked on her name.
‘The boy’s mother, Fiona? Yes. It just gave the jury something else to nibble away at. Jilted lover, betrayal of the woman who befriended him etc. Hugh said you knew her too?
Oh, yes, Fiona. I knew you. I nodded. ‘Is that it?’
She turned her extended thumb down, leaving a clenched fist. ‘Just one more teeny wee thing. He confessed.’
TEN
I rubbed my face with both hands. Short of a Pathe newsreel showing Hugh murdering the boy, this case was as watertight as a Clyde steamer.
‘To all five?’
‘Just Rory.’
‘Duress?’ I tried.
‘Do you mean is it likely he was forced to confess? Yes. I have absolutely no doubt. Round here, your former colleagues are not known for their compassion towards child molesters, far less child murderers. When I first saw Hugh, his face – such as it is – was badly bruised and so was his body. Resisting arrest, they said. By the time he got to trial the marks had pretty well vanished. And of course the police claimed they’d used kid gloves.’
I nodded. It wasn’t new. I’d seen plenty of interrogations that involved gentle persuasion with a truncheon or a boot. Disillusionment was one of the reasons I joined the army; not that I found many choirboys among my fellow NCOs.
‘Did he retract his confession in court?’
She leaned towards me, and shook her head. ‘Not as such. Hugh was – is – a sick man. Half the time he doesn’t know what day it is. They gave him some painkillers during the trial but either too little or sometimes too much. And there was something about him. A sense of fatality. He just wanted it all over with. The trial. The pain. His life.’
‘The poor wee bastard.’
‘That he is,’ she said. We were silent for a moment.
A thought struck me. ‘ Were there any witnesses? Anyone hear anything? Hugh says he lived up a close. Rented a single-end next door to a family. A mother and four kids. What did they have to say?’
She shook her head. ‘The police took a statement from them at the time, just after his arrest. They said they saw nothing, heard nothing.’
‘Did you question them? At the trial?’
She sighed. ‘They weren’t at the trial. They’d vanished.’
‘Vanished? How do you mean? There were five of them, were there not?’
‘Seems they were evicted a few weeks before the trial started. No forwarding address. No one knows where they went. It happens. The police say they exhausted all lines of inquiry. Convenient eh?’
‘Smelly.’
There was a tinkling of china behind me and then the door was bashed back. The receptionist came in bearing a tray and a grudge. She plonked it down with an unnecessary clatter and ‘Yer tea, miss’ and returned to her lair. For the first time Samantha Campbell and I smiled at each other. It made her look younger.
‘What do you think then?’ she asked.
‘I think we’re in bother.’ I slurped at my tea. ‘Can I read the trial report myself?’
‘Help yourself.’ She swivelled the papers round to face me. ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll be back in an hour. I have another client to see.’
I leaned over the desk and began reading and flicking through the papers. She’d summarised it well. It all stacked up. The verdict seemed a foregone conclusion. And yet, and yet, the very neatness and comprehensiveness of the proof was too good to be true. If I’d wanted to build a procurator fiscal’s case I could hardly have done better. Was it just too pat? Why had Hugh not got rid of the bloodstained clothes? Or the knife?
Then there was the question of when the boy had died. He’d been missing for a week. Six and a half days. Last seen on the Monday around teatime with his pals, then found at eight thirty the following Monday morning by the coalman come to deliver some more bags to the coal cellars behind the tenements. The police pathologist reckoned he’d been dead for two to three days. There was very little blood in the coal cellar. It was likely that the boy had died elsewhere and been dumped. So where had Hugh – or the murderer – hidden the boy for three or four days? Surely not in his single room? The police had searched it early on. Could he have kept the kid quiet for four days? Not a whimper? Using the heroin?
Reading the detectives’ reports I recognised several names. The Chief Superintendent in charge was George Muncie. I remembered him from before the war, a big florid man, with red hair and a temper to match and a high opinion of himself. He ran my old Eastern Division as his personal fiefdom. Reporting to him was the case officer, Detective Chief Inspector Willie Silver. He must have got over his drink problem to have risen from detective sergeant in ’39. Or maybe he’d got better at hiding it. As Sam Campbell had put it, ‘Glasgow’s finest’.
‘Anything?’
I turned as the lawyer came back to her office. ‘I need to get below the words here. I need to speak to people, find out what the forensic boys thought rather than just what they wrote. I don’t like this gap between the boy’s abduction and his death. Where was he? Did you ask Hugh?’
‘Of course. So did the prosecution. And the judge. He had no answer.’
‘Well, I guess he wouldn’t, if he didn’t do it.’
‘The prosecution just claimed he was covering up his bestiality or at best was in a drug-induced stupor. Either way he was a sick animal for whom hanging would be a mercy.’
‘This heroin habit of his. Did they ever find his supplier?’
‘I don’t think they looked. Is that relevant?’
‘I have no idea. It’s just a loose end. Another part of the jigsaw. Hugh didn’t have contact with many folk. One of them was the supplier. It might give us a picture of his movements that week.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Witnesses? Friends?
‘The only one who seemed to stick up for him was his priest, Father Cassidy. He kept telling Hugh he believed he was innocent. But even his faith seemed to waver as the case went on. But he still goes to see him at Barlinnie.
