Great War, seen my father come back with medals, sergeant’s stripes and a cough. Our tenement square was full of miners and miners’ sons who braved death every day. My notion of what made a man was laid down early. It didn’t involve conjugating irregular French verbs. I was twenty one, robed and capped with learning, but untested.
Percy Sillitoe was recruiting men to enforce civilised behaviour on Glasgow’s mean streets whether the mean citizens wanted it or not. I had a thirst for engaging with the real world for a few years before sinking back into the sweet embrace of intellectual argument and sentence parsing. I hadn’t counted on a second world war breaking out. I had no idea just how much I would be tested.
A trolley arrived and the library assistant began piling the big heavy binders on my desk. I lined all four up in front of me. I planned to do a daily skim of each to get the different textures of the day. I opened up each folder at Thursday 1 November 1945 and plunged in.
FIFTEEN
At first there was little but post-war news, stories of ration-book counterfeiting and troops still coming home from the fronts all over the world. Then came a snippet about a child missing in the Gallowgate and a big search, but nothing hinting about the horrors to come. The Gazette made the only connection with three earlier reported missing kids in Bridgeton and Hutchesontown but consigned it to the back pages. I wondered if my fellow journalists thought there was no mileage in slum kids vanishing, as though family disasters happened too often to be newsworthy.
Then midway through November came a report of Rory’s disappearance and suddenly other papers noticed. But it had taken five to go missing for them to see a pattern emerging. It was hard to say which came first, the newspaper speculation or the mob hysteria that was growing in the gossiping alleyways of the East End and the Gorbals. When Rory was found, and the details of his broken and naked body were disclosed, all hell broke loose. It was on the front pages under banner headlines. The police were under fire and were coming up with a stream of plodding platitudes that fooled no one.
When Hugh Donovan was arrested, the dam broke properly. The police were crowing and the papers were baying for blood.
A more moderate tone crept in as the trial started. They had no choice; Scotland’s courts were jealous of their ability to host a fair trial. Any intemperate speculation that affected the possible outcome would have brought down the wrath of the judiciary. Mind, it didn’t stop a good editor from fuelling the flames with innuendo and comments prefixed with that get-out-of-jail word, ‘alleged’. And of course they were allowed to report the day’s proceedings during the trial.
My head was buzzing and my eyes aching as I sat down in the tea shop in Sauchiehall Street for lunch. I sipped at my cup and chomped into a cheese sandwich. Beside me were my notes. I had four pages distilling six months of reporters’ stories, some of which were models of objectivity; many simply echoed the lynch mob in shrill prose.
One thing was clear: Rory’s abduction tapped into a ground-level panic in Glasgow about a monster who was snatching children. Rory’s disappearance was the final spark that lit the tinderbox. Fiona Hutchinson turned her frenzied search into a front page rallying point. The sudden newspaper pressure on the police to find the boys ratcheted up fears in every household across the city. It could be their wee Archie next. From a brief mention the day after the boy went missing to banner headlines took only ten days. I kept hoping to find a photo of Fiona, but perhaps the papers had been warned off about prejudicing the case. A pity. If she’d kept her looks, her tear-stained face would have sold extra editions by the cartful.
Within the week the stumbling desk sergeant filling the role of police spokesman had been replaced by Detective Chief Superintendent George Muncie himself. Muncie had never knowingly stepped into the shadows when there was a glimmer of limelight left to capture his hawk-nosed profile. The words ‘major man-hunt’ and ‘no stone left unturned’ poured from his fleshy lips in an endless stream of pompous cliches. I never understood why reporters loved him. Maybe they were just taking the piss.
By one of those quirks of divine comedy the hunt was being led by detectives from Eastern Division, my old nick at Tobago Street. It was on their patch the first two kids had gone missing, and they were just the other side of the Clyde from the Gorbals where Rory had been abducted. They were working closely – they said – with the Cumberland Street police, but that probably meant both teams slagging each other off for failing to make headway and being ready to nab the glory if one did. It also gave the newshounds access to two teams of coppers who’d say anything to make it look like progress to cover their own backsides.
By the time they’d found the body, half of Glasgow was out looking for the weans, Rory included. The other half was stuck at home, guarding their terrified kids from the ‘Gorbals Ghoul’, as he’d now been christened by the Gazette. The pressure was on Muncie and his boys to deliver, and into their laps fell the poor racked body of Hugh Donovan. Within hours Muncie was crowing – in sombre and portentous tones, of course – about the remarkable detective hunt that had led to their apprehension of a suspect. It made it sound as if there’d been a mass clear-out of dead wood among the ranks of Glasgow sleuths and the repopulation by honours graduates of the Sexton Blake academy. Which frankly was a pile of horse manure.
The ‘suspect’ was held initially at Cumberland Street; then he was transferred to Tobago Street so that the lead team could get the kudos. But the gang of howling vigilantes outside the jail – women in curlers and aprons carrying noosed lengths of rope from their washing lines – forced them to transfer Hugh to Barlinnie ‘for his own protection’. En route, his van was pelted with rotten food and cobbles, and by clever accident a cameraman from the Daily Record managed to catch a photo of Hugh’s melted face to nicely underscore everyman’s image of an ogre.
Before being driven off to the Bar-L, they’d given Hugh one outing. Muncie proudly announced that they’d taken the suspect back to the scene of the crime and that significant new evidence had come to light as a result of yet more fine police work. Was this what Sam had said about Hugh having ‘knowledge of the crime scene’?
The trial itself had the same mob baying outside for justice, by which they meant a good hanging. There was no mitigation for his war exploits. No balancing of the scales with recognition of what he’d given for his country. Inside, the Procurator Fiscal constructed a Clyde-built case from the piles of evidence available to him. The wonder of it was that the jury took three days to come up with their verdict, and then chose to give a majority decision that would take Hugh to the scaffold. The defence counsel, Advocate Samantha Campbell, scored two clever goals.
First she tore apart the evidence given by two of the detectives. Detective Sergeant Bill Kerr swore on oath that Donovan had made his confession before being taken to the crime scene. Detective Constable Davy White said he’d first mentioned the seven stab wounds and the naked body at the coal cellar. He claimed that Donovan had then, through feelings of remorse, made his confession when he’d returned to the cells. Sam had got the pair of them so tongue-tied that they’d been shouting at each other at the end of it. I wondered what their notebooks said?
The second and crucial way in which Sam undermined the prosecution was in the sequence of events and the handling of the bloody evidence. The scientist from Glasgow Forensic Medicine Laboratory told the court that the body of the child had been dumped in the coal cellar two to three days after he’d been killed. This was apparent from the lack of blood in the cellar and the state of decomposition.
Under interrogation, the policeman – a local bobby called Robertson – who’d made the initial search of Hugh’s flat the day after the boy had disappeared swore that he’d searched the tiny space from top to bottom, including under the sink. He claimed to have seen no sign of any blood-soaked material in a bucket, far less the boy himself. So where had the boy been held?
Within twenty-four hours of the boy’s body being found, so was the bucket, brimming with murder weapon, bloodstained clothes from the boy and Hugh, and Hugh’s fingerprints. Sam rightly asked why would a murderer keep the boy a prisoner for a few days in some as yet undiscovered location, then kill him, dump the body somewhere else and then cart all the evidence back to his flat? Why wouldn’t he have left the evidence in this mysterious other location? Why hadn’t the police searched for it? And if he was responsible for the other missing children, where had he kept them? Why provide this evidence? Naturally the prosecution couldn’t bring charges for the abduction and murder of the first four boys. No bodies had turned up. But they certainly sprayed round the innuendo like muck on a farmer’s field.
