about the dips and doubts, the chains and ties. Everything about the spark and fire of a kiss. The agonies of does she, doesn’t she? The racing blood, the utter certainty, the high passion. Why should a teenage love count less? It’s unconstrained, insane. It lacks adult defences and cynicism. First love is engraved on a developing heart. Like carving the letters on a tree and years later finding them swollen and proud on a mature trunk. Knowing they would last the lifetime of the tree. Longer than your own.
There had been girls since. Kind women, bright women, teasing women, women who wanted a life with me. I was too busy, too fussy. Fiona cast a long shadow.
I looked at the wrecked face in front of me. Beyond punching now. I hadn’t spoken to him or her since that day, just heard of their continued passion through others. Until she married someone else. Why? And why not me? Not even third best? And bore her husband – the jammy sod – a son. Why not mine, Fiona?
Did that have any bearing on the murder of her wee boy? The Hugh I knew didn’t have it in him, not for Fiona’s child, for pity’s sake. Surely? But I’d seen the hardest of men turn into gibbering wrecks after two days of bombardment in a desert foxhole. Hell, I still jolt awake wrapped in sweat-soaked sheets, with Panzer tanks rolling over me. How would being burnt alive affect you?
I’d phoned an old contact in the Glasgow police. He told me that five boys had gone missing over the past year, three in the East End, two in the Gorbals. Only the last one had been found. Fiona’s son Rory had been discovered in a coal cellar at the back of some tenements. He was naked and dead. He’d been raped, God help him. The following morning Hugh Donovan had been arrested in his single-end in the Gorbals. There was hard evidence all over the house that Hugh had killed the boy, including the boy’s clothing. And here was Donovan telling me he didn’t do it. Despite what he’d done to me, I wanted to believe him, wanted to believe that no one I knew was capable of such horror. But the facts said otherwise. And there was motivation: sick revenge on a faithless lover and her dead husband.
‘Tell me everything, Hugh. How did the boy’s clothes get into your flat?’ I took out my reporter’s notebook and a pencil, to encourage him to talk. It usually works.
He was shaking his head, holding his face in his hands. ‘It’s going to sound stupid.’ His eyes looked hunted. He flung up his hands. ‘I don’t know, Dougie! I just don’t know! I don’t know how they got there, and that’s the truth!’
‘What do you remember? I mean what was the last thing you recall before…’
‘Before they found me there? And took me away? Took me here?’
I nodded.
‘Look, I’d better tell you a wee bit about the last few months. How I ran into Fiona again.’
This is what he told me. These are the notes I took, good ex-copper and budding crime reporter that I was.
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
