‘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. He might be able to point you at other people who knew Hugh. Including the pusher. I’ll give you his address.’
She scribbled his name and address on a sheet of paper, tore it off and handed it to me. I looked at it. She was staring at me.
‘What?’
‘My turn. From what you’ve just read, what’s your verdict?’
‘If I was on the jury? And only using the evidence? Guilty.’
‘But?’
‘As an ex copper with a suspicious mind, it’s a little too watertight. I’ve never seen such an open and shut case.’
‘Can you suspend judgement?’
‘I’m not sure why.’
‘Will you at least stay and help?’
I thought I’d hardened myself to pleading eyes. But reading the trial papers had set up an itch I needed to scratch.
‘I suppose it does. For a few days anyway. I’ll need to get the rest of this week off from my boss at the London Bugle.’ I was pretty sure I could make up the time by working late or weekends, as long as I could knock up five hundred words of fearless crime reporting to keep my editor interested. I had a couple of half worked out ideas that didn’t require more research. I could write about Hugh’s predicament but it would have little interest for London readers. Besides, I’d just tie myself in knots wondering whose side I was on. Little chance of journalistic objectivity. And it would feel like I was using him.
‘Just use the phone here.’
‘I’m also going to need digs for a few nights. Any suggestions?’
She looked at me coolly for a long few seconds.
‘Do you snore? Get drunk and fall down stairs? Leave clothes on the floor? Leave toilet seats up?’
‘I can’t swear to the loo seat, but no to the rest. Though I’m not teetotal. Is this a temperance hotel you’re suggesting?’
‘I couldn’t make that claim. My folks left me their house. It’s fairly big. There’s a spare room and bathroom. In truth, there’s a choice.’
Was she just trying to make up for the initial brusqueness? I doubted it was animal passion. No need to lock my door at night. She didn’t look much like a man-eater. I hesitated. I didn’t want to be under constant inspection by this tough spinster who looked as if she had a preference for cold baths and hard beds. Cold beds, certainly.
‘Neighbours?’
She stood up, rifled through her bag and placed a key on the table. ‘It won’t be the first time I’ve scandalised them. If your reputation can stand it, so can mine.’
Scandalised the West End? Not washing her milk bottles would be enough. ‘What do you charge?’
‘Hand over your ration book and one pound ten for a week’s grub. Nothing fancy. The bed’s free, if – and only if – you come up with something new for the appeal. Deal?’
‘Miss Campbell, it’s a deal. Thank you.’
‘Call me Sam. Everyone else does. Do you prefer Doug or Douglas?
I shrugged. ‘Most just call me Brodie.’ Only my mother used my first name. And Hugh of course. I wasn’t about to get intimate with Samantha – call me Sam – Campbell.
‘Brodie it is. Are you going to try to see Father Cassidy now? Leave your case and I’ll take it back with me.’
‘Sure?’
She pointed at the corner. She scribbled her own address on a sheet of paper, together with the numbers of the trams that ran by. It was further into the city and up on the smart hillside of Kelvingrove Park. Very nice. I left her gazing at her piles of paper as though by sheer force of will they would file themselves.
ELEVEN
The Gorbals were legendary. In Kilmarnock, among the private pink and red sandstone houses that laced the better streets, the very word was synonymous with dirt and degradation. Even the working class of Kilmarnock, my class, in our roughcast council estates, gazed down with shaking head on their brethren just up the Glasgow road. The worst waster in the most run-down part of Kilmarnock clung to his illusion of being a rung above his counterpart south of the Clyde – a speculative ranking based on the size and numbers of rats patrolling the outside toilets.
For really it was only a question of scale. You’d find TB, rickets, polio and malnutrition in any sizeable Scottish town. It was just that those Glasgow wastelands stretched over a quarter of central Glasgow and were as densely packed and aromatic as a giant box of herring. And whereas Kilmarnock had its fair share of louts ready for a rammy on a Friday night, the Gorbals were infested with razor-wielding gangs like the Beehive Boys. If disease didn’t get you, a knife would. In the Kilmarnock Standard we’d read of bottle fights at the Glasgow dance halls and knew that there would be Gorbals’ thugs behind it; yet taking a tram ride through the area with your eyes part closed would have left the impression of wide streets and fine Victorian sandstone buildings, a township that should have turned out model citizens.
A closer look uncovered the deep problems: cobbled streets full of patched holes and covered in filth because the Corporation dustmen couldn’t be persuaded to visit without an armed escort; families living ten to a room; sewage systems literally bursting at the seams; and mass unemployment and illiteracy. For the last hundred years the Gorbals had been a magnet for the dispossessed. Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, Highland clearances, Irish tattie famines, and lately, Nazi persecution.