‘Head?’
‘Eyes. Right between them.’ She shook her sleek head, pushed on her specs and became the plain lawyer again. ‘What now?’ she asked, picking up an ancient leather briefcase and heading for the door.
‘I’m going to read the papers.’
She looked quizzical.
‘Down at the library. I’m going to soak up the atmosphere of the trial. See who was saying what. You get a different perspective from the pages of the fourth estate.’
She nodded. ‘Makes sense. Kind of. Then what?’
‘Then I’m going to look up some old pals. Could you get your helpful secretary to make an appointment this afternoon?’ I gave her two names.
She wrote them down and glanced at her watch. ‘Let’s meet at my office at end of day. See what you’ve got. I need something. Anything!’
God Bless Andrew Carnegie. The man was mad for libraries, and Scotland – his birthplace – benefited enormously from his largesse. They say it was conscience money for the way he treated his workers in his American steel company. But he gave wee boys and girls like me a lust for knowledge beyond the bare bones of classroom teaching. His millions helped feed a hunger for the written word in Scotland that turned us from a nation of hard-working peasants and fishermen into an industrial force that helped shape the world. Or it did before the Depression.
The library I knew best, apart from the university one, was at Townhead, a half hour’s walk into and across the city centre on this blue-sky morning. By the time I was on my approach to the fine red sandstone pile I’d warmed myself up nicely and eased arm muscles stiff from my altercation in Doyle’s.
I fondly inspected the building. There seemed to be no bomb damage, and the two statues stood proudly in their niches along the line of the parapet. Stepping inside to the solid carpentry and shining counter was like coming home.
I told the librarian I was researching a book about the trial and wanted access to the newspapers for the period of the trial and one month either side. So from November 1945 through to today, 4 April 1946.
He gazed at me over his half specs. ‘Do you know how many newspapers we take each week, sir?’
I shook my head.
‘Fifty-five. Do you want them all?’
‘Let’s start with the Glasgow Herald and the Scotsman.’ For the facts. ‘And the Daily Record and Glasgow Gazette.’ For the gossip.
I found a seat in the Reading Room under the great arched ceiling. Light streamed in from the roof-lights and boxed my wooden desk in sunlight. It raised nostalgia for university days, before the bloody war, before… before this nightmare. In front of me would be a pile of French or German literature. Everything from Hugo to Euken, Dumas to Kafka, not newspapers with hysterical tales of child molestation and murder. I should have gone into teaching as ordained by my school rector and university tutors. There was even the offer of an assistant lecturer’s position at the university. But the devil in me baulked at continuing a life buried in books. I’d grown up during the 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.