records and what I’ve garnered from the grapevine. You do rather owe me for this one, old boy.’
‘I don’t think we’re quite even yet, old boy.’ I offered him a cigarette to take the sting out of it.
‘Anyway,’ said Jeffrey, leaning over for the light I offered, ‘your Sergeant McGahern was a member of Gideon. But he got quite tight with the Jewboys.’
It was good to know that the small matter of six million dead had done nothing to dampen Jeffrey’s anti- Semitism. I thought of Jonny Cohen, who had fought a harder, realer war than this piece of shit, standing in the heart of Belsen. I felt the urge to smack Jeffrey about. Instead I said nothing and waited for him to continue.
‘And this is where this precursor of the SAS comes in. When things got out of hand with the Arabs in Palestine in thirty-six to thirty-nine, Wingate set up this unit called the SNS. Stood for Special Night Squads, apparently. They were unbelievably ruthless, encouraged by Wingate, and carried out raids against Arab villages and terrorist groups. Rumour has it that for every ten prisoners they took, they’d shoot one pour encourager les autres as it were. You know the Israeli general? You know, the ghaffir with the eyepatch?’
‘Moshe Dayan. I think you’ll find that ghaffir is more of a soldier than you’ll ever be, Jeffrey.’ Dayan had led the Israeli Army with devastating effectiveness in the Arab War four years before. The only war wound Jeffrey had ever risked was a paper cut.
‘Well he learned his soldiering from us. Dayan was a member of the SNS. Wingate selected Jews who had been in the Hagganah and the Jewish Settlement Police to serve in the Special Night Squads and in turn there were a number of SNS recruited into Gideon.’
For a moment Jeffrey’s attention seemed to wander. I followed his eyes to a slender, effeminate youth at the bar, no older than twenty with a cheap blue serge suit with the open collar of his shirt turned out over the lapels. The youth looked at Jeffrey blankly and turned away. I had Jeffrey’s attention again. The old problem.
Jeffrey’s predilections were the basis for my personal nickname for him. Jeffrey had never worked out why I had nicknamed him ‘Mafeking’: it was because he regularly needed relieving by boy soldiers.
It had been Jeffrey’s inclinations, no doubt cultivated in the late-night shenanigans in the dormitories of his boarding school, that had gotten him into the scrape I’d gotten him out of: a scrape with an eighteen-year-old pretty-boy conscript. It had been a set up from the start and Jeffrey found himself the victim of blackmail. I didn’t much care for Jeffrey’s type but he was what he was and I didn’t like people being screwed over for something they couldn’t help.
Added to which, let’s be honest, Jeffrey had had all kinds of contacts in army bureaucracy that would prove useful to me towards the end of my military career and, like now, after. So I had visited the pretty boy and demonstrated how easy it was for me to make him un-pretty. The fairy had handed over the photographs and the negatives and relinquished his hold on Jeffrey. Somehow or other I had never gotten round to handing them over to Jeffrey. Or destroying them.
‘Did you find out anything about the other men in this picture?’ I asked him.
‘Can’t say for sure, I’m afraid. But I did get a few names for you. There was one wallah who got pretty badly messed up. I’ve underlined his name…’ Jeffrey tore a page out of his notebook and pushed it across the table to me. His eyes darted to the boy at the bar and back.
I looked at the names. The first one to leap out at me was McGahern’s officer. Captain James Wallace.
‘William Pattison.’ I read the name Jeffrey had underlined.
‘Lance Corporal, according to records,’ said Jeffrey. ‘Apparently he got himself severely wounded. I thought it might be a starting point because I know where you can find him.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes… I would have been pushing things too far to get the pension addresses for the others, but it was in Pattison’s records that he’d been shipped home and installed in Levendale House.’
‘He’s still there?’ I knew Levendale House, or knew of it. It was a nursing home for disabled ex- servicemen.
‘That I don’t know, old boy, but I guess he would be. I mean, these chaps who go in don’t often come out.’
‘Did you find out anything else about the Gideon Force? Or Tam McGahern?’
‘Not much. Some of that stuff is still pretty secret. The other thing is, to be frank, that Sergeant McGahern didn’t mix in the same circles, as it were. Working-class Glaswegian NCO. And a mackerel-snapper, I believe.’
I frowned.
‘Catholic, old boy. Friday fish. But he did seem to be a good soldier. He’s dead, you say?’
‘Very. Do you know if he served anywhere particular in the Middle East? Before or after Abyssinia?’
‘’Fraid not. Lots of action in North Africa generally with the Desert Rats, but I don’t have details of his postings. I’m afraid I’ve pushed this as far as I can, Lennox. Any more and questions will be asked, that kind of thing.’ As he spoke, his eyes followed the young man who was making his way to the hallway behind the bar.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘If you’ll excuse me, old boy. Nature calls…’ Jeffrey stood up. I said goodbye to him and watched as he headed towards the lavatory into which the young queer had disappeared.
Unlike Glasgow, there was no subway in Edinburgh so after I left Jeffrey to his sordid lavatory-conducted business, I walked down the Royal Mile.
The March sky was bright, as it often was in Edinburgh, but chill and joyless, as it also often was in Edinburgh and the castle was squeezed up into the sterile blueness by the city’s tight-fisted grip. Edinburgh is basically divided into the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town, separated by Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Station. I made my way down The Mound towards Princes Street and the New Town beyond, but gave up on my original idea of walking all the way and hailed a passing cab. The otherwise glum cabbie smiled sneerily when I gave him the address I wanted in St Bernard’s Crescent.
Edinburgh is a city of self-righteous primness and was always for me, as an outsider, the counterpoint to Glasgow. Glasgow may have had a black heart, but it was a warm black heart. Edinburgh was all Presbyterian prissiness and ill-founded snobbery; or as Glaswegians were fond of saying, all fur coat and no knickers. It was actually a description that couldn’t have been more apt for the address I was about to visit. Despite Glasgow’s reputation for hard drinking, hard men and harder women, it was Edinburgh that was Scotland’s capital for sex crimes, pornography and prostitution. There was a lot of dark stuff went on behind the twitchy net curtains.
St Bernard’s Crescent was in the heart of Edinburgh’s Stockbridge: an arc of sandstone Georgian townhouses facing a small tree-filled park. Most of the properties were three storeys above street level and a basement level with windows peering up to wrought-iron railings. This layout was particularly relevant to the house I was visiting: they said the higher up the storey you visited, the more you paid.
Edinburgh taxi drivers are noted for having the joie de vivre of depressed undertakers and this particular cabbie had been silent throughout the journey. He managed, however, to repeat his earlier sneer as he pulled up outside the address I had given him in St Bernard’s Crescent and told me how much I was due him. I usually tipped taxi drivers well, particularly in London or Glasgow when you could often have the best conversation of your day in the back of the cab. In this case I counted out the exact change and not a penny more. My pointed meanness fell flat as the taxi driver didn’t seem to notice or care. This was Edinburgh, after all.
The house looked just the same as all of the others in the crescent; in fact the paintwork on the door and windows looked fresher and the steps better swept than its neighbours, and the young lady who admitted me was soberly dressed in a blue serge jacket and pencil skirt and white blouse. She asked me if I had an appointment and I explained that I wasn’t there on business but was a friend of Mrs Gersons. She smiled and led me into a small office-type room off the reception hall. As I passed along the hall I noticed how tasteful and expensive the decor was that Helena had invested in. It didn’t surprise me; Helena Gersons was a sophisticated and elegant lady. Yep, you certainly got a better class of whorehouse in Edinburgh, I thought to myself as I made a quick mental comparison with Arthur Parks’s place in Glasgow.
I was a cynical fuck. I admit it. The things I had seen, the things I had done, had turned me into somebody I really didn’t like and my way of dealing with it was often to greet each day with a sneer or a joke at someone else’s expense. Maybe I was just becoming acclimatized: attitudes were different here. In America and Canada we’d greet the day with ‘Another day another dollar!’; in Glasgow the motto was ‘Different day, same shite’. Whatever was going on around me, I was generally too cynical to give a crap.
However, when Helena Gersons walked into the office I felt like someone had given me a punch in the gut. Which, being between my heart and my groin, was appropriate. Helena Gersons was perhaps the most beautiful
