The Royal Hotel had a car park that looked out down the length of Loch Lomond. I sat in my Austin with the cold hard edges of the Webley digging into me and watched the clouds scud between the mountains and the inky water glisten. I looked at my watch. It was now past nine. This was my second clandestine meeting in a week. This time there was no Bedford parked behind me and I was more than prepared for any nasty surprises. And I had something better than the Central Station departure board to look at.
I got the impression that the middle-aged woman behind the small reception desk was the owner of the hotel. All the alarm bells started ringing in my head as soon as she frowned when I asked to speak to Mr Fraser. I knew at that moment that John Andrews hadn’t made it. Just to be sure that Andrews hadn’t been too scared and too drunk to remember the name I told him, I checked Jones. Then Andrews. I explained that they were business colleagues and we had agreed to meet at the hotel. The small woman shook her head concernedly, clearly feeling that she had let me down when she told me that no one had checked in that evening.
I walked back out to the car park. There were two other cars parked, neither John Andrews’s Bentley and both seemingly unoccupied. Nevertheless I unbuttoned my jacket and let my hand rest on the butt of the Webley in my waistband. I stood for a few seconds, satisfying myself that there was no menace in the car park other than the hulking shadow of Ben Lomond against a violet-black sky. I turned the ignition key of my Austin and started the drive back to Glasgow, taking the Drymen road in case Andrews had ignored my warning about passing up through Bearsden. Maybe the idiot had stopped off at his house to pick something up. Andrews had been right about one thing: I had had a conversation with a dead man.
It was a skinny young police constable who waved me down with his torch. There was a knot of other police officers and a Bedford ambulance pulled over at the side of the road. I could see from where I had been pulled over that there was a gap in the fencing. I checked that the pistol-butt bulge in my jacket wasn’t too conspicuous before winding down the window.
‘What’s the problem, constable?’ I asked.
‘Accident, sir. I’m afraid someone’s gone over the edge.’
‘Dead?’
‘Didn’t stand a chance. Just be careful as you go past the other vehicles, sir. You’ll have to pull over a little onto the verge.’
‘Okay.’ I eased the car forward, taking two wheels up onto the grass. As I passed the gap in the fence I looked down. I caught a glimpse of the tailgate of the car that had gone over the edge. It was a Bentley. I turned my attention back to the road and drove on. I didn’t need to look any more to know that it was John Andrews down there. The car would be pretty badly smashed up having taken a tumble like that, but I wondered if the police surgeon might, just for a second, be puzzled as to how the driver’s head had gotten quite so pulped.
*
It wasn’t a good-mood morning. It was difficult to find real coffee in Glasgow and my supply had run out. I had been forced to buy the locally produced alternative: a bottle of thick coffee and chicory which you diluted with boiling water. I decided to forgo the pleasure and went straight to the office. It was in the Glasgow Herald I picked up on the way: a short piece headed ‘Clyde Consolidated Importing chairman killed in tragic accident’. No real detail other than Andrews had been found dead at the scene. I winced as I read it: I am ashamed to say not out of sympathy for John Andrews but because I knew that a certain Detective-Inspector Jock Ferguson was likely to read the same piece in the course of the next day and come knocking on my door. Mind you, it could have been worse: at least it wouldn’t provoke a visit by Superintendent Willie McNab and his farmhand. Hopefully.
I still found myself looking over my shoulder and I now had more reason than ever. John Andrews hadn’t been killed because he was out for a drive in the country. Whoever killed him would have known he was meeting with someone and more likely than not that that someone was me. Of course, there was always the possibility that it had genuinely been an accident. After all, he had sounded more than a little drunk on the ’phone: maybe the booze and the dark and the sudden bend in the road had been the only conspirators in his death. It was a scrap of a hope to hang on to, anyway. But whether his death had been by accident or design, John Andrews had told me more than enough to shake me up: he had been set up by Lillian and whomever she was involved with, and he had told me that I had been set up. However, he hadn’t told me enough to indicate the direction I should be looking in. I decided that I was going to have to go to Sneddon and tell him everything I knew. Sneddon had been right, after all: I needed someone to watch my back.
Sneddon was out when I ’phoned and I left a message that I needed to talk to him. I looked out of my office window and watched people go about their day on Gordon Street. Trams passed. Taxis, like black beetles under a stone, scuttled in and out from under the lattice iron-worked canopy of Central Station. It was three in the afternoon. In the Maritimes of Canada it would be eleven in the morning. I never understood why I did that, but whenever I was stressed I thought of what time of day it would be at home. I had done it across Europe, imagining what my parents were doing, what the light in the garden would be like in New Brunswick, while I watched men die.
I unlocked my desk drawer — I had taken to locking it since my office had been so expertly searched — and took out the notebook and the photograph I had found in McGahern’s place. I looked again at the list of letters and numbers in the notebook. I noticed that most of the numbers ended in fifty-one and fifty-two. Nineteen fifty-two? Could these be dated shipment numbers? Andrews had said they were using his business to ship stolen goods. But there was no way I could get access to the CCI records now that he was dead.
I looked at the photograph again. There were five men in the picture. Again it looked to me like two, maybe three of them were foreign, too dark to be Scots. Scots are the whitest people on the planet: sometimes they’re almost blue-white. The only tans you ever saw in Glasgow were on stout walking brogues. But there again even Tam looked bronzed in the photograph. The last tanned face I’d encountered recently had been the cheery Fred MacMurray look-alike.
I picked up the ’phone and dialled an Edinburgh number. It was time to pull in a few favours.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Glasgow may have been the Empire’s Second City, but much-smaller Edinburgh was Scotland’s capital. Edinburgh’s inhabitants called it ‘the Athens of the North’, presumably because none of them had actually seen Athens. If Glasgow could be described as a black city, then Edinburgh was grey. Grey buildings and grey people. It was also the most Anglicized city in Scotland, which is perhaps why its residents were the most Anglophobe you could encounter: what you hate the most is that which you most want to be but are not.
When the train pulled into Waverley station I was greeted with a banner declaring Ceud Mille Failte, which I had been told was Gaelic for ‘A Hundred Thousand Welcomes’. Having got to know the personality of Edinburgh a little, I would have better believed it meant ‘Fuck off, you English Bastard’.
But Edinburgh’s ire was aimed at more than the English. The rivalry between Scotland’s two main cities was vast and vicious. Much was made of the cultural differences between Glasgow and Edinburgh. In Glasgow they called children weans and in Edinburgh they were bairns; in Edinburgh they took their fish and chips with salt ’n’ sauce, in Glasgow with salt ’n’ vinegar; Glaswegians inexplicably ended their sentences with the conjunction ‘but’, in Edinburgh with the interrogative ‘eh?’.
Sometimes I found myself dizzy from Scotland’s cultural kaleidoscope.
I took a taxi from the rank up to Edinburgh Castle and was dropped at the Esplanade. The officious little corporal on guard was reluctant to let me into the barracks until I informed him that I was Captain Lennox and I was here to meet Captain Jeffrey. He indicated the main office and when I got there Rufus ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey was waiting, hatless and dressed in civvies. ‘Mafeking’ was the n
ickname I had given him years before and which he resented, although he had no idea why I called him it. Jeffrey was a tall, lanky sort with blond hair frizzily receding. I could tell that he wasn’t particularly pleased to see me and, to be honest, I was never particularly happy to be back in a military environment, even the Chocolate Soldier setting of Edinburgh Castle.
‘I thought we’d grab a pint down in the Royal Mile, if that’s all right with you, old boy.’ Jeffrey’s smile was as genuine as his mock upper-class English accent, which had come courtesy of an Edinburgh private boarding school.
A Military Police sergeant marched his red cap past us and into the office. He brought back some unpleasant memories. ‘Sure,’ I said and we headed back down the Esplanade.
*
We sat in a corner of the pub. The bleak March sunlight from the window behind him sliced through blue smoke and made a halo of ‘Mafeking’ Jeffrey’s frizzy blond hair. We made small talk about the time that had intervened since our last meeting. The smallest of small talk: the truth was neither gave a crap about what had happened in the other’s life. I didn’t like Jeffrey and he didn’t like me, but I had something on him and I had, at one time, pulled his fat out of the fire. He had good reason to be grateful to me. Gratitude is by far the best foundation on which to build a true hatred.
‘Do you have the photograph you mentioned?’ he asked pleasantly enough. I slid it across the pub table to him. ‘Gideon…’ he read the back of it. ‘I know what this is. And I looked into this Sergeant McGahern for you. He may have started his service as a Desert Rat, but he didn’t end it as one. It would appear that Sergeant McGahern was a man of… how can I put it?… particular talents.’
‘A natural killer.’
‘And then some. But he was apparently quite the tactician and was also a natural leader of men. As you know yourself, Lennox, our last little European conflict required some innovation. You’ve heard of the SAS?'
‘Of course.’ Jeffrey’s lecturing tone irritated the hell out of me, as did his phoney accent. He belonged to that class of Edinburgh North British who wore kilts to Burns Suppers and Scottish Country Dancing and the Reel Society, but at the same time fought to extirpate any hint of Scottishness from their accents.
‘As you know the SAS was set up for special missions behind enemy lines, assassination, et cetera. But it wasn’t the innovation it seemed. There was a precursor, set up by mad old Orde Wingate who also created the Chindits.’
‘Gideon?’
‘The Gideon Force. It operated in Abyssinia. It was an elite force and was made up from the oddest mix… British, Abyssinian, Sudanese and Hymies.’
‘Jews?’
‘Mmm. Strange, isn’t it? Don’t have time for them myself but apparently Wingate had always been a great supporter of our Jewish friends setting up a state in Palestine. He’d been up to all kinds of shenanigans in what we now call Israel.’
‘So what’s this got to do with McGahern?’ I asked. ‘I take it he was a member of the Gideon Force?’
‘Forty-three and forty-four, according to what I’ve been able to find out between poking around in official 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 w
ith 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.
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