The Deep Dark Sleep

‘This is all very interesting, Billy,’ I said, ‘but what has this got to do with Gentleman Joe Strachan?’

‘I was getting to that. We was sent to Lochailort, way up in the middle of fucking nowhere on the west coast. It was where all the special units got their training. This wee fucking Highland village full of Beaverette armoured cars and machine gun posts all over the shop. The navy base there was where we was trained. You have no fucking idea the things they taught us. How to cut throats so that the fuckers dropped without a sound, how to make homemade bombs and them flame fougasses.’

‘What’s a fougasse?’ asked Archie.

‘A big fuck-off improvised incendiary. Five or ten-gallon barrels of petrol buried or hidden with a detonator attached. Some could be as big as fifty gallons. Anti-tank and personnel carrier stuff. Torches everything and everybody to fuck. I saw three of our boys burn to death in training when one of those fuckers went off accidentally. Anyway, we got all of this training. Hand-to-hand combat. Defendu, have you heard of it?’

‘Defendu … the Fairbairn system? Yes, I’ve heard of it,’ I said. ‘In the Canadian army we had Arwrology, which was pretty much the same thing.’

‘Aye. Defendu was invented by that bloke that designed the commando knife. But if you came from Glasgow you didn’t need to learn Defendu, we already had fuck-you.’ He laughed at his own joke. I made an impatient face.

‘Anyway, we was there for six weeks solid training, then back for another six. There was all kinds of brass hanging around the place, from every secret outfit you could imagine. We was under the command of the Special Operations executive, but there were commandos, Special Air, Special Boat brass, and others from units that I’d never heard of. It was during our second stint at Lochailort that I saw this officer, a major, with a group of others. One of the other officers this bloke was talking to was His Grace, who was a colonel. The officer I saw was one of ours … I mean he was Special Operations. And the other officers including His Grace was all attached to Scallywag training.’

‘Joe Strachan?’

Dunbar looked surprised that I’d jumped his conclusion.

‘I found out quite a bit about Strachan,’ I offered in explanation. ‘Do you think he was genuine? I mean a real officer and not just passing himself off as one?’

‘You was in the army, you know what them special bases are like with security. Naw, if Joe Strachan was wearing a British Army major’s uniform in that camp, then Joe Strachan was a British Army major.’

‘Aw, come on …’ Archie snorted. ‘A Glasgow hoodlum like Strachan an army major? I thought you had to be an officer and a gentleman, not an officer and a gobshite …’

I held up my hand to stop Archie. He stopped, but his eyebrows protested for a few seconds more.

‘Could you have been mistaken?’ I asked Dunbar.

‘Maybe. But I got a really good look at the fucker. I did one of them double takes. I mean, everybody’s supposed to have a double, aren’t they. Look at Monty. If this bloke wasn’t Gentleman Joe, he was his bastarding twin.’

‘I’m not being funny,’ said Archie, ‘but it maybe was his twin. You say Strachan’s daughters are twins, and twins run in families …’

‘Naw,’ said Dunbar emphatically. ‘Joe Strachan maybe became a man of mystery, but he was born in the Gorbals and there are no fucking mysteries or secrets there, when you’re crammed into a tenement with four families on each fucking floor. Strachan had two sisters and a brother. No twin. I’m fucking telling you, I saw Gentleman Joe Strachan as large as life and twice as fucking ugly, swanning about with a bunch of top brass and crowns on his shoulder boards.’

‘When was this?’

‘Forty-two. Summer of Forty-two.’

‘You tell anyone else about this?’

Dunbar looked at me contemptuously. ‘After the hiding I took in a police cell because they thought there was the slightest fucking chance that I might know something or someone that could lead them to someone else who might know more about Joe Strachan? Naw … I kept my mouth shut. Nobody knows what I saw. Until you, that is.’

There it was. Gentleman Joe hadn’t, after all, slept the deep, dark sleep. Of course, it didn’t mean he was still alive. If he had been attached to Special Operations, then he could be sleeping the dark sleep at the bottom of some canal in Holland or river in France. But even that thought – Joe Strachan as an officer in SOE – didn’t make the slightest bit of sense.

Dunbar had told us what he had to tell us and small talk, even expletive-laced small talk, was not his forte, so it was time for us to leave. As I got up a thought came at me from out of nowhere; or at least from somewhere deep in the back of my brain where it must have been taking slow form during my chat with Dunbar. Actually it was more an image than a thought. For some reason the picture I had retrieved from Paul Downey came to mind.