ELEVEN

‘Avraham, Avraham’

The two survivors of the raid on 30 Dizengoff Street were making a good recovery. Since their arrival, security at the hospital had been stepped up and guards were placed on all the entrances.1 The detention ward was on the ground floor and contained six beds. The prisoners were watched around the clock by two police sergeants, one of them an Irishman named Arthur Daly. Morton had known Daly since they were constables together at the Mount Scopus depot. Daly was the camp bugler and Morton recalled how ‘many a time I had watched with amusement when, on one elbow, he had blown perfectly the morning Reveille in the direction of the open window without getting out of bed’.2

Daly had distinguished himself in other ways. In 1936 he was awarded the British Empire Medal for an act of exceptional selflessness. The citation read that while on duty at Tel Aviv railway station ‘he saved the life of a woman who fell on the line beneath a moving train by throwing himself on top of her and holding her in position until safe to rise’. He was known for his good grasp of Hebrew, and had a streak of cunning that would prove invaluable in closing the ring around Avraham Stern.

According to Morton’s official report, the day after the prisoners were brought in from the Dizengoff Street shootings, ‘Sgt. Daly came to me and suggested that useful information might be forthcoming if he were to offer his services to the prisoners as a go-between, in order to take information to their friends and relatives outside.’ Morton told him to go ahead but emphasized he should make it clear that he expected to be paid for his trouble – this to allay suspicion that the sergeant was acting for any other motive than money.

The arrangement began working immediately. That same day, Yaacov Levstein accepted an offer from Daly to deliver a note to his mother, who lived not far from the hospital in Rambam Street, in south Tel Aviv.3 He admitted that the genial Irishman soon charmed them. ‘Dailey [sic] did his best to befriend us and put us at our ease,’ he wrote.4 ‘He told us he was Irish and had Jewish friends.’ Given their admiration for the IRA, being Irish was a great advantage in winning the confidence of the Jewish underground. Yitzhak Shamir chose ‘Michael’ as his nom de guerre in homage to Michael Collins, the IRA leader. Irishmen, even those in British uniform, if they appeared sympathetic, might be regarded as fellow victims of imperialist oppression.

Daly seems to have played the part to perfection. Levstein related how, when the Irishman asked if he wanted him to deliver a message to his parents, he ‘jumped at the opportunity’. His mother had pleaded with him to give up the underground life and lived in a state of perpetual anxiety. He ‘knew how worried’ his parents were and ‘how much better they would feel if they got a direct message from me’.

Morton said that ‘subsequently several notes of an innocuous nature … were passed backwards and forwards between Levstein and his mother through the intermediary of Sergeant Daly’.5 He was a welcome visitor. Daly became ‘quite friendly with my parents’, wrote Levstein. ‘He would stop to see them, chat with them, enjoy my mother’s home-made cookies and even received a shaving kit in return for his good offices.’6

On Wednesday, 11 February, the hospital’s medical officer examined Svorai and Levstein and found them in satisfactory health. He reported that they were now well enough to be discharged from hospital. This meant that very soon they would leave the comparative comfort of the ward for a cell, in the prison in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, where they would await trial on what in Levstein’s case might be capital charges. Levstein says that the news was broken to him by Daly who suggested that he might like a visit from his mother before he left. He replied that he would be happy to see her.

In his memoir Morton elaborated on Daly’s stratagem. The sergeant solicitously pointed out to both Svorai and Levstein that for the move ‘they would need some clean clothes – those in which they had been captured were caked with blood, and they would not want to don the uniform normally worn by convicted prisoners’.

Until this point Svorai had not taken up Daly’s offer of help. Morton says that he had mentioned in casual conversation that he had a wife and child in Tel Aviv. However, he could hardly ask Daly to communicate with his family without bringing trouble down on Tova. He was about to relent. According to Morton, ‘after some hesitation, Yaacov Levstein wrote a note to his mother asking her to bring him some clean clothes down to the hospital the next morning’.7 Svorai ‘at first refused to take any similar steps, but eventually agreed to add a note for his wife to the bottom of the Levsteins’ letter to his mother’. Svorai told Daly ‘Mrs Levstein would know how to get in touch with his wife’.8

This was an encouraging development. Up until now the translated notes had revealed nothing. The discovery of Tova Svorai’s address might provide more clues as to Stern’s whereabouts. There was nothing then to suggest that Tova might be harbouring him – though, given the couple’s closeness to Yair, it must have occurred to Morton that there was a chance that this was the case.

Then, slowly, that chance began to seem a real possibility. As soon as he received the notes Daly hurried to Morton’s office. Svorai’s caution had not entirely deserted him. Morton said that his note to Tova had been ‘written in an obscure Russian dialect in Hebrew characters and it was very difficult to translate’.9 There was a delay as he ‘got an agent in Tel Aviv to do it for me’. He hesitated to ask one of his staff. The reason he gave for this was that he ‘felt this was not a matter in which to implicate my Jewish colleagues’.10 The inference is that he feared the contents of the letter might be leaked to Stern sympathizers.

At 8.30 that evening he received back the translation from the unnamed ‘agent’. It was clumsily expressed but there could be no mistaking the import of two key phrases in Svorai’s letter. He started off ‘Shalom my Tova’, then proceeded to reassure her he was in good health. ‘I can imagine your worries and fears, especially after the other two died,’ he wrote. ‘I feel well and you know I always wish to tell you the truth.’ Far from being concerned about himself he was distressed at not having news of her, particularly as she had been ill. ‘I am worrying about your wellbeing as I know nothing of what is with you and of our guest,’ he declared. The word ‘guest’ gleamed from the typed page like neon. Just in case the police missed the clue, it was repeated again a few lines later: ‘I am worried because I have not seen or heard from you,’ he persisted. ‘There is no need to worry anyhow, consult with our guest.’

The coy reluctance to name the ‘guest’ could not fail to arouse the interest of the CID. Perhaps it was Stern. Perhaps not. Whoever it was, it seemed highly likely they had something to hide. In order to find out, Morton had first to discover the whereabouts of Tova, and for that he needed the help of Mrs Levstein, who, Moshe Svorai had told Daly, would know how to reach her. It was now the middle of the evening. Sergeant Daly, changed out of his uniform and dressed less obtrusively in civvies, set off for the Levsteins’ home in one of the ornate turn-of-the-century Ottoman houses lining Rambam Street. He handed Mrs Levstein her son’s letter and mentioned that there was an attachment from Moshe Svorai who believed she would be able to pass it onto his wife. According to Morton’s report, ‘Mrs Levstein informed Sgt Daly that she was at a loss to know what to do with this note as she did not know the whereabouts of Mrs Svorai’.11 Nonetheless, after Daly left, a watch was kept on the house. Midnight came and went. No one arrived and no one left. It seemed that Mrs Levstein was telling the truth.

There was heavy rain overnight. Up in the rooftop apartment at 8 Mizrachi Bet Street, it drummed on the windows and bounced off the flat, concrete roof. Inside the bed-sitting room Tova and Stern slept, she on the couch, he on a divan that slid out from underneath it. In the previous few days, Stern’s famous sang-froid had begun to melt. They lived in continual fear of discovery. The previous day the cistern in the tiny bathroom had flooded. The landlord had promptly sent round a plumber. When he arrived Stern once again had to climb into the wardrobe. He was forced to squat there for half an hour, in among Tova’s dresses, while the workman fixed the leak.12

The flat felt like a prison. Stern paced the cramped space, smoking, talking and writing. He scribbled poetry incessantly, pouring out a torrent of rage and despair. One ran: ‘And all Tel Aviv became hell/and every house became [a] gallows/and everyone in it became a detective’. His words showed he was reaching the end of his endurance. ‘Mad pouring rain and ardent, bitter cold./Where to rest my tired head? Where to hide my shivering flesh?’ He cried out to ‘My God, the God of revenge/The God of the Fighters of Freedom’.13

At other times he told Tova of the guilt he felt about the trouble he had caused his mother and Roni and the anguish they must experience as they pictured him jerking on the end of a British hangman’s rope. ‘When he said “neck” he would make a gesture with his hand to illustrate it,’ Tova remembered.14 He talked bitterly about those who had let him down over the years, among them David Raziel and Hanoch Strelitz, who had abandoned the struggle rather than stay and fight for their ideals. He found it hard to sleep. On Wednesday night when Tova went to bed he stayed at the table, writing and smoking, finally tiptoeing to his bed at four o’clock.

Tova would describe the night of 11/12 February 1942 as bitterly cold, ‘freezing my bones in a way that hadn’t happened for years’. At six o’clock, an hour before dawn, she heard a scratching at the door. ‘I raised my head and opened my eyes and looked across at Yair’s bed,’ she wrote. ‘I could see he had woken too.’ Who could it be? Everyone from their immediate circle was either dead, locked up or had gone to ground. The scratching was familiar. It was the signal Hassia gave when she visited − but she had been told to keep away. The noise continued. Tova glanced nervously at Stern. He nodded and she rose and padded the few steps over the cold tiles to the entrance. Tova turned the lock and opened the door. A gust of cold air filled the hall. There, framed in the doorway, her glasses gleaming, was the thin, anxious figure of Hassia Shapira. Tova pulled her inside and shut the door.

Hassia explained why she had disobeyed instructions and risked the visit. She was carrying an important message – potentially a life-saving one. It came from Nehemia Torenberg, an Irgunist of long standing from the Rosh Pinna community who had followed Stern after the split. He was conveying an offer he had just received via an intermediary from the new Irgun leader, Yaacov Meridor. Apparently the Irgun’s attitude towards Stern had softened. Having told Captain Wybrow that they were willing to ‘liquidate’ their former comrade, they now wanted to offer him sanctuary, just as the Haganah had earlier. Stern’s mood seemed to lighten as he read the letter. He considerately told Hassia to climb into bed with Tova to warm herself up. Then he sat down at the small table in the hall to write his answer. Politely but firmly, he rejected the offer. ‘My answer of course is no,’ he replied. ‘I am not one of those who voluntarily give themselves up to the police or do the bidding of the left or the right.’ In a reference to the Haganah proposal he added, ‘the left is also willing to look after me if I hand myself over to them’. He was, however, prepared to cooperate with the Irgun if they were planning action against the British. If the Dizengoff Street shootings and the ongoing treatment of refugees in the camp at Athlit had ‘opened their eyes and revealed to them the true face of foreign rule’ then he would be willing to listen to their plans.15 The letter was the last Stern wrote. He could not have wished for a better last testament, proof for all who came after him of his tungsten-hard determination and unquenchable fighting spirit.

Dawn came just after seven o’clock. By 7.30 there were people about on the streets and it seemed safe for Hassia to slip away to carry the reply back to Torenberg. Stern was anxious once more. He paced up and down, a few steps forward, a few steps back, a prowling, troubled figure. ‘Suddenly,’ Tova remembered, ‘I saw that Yair had stopped. He was holding onto the door that separates the hallway and the room. He pushed it backwards … I went over to him and he whispered: “Tova, they are watching us through the slats in the shutter.”’16 It was only eight o’clock. Could the landlord or his wife have decided to hang out their washing early? She prayed that they had not. The landlord was a friendly man who was in the habit of stopping to chat and ask after Herut, the Svorai’s little girl, now staying with her grandmother. She crept to the window. There was no one outside. The slats were half open to let in a little light. She pulled the lever to lower them. They both relaxed.

Tova moved around in her housecoat, laying the table for breakfast. It was the same one they always ate, a ‘three-storey’ sandwich made up of bread, cheese and jam, washed down with a cup of tea. She cleared away the plates and put a joint of meat in the oven in the galley kitchen to roast for the following day’s Shabbat supper. Then she tidied away the bedding and lay down on the sofa to read. A few feet away, Stern sat at the table, blue carpet slippers on his feet.17 The table was covered with strips of white paper. His pen moved steadily over them, covering them with his neat handwriting.

Tel Aviv was by now properly awake. Outside in Mizrachi Bet Street the vendors had set out their stalls and were chatting among themselves and bantering with the shoppers. The cafés were full of people drinking coffee and reading newspapers. All the news, it seemed, was bad. The Japanese were at the gates of Singapore. In Libya, Rommel was building up supplies for another push on Egypt. From German-occupied Europe leaked awful tales of Jewish persecution − massacres and round-ups, disease and famine. The columns combined to radiate a mood of impending crisis.

That morning Geoffrey and Alice Morton set off as usual from their mellow stone bungalow at Sarona for their places of work. The drive took about ten minutes, south along the Haifa−Jaffa highway. The cold, wet night had given way to a bright day. To the left as they drove stood orange groves and Arab villages, looking much as they had for centuries. To the right, the modernist apartment houses and office blocks of Tel Aviv gleamed clean and white in the morning sun. The car pulled up outside CID headquarters and Morton alighted and entered the building. The Jaffa High School for Girls, where Alice taught geography to Arab students, was only a short walk away.

Morton’s day got off to a bad start. The surveillance of the Levsteins’ home in Rambam Street had taken them no nearer to Tova Svorai and her mysterious guest. That line of inquiry seemed to have reached a dead end. Half a mile away at the Government Hospital, Moshe Svorai and Yaacov Levstein’s stay was almost over.18 Now they were about to exchange a hospital ward for a cell in the Jerusalem Central Prison, whose high, cavernous rooms and wide, flagged corridors had once been the Marianskya, a hostel for Russian women pilgrims to the Holy Land. Levstein was in surprisingly good spirits. ‘It was a beautiful spring day, full of sun and the singing of birds,’ he remembered.19 ‘I was happy to be recovering and looked forward to seeing my mother. I knew she would feel much better once she saw me. After all, she had once said that prison was a safe place for me, since she did not have to worry constantly something was going to happen to me.’

According to Morton’s official report, Mrs Levstein arrived at the hospital at 9.30 a.m. with clothing for her son. She was met by Sergeant Daly who ‘took her into the courtyard of the hospital and took the clothes from her, pointing out to her the window of the [ground floor] ward in which her son was accommodated’. He ‘subsequently allowed Mrs Levstein to stand in such a position as she could carry on a clandestine conversation with Zvorai [sic]’. Daly then ‘entered the detention ward and appeared to be busy with the other prisoner’.

Yaacov Levstein’s account differs slightly. He says that he and his mother talked first. They were speaking in Russian and Daly ordered them to switch to Hebrew. Aware the policeman spoke this well, Levstein was careful not to say anything revealing. ‘Once he realized that he did not stand to gain anything from my mother’s visit, he motioned to her it was time to leave,’ he wrote. It was then that Svorai made his fatal intervention. Levstein claimed that ‘as my mother was about to leave Svorai turned to her and said in a clear voice: “Perhaps you can give my regards to my wife who lives at 8 Mizrahi B[et] Street.”’

The effect on Daly was electric. He ‘lunged across the room as if bitten by a snake’, rushing to a telephone outside the door of the ward. Levstein recalls: ‘I fell back on my bed, my heart pounding violently. I knew something terrible was going to happen.’

Svorai never denied the essentials of the story. In a conversation with Stern’s biographer, Ada Amichal-Yevin, he said that when Mrs Levstein appeared at the window he let Yaacov speak first and ‘then I asked her, did you see Tova? She told me no, she hadn’t as she didn’t know where she lives.’20 When Moshe was arrested Stern had been installed chez Svorai for four weeks. Everyone knew the arrangement was a bad one and the last thing he had heard was that plans were in hand for him to move to Jerusalem at the beginning of February. ‘I did not imagine that on 12 February he would still be in the apartment,’ he claimed. ‘So I said what I said – Mizrachi B 8.’

In Geoffrey Morton’s official report, Daly heard Svorai give Mrs Levstein the address more precisely as ‘8 Mizrachi B Street – on the roof’. He also says that, rather than phoning, ‘he obtained a relief from Ajani Police Station [the nearest to the hospital] and came and reported the matter immediately to me’.

When Daly reached CID headquarters with the information, Morton ‘immediately dispatched Inspector Wilkin and a party of CID personnel to visit the roof … following myself a few minutes later’. Normally he was the first to rush to the scene of any drama, but as he explained later, he was expecting an important call from Jerusalem. Despite the colourful circumstances in which it was obtained, the information was after all fairly slight. The ‘guest’ might turn out to be an innocent party. Or he might be worthy of police attention, but have already flown the coop. After a dozen years of police work Morton was well used to false alarms and dud tip-offs.

So it was Wilkin who set off first, along with his assistant and friend Sergeant Bernard Stamp and other policemen. When Wilkin arrived at 8 Mizrachi Bet Street, Morton reported later, he immediately threw a cordon round the house to prevent anyone escaping. Then he and Stamp mounted the stairs to the little flat on the roof. Tova was reclining on the sofa where she would lie to ease the pain in her inflamed liver, when she heard a ‘light, delicate knock on the door. Yair got up from the quiet of his chair. His blue slippers with the soft soles did not make any noise. He went straight to the wardrobe and got in. I closed the door after him. Only then did I approach the outer door and open it.’21

Standing there were ‘the red-haired English officer Wilkin’ and two other detectives. Tova appeared to have met Wilkin before – possibly during the raid on the flat in Keren Kayemet Street – for she was familiar with his ‘sweet-talking’ manner. According to her account he asked her: ‘Tova, why didn’t you come to see the injured Moshe?’ She ‘evaded an answer or gave a short reply’. Wilkin continued: ‘I’ve come to take clothes for Moshe. He’s moving today to the prison in Jerusalem.’

Tova went into the living-room-cum-bedroom and fetched vests, pants and handkerchiefs from a drawer and took down Moshe’s suit hanging on the back of the door. She gave them to Wilkin who seemed in no hurry to leave. Instead, she said, he kept up his ‘smooth-tongued’ chat. ‘“Take my advice,” he said politely. “Persuade Moshe to give up his fight against the British. What good is it doing him? After all, he’s got a sick wife and a little girl. It’s time he took care of them because he’s never going to defeat the British.”’

Tova was desperate not to prolong the encounter and said nothing. Her apparent serenity ruffled Wilkin for, she claimed, his ‘face became red with anger’ and he shouted ‘you are murderers, you are thieves, all of Stern’s people!’ He ended the tirade by promising that, like Zak and Avraham, they would all end up in Nahalat Yitzhak, the cemetery on the eastern edge of Tel Aviv. This provoked Tova into an outburst of her own. She ‘could no longer be silent and I said in a strong, confident voice: “Wilkin, listen to what I’m telling you. It will be my privilege to see all of you running away from our country.”’

Now Wilkin decided it was time to search the flat. According to Tova there were more than two detectives in the party. One of them left to fetch more residents of the building, so as to have witnesses to back up the police if anyone tried to claim they were planting evidence or mistreating Tova. Wilkin sat down to examine the papers lying on the hall table. Meanwhile, according to Morton’s report, the other detective – Bernard Stamp – started to work his way through the apartment, opening and shutting cupboard doors first in the kitchen, then in the bed-sitting room. By the end there was only one place left to investigate … the wardrobe in the corner.

‘When he opened the door,’ wrote Tova, ‘Yair couldn’t be seen at all. The closet was filled with suits, dresses and a coat. But then he reached in with his hand. Of course it came in contact with the body of Yair. He pulled him towards him.’

Later, Morton could not disguise his satisfaction at the ignominious circumstances in which Stern had been discovered. ‘This tough gangleader, master-mind of terrorism, organiser of mass murder and assassinations by the dozen, arch-enemy of Britain and the war effort, this would be Quisling, had been found hiding in the wardrobe under the petticoats of his hostess,’ he wrote.22

Tova claimed that as Stamp pulled Stern out he saw the policeman’s hand move to his hip pocket and she assumed he was going for his gun. ‘I sprang up … and stood between Yair and the detective,’ she wrote. ‘“Don’t shoot,” I said. “Or if you do, shoot me.”’23

She had no reason to fear. Wilkin was in the room now and standing in front of Stern. He was ‘shaking his finger and saying “Avraham, Avraham” like a good father scolding his child.’ Stern stood ‘pale and quiet’ saying nothing, his nostrils quivering slightly. The detectives sat him down on the sofa. Stamp stood over him, holding his two wrists in one big hand and covering him with his pistol with the other. Another detective stood in the door, his gun drawn. Wilkin ordered Tova to sit next to Yair on the couch. He showed the neighbours one of the Stern ‘wanted’ portraits and referred to him as a ‘murderer’. This provoked further histrionics from Tova who urged them not to believe him. The frail figure sitting next to her was ‘a great Jew who loves his people and land’. Stern at last spoke. ‘Tova, it’s not worth replying to him,’ he said. Then he asked for his shoes, which were lying in a corner. She brought them over, ‘black shiny shoes’, and Stamp released his grip so that Stern could put them on. Tova noticed the clock on the sideboard next to the sofa. It read 9.40 a.m. Then there was a commotion and ‘at once the place was filled with English detectives, tall with light faces and hair. Their mood was exuberant …’ Geoffrey Morton had arrived.24

The first thing Morton says he did on reaching the flat was to order ‘the removal of Mrs Svorai to CID headquarters’. A later report written by Alan Saunders for the benefit of the Chief Secretary claimed she was ‘hysterical and began tearing off her clothes’.25 Tova maintained that a policewoman took her into the kitchen and searched her. Then she changed her housecoat for a dress and was escorted down the stairs by two policemen. A small car stood alongside the kerb. She was surprised to see Wilkin standing next to it. Parked across the street was a van which she assumed was there to take Yair to the police station. The escorts ordered her to get into the car. She saw Wilkin gazing up towards the rooftop apartment which was hidden by the parapet of the building. Nonetheless she, too, pressed her face against the window and stared upwards.

In that cramped flat Geoffrey Morton was looking for the first time on the face off the man he had been hunting for so long. The atmosphere in the room can only be imagined. From the door to the window set in the far wall the distance was twelve feet eleven inches. From side to side it measured just over twelve feet. In it were crammed a divan, a wardrobe and a sideboard. The tiny space was crowded with big British bodies. Morton and Stamp were both six feet tall and there was at least one other policeman present, all towering over the small figure hunched on the couch.

The truth of what happened next would be endlessly disputed. For the next fifty-four years of his life, Geoffrey Morton would find himself again and again having to defend his version of events, fighting several legal actions to defend his honour when his account was contradicted. The basic story was told when he sat down the day after the event to compose his report for his superiors in Jerusalem. The document does not lie in any of the official archives but was discovered tucked away among the papers of Alec Stuart, which, after his death, Morton arranged to be placed in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, London.26 It is written in flat police language, devoid of drama or emotion. After Tova Svorai’s departure he wrote that he ‘instructed Stern to exchange his slippers for walking shoes’. (According to Tova he had already done this, though the detail does not seem important.)

At the time ‘Stern was sitting on the edge of a settee and just as he finished lacing his shoes he took a leap towards the window opposite which he was sitting. He dived under the arm of No. 67. B/Con. Hancock, S.N., who was covering him with a revolver and passed behind Sgt Stamp who was examining the contents of the buffet [sideboard].’ Stern was ‘halfway out of the window when both Hancock and myself fired practically simultaneously’. He was hit immediately, ‘the first bullet catching him on the side of the head by the ear’. Then ‘he swung round and received other bullets as he fell one of which passed through his heart’. It seemed to Morton that ‘he died immediately’.27 From the back of the police car Tova heard the shots. She screamed to the people in the street: ‘Plainclothes police have murdered Yair Stern!’28

When Alan Saunders came to write a long report on the evolution of the Stern case for Chief Secretary Macpherson, he described the killing in the same way that it had been presented to him by Morton in his initial account. Stern was ‘half-way out of the window when he was shot by two of the three policemen in the room, bullets entering the side of his head near the ear and the left side of his chest’. These two reports would form the basis of the official explanation of the shooting, to be repeated in press statements, internal documents and responses to parliamentary questions. It was summed up in a sentence that, by now, as Morton was the first to admit, was discredited: Stern had been shot while trying to escape.

The detectives gathered up the papers scattered on Stern’s desk to take them away for translation. A journalist from the newspaper HaBoker who arrived on the scene reported seeing two plainclothes policemen, one of them a Jewish officer carrying the body down the stairs, covered in a grey sheet.29 It was put in an ambulance and taken to the Government Hospital in Jaffa.

There was a procedure that had to be followed before Stern could be buried. Moshe Svorai and Yaacov Levstein were in bed in the detention ward waiting to be moved to prison when a Jewish detective called Yosef Brenner entered with another officer and told them they had a duty to perform. Brenner led Svorai to a room in the hospital where a body lay stretched out under a cover. Morton was waiting for them. The cover was pulled back to reveal the body of Avraham Stern. Svorai was asked if he recognized it. He replied that he did not. The process was repeated with Levstein. He, too, claimed he did not know the man.30

That afternoon, at four o’clock, Stern’s wife, mother and brother gathered at an open graveside in the Nahalat Yitzhak cemetery. Roni had heard of her husband’s shooting on the radio. She travelled from her home at Ramat Hashavim about ten miles north of Tel Aviv to the apartment in the city where Stern’s brother, David, lived with their mother, Liza. David set off in search of more details, ‘hoping that Yair was only wounded and arrested’. He returned to find policemen in the flat, come to tell them that Avraham was dead. The body arrived at the cemetery in a car of the Chevra Kadisha religious burial society and was taken into a room for ritual purification. Then it was taken to the grave and lowered in. As David recited the Kaddish prayer for the dead, British police watched from a distance.31

Before it left the hospital, a photograph was taken of the corpse. It shows the body stretched out on what looks like a concrete slab, on top of a blanket. The head rests on a metal plate. Three bullet-entry wounds are visible on Stern’s thin, narrow torso – one below his left shoulder blade, one over his heart and one in his left side. There appears to be another through his left ear. His thick hair falls back in waves and his cheeks are clean-shaven. His eyes are half shut – but they seem almost alive. His mouth is relaxed; you sense the beginning of a smile. He looks strangely contented.