Harry's Game Part 12

'Has to be." She was wearing her hair up, and the wind was pulling it away from the big tortoisesh.e.l.l clip at the back of her head. It was whisping away--she hadn't taken enough time to settle it properly in the hurry to get the food ready and the kids dressed for the expedition. She had little make-up on, lipstick untidy. Not how she'd want Harry to see her. "But I don't think he'd volunteer for anything like this now, and I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would just pick him out over all the people they've got and rush him down to the Gulf. It just doesn't make sense. I thought he'd burned all the spook stuff out of him.'

'Still, it's not long now, only a fortnight or so," comforted her mother.

'That's what they said. We've no option but to believe them.'

Mary Brown could not confide the depth of her unhappiness to her mother. Too many years of marriage and before that secretarial college in London had dulled the relations.h.i.+p. Their marriage was too confidential to gossip about. What hurt most was that she had thought she had understood the man she had been living with for so long, and now she had discovered that there was a different compartment in his make-up.

'Well, at least we know he can look after himself," said her mother, sensing the barriers going up.

'Let's hope he doesn't have to. We'll get the kids back and have lunch.'

She called for them, and when they emerged filthy from the forest they all walked back to the car.

That same lunchtime Seamus Duffryn was summoned to a house in Beachmount and told by the Battalion intelligence officer to resume close surveillance on McEvoy. Duffryn was told a squad was going out in the afternoon to find a friend of McEvoy, a girl who had been out with him. Josephine Laverty from Clonard.

A few hundred yards away in the Springfield Road the British army unit that had been asked to find the girl was puzzled that it had no record of her or her mother living in the area. There was no reason why they should have done, as the house was in the name of Josephine's uncle, Michael O'Leary. A little after three o'clock the unit reported in that it had been unable to locate the girl. By then a critical amount of the available time had run out.

It took more than two hours from the time Frost called the army headquarters dominating Ardoyne and told them of the tip to the moment Billy Downs was identified. First the troops who had taken part in the search operation at the caeli had to be located. The lieutenant who had led the raid was in Norfolk on weekend leave, and there was no answer to his telephone. The sergeant, the next senior man out, recalled that he had busied himself near the door on security, but he was able to name the six soldiers who had carried out the split-up question-and-answer work. Private Jones was now in Berlin, but Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn was picked up by a Saracen from a foot patrol on the far side of the Battalion area. There was no written record, of course. That, along with Jones, were the only two pieces of evidence of the confrontation, and both had now disappeared. Llewellyn stared at the photokit issued in London that had been brought up from the guard room.

'That's the one it's like, if it's any of them. It's Downs. It's not a great likeness. It's not easy to pick him on that picture. But if he was there that's the one it was. There was his woman there, in yellow. She ran out across to him.'

With the name they attacked the filing system. Billy Downs. Ypres Avenue, number 41. There'd been a spot-check on his story about being down in Cork with his mother. The Garda had been fast for a change, and had cleared him of involvement. They said he'd been there through that period. There's been a query about him because he was away from home. Otherwise, clean with nothing known. The net inside the headquarters spread wider, to include the policeman who had seen him that night in the small hours.

'He was very cool. Not even a sweat on his palms. I know, as I looked.'

It was into the afternoon that they called Frost back.

'We think we've located the man you want. He's Billy Downs, without an "e" on the end. Ypres Avenue, wife and kids. Very quiet, from what we've seen of him. Unemployed. His story stuck after the Garda ran a check on the alibi he gave us to account for his long absence from the area. There was no other reason to hold him. Like to point out that the chaps that have actually seen this fellow say that he's not that like the pics you put out. Much fatter in the face, I'm told. Perhaps you'll let us know what you want done. We've a platoon on immediate. We can see pretty much down that street: I've an OP in the roof of a mill, right up the top.'

Frost growled back into the phone, "I'd be interested in knowing if Mr Downs is currently at home.'

'Wait one." As he held on for the answer Frost could hear the distant sounds of the unit operations room as they called up the OP on a field telephone. "Not quite so hot, I'm afraid. They log comings and goings. We think Downs left his home, that's number forty-one, around twenty-five minutes ago. That's fifteen-o-five hours precisely that he went out. But he goes in and out pretty regularly. No reason to think he won't be back in a bit.'

'I'd like it watched," said Frost, "but don't move in yet, please.

This number will be manned through the evening and the night. Call me as soon as you see him.'

Downs was on his way by car up the Lisburn Road at the time that the observation post overlooking Ypres Avenue was warned to look out for him. There were several subsequent entries in the exercise book the two soldiers kept for logging the comings and goings in the street. They had noted him as soon as he came from his front door and began the walk up the hill away from them to one of the decreed exits from Ardoyne. When the message came through on the radio telephone to the troops Downs was just out of his heartland, standing in the no-man's ground at the top of the Crumlin waiting for his pickup. This was neither Protestant nor Catholic territory. Side streets on either side of the road shut off with great daubed sheets of corrugated iron. Two worlds split by a four-lane road with barricades to keep people from each other's throats. Scrawled on one side was "Up the Provos', and "British Army Out', and beyond the opposite pavement the messages of "f.u.c.k the Pope" and "UVF'.

He was edgy waiting there in daylight beside such a busy road, one used heavily by military traffic, and the relief showed in his face when the Cortina pulled up alongside him, and the driver bent sideways to open the pa.s.senger door. The car had been hijacked in the Falls thirty-five minutes earlier.

A moment later they moved off, weaving their way through the city. By the crossroads in the centre of the sprawling, middle-cla.s.s suburb the car turned left and up one of the lanes that lead to the Down countryside through a small belt of woods. They turned off among the trees.

The driver unlocked the boot and handed over the Armalite rifle. It was wrapped in a transparent plastic bag. Downs checked the firing mechanism. It was a different weapon to the one that he had used before in his attack on the patrol, and was issued by a quite unconnected quartermaster. But the rifle came from the same original source--Howa Industries, of Nagoya in j.a.pan. It had been designed as a hunting weapon, and that astonished him. What sort of animal did you take a killing machine of this proven performance to hunt? He released the catch on the stock to check that the folding hinge was in working order. That reduced the length of the weapon by eleven inches, bringing it down to less than two-and-a-half feet, so that it would comfortably fit into the padded inside pocket of his coat. He was pa.s.sed the two magazines, glanced them over and fitted one deep into the attachment slot under the belly of the gun. He activated a bullet up into the breech, and flicked with his thumb at the safety catch to ensure it was engaged. The volunteer at the wheel watched the preparations with fascination.

With the stick folded, Downs pushed the rifle down into the hidden pocket.

'I don't know how long I'll be," he said. "For G.o.d's sake don't suddenly clear off or anything smart. Stick here. At least till midnight.'

They were the only words Downs spoke before he disappeared into the growing darkness to walk the half-mile towards Rennie's house. The only words of the whole journey. The teenager left behind with the car amongst the trees subsided, s.h.i.+vering, into the driver's seat to wait for his return.

The regular Sunday afternoon visit to the office to clear the acc.u.mulation of paper work off his desk was no longer a source of controversy between the policeman and Janet Rennie. It had been at first, with accusations of "putting the family into second place' being levelled. The increasing depression of the security situation in the province had caused her to relent.

It was now understood that she and the two girls, Margaret and Fiona, would have their tea, watch some television and then wait for him to get home before bedtime.

Over the last four years Janet Rennie had become used to the problems of being a policeman's wife. A familiar sight now was the shoulder holster slung over the bedside chair when he had an extra hour in bed on Sat.u.r.day mornings, before the weekly trip to the out of-town supermarket. So too were the registration plates in the garage, which he alternated on the car, and around the house the mortise locks on all the doors, inside and out. At night all these were locked with a formal ritual of order and precedence, lest one should be forgotten, and the detective's personal firearm lay in the half opened drawer of the bedside table, on which rested the telephone which, as often as not, would ring deep into the night.

Promotion and transfer to Belfast had been hard at first. The frequency of the police funerals they attended along with the general level of danger in the city had intimidated her. But out of the fear had come a fierce-rooted hatred of the IRA enemy.

Janet Rennie had long since accepted that her husband might not last through the troubles, might be a.s.sa.s.sinated by one of those . I.

m I i feyed, cold-faced young men whose photographs she saw attached to the outside of the files he brought home in the evenings and at weekends. She didn't shrink from the possibility that she might ride in the black Austin Princess behind the flag and the band to a grey, country churchyard. When he was late home she attacked her way through the knitting, her therapy along with the television set. He was often out late, seldom in before eight or nine--and that was a good evening. But she felt pride for the work he did, and shared something of his commitment.

The girls, seven and five, were in the bright, warm living-room of the bungalow, kneeling together on the treated sheepskin rug in front of the open fire, watching the television when the door bell rang.

'Mama! Mama! Front-door bell!" Margaret shouted to her mother at the back, too absorbed to drag herself away from the set.

Janet Rennie was making sandwiches for tea, her mind taken by fish-paste fillings and the neatness of the arrangement of the little bread triangles. They had become a treat, these Sunday teas, the girls and their mother playing at gentility with enthusiasm. With annoyance she wondered who it could be. Which of the girls from the close was calling right at tea time?

The bell rang again.

'Come on, Mama. It's the front door." Margaret resigned herself. 'Do you want me to go?'

'No, I'll do it. You stay inside, and you're not going out to play on your bikes at this time of night.'

She wiped her hands on the cloth hanging beside the sink. Right from the start she ignored the basic rule of procedure that her husband had laid down. As her hand came up towards the Yale lock that was always on, she noticed that the chain had been left off since the children came back from playing with their friends of three doors down. It should have been fastened. She should have fastened it before she opened the door. But she ignored the rules and pulled the door back.

'Excuse me, is it Mrs Rennie?'

She looked at the shortish man standing there on her front doorstep, hands in his coat pockets, an open smile round his face, dark hair nicely parted.

'Yes, that's right.'

Very quietly he said, "Put your hands behind your head, keep them there and don't shout. Don't make any move. I know the kids are here.'

She watched helplessly as through his coat, unb.u.t.toned and open, he drew out the ugly squat black shape of the Armalite. Holding it in one hand, with the stock still folded, he prodded her with the barrel hack into the hallway. She felt strange, detached from what was happening, as if it were a scenario. She had no control over the situation, she knew that. He came across the carpet past the stairs towards her, nicking the door closed with his heel. It clattered as it swung to, the lock engaging behind him.

'Who is it, Mama?" From behind the closed door of the lounge Fiona called out.

'We'll go in there now. Just remember this. If you try anything I'll kill you. You, and the children. Don't forget it when you want to play the b.l.o.o.d.y heroine. We're going to sit in there, and wait for that b.a.s.t.a.r.d husband of yours. Right? Is the message all plain and clear and understood?'

The narrow barrel of the Armalite dug into her flesh just above rhe hip as he pushed past her to the door and opened it. Their mother was half into the room before Fiona turned, words part out of her mouth but frozen when she saw the man with the rifle. Even to a child three months off her fifth birthday the message was brilliantly obvious. The girl rose up on her knees, her face clouding from astonishment to terror. As if in slow motion her elder sister registered the new mood. Wide-eyed, and with the brightness fading from her, she saw first her sister's face then her mother standing hunched, as if bowed down by some great weight, and behind her Downs with the small s.h.i.+ny rifle in his right hand.

Too frightened to scream the elder girl remained stock still till her mother reached her, gathered the children to her, and took them to the sofa.

The three of them held tightly to each other as on the other side of the room Downs eased himself down into Rennie's chair. From there he was directly facing the family, who were huddled away in the front corner of the sofa to be as far as possible from him. He also had a clear view of the door into the room, and of the window beyond it at the far edge of the lounge. It was there that he expected the first sign of Rennie's return, the headlights of the policeman's car.

'I'll warn you for the last time, missus. Any moves, anything clever, and you'll be dead, the lot of you. Don't think Mrs Rennie, when it comes to it, that you're the only one at risk. That would be getting it very wrong, a bad miscalculation. If I shoot you I do the kids as well. We'll leave the TV on, and you'll sit there. And just remember I'm watching you. Watching you all the time. So be very careful. Right, missus?'

Billy Downs paused and let the effect of his words sink in on the small room.

'We're just going to wait," he said.

I.

FIFTEEN.

The four men sent to question Josephine Laverty had none of the problems finding her that the British army unit in the Springfield Road had encountered. Smiling broadly, the oldest in the group, and the leader, suggested that old Mrs Laverty might care to go into the kitchen and take herself a good long cup of tea.

They took Josephine up to her bedroom far from the mother's ears. One of the younger men drew the curtains, cutting out the frail shafts of sunlight, and took up his position by the window. Another stood at the door. The third of the volunteers stood behind the chair they cursorily suggested Josephine should sit in. The older man they called Frank, and they treated him with respect and with caution.

The girl was poorly equipped to handle an interrogation. Frank's opening question had been harmless enough, and he was as astonished as the other three boys in the room at the way she collapsed.

Perhaps it was because she was one of the uninvolved, those few in the city who tried to weave a life outside the troubles. Her lack of commitment had built up a fear of violence, second nature to so many, and therefore not so terrifying. Without loyalties there was only self-preservation, and there was little anyone could do now to help her in the face of the unspoken brutality of the men who had crowded round her. Cold, cruel faces, pallid, expressionless, used and trained in begetting pain. There was only one reason they would come to her ... because of Harry, sweet and beautiful and chatty Harry. She looked at their hands, big, dirty, broken fingernails, roughened with usage. Their boots, hard and bruised from wear, drab from the rain outside. Men who would hurt her, punch her, kick her. And for what? For a few minutes" delay in the inevitable. She would tell them what they had come to find out. They were far outside her experience, the men who stood around her, moving among her possessions as if there by right. They did have the right, she thought. Yesterday on the Sperrins she had become involved in their territory, and that was why they had come.

'This fellow McEvoy, that you've been going with. Who is he?'

fThere had been no reply, only a dissolve as her head went down to her lap and she buried her cheeks and her eyes and ears into the palms of her hands.

'Who is he?" Frank was insistent. "Who is he, where does he come from?'

'You know who he is. Why come to me for it? You know well enough.'

Frank paced up and down, short steps, continually twisting round towards the girl when he lost sight of her, moving back and forward between the window and the door, skirting the single bed littered with the girl's clothes.

'I want you to tell me." He emphasized it. Like an owl with a scarce-whelped mouse, a stoat with a rabbit, he dominated the cringing girl at the wooden chair before him.

'I want it from you. D'yer hear? I've not much time.'

Josephine shook her head, partly from the convulsion of her collapse, and reeled away from him as he swung his clenched fist backhanded across her face. Her knuckles took much of the force of the blow, but through the splayed fingers across her eyes she saw the blood welling close and then breaking the skin at the back of her hands.

Frank could see that what had been put to him as somewhat of a routine questioning had become rather more complex. The fear and hesitation of the girl had alerted him. Her inability to answer a simple explicit question. Frank knew McEvoy only as a lodger at the girl's employer's guest house ... been out with him once or twice. A fair-looking piece, he'd probably knocked her off, but that wouldn't be enough to put her there doubled up and sniffling.

'I'm getting impatient, girl. To him you owe none of the loyalty you should give to us.'

He weighed up whether he would need to hit her again.

She nodded her head, very slightly at first, then merging into the positive move of acquiescence and surrender. Frank held back. He would not have to hit her again.

She straightened up, steadying herself as she prepared the words.

'He's with the British, isn't he? You knew that. He's British.

I.

I.

I don't know what he does, but he's been sent to live amongst us. He's looking for the man that killed the politico. Over in London. That's his job. To find that man. He said when he found him he'd exterminate him.'

She stopped, leaving the shadowy little room quiet. Below she could hear her mother about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down.

Josephine saw the enormity of what she had said. She'd told him, hadn't she, that his truth was safe with her. One backhander and she spilled it all. She remembered it, outside the pub on the hill at Glenshane. She'd promised it then, when she'd told him to quit.

Frank stared intently at her.

'His job was as an agent in here? He's a British agent? Sent in to infiltrate us? ... Holy Jesus!'

'You knew? You knew, didn't you? You wouldn't have come if you hadn't known.'

The room was near-dark now. Josephine could barely make out the men in the room--only the one silhouetted at the window by the early street light. Her mother called up for tea for her visitors. No one answered. The old lady lingered at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the reply, then went back to the kitchen, accepting and perhaps understanding the situation and unable to intervene.

The girl wavered one last time in her loyalties and her allegiance. Upbringing, tradition, community all came down heavily on the scales against the balance of the laugh and adulthood and bed of Harry. But there was the wee girl with the tossing feet and the tightening stocking, and the obscenity and the misery of death in the police cell, and that wiped Harry from the slate. She spoke again.

'He was the one that shopped Theresa, the girl that hung herself. She said she'd been with the man that did the London killing, but he couldn't perform. Harry tipped the army about it. He said the killing was a challenge to the British, and they had to get the man who did it, and kill him. Something like that, just to show who ran things. He told me this yesterday.'

The volunteers said nothing, their imagination stretched by what the girl said. Frank spoke. "Was he close to the man he was looking for? Did he know his name? Where he lived? What he looked like? Just how much did the b.a.s.t.a.r.d know?'

'He said he thought he knew what he looked like." She saw Theresa again in her mind, heard her giggling in the small s.p.a.ce round the basin outside the lock-up closet. That was the justification, that was enough ... to see the girl's face. Hear her choking. "He said he was a good shot, and a cool b.u.g.g.e.r, that's what he called him. And, yes, they were looking, he said, for a man who would be out of the main eye of things. That was the exact phrase he used.'

'And you, how did you spot this highly-trained British a.s.sa.s.sin, little girl?'

'I spotted him because of a silly thing. You have to believe me, but we were on the Sperrins yesterday. He said he'd been in the Merchant Navy, and sailed all over, but the gale on the mountain seemed to shake him a bit. I said to him it wasn't very good if he'd been to sea as much as he said. Then he didn't hide it any more. He seemed to want to talk about it.' Clever little b.i.t.c.h, thought Frank.

'Is he in regular touch, communication, with his controller?' 'I don't know.' 'Is he armed?'

'I don't know that either. I never saw a gun. I've told you all I know. That's G.o.d's truth.'

'There's one little problem for you, Miss Josephine." Frank's voice had a cutting edge to it now, something metallic, cold and smooth. 'You haven't explained to me yet how this British agent came to hear about Theresa and what she was saying about the London man. You may need a bit of time for that, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d wh.o.r.e. Treacherous little b.i.t.c.h.'

He came very close to her now. She could smell the tobacco and beer on his breath and the staleness of sweat on his clothes. He hadn't shaved that day, and his face was a p.r.i.c.kled, lumpy ma.s.s.

'Just work it out," he said. "Then tell the lads, because they'll be waiting for an answer. To us you're nothing, dirt, sc.u.m, s.h.i.+t. You've shopped one of your own ... a wee girl who hanged herself rather than talk to the f.u.c.king British. You betrayed her. You betrayed your lover boy as well. We'll put it about, you know, and we'll let the military know as well. You'll find somewhere to run, but there'll be sod-all people to help you get there, you little cow. But then, when these lads have finished with you, you'll be thinking twice before you go drop your knickers to another Britisher.'

Frank turned away and walked to the door. He said to the man who was standing there, "It's just a lesson this time, Jamie. Nothing permanent and nothing that shows. Something just for her to remember, to think about for a long time. Then lose yourselves. If we need you later we know where you'll be, so split from here. And, little girl, if you've half an inch of sense in your double-dealing painted head you'll not mention what's happened here tonight, nor what's going to.' He went out of the door and down the steep staircase. In the hall the old woman saw him, as she turned in her chair by the fire and looked at him. He smiled at her.

'Don't worry, lady," he said, "I can find my way out. You just stay where you are.'

The three younger men followed him through the door fifteen minutes later. They left Josephine doubled up on the bed wheezing for air and holding the soft solar plexus of her stomach. She lay a long time in the room, fighting the pain and willing it away. Her clothes lay scattered in the corners of the room where the men had ripped them from her.

'Right on your b.l.o.o.d.y flesh, you little b.i.t.c.h, where it hurts, and where it'll last.'

She'd thought they were going to rape her, but instead they simply beat her. She curled herself up, foetal position, her arms protecting her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and lower stomach, thighs clamped together. That was how she stayed after they'd gone. Her breath came back to her soon, and after that there was the long, deep aching of the muscles, and, mingled with it, the agony of the betrayal. Betrayal of Theresa. Betrayal of Harry.

Perhaps the men had been sensitive about beating up a girl, perhaps it was the sight of her nakedness, but the job was not thoroughly done. The effect soon faded. There was time to think then. Frank would have gone straight to the house to find Harry. He'd be taken, tortured, and shot, that would come later, or tomorrow morning. Her reasoning made any thought of warning Harry irrelevant. They would have him already, but did she want to warn him? One good screw, and what had he done? Lifted her bedroom tattle from pillow confidence to military intelligence information. Let him rot with it.