‘There’s been nothing from that fellow the PM launched,’ muttered the Brigadier. ‘Long shot at the best of times. No word, I’m told, and Frost in intelligence is still leaping about. Called it a bloody insult. See his point.’
‘Sunk without trace, probably. They sniff them out, smell them a mile off. Poor devil. I feel for him. How was he supposed to solve it when SB and intelligence don’t have a line in? If our trained people can’t get in there, how’s this chap?’
‘Bloody ridiculous.’
‘He’ll end up dead, and it’ll be another life thrown away. I hope he doesn’t, but if he sticks at it they’ll get him.’
‘I expect your SB were the same, but intelligence weren’t exactly thrilled. What really peeved them was that at first they weren’t supposed to know anything, then it leaked. I think the Old Man himself put it out, then came the message, and there wasn’t much to show from that. Frost stayed behind after the Old Man’s conference last Friday and demanded to know what was going on. Said it was an indication of no confidence in his section. Threatened his commission and everything on it. GOC calmed him down, but it took a bit of time.’
The music was loud in the dining room, and both men needed to speak firmly to hear each other above the canned violin strings. The policeman spoke:
‘I think Frost’s got a case. So have we for that matter’ . . . in mid-chord and without warning the tape ran out . . . ‘to put a special operator in on the ground without telling . . .’ Dramatically conscious of the way his voice had carried in the sudden moment of silence he cut himself short.
Awkwardly the two men waited for the half-minute or so that it took the reception staff away in the front hall to loop up the reverse side of the three-hour tape, then the talking began again.
The eighteen-year-old waiter serving the next table their courgettes had clearly heard the second half of the sentence. He repeated the words to himself as he went round the table – ‘Special operator on the ground without telling.’ He said it five times to himself as he circled the table, fearful that he would forget the crucial words. Then he hurried with the emptied dish to the kitchen, scribbling the words in large spidery writing on the back of his order pad.
He went off duty at 3.30, and seventy-five minutes later the message of what he had overheard and its context were on their way to the intelligence officer of the Provisionals’ Third Battalion.
Chapter 8
Harry spent a long time getting himself ready to go out that Saturday night. He bathed, and put on clean clothes, even changing his socks from the ones he’d been wearing through the rest of the day, took a clean shirt from the wardrobe and brushed down the one suit he’d brought with him. In the time that he’d been in Belfast he had tried to stop thinking in the terms of an army officer, even when he was on his own and relaxed. He attempted to make his first impulses those of the ex-merchant seaman or lorry driver that he hoped to become. As he straightened his tie, though, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that this was a touch different from a mess night with the rest of the regiment at base camp in Germany.
He’d spent a difficult and nearly unproductive first week. He’d visited a score of firms looking for driver’s work with no success till Friday when he had come across a scrap merchant on the far side of Andersonstown. There they’d said they might be able to use him, but he should come back on Monday morning when he would get a definite answer. He had been in the pub on the corner several times, but though he was now accepted enough for him to stand and take his drink without the whole bar lapsing into a silent stare none of the locals initiated any conversation with him, and the opening remarks he made to them from time to time were generally rebutted with non-committal answers.
It had been both hard and frustrating, and he felt that the one bright spot that stood out was this Saturday night. Taking Josephine out. Like a kid out of school and going down the disco, you silly bugger. At your age, off to a peasant hop. As he dressed himself he began to liven up. One good night out was what he needed before the tedium of next week. Nearly six days gone, and not a thing to hook on to. Davidson said three weeks and something ought to show. Must have been the pep talk chat. He came down a little after seven and sat in the chair by the fire in the front room that was available to guests. He was on his own. All the others scurried away on Friday morning with their bags packed and homes to get to after a half-day’s work at the end of the week. Not hanging about up here, not in the front line.
When the doorbell rang he slipped quickly out into the hall, and opened the door. Josephine stood there, breathing heavily.
‘I’m sorry I’m late. Couldn’t get a bus. They’ve cut them down a bit, I think. I’m not very late, am I?’
‘I think all the buses are on the scrap yards up the road, stacks of them there, doubles and singles. I’d only just come down. I reckon you’re dead on time. Let’s go straight away.’
He shouted back towards the kitchen that he was on his way out, that he had his key, and not to worry if he was a bit late.
‘How do we get there?’ he asked. ‘It’s all a bit strange to me moving about the city still, especially at night.’
‘No problem. We’ll walk down to the hospital, get a cab there into town, and in Castle Street we’ll get another cab up the Crumlin. It’s just a short walk from there. It won’t take long, we’ll be there in forty-five minutes. It’s a bit roundabout, that’s all.’
In Ypres Avenue the man and his wife were making their final preparations to go out. There had been an uneasy understanding between them since their talk in the early hours after his homecoming, and no further word on the subject had been spoken. Both seemed to accept that the wounds of that night could only be healed by time and silence. She had lain in bed the first three mornings waiting for the high whine of the Saracens, expecting the troops to come breaking in to tear her man from their bed. But they didn’t come, and now she began to believe what he had told her. Perhaps there was no clue, perhaps the photokit really did look as little like him as she, his wife, believed. Her mother was busying herself at the back of the house round the stove, where she kept a perpetual pot of freshened tea. All the children were now in bed, the twins complaining that it was too early. To both of them the evening was something to look forward to, a change from the oppressiveness of the atmosphere as the man sat about his house, too small for privacy or for him to absent himself from the rest of the family. It had been laid down by his superiors that he was not to try to make contact with his colleagues in the movement, or in any way expose himself to danger of arrest. It meant long hours of waiting, fiddling time uselessly away. Already he felt restless, but hurrying things was futile. That’s how they all got taken, going off at half-cock when things weren’t ready for them. Not like London. All the planning was there. No impatience, just when it suited and not a day earlier. Boredom was his great enemy, and the need was for discipline, discipline as befits the member of an army.
With his wife on his arm, and in her best trouser suit, he walked up his street towards the hut with the corrugated-iron roof that was the social club. He could relax here, among his own. Drain his pints. Talk to people. It was back to the ordinary. To living again.
By the time Harry and Josephine arrived at the club, it was nearly full, with most of the tables taken. The girl said she’d find somewhere to sit, and he pushed his way towards the long trestle tables at the far end from the door where three men were hard at it in their shirt sleeves taking the tops off bottles and pouring drinks. Harry forced his way through the shoulders of the men standing close to the makeshift bar, made it to the front and called for a pint of Guinness and a gin and orange.
As he was struggling back to the table where Josephine was sitting he saw a man come up to her and gesture towards him. After they’d spoken a few words he’d nodded his head, smiled at the girl and moved back towards the door.
‘Someone you know?’ he said when he sat down, shifting her coat onto the back of t
he seat.
‘It’s just they like to know who’s who round here. Can’t blame them. He wanted to know who you were, that’s all.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Just who you were, that’s all.’
Everything was subdued at this stage of the evening, but the effects of the drink and the belting of the four-piece band and their electrically-amplified instruments began to have a gradual livening effect. By nine some of the younger couples were ignoring the protests of the older people and had begun to pile up the tables and chairs at the far end of the room to the bar, exposing a crude, unpolished set of nail-ridden boards. That was the dance floor. The band quickened the tempo, intensified the beat. When he felt that the small talk they were making was next to impossible, Harry asked the girl if she’d like to dance.
She led the way through the jungle of tables and chairs. Near the floor Harry paused as Josephine slowed and squeezed by a girl in a bright-yellow trouser suit. It was striking enough in its colour for Harry to notice it. Then, as his eyes moved to the table where she was sitting, he saw the young man at her side.
There was intuitive, deep-based recognition for a moment, and Harry couldn’t place it. He looked at the man, who stared straight back at him, challenging. Josephine was out on the floor now waiting for him to come by the girl in yellow. He looked away from the face that was still staring back at him, holding and returning his glance, mouthed an apology and was away to the floor. Once more he looked at the man, who still watched him, cold and expressionless – then Harry rejected the suspicion of the likeness. Hair wrong. Face too full. Eyes too close. Mouth was right. That was all. The mouth, and nothing else.
The floor pounded with the motion of a cattle stampede – as it seemed to Harry, who was used to more ordered dances at the base. At first he was nearly swamped, but survived after throwing off what decorum he had ever learned as he and Josephine were buffeted and shoved from one set of shoulders to another. Sweat and scent were already taking over from the beer and smoke. When the band switched to an Irish ballad he gasped his relief, and round them the frenetic movements slowed in pace. He could concentrate now on the girl close against him.
She danced with her head back, looking up at him and talking. Looking the whole time, not burying herself away from him. She was wearing a black skirt, full and flared, so that she had the freedom to swing her hips to the music. Above that a tight polka dot blouse. The top four buttons were unfastened. There were no Josephines in Aden, no Josephines taking an interest in married transport captains in Germany.
They talked dance-floor small talk, Harry launched into a series of concocted anecdotes about the ports he’d visited when he was at sea, and she laughed a lot. Twice a nagging uncertainty took his attention away from her to where the man was sitting quietly at the table with the girl in the yellow trouser suit, glasses in front of them, eyes roving, but not talking. The second time he decided the likeness was superficial. It didn’t hold up. Face, eyes, hair – all wrong. Before he turned back to Josephine he saw the mouth again. That was right. It amused him. Coincidence. And his attention was diverted to the girl, her prettiness and inevitable promise.
The man too had noticed Harry’s attention. It had been pronounced enough to make him fidget a little in his chair, and for him to feel the hot perspiration surge over his legs inside the thick cloth of his best suit. He had seen the doorminder talk to the girl who brought him in, and presumably clear the stranger. But his nerves had calmed when he had seen Harry on the dance floor, no longer interested, but totally involved in the girl he was with. The man could not dance, had never been taught. He and his wife would sit at the table all evening as a succession of friends and neighbours came to join them to talk for a few minutes and then move on. Along the wall to the right of the door and near the bar were a group of youths, some of them volunteers in the Provisionals, some couriers and some lookouts. These were the expendables of the movement. The teenage girls were gathered round them, attracted by the glamour of the profession of terrorism, hanging on the boys’ sneers and cracks and boasts. None of the boys would rise high in the upper echelons but each was necessary as part of the supply chain that kept the planners and marksmen in the field. None knew the man except by name. None knew of his involvement.
First through the door was the big sergeant, a Stirling sub-machine-gun in his right hand. He’d hit the door with all the impetus of his two hundred pounds gathered in a six-foot run. Behind him came a lieutenant, clutching his Browning automatic pistol, and then eight soldiers. They came in fast and fanned out in a protective screen round the officer. Some of the soldiers carried rifles, others the large-barrelled, rubber-bullet guns.
The officer shouted in the general direction of the band.
‘Cut that din. Wrap it up. I want all the men against the far wall. Facing the wall. Hands right up. Ladies, where you are please.’
From the middle of the dance floor a glass curved its way through the crowd and towards the troops. It hit high on the bridge of a nose creeping under the protective rim of a helmet. Blood was forming from the wound by the time the glass hit the floor. A rubber bullet, solid, unbending, six inches long, was fired into the crowd, and amid the screams there was a stampede away from the troops as tables and chairs were thrown aside to make way.
‘Come on. No games, please. Let’s get it over with. Now, the men line up at that wall – and now.’
More soldiers had come through the door. There were perhaps twenty of them in the hall by the time the line of men had formed up, legs wide apart and fingers and palms on the wall high above their heads. Harry and the man were close to each other, separated by three others. At her table the girl in the yellow trouser suit sat very still. She was one of the few who wasn’t barracking the army with a medley of obscenities and insults. Her fingers were tight round the stem of her glass, her eyes flicking continuously from the troops to her husband.
Josephine’s table had been knocked aside in the scramble to get clear from the firing of the rubber bullet, and she stood on the dance floor interested to see what the army made of her merchant-seaman escort.
Six of the soldiers, working in pairs, split up the line of men against the wall and started to quiz each man on his name, age and address. One soldier asked the questions, the other wrote down the answers. The lieutenant moved between the three groups, checking the procedure, while his sergeant marshalled his other men in the room to prevent any sudden break for the exits.
Private David Jones, number 278649, eighteen months of his nine-year signing served, and Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn, 512387, were working over the group of men nearest the dance floor. The man and Harry were there. The way the line had formed itself they would come to the man first. It was very slow. Conscientious, plodding. The wife was in agony. Charade, that’s all. A game of cat and mouse. They had come for him, and these were the preliminaries, the way they dressed it up. But they’d come for him. They had to know.
The lance-corporal tapped the man’s shoulder.
‘Come on, let’s have you.’ Not unkindly. It was quiet in the Ardoyne now, and the soldiers acknowledged it.
The man swung round, bringing his hands down to his side, fists clenched tight, avoiding the pleading face of his wife a few feet away. Llewellyn was asking the questions, Jones writing the answers down.
‘Name?’
‘Billy Downs.’
‘Age?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Address?’
‘Forty-one, Ypres Avenue.’
Llewellyn paused as Jones struggled in his notebook with the blunted pencil he had brought with him. The lieutenant walked towards them. He looked hard at the man, then down into Jones’s notebook, deciphering the smudged writing.
‘Billy Downs?’
‘That’s it.’
‘We were calling for you the other morning. Expected to find you home, but you weren’t there.’
He stared into the young man�
�s face. That was the question he posed. There was no reply.
‘Where were you, Mr Downs? Your good wife whom I see sitting over there didn’t seem too sure.’
‘I went down to see my mother in the South. It’s on your files. You can check that.’
‘But you’ve been away a fair few days, Downs boy. Fond of her, are you?’
‘She’s not been well, and you know that. She’s a heart condition. That’s in your files and all. It wasn’t made any better when there weren’t any of you lot around when the Prods came and burned her out . . . and that’s in your files too.’
‘Steady, boy. What’s her address?’
‘Forty, Dublin Road, Cork.’ He said it loud enough for his wife to hear the address given. His voice was raised now, and she listened to the message that was in it. ‘She’ll tell you I’ve been there for a month. That I was with her till four days ago.’
The lieutenant still gazed into Downs’s face, searching for weakness, evasion, inconsistency. If there was fear there he betrayed none of it to the soldier a bare year older than himself.
‘Put him in the truck,’ the lieutenant said. Jones and Llewellyn hustled Downs across the room and towards the door. His wife rose up out of her chair and rushed across to him.
‘Don’t worry, girl, once the Garda have checked with Mam I’ll be home. I’ll see you later.’ And he was out into the night to where the Saracen was parked.
The two soldiers came back to the line, and the lieutenant moved away to the other end where the youths, resigned to a ride back to barracks and an interrogation session at the end of it, snapped back sullen replies to the questions.
Llewellyn touched Harry’s shoulder.
‘Name?’
‘Harry McEvoy.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-three.’
Harry's Game Page 12