Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  Each left his imprint on the situation, and all went into the mythology of the movement. The one common factor was their ability to move, almost at will, round the rambling Andersonstown estate. Their names were well known to the troops, but their faces were blurs taken for the most part from out-of-date photographs. One had ordered his wife to destroy all family pictures that included him, and given all his briefings from behind curtains and drapes, so that under the rigours of cross-examination his lieutenants would not be able to give an accurate description of him. The most famous of all had sufficient mastery of impersonation to be able to win an apology for inconvenience from a young officer who had led a search party through the house where the Brigade commander was giving an interview to a reporter from a London Sunday.

  To a portion of the community their names provoked unchecked admiration, while to those less well disposed they sowed an atmosphere of fear. There were enough youths with ‘kneecap jobs’ and daubed slogans of ‘Touts will be shot dead’ for the message not to have to be repeated that often.

  That there were a few prepared to risk the automatic hooding and assassination was a constant source of surprise to the army intelligence officers. Money was mostly the reason that men would whisper a message into a telephone booth, but not even then big sums. There was seldom the wish to rid the community of the Provisionals . . . Men who felt that way stayed silent, kept their peace, and went about their lives. It was because the Brigade commander and his principal lieutenants could never be totally certain of the loyalty of the men and women who lived in Andersonstown that they delayed their meeting till midnight, though their arrival at the house had been staggered over the previous seventy minutes.

  None was armed. All were of sufficient importance to face sentences of up to a dozen years if caught in possession of a firearm. If arrested without a specific criminal offence provable against them they could only be detained in the Kesh – with the constant likelihood of amnesties.

  They took over a back bedroom while below the lady of the house made them a pot of tea. She took it up the stairs on a tray with beakers and milk and sugar. They had stopped talking when she came in and said nothing till she had placed the tray on the flat top of a clothes chest, and turned to the door.

  ‘Thanks, mam,’ the Brigade commander spoke, the others nodding and murmuring in agreement. She was away down the stairs to busy herself with her sewing and late-night television. When that was over she would sleep in her chair, waiting for the last man to leave the house to tell her the talking was over. The woman asked no questions and received no explanations other than the obvious one that the positioning of the house made it necessary that the men should use it.

  There were six men in the room when the meeting started. The Brigade commander sat on the bed with two others, and one more stood. Frank and Seamus Duffryn were on the wooden chairs that, apart from the bed and the chest, represented the only furniture in the room. The present commander had been in office more than six months, and his general features were better known than was common. He scorned the flamboyance of masks. From the pocket of his dark anorak he brought a small transistor radio of the sort with a corded loop to be slipped over the wrist so that he could walk along the pavement with it pressed to his ear. This was how he kept abreast of the activities of the ASUs, the Active Service Units.

  The crucial listening times of the day for him were 7.50 a.m., the 12.55 lunchtime summary, and then five to midnight. Each day the BBC’s Northern Ireland news listed with minute detail the successes and failures of his men. Shootings, hijackings, blast bombs, arms finds, stone-throwing incidents, all were listed and chronicled for him. The lead story that night was of the shooting at a policeman’s house in Dunmurry.

  The men in the room listened absorbed to the firm English accent of the announcer.

  The gunman had apparently held Mrs Rennie and her two children at gunpoint in their house for some hours while he waited for her husband to return from duty. A police spokesman said that when Mr Rennie entered the living room of his home the gunman fired at him. Mr Rennie dived for shelter behind an armchair just as his younger daughter ran towards him. It seems the child ran into the field of fire of the terrorist, who then stopped shooting and ran from the house. Mr Rennie told detectives that when the girl moved he thought she was going to be killed as the gunman was on the point of firing at him. The family are said to be suffering from shock and are staying the night with friends.

  In the Shantallow district of Londonderry a blast bomb slightly wounded . . .

  The commander switched off the set.

  ‘That’s not like bloody Downs from the Ardoyne. Not like him to lose his nerve. Why should he do that?’

  ‘Stupid bastard. We needed Rennie killed. Put a lot of planning in and a deal of work to have him rubbed. Then it’s screwed. Could be they’re just feeding us this crap.’ It was the Brigade quartermaster who came in.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like that. Sounds like Downs just threw it. Hardly going to fool us, are they? The bugger Rennie, he’s alive or he’s dead. We sent for him to be killed, he’s not. So that means it’s failure, can’t be any other answer. What matters is that our man couldn’t finish it.’

  He pondered on the decision he was about to take as the other men waited for him. He alone knew of the link between Danby in London and the man Downs from the Ardoyne. Later perhaps he would include the others in the knowledge, he decided, but not now. At this stage, he felt the fewer the better. Some of the commanders ran the office by committee, but not the man who now spoke again.

  ‘On from there. What about the man they’ve put in? What do we have?’

  ‘I think it’s watertight.’ Frank had taken the cue and come in. Frank had been with the Provisionals since the split with the Officials, the ‘Stickies’ as they called them, but this was the first time he had been in such élite company. It slightly unnerved him. ‘The girl he was laying spilt it all. It’s incredible, what he told her. She was saying that he says to her that he was sent over to get the man that shot Danby in London. She told him about the girl, the one that was picked up and taken to Springfield, the one that hanged herself. It was because he shopped her that she was taken in. She says she challenged him about it yesterday afternoon. He admitted it.’

  The Brigade intelligence officer was sitting on the bed beside the commander. Hard face, tight pencil lips, and darting, pig-like eyes.

  ‘What’s his name, the Englishman?’

  ‘The name he’s using is Harry McEvoy. I doubt if it’s real or—’

  ‘Course it isn’t. Doesn’t matter that. They must be a bit touched up then over there, if they send a man over on his own, to find us just like that.’

  Duffryn spoke.

  ‘But it all fits with what we had from the hotel. The army man and the RUC. The bit we had about them putting a man in and then not telling the brass. We thought we’d caught the buggers griping about it. It has to be some nonsense drawn up by one of them bastards sat behind a desk in London, in the Ministry.’

  Duffryn was little more than a name to the commander. He looked at him with interest.

  ‘You had a line on the man first, right? Through his accent? Where is he now? What’s covering him?’

  ‘He’s at the guest house, where he has his lodgings. It’s called “Delrosa”, run by Mrs Duncan, off the Broadway. She’s all right. He’s there in a back room that he rents. The front and back are watched at the moment and the lads have been told in the last hour or so that if he goes out he’s to be tailed. But they must stay right back.’

  ‘And the girl you’ve talked to, won’t she warn him?’

  ‘We told her not to. I think she understood. She won’t do anything,’ Frank said.

  The commander lit his fourth cigarette in less than half an hour, pulled at it, forcing the smoke down into his throat.

  ‘I think we want him before we hood him. We would like to talk to him for a bit first. Pick him up and bring him in for
a talk. Does he work?’

  ‘In a scrap yard. He leaves to walk there about eight, just a few minutes after perhaps.’

  ‘Take him when he’s walking. On the main road, get him into a car and take him up the Whiterock, into the Crescent, the house there we’ve used. I don’t want him killed unless it’s that or he’s away. Remember that, I want him chatted with.’

  For Frank and Seamus it seemed the end of their part in the evening. They rose out of the chairs, but were waved down by the commander.

  ‘Where’s Downs now?’

  The Brigade quartermaster said, ‘The message came through just before I left to come here. The wound he got, it’s a light one, in the arm. Flesh. It’s being fixed up now by the quack in the Murph. He’s OK, but he hasn’t gone home yet. The quack will want to keep an eye on him for the next few hours.’

  The Brigade commander talked to no-one in particular.

  ‘What do they say when a driver’s been in a crash? A lorry driver, bus, heavy truck? That sort of thing. What do they say? Send him straight back out again. Don’t hang about fidgeting and mumbling about it. Get stuck in again. Downs can go on this one. His nerve wasn’t too good last night. He’ll need this to get him back into scratch again. He’ll want to retrieve himself a bit. Get him here in an hour. Downs can finish him after the talking to.’

  It amused him: the fox turning back on the hound.

  For Frank and Seamus the briefing was finished. They went out through the back of the house to where a car was parked some three hundred yards away, keys in the dash. Frank would drive on to the doctor and drop Seamus near his home.

  Seamus Duffryn was frightened for the first time since he had become involved with the movement. He’d been present three months earlier at an interrogation. A kid from up in Lenadoon. The charge was that he had betrayed colleagues in the movement to the military. The muffled screaming of the youth was still in his ears, bouncing and ricocheting about. They’d burned his naked stomach with cigarette ends while he was strapped in a chair, with a blanket over his head folded several times to deaden the noise. He’d screamed each time the glowing ash met his skin, from a deep animal desperation and not with hope of release. Seamus Duffryn had become involved that night, and would become involved again tomorrow. The paper stuff he did, that was unimportant. This is when it mattered and you were either in the movement or you were out of it. There had been an awful, shaming thrill through his entire body when he saw the light grey material of the boy’s trousers turn to heavy charcoal. As the urine ran down the kid’s leg there’d been the steam rising through the trousers, and the hood had gone on, and the gun had been cocked. At the moment they shot him the kid was still screaming but uncontrolled.

  If McEvoy was British army, how would he take it? Duffryn wondered. That was a nothing from Lenadoon. McEvoy would be different. How would he stand up to their interrogation and the ritual end?

  He would find out by tomorrow night. He hurried on his way through the night to his home and his mother.

  After he’d made his phone call to London Harry had spent the rest of the day in his room. Before dark he gazed mindlessly into the abstract of roofs and walls that was the view from his window. He had not gone down to Sunday high tea, and to Mrs Duncan’s enquiries only replied that he thought he had something of a chill coming on. He was going to have an early night, he shouted through the door. She had wanted to bring him a hot drink in his room, but through the closed door he managed to persuade her that there was no need.

  He wanted to be alone, shutting out the perpetual tension of moving in company and living the falsehood that had been planned for him. That girl. It had upset him. Created imbalance in the delicate poise he had taken up. Blown by a silly girl who couldn’t stop talking. Up on a mountain, wind and rain, like some cigarette advertisement, and he’d chucked the whole operation. Ridiculous and, worse, so bloody unprofessional. He brooded away the hours. He’d put faith down on the line of a girl whose address he didn’t even know. What in Christ’s name would they be thinking in London when he put the request in for the special treatment for Harry’s bit of tail? Go raving mad, wouldn’t they? And reckon he’d twisted. No way they wouldn’t. And they’d want to get him out.

  He’d heard all the radio broadcasts, searching for the formula announcement that would end it all. Arrest . . . Man wanted for questioning . . . London murder . . . Big operation . . . Tip off . . . Appear in court. That would be the jargon. There had been nothing.

  He had steeled himself to what he would do if he heard of the capture of the man. He’d be out of the front door, straight out, with no farewells or packing of luggage, on to the Falls, and turn right along the main road, and then right again before the hospital and on down to the Broadway barracks, and in through the front door . . . But without the news he couldn’t end it all. He had to stay, finish the job. No arrest and it was all a failure, abject and complete. Not worth going back for, just to report how it all got boobed. Didn’t really matter what Davidson said. No arrest, no return.

  But where was the bloody army? Why wasn’t it all wrapped up? Big enough, weren’t they? Got enough men, and guns, and trucks. He’s out there just waiting for you to go and get him. The National bulletins traced their way round the news; there was nothing from Northern Ireland.

  The frustration mounted in Harry, welling up against his reason and his training. How much information had he pushed at them in London over the last two, three weeks? How much did they want? All sewn up, it should be, cut and dried, taped and parcelled – and now more delay. Through Josephine, streak of bloody luck there, about as much information had come out as he was ever likely to get his hands on. The long-term adrenalin was fading . . . he wanted out . . . he wanted it over . . . but when it was finished.

  As the dusk came he unwrapped the Smith & Wesson. After locking the door he took the weapon to pieces and laid it out on a handkerchief on the bed. With a second, dirtied handkerchief from his pocket he cleaned the firing mechanism, then reassembled the gun. He would take it with him next morning to the yard. Put it in the bag where the sandwich box went. It was a sort of therapy, the gun, the instant pick-me-up. It had gone wrong. Nothing on the radio when there should have been. The girl, that was where it had gone wrong, with that bloody girl. Lovely face, lovely body, lovely girl, but that was where it all loused up. Nothing else, that’s the only point where it’s gone wrong, but that’s enough. Gossip, don’t they, and she won’t keep her mouth shut any more than the rest of them. Like she talked about Theresa, so she’ll talk about me. A lonely man in a back-room bedsitter. The gun was insurance, the disaster was less distinct.

  When he went to bed he lay a long time in the dark of the room thinking about Germany, the family, home and the people with whom he worked. The other officers, easy and relaxed, none of them knowing where Harry was, and few caring. He envied them, yet felt his dislike of that easy way of life. His distrust of the others not committed to the front, as he was now, was all-consuming. It was only rarely that he turned his mind to his wife and the children. It took him time, and with difficulty he re-created them and home on the NATO base. The chasm between their environment and Harry’s was too difficult for him to bridge. Too tired, too exhausted.

  His final thought was salvation and made sleep possible. Of course the man was in custody, but they’d be questioning him. It would take thirty-six hours at least. They wouldn’t rush it, they’d want to get it right. Tomorrow evening they would be announcing it, and then home, and out of the hole; another forty-eight hours perhaps, and then out.

  In the early hours of that Monday morning, while Harry alternately dozed and dreamed in his bed, and while the Brigade nucleus sat up in Andersonstown waiting for Downs to come, Davidson in the Covent Garden office was scanning the first London editions of the papers.

  Both The Times and the Guardian carried reports from Northern Ireland that the Provisional IRA were claiming that British intelligence had launched a special agent
into the Catholic areas, and that people in those areas had been warned to be especially vigilant. Both the writers under whose bylines the stories appeared emphasized that, whether true or false, the claim would have the effect of further reducing the minimal trust between the people of the minority areas, the front-line housing estates of the city and the security forces. There was much other news competing for space – on the diplomatic front, the state of the economy, and the general ‘human interest claptrap’ that Davidson raged about. The Belfast copy was not prominently displayed, but to the man propped up on his camp bed it presented a shattering blow. He lay deep in newsprint and pondered his telephone, wondering whether there were calls he should make, anything he could usefully do.

  Those bungling idiots had still failed to pick up the chap Downs and the girl Josephine. Near a day to get them, and nothing to show for it. He was astonished, too long after the war, too long after the organization had run down, too many civilians who’d never been up the sharp end. Without the arrest the scheme of which he was an integral part would collapse, and at a rate of knots. In all conscience he could not ring that man Frost again, supercilious bastard, and once more expose himself to that sarcasm. On the wall by the door the clock showed after two. For a moment he comforted himself that Harry might see the report for himself and do a bunk on his own.