Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘It’s clean, sir.’

  That was the cue for her to return to the attack.

  ‘Are you through now, you bastards? All these men and one little house, and one wee girl alone with her kids, and it takes all of you and your bloody guns and Saracens—’

  ‘You know why we want him?’ The major lashed out. ‘You know what he did? We’ll go on till we get him. If we have to rip this house to pieces each week till we get him, we’ll do that. Doesn’t he tell you where he’s going at night? Doesn’t he tell you what he did last month? Try asking him one day.’

  He strode out through the house, followed by his search team. It was three minutes after six o’clock. Failure and frustration was how the majority of these raids ended. He knew that, and he’d never lost his temper before, never gone overboard as he’d done with the woman in No. 41. He comforted himself on two points. It needed saying; and the intelligence officer who had tagged along hadn’t heard it.

  Once the army had gone a clutch of neighbours moved into the house to gather round the woman and commiserate on the damage left behind. None knew of the importance of Billy Downs among the Provisionals and so news of the army outrage at the house would travel fast through the community. Yet those that came to dress the children and help in the clearing up and the making of tea and breakfast noted how subdued was their friend. Cowed by what had happened. That was not the usual way. The familiar reaction was to greet the going of the soldiers with a hail of insults and obscenities at their backs. But not this woman.

  Once the friends and neighbours had left her, to get their own families ready for work or school or just dressed and fed, the words of the officer returned to ring in her ears. Quietly she padded about the house, her children in a crocodile procession behind her, checking to see which of her few possessions were damaged or tarnished or moved.

  This was the confirmation. God, this was what she had feared. Right back to the first night back home after London, she had been waiting. So much wind this confidence he had, that no-one knew him. Like a rat he was, waiting in a barn with the door shut for the farmer to come in the morning with his gun and his dogs. The big, fresh-faced officer, with the smears on his cheeks, with his suspicion of a moustache and posh accent, who hated her, he had laid down the future. He had mirrored her nightmares and hallucinations while she lay sleepless beside her man. They would come, and come again for him, and keep on till they found him.

  Last night he had not slept beside her. On the radio in the back room she heard the early news. A policeman shot at . . . an intruder hit . . . in the middle evening. That was the top story. Whoever had been involved should have been home now. Her man was usually home by now, or he would have said something.

  Around the passage and stairs and landing of the house she thought of her man. Wounded, maimed, alone in the dawn of the city. What hurt most was that she was so unable to influence events.

  News carried across the city. With the efficiency of tribal tom-toms word passed over the sprawling urban conglomeration that the terraced house in Ypres Avenue had been raided. Less than an hour after the major had walked through the front door and to his armoured Land-Rover Billy Downs would hear of it. Brigade staff had decided that he should know. They felt it could only enhance his motivation for the job at hand.

  Harry’s alarm clock dragged him from the comfort of his dreaming, and woke him to the blackness of his room. His dreams had been of home, wife and children, makeshift garden behind his quarters, holidays in timber forest chalets, fishing out in the cool before the sun came up, trout barbecued for breakfast. With consciousness came the knowledge of another Monday morning. It was three weeks to the day that he had left the house at Dorking with the view of the hills and vegetable garden. Twenty-one days exactly. ‘Must have been out of my mind,’ he muttered to the emptiness of the room.

  Over the weekend he had thought of what Josephine had said to him. She’d accused him of interfering in something that was basically none of his concern, of causing death when he should have stayed uninvolved. Stupid bitch should have passed the same message to the man who came to London with the Kalashnikov.

  He examined his position and its natural courses. He wanted to finish it. End it properly. End it with a shooting, with the man in the picture with his black and white-lined face, dead. That was not emotional, there was no wild spirit of revenge, just that such an ending was the only finite one, otherwise the job was incomplete.

  In Aden, good old Aden, it had been so much more simple. British lives at stake, the justification of everything, with the enemy clearly defined – Arabs, gollies. But here, who was the enemy? Why was he the enemy? Did you have to know why to take his life? It churned over and over, unanswered, like pebbles in a coffee machine, grating, ill-fitting and indigestible.

  In spite of the fact that Harry came originally from a country town an hour or so’s drive from Belfast the army’s mould had been the real fashioning influence overreaching his childhood. Like his brother officers in the mess he was still perplexed at the staying power of the opposition. But here he parted company. To the others they were the enemy, to Harry they were still the opposition. You could kill them if it was necessary, or if that was demanded for operational reasons, but they remained the opposition. They didn’t have to be the enemy to make them worth killing.

  But how did they keep it up? What made them prepared to risk their lives on the streets when they took on the power of a British army infantry section? What led them to sacrifice most of the creature-comforts of life to go on the run? What made them feel the God-given right to take life, and torture a man in front of his family?

  They’re not heroes. Bloody lunatics, he said to himself as he pulled the sweater over his head. They rejected all the ordinary things that ordinary people search for, and chose to go on against these massive odds. It didn’t involve Harry. The man he was searching for was quite straightforward. He was a killer. He was a challenge. Simple and clean. Harry could focus on that.

  ‘A cup of tea, Mr McEvoy?’ Mrs Duncan at the door cut short his thoughts. ‘What would you be wanting for breakfast? There’s the lot if you can manage it. Sausages, bacon, tomatoes, eggs, and I’ve some soda bread?—’

  ‘Just toast and coffee, thanks. I’ll be away down in a moment.’

  ‘That won’t get you far. It’s a raw day, right enough.’

  ‘Nothing more, thank you, Mrs Duncan. Really, that’s all I want. I’ll be right down.’

  ‘Please yourself then. Bathroom’s clear. Coffee’s made, and remember to wrap up well. It’s a cold one.’

  After he’d shaved there was not much to the dressing. Sweater already on and damp from the soap and flannel, faded jeans, his socks and boots and his anorak. He took the face towel from the rail in the bathroom, brought it back into his room and when he had finished dressing laid it out on the bed. About two feet by one and a half, it was bigger than the one the Smith & Wesson was already wrapped in, and he changed them over, putting the revolver in the new towel.

  ‘Silly bugger,’ he thought, ‘clean towel just to wrap a gun in.’ He needed a towel to disguise the outline of the weapon when it sat in the deep pocket of his anorak on the way to work. But he didn’t need a clean towel. That’s the army for you: everything clean on a Monday morning. Funny if he got stopped at a roadblock. He thought of that and a whole band of disappointed squaddies having to hand him over. Wouldn’t have cried overmuch either. Last night, late, he’d decided to put the gun in his coat, easier access than the food bag slung over his shoulder, and the bag with the sandwiches and flask would be lying about in the rest hut through the day, and God knows who could be rummaging around in there. When the revolver was wrapped it was light and blunt, though still bulky and hard to ignore, bigger than a spectacle case, bigger than twenty cigarettes and the large box of matches that most men carried.

  He breezed into the kitchen.

  ‘Morning, Mrs Duncan, all right then?’

  ‘Not s
o bad, little enough to complain about. You’re sure about the toast and coffee?’ Disappointment clouded her face when he nodded. Harry had been in the bathroom during the seven o’clock news bulletin, and through the closed door he had heard her radio playing faintly downstairs, loud enough to be aware of it, but too indistinct to hear the actual words.

  ‘Anything on the news, then?’

  ‘Nothing to note, just the usual. It goes on. A policeman chased a man out of his house and shot him. That’s his version, anyway, up Dunmurry way, more trouble in the Unionists. Never change their spots, that crowd. They’ve given nothing to us without it being wrung out—’

  Harry laughed. ‘They haven’t caught the big man yet then, top of the Provos?’

  ‘Well, Mr McEvoy, if they have, they didn’t say so, which means they haven’t. They’d be trumpeting it if they had, but that’s all the news is, the troubles. Makes you wonder what they used to put in before it all started. I can hardly remember. There must have been something else for them to talk about, but they’ve forgotten it now, right enough.’

  ‘Well, then, no big man in the net—’

  ‘They don’t get the real big men, only the shrimps.’

  ‘No, it’s just that I read in one of the papers I saw up at the yard that they were mounting an effort to rake in the big fish.’

  ‘They say they’re doing that each week, and nothing comes of it.’

  Harry had banked a lot on the man being in custody. It was twenty-one hours after the call to London, to Davidson. Couldn’t be that difficult to pick the bastard up. Shouldn’t be taxing the might of the British army. They must have him, but they weren’t saying yet, had to be that way. They wouldn’t say yet, too early, of course it was. The explanation was facile but enough to tide him over his breakfast.

  It was Monday morning and he was the only guest. Tonight, round teatime, the travellers and the others would be back in the front room. The place then was not quite his own as on Saturdays and Sundays. Lord and master of the household was how he felt over the weekend. Delusions of grandeur.

  ‘Will Josephine be in this afternoon?’ He sounded casual, matter-of-fact.

  ‘Should be, Mr McEvoy. Should be here in time to help me with the teas and a bit of tidying up that I haven’t got round to. She’s back on early shift this week. You wanted to see her?’

  Shrewd old goat, thought Harry. Beautiful throwaway, real afterthought.

  ‘I’d said I’d lend her a book,’ he lied gracefully.

  ‘She’ll be here when you get back. I’ll need her today, and all. We’re full tonight. It’s the way it should be, but work all the same.’

  ‘And money, Mrs Duncan.’ It was as much familiarity as was permitted.

  ‘Your sandwiches are there on the sideboard.’ She wasn’t drawn. ‘Bovril as you like them, horrid stuff, and some coffee in the flask. I put a boiled egg in, too, and an apple.’

  ‘Very naughty, Mrs Duncan, you’ll make me into an elephant.’

  She liked the banter and was still laughing with him as he walked into the hall and to the front door.

  ‘You’ve got enough clothes on, then? We don’t want you with a cold and that.’

  ‘Don’t you fuss, Mrs Duncan.’

  The Prime Minister liked to start the day with his papers, a cup of tea and the first radio news bulletin. He amused himself by making that first news the commercial one, maintaining to all those who expressed surprise that he was not locked on to the BBC, that he was a capitalist, and as head of a capitalist government he should hear the capitalist-funded station. The radio acted as window dressing to his reading, the spoken version of canned music. He could not do without it, hated silence, but it took an almighty news story to distract his attention from the newspapers. Like all politicians he had a consummate appetite for newsprint, able to take in, extract, cross-reference or ignore the thousands of words that made up his daily diet. Included in the pile that rested on his lap in the middle of the bed were the Western Mail and the Scotsman. He would have liked the Belfast News Letter, but the printing times and transportation problems across the Irish Sea made it impossible, so he compromised by having the previous afternoon’s Telegraph sent over. He waded through the politics, diplomatic, economic, pausing fractionally longer on the gossip columns than he would have wanted others to know, and through sport where he delayed no longer than it took him to turn the pages. The pace was enormous, nothing read twice unless it had major impact.

  The frown began deep between the overbearing bushiness of the eyebrows. The degree of concentration extended. The mixture written on his stubbly face was of puzzlement and anger.

  The Times had put it on page two, and not given it much. Eight paragraphs.

  He found the same story in the Guardian, a little longer, and above it the resident staff reporter’s name. The length of the copy had relatively little importance or significance to the Prime Minister. The content flabbergasted him. He read three, four times that a British agent had been identified by the Provisional IRA, and the population in the ghetto areas alerted so that they might be on their guard against him.

  For Christ’s sake. Five weeks since Danby was killed. Outcry and outrage over, gone with the memorial service. Whole wretched business faded and, just as well, no leak that Danby himself had asked for his detective to be taken off. And now the prospect of it all back again, supercharged, and with what drifting out? Heaven only knows. With a surge he swept the bedclothes from him and leaned across the bed. He never had been able to make a telephone call lying on his side. He slung the dressing gown over his shoulders and sat on the edge of the single bed he had occupied since his wife died, feet dangling, and picked up the telephone.

  ‘Morning, Jennifer, first of the day.’ Always something friendly to the girls on the switchboard, worked wonders with them. ‘Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Quick as you can, there’s a good girl.’

  He sat for two-and-a-half minutes, reading other papers but unable to turn his full attention to them till the telephone buzzed angrily in its console.

  ‘The Secretary of State, sir. Seems he’s in the air at the moment. Left Northolt about eight minutes ago. He’ll be down at Aldergrove in forty-one minutes. He’s early this morning because he’s going straight down to an industrial estate in Londonderry, opening something. There’s a helicopter waiting to lift him down there. That’s his immediate programme.’

  ‘Get him to phone me as soon as he reaches Aldergrove. Let them know I’d like it on a secure line.’

  He considered calling the Ministry of Defence or Fairbairn in Lisburn, and then dismissed it. Protocol up the spout if he did. If they were to be dropped in a monumental balls-up then the Secretary of State should do some of the lifting, and take a bit of the weight. Time to play things straight down the middle, the Prime Minister reflected.

  Across London Davidson was shaving. Wet. With a brush and new blade. He had read his papers again in the daylight. He knew, since he had not been woken from his sleep by the telephone, that in Belfast Billy Downs and the girl were still at large. He could not be certain at this stage to what level of danger Harry was exposed. When he ditched his logical appraisal the only conclusion was that the situation must be slightly worse than critical. He said that out loud; the aide was in the other half of the office and would not hear him. The words rolled off his tongue, giving him that almost sexual pleasure that excitement and tension carry in their wake. He stood there in his trousers, socks and vest, with the bowl of tepid water in front of him . . . all so much like the war. The Albania operation, Cyprus. But how to reconcile that when advanced base headquarters, ABHQ, they used to call it, was in Covent Garden, West One, Central London?

  He patted his face, reddened by the sharpness of the blade and the cool water. Putting on his shirt, he dialled Lisburn military direct. When the WRAC operator came on the line he asked for Frost. The intelligence colonel was already in his office.

  ‘Morning, Colonel. I wante
d to ring you to find the up-to-date situation. I fancy there’ll be various meetings in the morning. People will want to know. I take it there’s been no positive news or you would have called me.’

  ‘Right, Mr Davidson.’ Had to be the ‘Mister’, didn’t it? Doesn’t miss them. Not a chance of twisting it. ‘There is no news. We haven’t found the girl. We did Downs’s home, and the report an hour ago said he wasn’t there, but had been a few hours earlier. There’s an off-chance he’s in trouble. A man of his description attacked a policeman’s home late yesterday and botched it up. The policeman thinks he hit him with a single revolver shot as he was escaping. There are one or two blood spots on the escape trail, but we won’t get much from them for a bit till the follow-up report is in. It doesn’t seem enough to indicate a serious wound. As for your man, well, we’re taking out the Andersonstown scrap merchants in about forty minutes. I’ve nothing else.’

  ‘Are you putting it that there’s a good chance Downs was out on this shooting last night, or not?’

  ‘There are similarities, but it’s not a positive identification. Hair’s not the same as the picture, so the policeman’s wife says. She was a long time with him. Face is similar. The policeman himself is not able to be very helpful as he was moving most of the time and getting his gun out and being shot at. He didn’t get much of a look. We have the picture you sent us, it’s with the unit now that’s going to try to round your fellow up.’

  ‘Thank you very much, Colonel.’

  ‘That’s all right, Mr Davidson. I’m sure we’ll never have the opportunity again of providing a similar service to your organization.’

  Davidson put the phone down.

  ‘Stupid, pompous bugger. Bloody man, does he think we’re having a picnic at this end?’

  He said it with enough ferocity to wake his assistant in the armchair by the door on the other side of the partition. The younger man shrugged himself out of his sleep.