Harry's Game

Chapter 9

They’d come into the house on tiptoe and holding their shoes. Both knew the prim well-scrubbed hallway and stairs well enough to estimate where the boards creaked, and where it was safe to put down their full weight. Harry held the girl’s hand very tight. At first they had tried to go up the stairs together, and then, finding that impossible, he had gently led the way. There had been no talk about what they should do, where they should go when they left the taxi, no discussion whether she should come back to Delrosa with him. He had looked into her face at the doorway as he rummaged with his free hand for the latch key, seen those mocking, querying eyes turned up to his face, looking as if to challenge or dare him to take her inside. He’d squeezed her hand, and they’d gone in together. The message of silence was implicit.

Once in his back room a floorboard had erupted in protest at her foot and he had pulled her away from the place near the basin where she was standing wriggling out of her coat. That was where it would creak. That was the place where he had prised up the planks two days earlier to find a secure hiding place for his Smith & Wesson revolver.

She slung the coat across his easy chair by the window, and stood waiting for him to move towards her. He felt a tightness streaming through him. Clumsy. Gauche. Inhibited. He reached out towards the tall girl who gazed back at him, her expression one of interest, curiosity to see what he had to offer.

‘You make me feel… a bit like someone who’s forgotten most of it,’ he whispered into her ear, one hand holding the back of her neck, the other flattened into the small of her back.

‘You haven’t made me feel anything yet.’

‘Cheeky girl.’

‘Try a bit of cheek yourself. Might take you a long way.’

He pulled his left hand round, drawing back from her to give himself room to unbutton the few remaining buttons on her blouse.

‘Not much of an obstacle course here,’ he murmured as he flicked the buttons, small and transparent, through the opened holes of the fabric.

‘Who said they were supposed to be?’

His hand had moved inside her blouse, and he began to ease the soft cotton over her shoulders and down her arms.

‘I was never very much one for this. Getting everything off in the right order, like a bloody production line in reverse.’

‘And it takes so much more time. Let’s see to it ourselves. I’ll meet you under the sheets in forty-five seconds from now.’

In a welter of tights, pants, black skirt, shoes and bra she stripped herself and was away in the bed waiting for him. Harry was fighting with his right cuff link. She had started to follow the second hand of her watch with exaggerated interest before he climbed into the narrow bed alongside her.

‘You took thirty seconds over the limit. Bad marks for that, sailor boy.’

‘Wasn’t for lack of trying.’

He had curved his arms round her, as she came close to against him. His fingers ran their course across her skin, tight, cool and firm. Beautiful girl. Her eyes closed. She moaned. Calling for him, hurrying him. That first time there were few preliminaries, few subtleties. He found her fast, deep, easy. He poured himself into her. Both engaged in a frantic, uncaring race. He sagged away. Disastrous. Bloody Belfast. Like everything else — crude and rushed. No future for tenderness or patience.

‘Got a bus to catch?’

‘It’ll be better next time,’ he said, ‘it happened too quick for me. And I never got round to asking you whether… you know, whether you take anything… or what?’

‘There’s Catholics and good Catholics here. I’m one of the first. You don’t have to worry about that.’

The second time was better. Softer, calmer. Slower. He took a long time finding the routes and depths and contours of her body. Finding where she moved and squirmed, and when she thrust herself at him. Heat against his chest and his thighs. She called the time she was ready for him to come into her, called quietly in his ear. Her mouth open, almost soundless. He smiled down at her as he felt himself slipping away into the void. It was over and they lay together. Her hair strewn with the sweat out on the pillow, he on her softness waiting for the limpness to come. Still locked together.

‘You’ve no worries, then?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean? I don’t think so.’

‘You can’t screw if you’re really worried. Did you know that?’

‘Old wives. Where did you hear that? Who told you that?’

‘Just what one of the girls said in the bog tonight.’

‘Tell me what she said.’ He lay straddled across her, her mouth an inch or so from his ear.

‘She said she’d tried to do it with one of the big men, but he couldn’t manage it. She said he was all so tied up he couldn’t make it. She was ever so upset.’

Harry grimaced in disbelief.

‘No, that’s what she said. She was there tonight. She told me in the loo. She’s a bit frantic at the best of times. Then the army nicked the fellow who’d have had her on the way home. Peeved her a bit. On her own on Saturday night. Not right for her. That’s what she said. Big hero. Big deal. I’m all for cowards in this city.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Harry, very still now. ‘Which girl was it?’

‘I’m not telling you the best lay in Ballymurphy!’

‘I don’t believe you. You’re making it up.’

She pushed him back sideways. In the small bed there was hardly enough room, and he clung to her to save himself from disappearing on the floor. She rolled over onto him, half her weight supported by his hips and waist and the other half supported by an elbow.

‘It was Theresa. In pink. She had the tight skirt? Remember her? Believe me. You’ll be up to Ballymurphy sniffing round now. Randy bugger.’

‘I’d believe anything said by anyone as lovely as you,’ said Harry.

‘Bullshit,’ she said.

‘Who was the big man that didn’t slake wee Theresa’s thirst?’ His hands were on the move again now, seeking the closeness between her thighs. She rolled and rose beneath him.

‘Just like that. Go on. Just like that. The big man, the one they’re all looking for. The London man. The one that did the politician in London. Don’t stop there. Just like that. Faster! There’s bugger all time. The old girl’s alarm’ll be off in half an hour. She’s out like a flash then. Makes enough noise to wake half the folks in Milltown Cemetery.’

Minutes later she was out of bed, dressed and making her way quietly down the stairs to the front door. She refused to let Harry come and see her off, gave him a sisterly kiss on the forehead and was gone. He stood at his bedroom window and saw her some moments later walking along the main road under the street lights. When she had gone beyond the gap he lost sight of her.

After she had left Harry lay in his bed, stretching out his legs, searching out the new-found room, working over in his mind the information she had given him. No problem for the intelligence guys. A girl called Theresa, about eighteen or nineteen, in Ballymurphy. Sleeps around a bit. No problem. Should wrap up the whole thing. Not bad; one good screw in the line of duty, and the big coup. He could scarcely believe his luck — getting so far so quickly — all falling into his lap — and on a night out, at that. And the old woman, Davidson, who didn’t rate his chances, who fussed and clucked over him, what would he be thinking when Harry called through? A moment to savour, that would be. I’d like to see his face, thought Harry.

There was still the worry over being recognized by that stupid, gawping soldier. But they should have the man within forty-eight hours, and then what the soldier saw wouldn’t matter. All be academic by then. But where did the soldier come from? He turned over in his mind the military situations he’d been in over the last two years, trying to work out where he had seen the young man who had no doubts about him. Davidson would sort it out. Ring him in the morning. Let him know it’s just about wrapped up.

For the first time since he had come to Belfast he felt the excitement that had been the hallmark of the Sheik Othman operation.

He used to leave little pencilled messages in English in an old fruit tin on the Sheik Othman-to-Mansoura road. Nothing as luxurious as a telephone. Sometimes he’d stay around in the afternoon heat the next day when the town was sleepy and out of gear and watch the military come bulldozing into the town in their Saladins and Saracens. He would watch the leather-faced, expressionless men hustled away into the armoured cars, resisting the show of force that came to get them only with the contempt in their eyes. That was the reward for the strange job he did — to see the clumsy boot of the army stepping into the exact footprints he had silently prepared for them.

It was a good two and a quarter hours before Davidson would be in the office. He had told Harry that for the first three weeks at least he would be there every day, Sundays included, at eight in the morning and stay till ten at night. Must be playing havoc with his marriage, thought Harry. Can’t really see Davidson with a wife, though.

He’d go into town, he decided, and make the call from one of those anonymous call boxes in the city centre. Now two hours’ sleep. That bloody woman. He was exhausted.

But she was a bit special.

Not like that at home. Couldn’t be really. Nothing in married life vegetating round a barracks square in a line of neat, desiccated quarters that matched the drawn bowstring of the city at war. Too many bombs, too many snipers, too many mutilations for people to hang about on the preliminaries. You’d want a few memories as you bumped about in the box up the Falls to Milltown Cemetery. That was the philosophy of life for Belfast. And not a bad one, thought Harry.

Across in Germany they’d be asleep now. The wife and the kids, tucked up in their rooms, the familiar bits and pieces round them. The things, semi-junk, that they’d collected from the duty-free lounge and the market places where they went shopping when he was off duty. Knick-knacks that brightened the service furniture they lived off. Josephine didn’t fit in there, was outside that world. They’d be up soon. Always had an early breakfast on Sundays. Someone would take the boys out for football. That was regular. And his wife… how would she spend a cold Sunday in North Germany? Harry was half asleep. Not quite dreaming but close. She’d go visiting, walk out along the line of officers’ detached houses for a coffee in mid-morning, and stay for a drink before lunch, and have to make her excuses, and there’d be laughter when she’d flap about the lunch in the oven. Perhaps someone would ask her to stay and share theirs. That would be par for the course. And they’d say how sorry they were that Harry was away, and how suddenly he’d gone, and fish for an explanation. The questions would confuse her, and embarrass her, because they’d expect her at least to have an idea of why he’d vanished so quickly. And she wouldn’t have an answer.

Could she comprehend it even if she did know? Could she assimilate this tatty, rotten job? Could she understand the man that was hunted, and the need to kill him? Could she accept what might happen to Harry? ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said to himself. ‘God knows how many years we’ve been married, and I don’t know. She’d be calm enough, not throw any tantrums, but what it would all mean to her, I’ve not the faintest idea.’

That would all sort itself. And when the answers had to be given then Josey would be a fantasy, and over.

Billy Downs was in his bed now, and asleep. He’d come back to find his wife sobbing into her pillow, disbelieving he could be freed, still suffering from the strain of the phone call she had made hours earlier. Many times he told her it was just routine, that there was nothing for them to fear. Relax, they know nothing. It’s clean. The trail is old and cold and clean. She held onto him as if uncertain that he was really there after she had mentally prepared herself for not seeing him again as a free man. The terror of losing him was a long time thawing. He put a brave face on it, but didn’t know himself the significance of his arrest. But to run now would be suicide. He would stay put. Act normally. And stay very cool.

As soon as he came off duty, in the small hours of Sunday morning, Jones asked to see his commanding officer. His platoon lieutenant asked him why, and about what, but the shuffling private merely replied that it was a security matter and that he must see the colonel as soon as he woke. He was marched up the wide steps of the mill, enclosed with the dripping walls festooned with fire- and parcel-bomb warnings and urging the soldiers to be ever vigilant, and shown into the colonel’s office. The colonel was shaving electrically and continued with the modern ritual as the soldier put together his report. Jones said that while searching a social club the previous night he had seen a man he definitely recognized as having been the transport officer at a base in Germany where his unit had refitted after a NATO exercise. He said that the man had given his name as McEvoy, and he explained about the kicked ankle, and the instruction to forget what he had seen. There was a long pause while the officer scraped the razor round his face, doubtful what action to take, and how he should react. The minute or so that he thought about the problem seemed to the young private an eternity. Then he gave his orders. Jones was to make no further mention of this incident to any other soldier, and was confined to barracks till further notice.

‘Please, sir. What do I tell the sergeant-major?’

‘Tell him the MO says you’ve a cold. That’s all, and keep your mouth shut. That’s important.’

When the soldier had about-turned and stamped his way out of the office the colonel asked for his second in command to come and see him. Sunday was normally the quiet morning, and the chance of a modest stay in bed. The second in command came in still wearing his dressing gown. To the colonel the position was now clear.

‘There’s all these chaps running round in civvies. I think we’ve trampled on one. If we say we’ve done it, there’s going to be a hell of a scene all the way round, lot of fluff flying and problems. I’m going to ship Jones out to Germany this afternoon and have the page of his log destroyed. We can take care of this our own way and with rather less palava than if it goes up to old Frost at HQ.’

The second in command agreed. He would ask for the log book, and deal with the offending page personally. Before his breakfast.

Early Sunday morning in Belfast is formidable. To Harry it was like the set of one of those films where there has been a nerve gas attack and no-one is left alive. Nothing but grey, heavy buildings, some crazily angled from the bomb blasts, others held up at the ends by huge timber props. Outside the city hall, vast and enormous and apparently deserted, the pigeons had gathered on the lawns. They too were immobile except when they ducked their heads while searching for imaginary worms in the ground. No buses. No taxis. No cars. No people. Harry found himself scurrying to get away from so much silence and emptiness. It was almost with a sense of relief that he saw a joint RUC and Military Police patrol cruising towards him. This typified the difference for him between Aden and here. When he was on his own in Mansoura he had shut himself away from the safety of the military and accepted that the run for home would be way too long if his cover was blown or he gave himself away. Now he had the army and police all round him. He was part of their arm, an extension of their operations.

Yet he felt the very closeness of the security forces was unnerving. The agent operating in hostile territory has to be self-sufficient and self-supporting. All just as applicable to the British agent working in Great Britain. Can’t be like the little boy with the bloody nose running home to Mum. In Mansoura it had been quite conventional and therefore more acceptable.

Not only was the city deserted of people. It was battened down for the day. Iron railings, their tops split into sharp tridents, blocked off the shopping streets that fanned off Royal Avenue. The turnstile gates into the security precincts were padlocked. Shops inside and outside the barricades had their windows barricaded and shuttered.

Down near the post office he found a bank of empty phone boxes, with only the work of vandals to prevent him taking his pick from a choice of six. It was cold inside the booth, with the wind cutting through the gaps left where the kids had kicked out the glass in the days before the army operated in strength in the city centre.

He took from his pocket a pile of ten-pence pieces and arrayed them in formation like fish scales on the top of the money box, and dialled the London number he had memorized in Dorking. If he had gone through an operator some of his call might have been overheard. This was the safe way. The phone rang a long time before it was answered.

Davidson heard the ringing when he was at the bottom of the stairs.

Against its shrill persistence he fumbled with his key ring to release the three separate locks on the heavy door, and stumbled across the darkened room where the blinds were still down. He picked up the receiver.

‘Four-seven-zero-four-six-eight-one. Can I help you?’

‘It’s Harry. How are the family?’

‘Very well, they liked the postcards, I’m told.’

That was the routine they had agreed. Two sentences’ chatter to show the other that he was a free agent and able to talk.

‘How’s it going, Harry boy?’

‘Middling. I’ll get the report over first. Then we’ll talk. Going in ten from now.’

That was time enough for Davidson to get the drawer in the leg of his desk open, switch on the cassette recorder and plug in the lead to the telephone receiver.

‘Going now, OK? The man is in Belfast still. I’m sure of that. He is apparently under great stress and while on the run shortly after the shooting was with a girl called Theresa. No second name. She’s from the Ballymurphy area. He tried to screw her, and she’s telling her friends that he couldn’t make it, because he was so wound up about the shooting. She’s late teens or early twenties. She was at a dance last night in a green-painted hut in the Ardoyne. She was wearing pink, tight skirt. The army heifered their way in, and picked up about a dozen blokes, some of them in Theresa’s group. They should be holding them still, unless they work bloody fast. One of them can identify her. So she’s worth a bit of chat and then I think we’ll be homeward bound. Seems straight sailing from here. That’s the plus side. Now the anti. In the club I was lined up for an ID check. Lance-Corporal from Wales asking questions, a young boy writing down the answers. The boy recognized me. God knows from when, but he did. I’d like it sorted out. I’m going to lie low for today, but I may have a job of sorts coming up. That’s about it, basically.’

‘Harry, we were worried when we didn’t hear anything.’

‘I didn’t want to call in till I had something to say.’

‘I won’t mess you about. But I know you’re not staying where we planned for you.’

‘Too bloody right. Right little army rest house. Right out of the interesting areas, and I take a peep at the place and out comes some squaddie in plains. Shambles that was. You should crucify whoever sold you that pup.’

‘Thanks, Harry. I’ll kill them for it. I’ll go high on it.’

‘I’ve made it on my own. Quite snug, on the other side of town. Let’s leave it that way. I’ll call you if anything else shows up.’

‘We’ll do it your way. It’s not usual, but OK. Nothing more?’

‘Only tell the people who pick the girl up to go a bit quietly. Don’t ask me what the source of this is, but I don’t want it too obvious. If you can get her in without a razzamatazz you should have your man before anyone knows she’s gone, and can link her to him.’

‘I’ll pass that on. Anything else?’

‘Nothing more. Cheers. Good hunting.’

Davidson heard the phone click down. The call had lasted one minute and fifty-five seconds.

Harry let the receiver stay a moment in his hand after he’d pressed down the twin buttons with his fingers to end the call. He would have liked to talk with Davidson, unimportant small talk. But that would be unprofessional. Dangerous. Soft. Diverting. Pray God they would get the bastard now. He began to walk back to a lonely day at Delrosa, as the city on half-cylinder sparked to life.

Davidson had been surprised that Harry had rung off so fast. He reached down into his drawer and spun back the spools of his tape a few revolutions to check that the recording had operated correctly. He then wound the tape back to the beginning and played it from start to finish, taking a careful shorthand note of the conversation. He then rewound the tape again and played it once more, this time against his shorthand. Only when he was satisfied that he had correctly taken down every word spoken by Harry did he disconnect the leads between the tape and the telephone. He searched in his diary, at the back in the addresses and useful numbers section, for the home phone number of the Permanent Under-Secretary.

‘I thought you’d want to know, after our talk the other day. He’s surfaced. There’s some quite useful stuff. Should give a good lead. He sounded a bit rough. Not having much of a joyride, I fancy. I’ll call you in the office tomorrow. I’m quite hopeful we may be on to something. Yes… I’m going to pass it on now.’

His next call was to an unlisted extension in the Ministry of Defence.

Minutes later Harry’s message was on a coded tele-type machine in the red-brick, two-storey building that housed the intelligence unit at army headquarters, Lisburn. It was of sufficient immediate importance for Colonel George Frost to be called from his breakfast. Cursing about amateurs and lack of consultation he set up an urgent and high-level conference. He summoned his own men, the 39 Brigade duty operations officer, Police Special Branch, and the army officer commanding the unit that controlled the Ardoyne. The meeting was called for nine, and the unit officer was given no information as to why he was wanted at HQ, only told that on no account were any of last night’s suspects to be released. Davidson had somewhat shortened Harry’s message. Believing that an arrest was imminent now, he too had decided that the report of the recognition should be suppressed and should go no further. A million-to-one chance. It could happen again. Could be forgotten. Only cause a flap if it went official.

Whilst he was waiting for the meeting Frost reflected on the punched capitals in front of him, deciphered from the code by one of the duty typists. It was detailed enough to impress him, improbable enough to sound likely, and the sort of material you didn’t pick up sitting on your backside in the front lounge. When he had read his riot act at the General about being kept out of the picture he’d heard of the three weeks’ crash training course, and been told the arrival date. The source was now about to start his second week. Five lines of print that might be the breakthrough — and might not.

It was the sort of operation Frost detested. Ill-conceived and, worst of all, with the need for fast results dictated by political masters. If he’s working at this pace, involved enough to get his nose stuck into this sort of stuff, then Frost reckoned he had about another week to go. That would be par for the course on a job like this. That was always the way. Crash in hard while the trail is still warm. You might get something when you stir the bottom up. But not discreet. No, and not safe either.

Poor bastard.

Frost had seen the body of the Armoured Corps captain, found shot and hooded, dumped outside Belfast. He had been working with a full team behind him. All the back-up he needed. Time on his side. Now this nameless and faceless man was trying to do what the whole army and police couldn’t. Stupid. Idiotic. Irresponsible. All of those things, that’s how Frost rated it. And there’d be a mess. And he’d have to clear it up.

Harry was nearly at his digs by the time the meeting Frost had called was under way. He had decided this was to be his day off. Tomorrow he would chase the job and try to get a bit of permanence into his life.

But today the pubs were closed. Nothing to do but eat Mrs Duncan’s mighty roast and sit in his room and read. And listen to the news bulletins.

The platoon commander briefed to go and arrest the girl deep in the network of the Ballymurphy housing estate had stood his ground when asked to take the minimum number of troops needed for the pick-up.

‘We’ve had four patrols shot at from that street or the alleys off it in the last eighteen days. If we have to search for her we’ll be in there twenty minutes or so, and I can’t just leave a couple of men outside to play Aunt Sallys. If I take a Saracen and a Pig they’ll carry sixteen, and that way I can have enough men round the house, and enough to search the place as well.’

‘They’ve asked for it to be discreet,’ said his company commander.

‘Well, what do they want us to do, have the padre drive a Cortina up to the front door and ask her to come for a picnic with him? Who is the girl anyway, sir?’

‘Don’t know why they want her. We hardly know her. The CO went up to Brigade this morning about something, and then came on the net with the instruction to pick her out.’

‘However we do it, the whole street will know inside five minutes. It’s Sunday, so we can’t take her on the way back from work, wherever that is. If we’re going into those streets we ought to have a proper back-up. Can they wait till dark?’

‘No, the instruction is for immediate. That’s quite clear. I take your point. Have as many men as you want, but be fast in there, and don’t for God’s sake start a riot.’

Theresa and her family were at lunch when the army arrived. The armoured troop carriers outside the tiny overgrown front garden, soldiers in fire positions behind the hedge and wall that divided the grass from next door’s. Four soldiers went into the house. They called her name, and when she stood up took her by the arms, the policeman at the back intoning the Special Powers Act. While the rest of the family sat motionless she was taken out to the back of the armoured car. It was moving before her mother, the first to react, had reached the front door.

None of the soldiers who surrounded the girl in the darkened steel-cased Saracen spoke to her, and none would have been able to tell her why she had been singled out for this specific army raid. From the Saracen she was taken into a fortified police station, through the back entrance, and down the stairs to the cells. A policewoman was locked in with her to prevent any attempt at communication with other prisoners in the row. An hour or so earlier the nine boys taken from the club the previous night had been freed after sleeping in identical cells on the other side of the city. One of their number, pressed to identify someone who would swear he had been in the club all evening, had unwittingly given Theresa’s second name and address.

The decision had already been taken that she would be kept in custody at least until the intelligence operation that had produced the information was completed.