Harry's Game

Chapter 14

Harry was up early again that Sunday morning, and out of the house well before eight to make his way down to the city centre and the phone that he could use to talk to Davidson. This time he took the revolver with him, in his coat pocket, with the roughness of its shape shielded by the length of the covering anorak. The decision to take the gun had been an instinctive one, but now that he had it, and out on the streets and loaded, the situation that he faced was all the more clear. For the first time since they had flown him in from Germany he felt uncertain. That was the girl. Up that mountain talking a load of slop when he should have been concentrating, then letting her go last night, back into the warren that she shared with his opposition. Madness, and it aggravated him. Perhaps also there was the knowledge that the trail that had seemed so warm a week ago had now chilled.

The Smith & Wesson jarred against him as he stepped out down the Falls to the phone and communication with Davidson. There were no eyes watching him after he left Delrosa: the orders of the Battalion intelligence officer were being strictly obeyed.

He dialled the number, four-seven-zero-four-six-eight-one. After several desultory clicks he heard it ringing at the other end. It was answered.

‘It’s Harry here. How are the family?’

Davidson was in early too, and hoping for the call. ‘Very well, they liked the postcards.’

‘I’ve got a bit of a problem.’ Pause. ‘I’ve been blown by this girl, the one that helped me with the business I gave you last week. What a cock-up that was.’ Pause. ‘But anyway, putting the finger on that bird has led this girl straight back to me. She knows what I am. Not who I am, but what we’re here for. I want you to take her out. Get her out of the scene for the duration. You can do that, can’t you? She tells me that the man we want was at the same dance that we were at, a fortnight ago. I half-felt I remembered him. But the face wasn’t quite right on the photokit. If it’s the man then the army pulled him in, but that looked routine. He was just one of the ones that were rounded up. He had a woman with him, presumably his wife, in a yellow trouser suit. Have you got all that?’

‘I’ve got it on tape, Harry. Anything else?’

‘Hell, what more do you want? No, that’s all I have at the moment. But look, I don’t want the living daylights bashed out of this girl. I just want her lifted out so she doesn’t get involved any more. She’s Josephine Laverty, lives with her mother in one of those little streets in Clonard, up off the Springfield on the right. You’ll find her, but get to her quick, there’s a good lad.’

‘We’ll work something out. Don’t worry.’

‘There’s not really much else. It’s a bit chill here at the moment but I think I’m settled in here OK. If you don’t wrap it up on what I’ve just given you then it’ll be a very long time. Do we have time for that?’

‘We’ve plenty, as long as you think it worth it, Harry. But we ought, as you say, to kill it this time. It was a hell of a balls-up over the other girl. There was a lot of praise at this end for what you got. Great satisfaction. You’re all right yourself, are you? No-one following you about, no awkward questioning? Our assessment is that they would be right up to you by now if they were about to blow you, and that you’d probably have been aware of something. That’s not just supposed to cheer you up, but if no-one is sniffing around you then it should mean you’re OK.’

‘No, there’s nothing like that,’ Harry said. ‘I’m working too. Job in a scrap yard in Andersonstown, and paying well. Back to the scene, then.’

‘Harry, look, you ought to know this. I got well and truly chewed up over your living arrangements, us not knowing. It’s not only unusual, it’s unprofessional as well. Very unprofessional.’

‘The whole thing’s unprofessional,’ Harry replied. ‘Nothing’s going to change. You’re not going to order me, are you? I don’t think it would help, and it’s my neck. Thanks very much for caring. Cheers, maestro.’

‘Bye, Harry, I understand. No-one else does. Take care, and listen to the news. As soon as you hear we’ve got him, come whistling out. Give me a call first if you can, but head on up to the airport like you’ve got a bomb up your backside. Take care.’

Harry put the phone down, and hurried out into the cold and the long walk back up the Falls. He was concerned that they should get the girl out of the quagmire, and fast, before her involvement became too great for her to extricate herself… before she followed the other girl he’d brought into the game.

But things did move fast that Sunday.

Twenty minutes after Harry had rung off Davidson called the Permanent Under-Secretary. He caught the civil servant on the point of going to early morning service. The bad news first. Always play it that way, Davidson liked to say. Kick them a bit, then produce the magic sponge. They like it better. The agent was still declining to name a contact point. Not refusing, but declining. Don’t want to make an order of it. Told him it’s stupid, but can’t do more than that. As he says, it’s his neck. Our scandal if he catches it, mind, but his neck for all that. Now the bonus. Good information out of our chap. He’ll like that.

‘Keep that for a moment,’ snapped the civil servant. ‘I’ve had calls in the night. GOC has been on, and that man of his, Frost of intelligence. Bloody misnomer that. They want our fellow out, and kicking up a hell of a scene. They think he’s blown.’

Davidson bit his tongue. He heard at the end of the line the call for the rest of the family to go on.

‘There’s been some sort of leak. Like a sieve, that place. The papers have got a story from the opposition that they know a big man has been put in. There’s panic stations over there. Anyway the order is get the chap out or the General says he’ll go to the PM. Consolation is that the men over there say they don’t think the IRA have a name. But that’ll come soon enough. And you haven’t an idea where we could go and just take hold of him?’

‘All I have is that he works in a scrap merchant’s in Andersonstown. Nothing more.’

‘That won’t do us much good till Monday morning.’

‘He’s done well again, our chap. The man we want was actually at the dance where Harry was the other night. The military had him, and must have let him go, or are holding him on something else…’

‘Look, for God’s sake, Davidson, I’m at home. I’m going to church. There’s no point feeding me that sort of material over the phone. Talk to Frost direct. He’ll be in his office, prancing about. He’s having a field day. But if this Harry man should call again, get him out. That now is an instruction.’

Davidson had always had to admit that he enjoyed the complicated paraphernalia of introducing the agent into the operations theatre. He could reflect on it now, with the phone quiet, and his superior racing down the country lanes late for his communion. Davidson had been on the old Albania team. There had been the months with the undercover Greeks and Turks in Cyprus. Three years’ secondment to the Singapore government to train bright-faced little policemen in the techniques of urban infiltration and maintaining men in a hostile environment. There was a gap in his wide experience. He recognized it. The men he sent into the field or discussed sending were all, as Davidson saw them, foreigners. The involvement with the men who listened to his lectures or acted under his orders was loose, and in no way binding.

With Harry it had become quite different. The danger that he now knew his agent to be facing numbed Davidson to a degree that almost shamed him. He had long seen himself as a tough, near-ruthless figure, the man in charge who put his agents onto the ground without sentiment or personal feeling. His defensive walls were being breached, he realized, as he thought of his man across the water, with the enemy closing on him.

And Harry didn’t just not know of it: he’d just been told that all was well and looked good. That made him vulnerable.

Davidson had a growing feeling of nausea when he remembered how Harry had been brought to Dorking. Damn-all chance he’d had of backing out of the operation. The Prime Minister personally authorized the setting up of the team, and we’ve chosen you as the most suitable man. What chance did he have of sidestepping that little lot? He’d been belted off on the plane on a wild-goose chase. If he’s not out of there soon he’ll be number one thousand and bloody something pushing up daisies.

He picked up his phone and called Frost direct, in his office where he’d been told he’d be. At the other end of the line the serving colonel in intelligence left the London-based civilian with no illusions as to what he thought of armchair administrators organizing undercover work without consultation or know-how. Davidson resigned himself to it, letting it blaze over him. Between the interruptions he read over the transcript of Harry’s message. He ended on a high note.

‘He did pretty well with the first lot of stuff we gave you. We were disappointed in our team it didn’t come to much. You should have it sewn up this time, don’t you think, old boy?’

Frost didn’t rise. It was a juicy and wriggling bait, but the office was crowded, and it was not the day for telephone brawling. That would come after this merry little show was wrapped up and in mothballs — what was left of it. He called the Springfield Road police to request the locating and picking up of the girl Josephine Laverty of Clonard, and then turned his attention to the matter of the man having been in and presumably out of military hands on Saturday night two weeks back. Cool bastard he must be, appraised the colonel. In between the calls he cancelled his Sunday-morning nine holes with G2 Ops.

Other operations had gone wrong before, Davidson recalled. There were those endless nights when they parachuted Albanians into the marshlands between the sea and Tirana and waited in vain with their CIA colleagues for the chatter of radio signals that would let them know all was well. When the Cypriot agents he had controlled had disappeared there had been days of nagging uncertainty until the bodies showed up — generally tortured, and always shot through the back of the head. But they were only aliens, so that the recriminations were short-lived, the reprisals muted. But if they lost Harry then the ramifications would be huge, and public. The round-up of scapegoats would be spectacular, Davidson had no doubt of that. The Permanent Under-Secretary would have faded from the picture by then, would have fetched his sliding carpet out. The old hack would be left holding the baby.

He called his assistant in from the outer office where, thank God, the man spent most of his time, and told him to watch the phones. He was to tape all calls, regardless, on the cassette recorder, whichever phone they came through on. He slipped out of the building. Sunday morning in Covent Garden. Some sunlight about on the upper reaches of the big buildings. Piles of fruit and vegetable boxes. No people. Davidson walked to the small grocer that he knew would be open to serve the flats, big and grey-smeared, to the north of the market square. He bought bread, and cartons of milk, coffee and biscuits, some butter, and lemon curd. He’d liked that ever since boarding school thirty-five years ago. The total was about all his cooking facilities would cope with.

There had been no calls when he returned. He phoned his wife, told her he would be in town for a day or so, and not to worry. She didn’t sound as if she was. There was an army-issue camp bed kept in the wardrobe behind his desk, excruciatingly uncomfortable but better than nothing. It would be a long wait, and no-one to spend it with but the boring young man they’d sent along to give him a hand. Davidson had realized soon that they had not fully briefed his assistant on what was happening. He had no intention himself of enlightening him. They were on stand-by now, operational twenty-four hours.

The boys ran intricately between the towering regimented lines of the pine trunks, hurtling their way over the bending carpet of needles and cones in perpetual games of chase and hide and seek. Their voices were shrill, loud as if to fight off the cold attacking wind that heralded the real winter of the great plain east of Hanover. This was where Harry liked to bring them, to search for trout in the streams in high summer and spend weekends in a wooden chalet, to run round to keep warm in the early winter, and then, when the snow came, to bring their toboggans. Sometimes they would set up a fox that had hidden in the sparse, stunted undergrowth under the pine umbrella hoping to avoid detection, then when its nerve went and it bounded clear there would be the noisy, clumsy chase, the ground giving under their boots before the quarry made its escape. It would take them deep into the forest, and when the brown flash was well lost they would stop and ponder and think of the direction of the fire-break path where they had left their mother, Mary Brown.

She had brought sandwiches full of sausage and a Thermos of tomato soup today, and they would have that later sitting at a wooden table in the picnic area beside the car park.

From the wide path she could hear the distant noise of their voices, as she walked with a taller, older woman, her mother. A week after Harry had gone she had written to her home in the English midlands countryside. There the three-page letter had been recognized as a distress flare, a call for help. Arrangements had been made. Father could look after himself for a week, cook his own meals, get the garden into shape for the long winter lay-off.

When the children were in bed the conversation often, and hardly accidentally, strayed to Harry’s abrupt departure, and now that they were again out of earshot it continued.

‘It’s just so difficult to understand,’ said Mary’s mother, ‘that no-one should be able to tell you anything about it. You’d have thought someone could have had the gumption, even the courtesy, to say something to you.’

‘There’s been nothing,’ said Mary, ‘not a word from anyone since they came and packed his case. Rummaged around in the wardrobe, right down the bottom where his old things are — half of them should have gone this week to the sergeants’ wives’ jumble sale — things he’d only wear if he was gardening or painting or cleaning out the cellar, or something like that. We’ve had two postcards from somewhere down the Gulf, and otherwise nothing.’

The postcards had shown a camel corps contingent of the Sultan, and a gold-domed mosque. The messages had been brief and facetious. ‘Having a wonderful time, got a very red nose from the heat, don’t think there’ll be snow here this Christmas, love to the boys and to you, my darling, Harry,’ and ‘Giving church parade a miss this week. Missing you all. Sorry about the nonsense but it will all seem clear when I’m home. Love you all, Harry.’ They’d taken a long time to arrive, and now they decorated the mantelpiece above the fire in their front room.

‘But tell me again, dear, exactly what they said when you asked the people in the office.’ Mother had the infuriating habit of demanding endless, word-by-word repetitions of conversations she’d already heard umpteen times.

‘Just what I told you. That it was as a result of a signal from London, that everyone here was as much in the dark as I was. That Harry would be away six weeks’ minimum, probably not more than eight. And that if I were short of anything or having problems not to hesitate to call the Families Officer. He’s an awful old bore — a passed-over major. I’d really be on my last legs if I called him. I just don’t think they know.’

‘It must be to do with the Aden business, I suppose. The thing he was awarded the Military Cross for. Your father and I were very proud for you—’

Mary cut in, ‘I cannot believe it’s anything to do with that. It was years ago, and Harry was really knocked out by that. He had weeks of sick leave. He doesn’t talk much about it. But it must have been awful from what I was told. He just lived in amongst them then, wasn’t even fluent on Arabic. Passable but not fluent.’

‘Well, it has to be something secret.’

‘Has to be.’ She was wearing her hair up, and the wind was pulling it away from the big tortoiseshell 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 relationship. 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 the 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 céilidh 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 guardroom.

‘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’d 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 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 the Ardoyne. When the message came through on the radio-telephone to the troops, Downs was just out of the heartland, standing in the no-man’s ground at the top of the Crumlin waiting for his pick-up. 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 ‘Fuck 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 passenger 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-class 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. 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 Japan. 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 passed 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 breach, 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 stock folded, Downs pushed the rifle down into the hidden pocket.

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said. ‘For God’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, shivering, into the driver’s seat to wait for his return.

The regular Sunday afternoon visit to the office to clear the accumulation 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 Saturday 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 assassinated by one of those wild-eyed, 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 four, 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 doorbell rang.

‘Mama! Mama! Front-doorbell!’ 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 teatime?

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, unbuttoned 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 back 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, flicking 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 bloody heroine. We’re going to sit in there, and wait for that bastard 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 the 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 shiny 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.