Harry's Game

Chapter 15

The four men sent to question Josephine Laverty had none of the problems finding her that the British army unit in the Springfield Road had encountered. Smiling broadly, the oldest in the group, and the leader, suggested that old Mrs Laverty might care to go into the kitchen and take herself a good long cup of tea.

They took Josephine up to her bedroom far from the mother’s ears. One of the younger men drew the curtains, cutting out the frail shafts of sunlight, and took up his position by the window. Another stood at the door. The third of the volunteers stood behind the chair they suggested Josephine should sit in. The older man they called Frank, and they treated him with respect and with caution.

The girl was poorly equipped to handle an interrogation. Frank’s opening question had been harmless enough, and he was as astonished as the other three boys in the room at the way she collapsed.

Perhaps it was because she was one of the uninvolved, those few in the city who tried to weave a life outside the troubles. Her lack of commitment had built up a fear of violence, second nature to so many, and therefore not so terrifying. Without loyalties there was only self-preservation, and there was little anyone could do now to help her in the face of the unspoken brutality of the men who had crowded round her. Cold, cruel faces, pallid, expressionless, used and trained in begetting pain. There was only one reason they would come to her… because of Harry, sweet and beautiful and chatty Harry. She looked at their hands, big, dirty, broken fingernails, roughened with usage. Their boots, hard and bruised from wear, drab from the rain outside. Men who would hurt her, punch her, kick her. And for what? For a few minutes’ delay in the inevitable. She would tell them what they had come to find out. They were far outside her experience, the men who stood around her, moving among her possessions as if there by right. They did have the right, she thought. Yesterday on the Sperrins she had become involved in their territory, and that was why they had come.

‘This fellow McEvoy, that you’ve been going with. Who is he?’

There had been no reply, only a dissolve as her head went down to her lap and she buried her cheeks and her eyes and ears into the palms of her hands.

‘Who is he?’ Frank was insistent. ‘Who is he, where does he come from?’

‘You know who he is. Why come to me for it? You know well enough.’

Frank paced up and down, short steps, continually twisting round towards the girl when he lost sight of her, moving back and forward between the window and the door, skirting the single bed littered with the girl’s clothes.

‘I want you to tell me.’ He emphasized it. Like an owl with a scarce-whelped mouse, a stoat with a rabbit, he dominated the cringing girl on the wooden chair before him.

‘I want it from you. D’yer hear? I’ve not much time.’

Josephine shook her head, partly from the convulsion of her collapse, and reeled away from him as he swung his clenched fist back-handed across her face. Her knuckles took much of the force of the blow, but through the splayed fingers across her eyes she saw the blood welling close and then breaking the skin at the back of her hands.

Frank could see that what had been put to him as somewhat of a routine questioning had become rather more complex. The fear and hesitation of the girl had alerted him. Her inability to answer a simple explicit question. Frank knew McEvoy only as a lodger at the girl’s employer’s guest house… been out with him once or twice. A fair-looking piece, he’d probably knocked her off, but that wouldn’t be enough to put her there doubled up and sniffling.

‘I’m getting impatient, girl. To him you owe none of the loyalty you should give to us.’

He weighed up whether he would need to hit her again.

She nodded her head, very slightly at first, then merging into the positive mood of acquiescence and surrender. Frank held back. He would not have to hit her again.

She straightened up, steadying herself as she prepared the words.

‘He’s with the British, isn’t he? You knew that. He’s British. I don’t know what he does, but he’s been sent to live amongst us. He’s looking for the man that killed the politico. Over in London. That’s his job. To find that man. He said when he found him he’d exterminate him.’

She stopped, leaving the shadowy little room quiet. Below she could hear her mother about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down.

Josephine saw the enormity of what she had said. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that his truth was safe with her. One backhander and she spilled it all. She remembered it, outside the pub on the hill at Glenshane. She’d promised it then, when she’d told him to quit.

Frank stared intently at her.

‘His job was as an agent in here? He’s a British agent? Sent in to infiltrate us?… Holy Jesus!’

‘You knew? You knew, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t known.’

The room was near-dark now. Josephine could barely make out the men in the room — only the one silhouetted at the window by the early street light. Her mother called up for tea for her visitors. No-one answered. The old lady lingered at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the reply, then went back to the kitchen, accepting and perhaps understanding the situation and unable to intervene.

The girl wavered one last time in her loyalties and her allegiance. Upbringing, tradition, community all came down heavily on the scales against the balance of the laugh and adulthood and bed of Harry. But there was the wee girl with the tossing feet and the tightening stocking, and the obscenity and the misery of death in the police cell, and that wiped Harry from the slate. She spoke again.

‘He was the one that shopped Theresa, the girl that hung herself. She said she’d been with the man that did the London killing, but he couldn’t perform. Harry tipped the army about it. He said the killing was a challenge to the British, and they had to get the man who did it, and kill him. Something like that, just to show who ran things. He told me this yesterday.’

The volunteers said nothing, their imagination stretched by what the girl said. Frank spoke. ‘Was he close to the man he was looking for? Did he know his name? Where he lived? What he looked like? Just how much did the bastard know?’

‘He said he thought he knew what he looked like.’ She saw Theresa again in her mind, heard her giggling in the small space round the basin outside the lock-up closet. That was the justification, that was enough… to see the girl’s face. Hear her choking. ‘He said he was a good shot, and a cool bugger, that’s what he called him. And, yes, they were looking, he said, for a man who would be out of the main eye of things. That was the exact phrase he used.’

‘And you, how did you spot this highly-trained British assassin, little girl?’

‘I spotted him because of a silly thing. You have to believe me, but we were on the Sperrins yesterday. He said he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and sailed all over, but the gale on the mountain seemed to shake him a bit. I said to him it wasn’t very good if he’d been to sea as much as he said. Then he didn’t hide it any more. He seemed to want to talk about it.’

Clever little bitch, thought Frank.

‘Is he in regular touch, communication, with his controller?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is he armed?’

‘I don’t know that either. I never saw a gun. I’ve told you all I know. That’s God’s truth.’

‘There’s one little problem for you, Miss Josephine.’ Frank’s voice had a cutting edge to it now, something metallic, cold and smooth. ‘You haven’t explained to me yet how this British agent came to hear about Theresa and what she was saying about the London man. You may need a bit of time for that, you bastard whore. Treacherous little bitch.’

He came very close to her now. She could smell the tobacco and beer on his breath and the staleness of sweat on his clothes. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his face was a prickled, lumpy mass.

‘Just work it out,’ he said. ‘Then tell the lads, because they’ll be waiting for an answer. To us you’re nothing, dirt, scum, shit. You’ve shopped one of your own… a wee girl who hanged herself rather than talk to the fucking British. You betrayed her. You betrayed your lover boy as well. We’ll put it about, you know, and we’ll let the military know as well. You’ll find somewhere to run, but there’ll be sod-all people to help you get there, you little cow. But then, when these lads have finished with you, you’ll be thinking twice before you go drop your knickers to another Britisher.’

Frank turned away and walked to the door. He said to the man who was standing there, ‘It’s just a lesson this time, Jamie. Nothing permanent and nothing that shows. Something just for her to remember, to think about for a long time. Then lose yourselves. If we need you later we know where you’ll be, so split from here. And, little girl, if you’ve half an inch of sense in your double-dealing painted head you’ll not mention what’s happened here tonight, nor what’s going to.’

He went out of the door and down the steep staircase. In the hall the old woman saw him, as she turned in her chair by the fire and looked at him. He smiled at her.

‘Don’t worry, lady,’ he said, ‘I can find my way out. You just stay where you are.’

The three younger men followed him through the door fifteen minutes later. They left Josephine doubled up on the bed wheezing for air and holding the soft solar plexus of her stomach. She lay a long time in the room, fighting the pain and willing it away. Her clothes lay scattered in the corner of the room where the men had ripped them from her.

‘Right on your bloody flesh, you little bitch, where it hurts, and where it’ll last.’

She’d thought they were going to rape her, but instead they simply beat her. She curled herself up, foetal position, her arms protecting her breasts and lower stomach, thighs clamped together. That was how she stayed after they’d gone. Her breath came back to her soon, and after that there was the long, deep aching of the muscles, and, mingled with it, the agony of the betrayal. Betrayal of Theresa. Betrayal of Harry.

Perhaps the men had been sensitive about beating up a girl, perhaps it was the sight of her nakedness, but the job was not thoroughly done. The effect soon faded. There was time to think then. Frank would have gone straight to the house to find Harry. He’d be taken, tortured, and shot; that would come later, or tomorrow morning. Her reasoning made any thought of warning Harry irrelevant. They would have him already, but did she want to warn him? One good screw, and what had he done? Lifted her bedroom tattle from pillow confidence to military intelligence information. Let him rot with it.

When her mother came up the stairs late in the evening she was still doubled up, still holding her stomach, and cold now on her skin. The old lady looped the girl’s nightdress over her head, and twisted her feet under the clothes. She spent some minutes picking the clothes up from the floor, showing no more interest in those that were torn than in those that formed the general muddle on the floor.

Twice during the Sunday evening Davidson phoned through to Frost. The first-floor office had, with the coming of darkness, taken on the appearance of a bunker. The telephone that was specified for outgoing outside calls was on the floor beside the canvas camp bed, now erected.

Davidson was curtly told there was no information, and reminded that he’d already been told that he would be notified as soon as anything was known. The earlier elation had left him, and he allowed Frost the last word on an operation so inefficient that you cannot even get in touch with your man when you need to get him out.

But for all his bark Frost was now sufficiently involved in the operation to call Springfield Road, wait while the commanding officer was brought to speak to him, and stress the urgency with which the girl Laverty should be found.

In their eyrie high above the Ardoyne two soldiers looked down on Ypres Avenue. There were no street lights, old casualties of the conflict, but they watched the front door of No. 41 from the image intensifier, a sophisticated visual aid that washed everything with a greenish haze and which enabled them to see the doorway with great clarity. On the hour they whispered the same message into their field telephone. No-one had used the front door of the house.

Frank did not go near Delrosa that night. On his bicycle he had ridden up to Andersonstown in search of his Battalion commander. It was arranged that at midnight he would be taken to meet the Belfast Brigade commander. Frank knew his name, but had never met him.

From his home the Permanent Under-Secretary had authorized the sending of a photograph of Harry to Belfast. The next morning, Monday, it was to be issued to troops who would raid the various Andersonstown scrap merchants’. Less than half a dozen people in the province would know the reason for the swoops but each search party would have several three-inch-by-four pictures of Harry. It had originally shown him in uniform, but that had been painted out.

The big television in the corner of the room droned on, its Sunday message of hope and charity, goodwill and universal kindness expounded by ranks of singers and earnest balding parsons. The family sat quite still on the sofa watching the man with the Armalite.

The pictures claimed no part of the attention of Janet Rennie as she stared, minute after minute, at the man with the rifle across his knee, but for long moments the children’s concentration was occasionally taken by the images on the screen before being jerked to the nightmare facing them across the carpet. It was a new degree of fear that the children felt, one they were not able to cope with or assimilate. They held fast to their mother, waiting to see what would happen, what she would do. To the two girls the man opposite represented something quite apart from anything they had experienced before, but they recognized him as their father’s enemy. Their eyes seldom left his face, held with fascination by the greyness of his skin, its lack of colour, its deadness. This was where they saw the difference between the intruder and their world. There was none of the ruddiness and weight, the life and colour that they knew from their friends’ fathers and the men that came home with their father.

In the first twenty minutes that Downs had been in the room, Fiona, who traded on her ability to charm, had attempted to win the stranger with a smile. He looked right through her, gap-toothed grin and all. She’d tried just once, then subsided against her mother.

He’s never come out into the light, the elder girl, Margaret, told herself. He’s been locked up, and like a creature he’s escaped from wherever they’ve kept him. This man was across the wall, but she knew little of the causes of the separation and the walling-off. She studied the deepness of his eyes, intent and careful, uninvolved as they took in the room, traversing it like the light on a prison camp watchtower, without order or reason but hovering, moving, perpetually expecting the unpredictable. She saw his clothes too. A coat with a darned tear in the sleeve, the buttons off the cuffs, trousers without creases and shiny in the knees, frayed at the turn-ups and with mud inside the lower leg. To children, suits were for best, for work, not for getting dirty and shabby. His shoes were strange to them, too. Cleaned after a fashion by the rain on the winter pavements, but like his face without lustre, misused.

Margaret understood that the gun on Downs’s lap was to kill her father. Her sister, twenty months younger, was unable to finish off the equation and so was left in a limbo of expectancy, aware only of an incomprehensible awfulness. Margaret had enough contact with the boys at school who played their war games in the school yard to recognize the weapon as a rifle.

He’ll be a hard bastard, Janet Rennie had decided. One of the big men sent in for a killing like this. Won’t be able to distract him with argument or discussion enough to unsettle him. He’s hard enough to carry out his threat. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Would have his own kids, breed like rats the Catholics, have his own at home. But he’d still shoot hers. She felt the fingers of her daughters gripping through her blouse. But she kept her head straight, and her gaze fastened on Downs. There was no response to her stare, only the indifference of the professional, the craftsman who has been set a task and time limit and who has arrived early and therefore must wait to begin. Faster than her children she had taken in the man, searched him for weakness, but the gun across his knees now held her attention. If he were nervous or under great strain then she would notice the fidgeting of the hands or the reflection of the perspiration on the stock or barrel of the gun. But there was no movement, no reflection.

He held the gun lightly, his left hand halfway along the shaft and his fingers loose round the black plastic that cradled the hard rifled steel of the barrel. His hand was just above the magazine and her eyes wandered to the engineered emplacement where the capsule of ammunition nestled into the base of the gun. Just after he had sat down, Downs had eased the safety catch off with his right index finger, which now lay spanning the half-moon of the trigger guard. Like a man come to give an estimate on the plumbing, or life insurance, she thought. None of the tensions she would have expected on display. Thirty minutes or so before she thought her husband might be arriving home she decided to talk.

‘We have no quarrel with you. You’ve none with us. We’ve done nothing to you. If you go now you’ll be clean away. You know that. You’ll be right out of here and gone before my husband gets back.’ That was her start. Poor, she told herself, it wouldn’t divert a flea.

He looked back with amused detachment.

‘If you go through with this they’ll get you. They always get them now. It’s a fact. You’ll be in the Kesh for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?’

‘Save it, Mrs Rennie. Save it and listen to the hymns.’

She persisted. ‘It’ll get you nowhere. It’s the Provisionals, isn’t it? You’re beaten. One more cruel killing, senseless. It won’t do any good.’

‘Shut up.’ He said it quietly. ‘Just shut up and sit still.’

She came again. ‘Why do you come here? Why to this house? Who are you?’

‘It’s a pity your man never told you what he did when he went to work of a morning. That’s late in the day now, though. Quiet yourself and stay where you are.’

He motioned at her with the rifle, still gently, still in control. The movement was definitive. Stay on the sofa with the children. He sensed that the crisis was coming for her, and that she knew it. With growing desperation she took up the same theme.

‘But you’re beaten now. It’ll soon be all over. All your big men are gone. There’ll have to be a cease-fire soon, then talking. More killing won’t help anything.’ Keep it calm, don’t grovel to him, talk as an equal with something on your side. There’s nothing to counter-balance that Armalite but you have to make believe he doesn’t hold everything.

‘We’re not beaten. It’s not over. We’ve more men than we can handle. There’ll be no talks, and no ceasefire. Got the message? Nothing. Not while there are pigs like your man running round free and live.’

The children beside her started up at the way the crouched stranger spoke of their father. Janet Rennie was an intelligent woman and hardened by her country upbringing. That she would fight for her husband’s life was obvious: the problem had been in finding the medium. For the first time in nearly two hours she believed she stood a chance. She still watched the hands and the rifle. The hands were in a new position on the Armalite. From resting against the gun they were now gripping it. Attack, and how can he hit back before Rennie comes home?

‘There’s no future for you boys. Your best men are all locked up. The people are sick and tired of you. You know that. Even in your own rat holes they’ve had enough of you—’

‘You don’t know a bloody thing about what goes on. Not a bloody thing. You know nothing. Nothing. Shut up. Shut your bloody face…’

She taunted him, trying to act it with her voice to overcome the fear. ‘They don’t want you any more. You’re outnumbered, living off the backs of people. Without your guns you’re nothing—’

He shouted back across to her. ‘What do you know of the way we live? What do you know of what support we have? All you see is what’s on the bloody television. You don’t know what life is like in the Falls, with murdering bastards like your husband to beat the shit out of boys and girls. We’re doing people a service when we kill fucking swine like that husband of yours.’

‘My husband never killed anyone.’ She said it as a statement of fact. Safe.

‘He told you that, did he?’ Very precise, low and hissing the words out. ‘Pity you never asked him what sort of little chat he had with the wee girl that hanged herself in the cells at Springfield.’

She had built herself towards the climax. Now he watched with relish the demolition. She remembered reading about the girl, though it had not been mentioned at home. Work rarely was. The rebuttal caught her hard, draining her. The hands. Hold on to the hands, and concentrate on them. The only lifeline is the hands. The left knuckle was white on the barrel, blood drained out from round the bones. He was holding the rifle with both hands as he brought it up across his face to wipe his forehead with the sleeve on his right arm. He was sweating.

‘You’re nothing, are you? That’s all you’re fit for. Sitting in people’s homes with guns, guarding women and wee bairns. You’re a rat, a creeping, disease-ridden little rat. Is that what the great movement is about? Killing people in their homes?’

Her voice was battering it out now, watching the anger rise first in his neck and spread through the lower jaw, tension, veins hardening and protruding. Safe. What can the gun do now that would not rouse the neighbours who lived through the thin brick-and-cement walls of the estate just a few feet from her own bungalow?

‘You’ve made it all out wrong, Mrs Rennie. Whatever your bloody man says you don’t kill the Provos just by locking a few up. We are of the people. Don’t you know that? The people are with us. You’ve lost, you are the losers. Your way of life, God-given superiority, is over and finished, not us… We’re winning. We’re winning because the people support us. Go into Andytown, or the Murph or the Ardoyne or Turf Lodge. Go in there and ask them about Provo rule. Then ask them what they think of RUC scum.’

He was shouting, half-rising out of the flower-covered seat of the chair. The rifle was now only in the right hand, but with the finger still close to the trigger. His left arm was waving above his head.

The hatred between the two was total. His fury was fanned by the calmness she showed in face of the rifle, and the way she had made him shout and the speed with which he had lost his control. Her loathing for the Republicans, bred into her from the cradle, gave her strength. With something near detachment she weighed the pluses and minuses of rushing him there and then. He was gripping the gun, but it was pointed away from the family. There was no possibility that she could succeed. She felt the children’s grip on her arms. If she surged suddenly across the room she would carry them like two anchors halfway with her.

He was not so calm now, and she saw the hint in his eye that he felt the claustrophobia of the room, that the time he had sat in the chair had sapped that sense of initiative and control that were so important to him. She remembered a young Catholic boy who had come round her father’s store, idling or loitering or just with nothing to do, and how her father had pulled him up by the front of his collar, and shaken him like an animal to find what he was doing there, on the corner outside the shop. And there had been then the trapped-rodent fear of the youth, of the second-grade boy, who accepted that this would happen, and ran when released, feeling himself lucky not to be thrashed. In the eyes of the man across from her was the hint that he knew he no longer dominated the situation.

When Rennie turned into the cul-de-sac he noted immediately that the garage interior light was not switched on. He stopped his car forty yards from the bottom of the road, and turned off his engine and lights. The bungalow seemed quite normal. The curtains were drawn, but there was a slice of light through the gap where they had been pulled not quite together, from the hall light filtering through the patterned and coloured glass. Everything as it should be.

But no light in the garage. For months now it had been a set routine that an hour or so before he was expected Janet would go into the kitchen and switch on the light in the garage. They kept the garage empty, without the clutter that the neighbours stored there. That way there was no hiding place for an assassin.

The detective sat in the car, watching, allowing himself some minutes just to look at the house and search in front of him in detail for any flaw other than the unlit garage. There was no light upstairs. Perhaps there should have been, perhaps not. Usually Fiona would be having her bath by now, but only darkness there. That was another cautionary factor.

Over the years Howard Rennie had been to enough full-dress police funerals to wonder how it could happen to himself. There was only one way. The epitaphs of the dead men were clear enough. Carelessness. Somewhere, for some time, usually minuscule, they had slackened. Not all, but most, grew overconfident and fell into the convenience of routine, began to believe in their own safety. A few were killed in closely-planned attacks, but most as Rennie knew well presented themselves as casual targets.

This was why he had a light fitted for the garage that should now be on, and why he noticed it was not lit.

His wife was a meticulous and careful person. Not one to make a silly mistake about the garage. It was the dilemma of the life they led that he wondered constantly how far as a family they should take their personal security. On the one hand there could be something drastically wrong that had prevented his wife from switching on a light as agreed. On the other she could be next door for sugar or milk, and stayed to gossip while the children played or watched television.

But it was quite out of character for her to forget.

He eased out of the car, pushing the door to but not engaging the lock, and reached for the PPK Walther in his shoulder holster. He had loaded and checked it before starting his drive home from Castlereagh, but he again looked for the safety-catch mechanism to see it was in the ‘on’ position. On the balls of his feet he went towards the front gate. The gate was wrought-iron and had never hung well — it rattled and needed a lifting, forcing movement to open it. Rennie instead went to the far side of the gatepost before the hedge thickened, through a gap, past the roses and onto the grass. The run up to the front door was gravel and he kept to the grass, fearful of any noise his feet might make. Though the window showed the light from inside, the gap between the curtains was not enough for him to see through.

There were no voices at the moment he reached the window, just the hymn-singing on the television. Rennie came off the grass and stepped onto the tiled step of the doorway. The Walther was in his right hand, as with the left he found his Yale key and inserted it gently into the opening. Steady now, boy. This is the crucial time. If you’re noisy now it’s blown — if there’s anything to blow. For a moment he felt sheepish at the stupidity of tiptoeing across his own front lawn. Had the neighbours seen? The door opened, just enough to get him inside. To the lounge door. It was off the latch, and the aperture of an inch or so acted as a funnel to the final crescendo of the programme, and the choir’s lusty singing. As the sound tailed away he heard his wife speak. ‘Great hero, aren’t you? With your bloody rifle. Need it to make a man of you…’

The voice, shrill and aggressive, was enough to deaden the tiny amount of sound Rennie made as he leaned into the door, and the man in his chair was aware of nothing till the door started swinging on its hinges towards him.

Downs saw the door moving long before the woman and her children.

His body stiffened as he fought to take hold of himself, and for concentration after seeing his control debilitated long before by the argument across the room. He was still raising his rifle into the fire position when Rennie came in, low and fast, to hit the carpet and roll in one continuous action towards the heavy armchair between the fireplace and the window.

The movement was too fast for Billy Downs, who fired three times into the space by the door before checking to realize that the policeman was no longer there. He struggled up from the sitting position in the deep soft armchair, flooded with the sudden panic that he had fired and missed, and didn’t know where his target was.

The metallic click of Rennie’s safety catch, and the single shot that howled by his ear and into the French windows behind, located the target.

Rennie was not a marksman. He had been on pistol-shooting courses, most of which simulated a street situation. Only once they’d practised storming a room. When you go in, they’d said, dive and roll as soon as you hit the floor, and keep rolling till you find cover. You’re difficult to hit while you’re moving. The first shot came as he balanced momentarily on his left side, his right arm free to fire in the general direction of the dark shape across the carpet. But his momentum carried him on till he cannoned into the solid bulk of the big chair. He was on his right side, the Walther driving into the softness of his thigh when he realized his impetus had wedged him between the wall and the chair. He twisted his head, seeing for the first time with agonizing clarity the man, his wife and the children, as he struggled helplessly to swivel his body round. His survival depended on that movement.

The rifle was against Downs’s shoulder now, eye down the barrel, not bothering with the complicated sight device, just using the barrel to give him a line. He poised himself to fire. Wait for it, you bastard copper, wait for it, now. The triumph of the mission was there now, the bloody slug of the copper on the deck, soft, fat and vulnerable. And dead.

Rennie was screaming. ‘No, no. Keep away.’

For the two children the room had disintegrated in speed and noise. When Fiona saw her father some four seconds after he had come through the door she fled from the sofa across the middle of the room towards him.

It was the moment that the man had chosen to fire.

Fractionally his vision, misted and unclear, of the man that he had come to kill was blocked by the chequered dress and the long golden hair.

He hesitated. Staring at the body feverishly trying to get the child behind it and away. It was the time to shoot, a perfect target. Still he hesitated.

He saw the child with pin-point clarity, as sharp as the mummified kids back in the street in London. Not part of the bloody war. He couldn’t see the face of the girl as she writhed closer to her father, only the brightness of her dress, the freshness of the white socks, the pink health of the moving skin on the small legs. Couldn’t destroy it. Rennie was struggling to pull the child under him to protect her. Downs could see that, and when he’d done so the big policeman would be free to fire himself. Downs knew that. It had no effect. Not shoot a child, no way he could do it. He felt himself drifting away from the reality of the room, concentrating now on his wife. Kids at home, not as clean, scrubbed as these, but the same. If his wife knew he’d slaughtered a small one… He saw the slight body fade under the shape of the detective, and the other man’s firing arm come up to aim.

Behind the man were the French windows and the light framework of wood. He spun and dived at the centre of one of the glass panels. The wall of wood and glass squares gave way. Rennie, the child spread-eagled under him, emptied the pistol in the direction of the window.

It was the fifth or sixth shot that caught Downs in the muscle of the left arm, just above the elbow. The impact heaved him forward through the obstacle of wood and glass splinters and across the neat patio towards the well-cut back lawn.

The pain was searing hot as Downs ran across the lawn. At the bottom, among the vegetables still in the ground, he crooked the rifle under his injured arm and with his right levered himself over the fence and into a cut-through lane.

Struggling for breath he ran down the lane and then across a field to get to the road where the car was parked. Pushing him forward was the fear of capture, and the knowledge that the failed shooting would bring massive retaliation down on him. Like the fox discovered at work in the chicken coop who flees empty-handed, the sense of survival dominated. The experience in the house, coupled with the exhaustion of the running and the pain in his arm combined to create a confusion of images all returning to the looming blond head of the child thrust into his line of fire as the detective lay on the ground. It merged with the memory of the muted stunned children in London as he fired at their father. Again and again, though, as with a film loop, came the face of the child across the room, throwing herself at her prone father. And after that, as he neared the car, was the knowledge that if he had fired he would have killed the policeman. He might have hit the child, that was the area of doubt: he would have killed the policeman, that was certainty. He had hesitated, and through his hesitation his target was alive. It was weakness, and he had thought himself above that.

The young driver was asleep when he felt his shoulder shaken violently and above him the frantic and blood-etched face of the man.

‘Come on. Get the fucking thing moving. Don’t hang about. Get it out of this bloody place.’

‘Aren’t you going to do something about that—?’ the youth pointed to the still-assembled Armalite, but cut off when he saw the blood on the arm that was holding the rifle.

‘Just get moving. Mind your own bloody business and drive.’

The boy surged the car forward and out onto the road in the direction of Andersonstown.

‘Did it go OK?’ he asked.