Harry's Game

Chapter 17

The long night was coming to its close when B Company swarmed into Ypres Avenue. The column of armoured cars had split up some hundreds of yards from the street, and guided by co-ordinated radio messages had arrived at each end of the row of bleak terraced houses simultaneously. The first troops out sprinted down the back entrances behind the houses, taking up positions every fifteen yards or so of the debris-strewn pathways. From the tops of the Land-Rovers searchlights played across the fronts of the houses as the noise and banging in the street brought the upstairs lights flickering on.

The major who commanded the company had received only a short briefing. He had been told the man they were looking for was named Billy Downs, the address of his house, and that he was expected to search several houses. He was thirty-three years old, on his fourth tour to Northern Ireland, and as a company commander in South Armagh on his last visit had witnessed four of his men killed in a culvert bomb explosion. His hatred of the Provisionals was deep-rooted and lasting. Unlike some of his brother officers who respected the expertise of the opposition he felt only consuming contempt.

What Downs was wanted for he hadn’t been told, nor what his status was in the IRA. He’d only guessed the reason for the raid when they had unpinned the picture from the guardroom wall and given it to him. It was the photokit that had gone up five weeks earlier after the London shooting and remained top of the soldiers’ priority list. The intelligence officer down from Lisburn noticed the flash of recognition spread across his face as he looked down at the picture.

Once the street was sealed there was time to work carefully and slowly along the road. No. 41 was the third house they came to. The soldiers banged on the door with their rifle butts. The few who had seen the picture of the man they wanted were hanging on the moment of anticipation, wondering who would come and open the door.

From upstairs came the noise of crying, steadily increasing to screaming pitch as the family woke to the battering at the wooden panels. Downs’s wife came to the door, thin and frail in her nightdress and cotton dressing gown. A tiny figure became silhouetted against the light from the top of the stairs when she drew back the bolts, turned the key and stood against the soldiers. The troops in the search party pushed past her, huge in their boots and helmets and flak jackets. They raced up the stairs, equipment catching and bouncing off the banisters. A lieutenant and two sergeants. All had seen the picture, all knew what they were there for. The officer, his Browning pistol cocked and fastened to his body by a lanyard, swung his left shoulder into the front bedroom door, and bullocked his way to the window. The man behind switched on the light, covering the bed with his automatic rifle.

Two faces peered back at the intruders. Saucer-eyed, mouths open, and motionless. The troops patted the bodies of the children and pressed down the bedclothes round them, isolating the little humps they made with the blankets. They looked under the bed and in the wardrobe. There were no other hiding places in the room.

They had come in hard and fast, and now they stopped, halted by the anticlimax of the moment.

The lieutenant went to the top of the stairs and shouted down.

‘Not here, sir.’

‘Wait there, I’ll come up.’

The major came in and looked slowly round the room.

‘Right, not here now. But he has been, or she’s a dirty little bitch round the house. There, his pants, vest, socks. I wouldn’t imagine they lie round the house too long.’

By the window was the crumpled pile of dirty clothes underneath the chair that Downs used to hang his coat and trousers on at night.

‘Get her up here,’ said the major. ‘And get the floorboard chaps. He’s been here pretty recently. May still be in the house. If he’s about I want him found, wherever he is, roof, basement if there is one, wherever.’

She came into the room, her two younger children hanging like monkeys over her shoulders, thumbs in mouths. Like their mother they were white-faced, and shivering in the cold away from their bedclothes.

‘We were wondering where we might find your husband, Mrs Downs.’

‘He’s not here. You’ve poked your bloody noses in, and you can see that. Now get out of here.’

‘His clothes are here, Mrs Downs, you and I can both see that. I wouldn’t expect a nice girl like you to leave his dirty pants lying on the floor that many days.’

‘Don’t be bloody clever with me,’ she snarled back at him. ‘He’s not here, and you can see that, now get your soldiers out of here.’

‘The problem, Mrs Downs, is that we think your husband could still be here. That would be the explanation for his clothes being on the floor. I’m afraid we’re going to have to search round a bit. We’ll cause as little disruption as possible. I assure you of that.’

‘Big heroes, aren’t you, when you have your tanks and guns. Big and bloody brave.’

The soldier with the crowbar mouthed an apology as he came past her. He flipped up a corner of the thread-worn carpet and with a rending scrape pulled up the board at the end of the room. In four separate places he took the planks up before disappearing to his hips down the holes he had made. The major and his soldiers waited above for him to emerge with his torch for the last time and announce with an air of professional disappointment that the floor space was clear. Using ladders, they went up into the loft, shaking the beams above the major and the man’s wife, and swinging the light fitting.

‘Nothing up there either, sir.’

The ground floor was of stone and tile, so that stayed put, while the expert banged on the walls with his hammer in search of cavities. The coal bunker out in the yard was cleared out, the wooden framework under the sink taken down.

‘It’s clean, sir.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He breezed into the kitchen.

‘Morning, Mrs Duncan, all right then?’

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

‘Anything on the news, then?’

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

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

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

‘Well, then, no big man in the net—’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Don’t you fuss, Mrs Duncan.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you very much, Colonel.’

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

Davidson put the phone down.

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

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

‘Any news?’

‘Not a bloody dicky bird that matters.’

The men on duty in the intelligence section moved quietly round the room, unwilling to attract Frost’s attention. He was slumped ungracefully in his chair, his eyes half closed, half focused on the ceiling. He was a man of method and neatness, following his own individual rule book, but following it closely, and expecting others to ape him. Harry McEvoy violated the rule book. The theory, the preparation and the execution of the McEvoy operation all contravened the requirements of this sort of business. His subordinates had detected the inner anger and knew enough to keep their distance.

Frost could see the weakness in the whole affair. This lunatic fighting between departments and services. Point-scoring at a grand level and at the expense of the man out there on the streets. He was as guilty as any. But the issue had to be settled so there would be no repetition. That was where it was all so amateurish. The Prime Minister and the GOC… They should have their heads knocked together. But rivalries don’t come from a victory march, they don’t surface when the show’s going well, they’re the product of long-drawn-out failure.

The chatter of the teletype machines and the noise of men shuffling round the room, doors opening, muted talk were insufficient to disturb his train of thought.

It’s because we’re all lashing around, stranded by the tide, looking for the way out when there isn’t one, that a damn-fool thing like this gets launched. And after five endless years of it, and the promise of how many more to come, the inevitability that the professionals are going to be cold-shouldered, that the outsiders will want to have their say. Inevitable. And the price we pay for it is having that poor devil McEvoy or whatever his real name is out there on the streets, working for God knows who.

Frost straightened up in his chair. ‘Get me some coffee, please. Black, and make sure there’s plenty there this morning.’ He was tired, exhausted by it all. They all were.

The postcard was lying on the mat, colour side down, when Mary Brown responded to the flap of the letter box in the front door.

‘There’s a card from Daddy, darlings,’ she called into the back of the house where the boys were having their breakfast.

‘Not a letter, Mum?’ her elder boy shouted back.

‘No, just a card. You know how awful your father is about letters.’

There was a market scene on the card. Men in kaffiyehs and futahs staring blankly from the gold market that stood in the middle distance.

‘Hope to see you all soon. Still very hot, and not much to do. Love you all, Harry.’ That was all there was on the card, written in Biro and in Harry’s large hand.

Josephine Laverty was late, and hurried in a frantic mixture of a run and a walk down the Falls to the mill where she worked. She couldn’t go fast as the pain still bit into her ribs. She too had heard the early radio news, half expecting in an uninvolved sort of way to hear that Harry McEvoy had been found face down, hooded and dead. It had surprised her that there was no mention of him. This morning she had wondered for a wild moment whether to go to see if he was still at Delrosa, but there was no will power and the emotion he had created was now drained from her.

Perhaps she would go to Mrs Duncan’s tonight to help with the teas. Perhaps not, but that could be a later decision. There was now an irrelevance about Harry McEvoy. Forget him. The pillow eavesdropper who had a girl killed. Forget the sod.

With their photographs of Harry the troops from Fort Monagh raided the five scrap yards in Andersonstown. No-one in the operation had been told why they were to pick up the smiling man in the picture who wore his hair shorter than their more general customers. The orders were that if the man was found he was to be taken straight to Battalion headquarters and handed over. Amongst those NCOs who were the foremen of the military factory floor and who knew most of what mattered there was surprise that so many men were occupied in looking for a man whose picture was not on the operations room wall, whose name was completely fresh. They had their regular batch of photographs, top ten for the week, top thirty for the month, four for each day of the week. Made up on little cards and issued to the troops to study before they went out on patrol. But this face had never been among them.

At the scrap yards the employees who had arrived before the troops stood sullenly against the walls of the huts, hands above their heads, as they were searched and then matched with the photograph. From the five locations the initial report was that a blank had been drawn. But the troops would lie up in the yards till nine at least in the hope that the man they wanted would still come — was just late. At the yard where Harry in fact worked there was disbelief when they were shown the picture. Never involved, never talking politics, just an ordinary man, too old to be with the cowboys. The little man who ran the yard looked round the armoured cars, and the soldiers, reckoned Harry must be important and determined to say nothing. He confirmed the picture, that he employed a man called Harry McEvoy, that he had started work recently, that was all. Let them find the rest out for themselves.

‘Where does he live?’ the lieutenant who led the raid asked him.

‘Don’t know. He never said. Just down the road somewhere, that’s all he said.’

‘He must have given some impression where he lived?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What about his stamps, his insurance?’

The little man looked embarrassed. The answer was clear enough.

The lieutenant was new to Northern Ireland. The man opposite him seemed of substance, a cut above the yobbos, respectable even.

‘Look, we need this man rather badly.’ He said it quietly, out of earshot of the other men.

‘Well, you’ll have to wait for him, won’t you.’

But time was ticking on its way, and as the soldiers crouched behind the wrecked cars and buses and waited there was no sign of the face in the photograph. Even the little man became worried by Harry’s non-arrival. His first reaction had been that it was a case of mistaken identity, but that Harry should be absent at the same time that the military launched this reception led him to suppose that his newest hand was a rather more complex figure than he had believed.

The soldiers radioed in, hung about a few more minutes and drove back, empty-handed, to Fort Monagh.