Harry's Game

Chapter 2

Normally the Commissioner travelled alone, with only the elderly driver for company. That afternoon sitting in the front with the driver was an armed detective. The car turned into Downing Street through the crash barriers that had been put into position half an hour after the shooting was reported. The dark, shaded street was empty of Ministerial cars, and sightseers were banned for the day. By the door two constables had established their will on the group of photographers gathered to record all comings and goings, and shepherded them into a line stretching from the railings, over the pavement and out into the parking area. The Commissioner was met in the hall, warm with its red carpets and chandeliers, and escorted to the lift. As he passed the small room to the right of the door, he noted the four plain-clothes men sitting there. His order that the Prime Minister’s guard should be doubled had been carried out. Two floors later he was led into the Prime Minister’s study.

‘I just wanted to see if there was anything you wanted to say before we get involved in the main scene downstairs.’

‘All I can do now, sir, is say what we know, what we’re doing. Not much of the first, a lot of the second.’

‘There’ll be a fair amount of questioning about the security round the Minister…’

The Commissioner said nothing. It was an atmosphere he was not happy in; he reflected that in his three years as Commissioner and the country’s top policeman he’d never got into this marble tower before, never got beyond the first-floor reception salons. On the way to Whitehall he had primed himself not to allow the police to become the scapegoat, and after thirty-six years in the Force his inclination was to be back at Scotland Yard hovering on the fifth floor by the control room, irregular as it was, but at least doing something.

There was little contact, and both acknowledged it. The Prime Minister rose and motioned with his hand to the door. ‘Come on,’ he murmured, ‘let’s go and meet them. Frank Scott of the RUC and General Fairbairn are coming in from Belfast in an hour or so. We’ll hear them after you.’

The man was striding his way along the vast pier of Schipol Airport, Amsterdam, towards the central transit area. If his connections were working he had fifty-eight minutes till the Aer Lingus 727 took off for Dublin airport. He saw the special airport police with their short-barrelled, lightweight carbines patrolling the entrance to the pier where the El Al jumbo was loading, and had noticed the armoured personnel carriers on the aprons. All the precautions of the anti-hijack programme… but nothing to concern him. He went to the Aer Lingus desk, collected the ticket waiting for him, and drifted away to the duty-free lounge. They’d told him not to miss the duty-free lounge; the best in Europe, they’d said. Belgrave Square and the noise and the screaming were far away; for the first time in the day he felt a degree of calm.

In the first-floor Cabinet Room the Commissioner stood to deliver his briefing. He spoke slowly, picking his words with care, and aware that the Ministers were shocked, suspicious and even hostile to what he had to say. There was little comfort for them. On top of what they had seen on the television lunchtime news they were told that a new and better description was being circulated… for the first time the policeman had the full attention of his audience.

‘There was a slight jostling incident at Oxford Circus this morning. A man barged his way through, nearly knocking people over, and noticeably didn’t stop to apologize. Not the sort of thing that you’d expect people to remember, but two women independently saw the television interview from Belgrave Square this morning, and phoned the Yard — put the two together. It’s the same sort of man they’re talking about as we’d already heard of, but a better description. We’ll have a photokit by four o’clock—’

He was interrupted by the slight knock on the door, and the arrival of the Royal Ulster Constabulary Chief Constable, Frank Scott, and General Sir Jocelyn Fairbairn, GOC Northern Ireland. When they’d sat down, crowded in at the far end of the table, the Prime Minister began.

‘We all take it this is an IRA assassination. We don’t know for what motive, whether it is the first of several attempts or a one-off. I want the maximum effort to get the killer — and fast. I don’t want an investigation that runs a month, two months, six months. Every day that these thugs get away with it is a massive plus to them. How it was that Danby’s detective was withdrawn from him so soon after he’d left the Ulster job is a mystery to me. The Home Secretary will report to us tomorrow on that, and also on what else is being done to prevent a recurrence of such attacks.’

He stopped. The room was silent, disliking the schoolroom lecture. The Commissioner wondered for a moment whether to explain that Danby himself had decided to do without the armed guard, ridiculing the detective-sergeant’s efforts to watch him. He thought better of it and decided to let the Prime Minister hear it from his Home Secretary.

The Prime Minister gestured to the RUC man.

‘Well, sir… gentlemen,’ he started in the soft Scots burr of so many of the Ulstermen. He tugged at the jacket of his bottle-green uniform and moved his black-thorn cane fractionally across the table. ‘If he’s in Belfast we’ll get him. It may not be fast, but it’s a village there. We’ll hear, and we’ll get him. It would be very difficult for them to organize an operation of this scale and not involve so many people that we’ll grab one and he’ll bend. It’s a lot easier to make them talk these days. The hard men are locked up, the new generation talks. If he’s in Belfast we’ll get him.’

It was past five and dark outside when the Ministers, and the General and the Prime Minister again, had had their say. The Prime Minister had called a full meeting of all present for the day after tomorrow, and reiterated his demand for action and speed, when a private secretary slipped into the room, whispered in the Commissioner’s ear, and ushered him out. Those next to him had heard the word ‘urgent’ used.

When the Commissioner came back into the room two minutes later the Prime Minister saw his face and stopped in mid-sentence. The eyes of the eighteen politicians and the Ulster policeman and the General were on the Commissioner as he said:

‘We have had some rather bad news. Police officers at Heathrow have discovered a hired car in the terminal car park near No. 1 building. Under the driver’s seat was a Kalashnikov rifle. The car-park ticket would have given a passenger time to take flights to Vienna, Stockholm, Madrid, Rome and Amsterdam. The crew of the BEA flight to Amsterdam are already back at Heathrow, and we are sending a photokit down to the airport, it’s on its way, but one of the stewardesses thinks a man who fits our primary description, the rough one we had at first, was in the fifteenth row in a window seat. We are also in touch with Schipol police, and are wiring the picture, but from the BEA flight there was ample time to make a Dublin connection. The Aer Lingus, Amsterdam/Dublin flight landed in Dublin twenty-five minutes ago, and they are holding all passengers in the baggage reclaim hall.’

There was a common gasp of relief round the Cabinet Room, as the Commissioner went on.

‘But the Dublin airport police report that those passengers without baggage went through immigration control before we notified them.’

‘Would he have had baggage?’ It was the Prime Minister, speaking very quietly.

‘I doubt it, sir, but we’re trying to establish that with the ticket desk and check-in counter.’

‘What a cock-up.’ The Prime Minister was virtually inaudible. ‘We’ll need some results, and soon.’

From Heathrow, the Kalashnikov, swaddled in a cellophane wrapping, was rushed by squad car to Woolwich on the far side of the city, to the police test firing range. It was still white from the chalk-like fingerprint powder brushed on at the airport police station, but the airport’s resident fingerprint man declared it clean. ‘Doesn’t look like a gloves job,’ he said, ‘he must have wiped it — a cloth, or something. But it’s thorough; he’s missed nothing.’

In the suburbs of Dublin, in the big open-plan news-room of RTE, the Republic of Ireland’s television service, the central phone in the bank used by the news editor rang at exactly six o’clock.

‘Listen carefully, I’m only going to say this once. This is a spokesman for the military wing of the Provisional IRA. An active service unit of the Provisional IRA today carried out a court-martial execution order on Henry DeLacey Danby, an enemy of the people of Ireland, and servant of the British occupation forces in Ireland. During the eighteen months Danby spent in Ireland one of his duties was responsibility for the concentration camp at Long Kesh. He was repeatedly warned that if the regime of the camp did not change, action would be taken against him. That’s it.’

The phone clicked off, and the news editor began to read back his shorthand.

Ten hours later the Saracens and Pigs, on dimmed headlights, were moving off from the Belfast police stations, heading out of the sandbagged tin- and chicken-wire fortresses of Andersonstown, Hasting Street, Flax Street, Glenravel Street and Mountpottinger. Sentries in steel helmets and shrapnel-proof jerkins, their automatic rifles strapped to their wrists, pulled aside the heavy wood and barbed-wire barricades at the entrances of the battalion and company headquarters and the convoys inched their way into the darkness. Inside the armoured cars the troops huddled together, their faces blackened with boot polish, their bodies laden with gas masks, emergency wound dressings, rubber-bullet guns, truncheons and the medieval Macron see-through shields. In addition they carried with them their high-velocity NATO rifles. Few of the men had slept more than a few hours, and that cat-napping in their uniforms, their only luxury that of being able to take off their boots. Their officers and senior NCOs, who had attended the operational briefings for the raids, had slept even less. There was no talk, no conversation, only the knowledge that the day would be long, tiring, cold and probably wet. There was nothing for the men to look at.

Each car was battened down against possible sniper attacks; only the driver, the rifleman beside him and the rifleman at the back, with his barrel poked through the fine visibility slit, had any sight of the darkened, rainswept streets. No house lights were on, no shop windows were illuminated, and only occasionally was there a high street lamp, one that had survived the attempts of both sides over the last four years to destroy its brightness.

Within a few minutes the convoys had swung off the main roads and were splitting up in the housing estates, all but one on the west side of the city. Two thousand troops, drawn from six battalions, were sealing off the streets that have the Falls Road as their spinal cord — the Catholic artery out of the west side of the city, and the route to Dublin. As the armoured cars pulled across the streets, paratroopers, marines and men from the old county infantry units flung open the reinforced doors and ran for the security of their fire positions. In the extreme west, on the Andersonstown and Suffolk border, where the houses are newer and the sight therefore more incongruous, the troops were from a heavy artillery unit — men more used to manœuvring with the long-range Abbot gun than looking for cover in front gardens and behind dustbins. Away across the city from the Falls more troops were spreading into the Ardoyne, and across on the east side of the Lagan the Short Strand area was sealed.

When their men were in position the officers waited for first light. Cars that tried to enter or leave the cordoned streets were sent back. In a gradual drizzle the troops lay and crouched in the cover that they had found, thumb on the safety catch. The selected marksmen cradled their rifles, made heavier by the attachment of the Starscope, the night vision aid.

The noise started as the soldiers began the house-to-house searches. Women, mighty in dressing gowns with hair piled high by their bright plastic-coated curlers, surged from the houses to blow whistles, howl abuse and crash dustbin lids. Amid the cacophony came the beating of rifle butts on doors, and the thud of the axes and sledgehammers when there was no ready answer. Within minutes there were as many civilians on the streets as soldiers, bouncing their epithets and insults off the unmoving faces of the military. Protected by small knots of soldiers were the unhappy-looking civilian police, usually with their panting, gelignite-sniffer Labradors close by. Occasionally there would come a shout of excitement from one of the small terraced houses, the accent North Country or Welsh or Cockney, and a small shining rifle or pistol would be carried into the street, wrapped to prevent the loss of clues that would convict the still half-asleep man bundled down the pavement and into the back of an armoured truck. But this was not often. Four years of searches and swoops and cordons and arrests had left little to find.

By dawn — and it comes late as far north as Belfast, and then takes a long time coming — there was little to show for the night’s work. Some Japanese-made Armalite rifles, some pistols, a sackful of ammunition and crocodile lines of men for questioning by the Special Branch, along with the paraphernalia of terrorism — batteries, lengths of flex, alarm clocks, and sacks of potent weed killer. All were itemized and shipped back to the police stations.

With the light came the stones, and the semi-orderliness of the searches gave way to the crack of rubber bullets being fired; the streets swirled with CS gas, and always at the end of the narrow line of houses were the kids heaving their fractured paving stones at the military.

Unaware of the searches, bus drivers down the Falls Road, stopping at the lights, found youths climbing onto their cabs, a variety of pistols threatening them, and handed over their double-deckers. By nine o’clock the Falls was blocked in four places, and local radio bulletins were warning motorists once again to stick to alternative routes.

As the soldiers withdrew from the streets there were infrequent bursts of automatic fire, not pressed home, and causing no casualties. Only on one occasion did troops have enough of a target to fire back, and then they claimed no hit.

For both sides the raid had its achievements. The army and police had to stir up the pool, and muddy the water, get the top men on the other side on the move, perhaps panic one of them into a false step or a vital admission. The street leaders could also claim some benefit from the morning. After the lull of several weeks the army had arrived to kick in the doors, take away the men, break up the rooms, prise out the floor-boards. At street level that was valuable currency.

The man had seen the police convoy racing into the airport as he’d left, carrying as his sole possessions the Schipol duty-free bag with two hundred cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch. As he’d come through a young man had stepped forward and asked him if he were Mr Jones. He’d nodded, nothing more was required of him, and followed the young man out of the new terminal and into the car park.

It was as they had driven past the airport hotel they’d seen the Garda cars and a van go by. Neither driver nor passenger spoke. The man had been told he would be met, and reminded that he must not speak at all on the journey, not even on the home run. Speech is as identifiable as a face, they explained. The car took the Dundalk road, and then on the stretch between Drogheda and Dundalk turned left and inland towards the hills.

‘We’ll be away over near Forkhill,’ muttered the driver. The man said nothing as the car bumped its way down the side road. After fifteen minutes at a crossroads, where the only building was a corrugated-iron-roofed store, the driver stopped, got out and went inside saying he’d be a minute and had to telephone. The man sat in the car, the light-headedness he’d felt at Schipol that afternoon suddenly gone; it was not that he was alone that worried him but that his movements and immediate future were not in his own hands. He had started to conjure up images of betrayal and capture, of himself left abandoned near the border and unarmed, when the driver walked back to the car and got in.

‘Forkhill’s tight, we’re going farther down towards the Cullyhanna road. Don’t worry, you’re home and dry.’

The man felt ashamed that the stranger could sense his suspicion and nervousness. As a gesture he tried to sleep, leaning his head against his safety belt. He stayed in this position till their car jerked and flung his head hard against the window of the door. He shot forward.

‘Don’t worry’ — again the self-assured, almost patronizing approach of the driver. ‘That was the crater we filled in two years ago. You’re in the North now. Home in two hours.’

The driver cut back to the east, through Bessbrook and on to the north of Newry and the main road to Belfast. The man allowed himself a smile. There was dual carriageway now, and a good fast road, till the driver pulled up outside Hillsborough and motioned to the duty-free bag on the back seat under the man’s coat.

‘Sorry, boy, I don’t want that as we come into town. Ditch it.’

The man wound down his window and flung the plastic bag across the lay-by and into a hedge. The car was moving again. The next sign showed Belfast to be five miles away.

On his return from London the previous evening, the Chief Constable had put a picked team of detectives on standby to wait for information over the confidential phone, the heavily publicized Belfast phone numbers over which information is passed anonymously to the police. They waited through the day in their ready room, but the call they hoped for never came. There was the usual collection of breathy messages naming people in connection with bombs, shootings, locating the dumping of firearms… but not a word even of rumour about the Danby killing. In three pubs in the centre of Belfast, British army intelligence officers met their contacts and talked, huddled forward in the little cubicles they favoured. All were to report later that night to their controller that nothing was known. While they talked, threatening, cajoling, bribing their sources, military police Land-Rovers cruised close by. The red-caps had not been told who they were guarding, just detailed to watch and prevent the sudden entry of a number of men into those pubs.

The blowing of the laundry van intelligence surveillance unit, when soldiers kept watch on an IRA base area from the false ceiling of a laundry van while their colleagues plied for trade below, had woken the operation directors to the needs for safeguards when their men were in the field. That was thirty months back. The tortured and mutilated body of a Royal Tank Regiment captain found just three months before had demonstrated the probability of a security leak close to the heart of the unit, and the public outcry at home at the exposing of soldiers to these out-of-uniform dangers had led to a Ministry directive that military personnel were no longer to infiltrate the Catholic community, but instead stay out and cultivate their informers. Funds and the availability of one-way air tickets to Canada were stepped up.

Quite separate from the military intelligence team, the RUC’s Special Branch was also out that night — men who for three years had slept with their snub-nosed PPK Walthers on the bedside table, and kept a stock of spare number plates at the back of the garage, who stood to the side at the well-photographed police funerals. They too were to report that there was no talk about the Danby killing.

In the small hours Howard Rennie settled onto a hard wooden chair on the first floor of headquarters down the Stormont Road, and began with painful awkwardness to type out his first report. Some of his colleagues had already been in with the news that they had discovered nothing, that their informants were pleading total ignorance of this one; others would come after him to tell the same story. Even the recording tapes — the ‘Confidential Line’ — had failed them.

As a chief inspector, Rennie had been hammering the typewriter keys for statements, criminal assessments and incident report sheets for eighteen years, but he still maintained the right-index-finger, left-index-finger patter.

From his time in Special Branch Rennie knew the way the city would buzz after a Provisional spectacular, how rumour and gossip passed from ghetto to ghetto, carrying the message of success and with it a degree of indiscretion. That was where the Branch came in, men trained to be sensitive enough to pick up the murmurs of information. But the days of Special Branch glory in Belfast were long past.

Rennie could remember the courses he’d been on in the early days before it all went haywire, and the troops arrived, when he’d been told across in England by dour-faced men with biscuit tans from long service in the Far East and Africa that the inside work by the police was the only hope of breaking a terrorist movement in its infancy. ‘When you get the army in, lording it over your heads, telling you what to do, knowing it all, then it’s too late. It’s out of your hands by that time. The military on the streets means the enemy are winning, and that you are no longer a force for the opposition to reckon with. The army are bad news for policemen, and the only way for a counter-terrorist operation to be successful is for the Special Branch to be in there, infiltrating, extracting knowledge at ground level.’

And they’d been right. Rennie could see that now. He and his colleagues didn’t poke their noses into the corners and crannies of the Provisional heartland. They let the army do that with their fire-power and their armour plating, while the detectives sat back and contented themselves with the interrogation of the flow of arrested men. It was the next best thing, but not good enough.

He’d never been much for the cloak and dagger stuff himself. Too big, too heavy, too conspicuous, not a man to flake his way into a crowd, not ordinary enough. But there were others who had been good at it, till the funerals became too frequent, and the Chief Constable had called a halt.

One man, for instance, had been the king of the Branch men till he died up the Crumlin in a hail of automatic fire. Just watching the nightly riot when the sniper spotted him, and gone was a card-index memory, a walking filing system.

Rennie’s report turned out to be a drab document. A succession of negatives after a score of calls and a search through the big tin drawers that carried the buff folders and the photographs and case histories. The Chief Constable came into the room as Rennie was pushing the typewriter back across the table.

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing at all, sir. It’s a blind alley so far. No-one saying anything. Not a word.’

‘I told them in London that it’ll come at this end, the man they’re looking for. His equipment was too good for anyone based in London. He’ll be here. How many do we know who’re capable of it, capable of the discipline, of that sort of training?’

‘There are quite a few,’ said Rennie, ‘but none of them out. I could name half a dozen in Long Kesh who we would be looking for if they were free. But, taking them out of the game, I can’t see anyone. A bit ago, yes, but not now.’

‘I’m calling for a very big effort, maximum effort,’ the Chief Constable had walked away from the table and was talking half to himself, half out into the darkness beyond the shatterproof taped windows. ‘London have said in the past that they don’t get the co-operation they’re looking for when there’s a big one in England, and they come here for our help. I don’t want them saying that this time. God, it’s a damned nuisance. All the manpower, all the effort, everything that has to be dropped for a thing like this. But we have to have him.’

He looked for a long time into the black distance beyond the floodlit perimeter fence. Then swung on his heel. ‘Goodnight,’ he said, and closed the door carefully behind him.

It’ll go on a bit now, thought Rennie, every night here for the next few weeks, typing away, and with little to show for it, unless we’re just lucky. Just lucky, and that doesn’t happen often.

But just before midnight came the first positive identification of the killer back in the city. The duty major in intelligence section at Lisburn military headquarters, leafing through the situation reports of the evening, read that a patrol of the Lifeguards had for fifteen minutes closed the Hillsborough to Banbridge road while they investigated a package at the side of the road. It was cleared after the bomb disposal expert arrived and found the bag contained a carton of cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch, duty free and bought at Schipol airport. He hurriedly phoned his chief at home, and the RUC control centre. But, nagging at him, was the question of how such an operation as the Danby killing could have been mounted, with no word coming out.

The man was asleep now, in the spare back bedroom of a small terraced house off the Ballymurphy Bull Ring. He’d come at 11.25 up from Whiterock where he had stayed since arriving in Belfast. Round him a safety system was building, with the arrangement that he’d sleep till 5.30, then move again up into New Barnsley. The Brigade staff in Belfast were anxious not to keep him long in one place, to hustle him round. Only the Brigade commander knew the value of the man the precautions were made for… No-one else was told, and in the house he was greeted with silence. He came in fast over the back fence, avoiding the kids’ bikes, ducked under the washing lines and made his way through the damp, filthy scullery into the back room. The family was gathered in semi-darkness with the television on loud — Channel 9. His escort whispered into the ear of the man of the house, and was gone, leaving him. The man was not from this part of the city, and was not known anyway.

His arrival and needs, after four years of warfare, were unremarkable. In the ‘Murph’ his name could be kept secret, not his reason for running — not after the Scotland Yard photokit had been flashed up on the screen during the late-night news. On orders from London the photo had been withheld until after the intelligence and Special Branch officers had attempted to identify the killer. With their failure the picture had been released.

The family gathered round the set to hear the announcer.

High on the fireplace over the small fire grate was a carved and painted model of a Thompson machine-gun, a present to the family from their eldest son, Eamon, held for two years in Long Kesh. It was dated Christmas 1973. Below the gun the family registered no reaction to the picture shown on their screens.

In the small hours Theresa, Eamon’s sister, tiptoed her way round the scarred door of the back room. She eased her path over the floorboards, still loosened and noisy since the army came to look for her brother. In the darkness she saw the face of the man, out from under his blankets with his arms wrapped around his pillow, as a child holds a favourite doll. She was shivering in the thin nightdress, transparent and reaching barely below her hips. She had selected it two hours before to put on before waiting to be sure her people were asleep. Very gently at first, she shook the shoulder of the man, till he started half out of bed, gripped her wrist, and then in one movement pulled her down, but as a prisoner.

‘Who’s that?’ he said it hard, tautly, with fear in his voice.

‘It’s Theresa.’?There was silence, just the man’s breathing, and still he held her wrist, vice-like. With her free hand she moved back the bedclothes and moved her body alongside his. He was naked and cold; across the room she saw his clothes strewn over the chair by the window.

‘You can let go,’ she said and tried to move closer to him, but only to find him backing away till the edge of the single bed stopped his movement.

‘Why did you come?’

‘To see you.’

‘Why did you come?’ Again harsher, louder.

‘They showed your picture… on the telly… just now… on the late news.’

The hand released her wrist. The man flopped back on the pillow, tension draining out of him. Theresa pressed against his body, but found no response, no acknowledgement of her presence.

‘You had to know, for when they move you on. I had to tell you… we aren’t your enemies. You’re safe with us… there’s no danger.’

‘There are six men in the city who know I’m here — and you…’

A little more nervously she whispered back, ‘Don’t worry yourself, there’s no narks here, not in this street… not since the McCoy girl… they shot her.’ It was an afterthought — Roisin McCoy, soldier’s girl-friend, part-time informer, found shot dead under Divis mountain. Big outcry, no arrests.

‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘I didn’t come to talk, and it’s freezing, half out of the bloody clothes.’

He pulled her down, close now against him, the nylon of her nightdress riding up over her hips and breasts. She pushed against him, screwing her nipples against the black hair of his chest.

‘Not much, are they?’ she murmured. ‘Couple of bloody bee stings.’

The man smiled, and the hand that had grasped her wrist to the point of half stopping the blood flow now stroked and rubbed urgently at the soft white inside of her thighs. She reached down and felt his stomach back away as she took hold of him, limp and lifeless, pliable in her hand. Slowly, then frantically, to match her own sensations she stroked and kneaded him, but without success.

Abruptly the man stopped his movements, pulled his hand away from the moist warmth.

‘Get out. Bugger off. Get out.’

Theresa, nineteen years old, four of them spent on the mill weaving line, had heard and seen enough in her life to say, ‘Was it that bad… London… was it…?’

The interruption was a stinging blow across the right side of her face. His cheap onyx wedding ring gouged the skin below the eye. She was gone, out through the door across the passage to her bed; there she lay, legs clenched together, fascinated and horrified at the knowledge she had.

In her half-sleep she heard the whisper of voices and the footsteps on the stairs as the man was taken to his next place of hiding.

In the Cabinet Room the Prime Minister was showing little patience for the lack of a quick arrest. He had heard the Commissioner say that the case was static in London now, and that the main police effort was to establish how and where the man had entered the country. The boarding house in Euston where he had slept the night before the shooting had been searched, but nothing found. As expected the gun had yielded no fingerprints, and the same process of elimination was being used on the car. Here it was pointed out that the police had to identify the fingerprints of everyone who had handled the car over the previous six weeks or so before they could begin to come up with a worthwhile print and say this was the killer’s. It would take a long time, said the Commissioner, and involved drivers, Avis staff, garage personnel. Nothing had been found on the basics — steering wheel, door handle, gear lever. He reported on the new security measures surrounding Ministers, pointed out that they were nearly if not totally a waste of time if politicians did not co-operate, and urged no repetitions of the situation by which the murdered Minister had been able to decide for himself that he no longer wanted protection. He finished by putting the proposition that the killer had no contact in Britain, and had operated completely on his own. Reservations for tickets in Dublin, Heathrow and Amsterdam had all been made over the phone and were untraceable. He fell back on the theme that the solving of the crime would happen in Belfast, and that yesterday a Chief Superintendent from the Murder Squad had gone to Belfast to liaise with the RUC.

Frank Scott, the Chief Constable, reported nothing had come in on the confidential phones, and as yet there had been no whisper on the Special Branch net. ‘Now we know he’s in the city we’ll get him, but it may not be fast — that’s the situation.’ It had been left to him to report the finding of the Amsterdam duty-free bag.

‘That’s what you said two days ago,’ snapped the Prime Minister.

‘And it’s still the situation.’?The Chief Constable was not prepared to give ground. The Northern Ireland Secretary chipped in, ‘I think we all accept, Frank, that it’s near impossible to stampede this sort of operation.’

‘But I have to have results.’?The Prime Minister drummed his knuckles on the table. ‘We cannot let this one hang about.’

‘I’m not hanging about, sir, and you well know that no-one in my force is.’ The Ulster policeman’s retort caused a certain fidgeting down the sides of the table from Ministers who had begun to feel their presence was irrelevant to the matter in hand — other than that by their arrivals and departures the cameras could witness the activity and firm hand of government. The Commissioner wished he’d come in faster. One up to the RUC.

The Prime Minister, too, sensed the chilliness of the situation, and invited the opinion of General Fairbairn. As the GOC Northern Ireland, commanding more than fifteen thousand men there, he expected to be listened to. He weighed his words.

‘The problem, sir, is getting inside the areas the IRA dominate. Getting good information that we can trust and then can act on fast enough while the tips are still hot. Now, we can thrash around as we did yesterday morning, and as we have done to a more limited degree this morning, and though we pick up a bit — a few bodies, a few guns, some bomb-making equipment — we’re unlikely to get at the real thing. I would hazard the motive behind the killing was to get us to launch massive reprisal raids, cordon streets off, taking house after house to pieces, lock hundreds up. They want us to hammer them and build a new generation of mini-martyrs. It’s been quiet there these last few weeks. They needed a major publicity-attracting operation, and then a big kick-back from us to involve people at street level who are beginning to want to disengage. The raids we have been mounting these last thirty-six hours are fair enough as an initial reaction, but if we keep them up we’ll be in danger of reactivating the people who had begun to lose interest in the IRA.’

‘What about your intelligence men, your men on the inside?’

‘We don’t go in for that sort of thing so much now, we tend to meet on the outside — after the young captain was murdered three months ago, horrible business… the Ministry wasn’t happy, we suspended that sort of work.’

‘Suspended it?’ The Prime Minister deliberately accentuated the touch of horror in his voice.

‘We haven’t had an operation of anything like this size to handle for around a year; things have been running down. There hasn’t been the need for intelligence operatives. Now we would have to set up a new unit completely — the men we have there at the moment are too compromised. I don’t think in your time-scale, Prime Minister, we have the time to do it.’

He said the last drily, and with only the faintest hint of sarcasm, sufficiently guarded to be just about permissible for a General in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street.

‘I want a man in there… nothing else to think about.’ The Prime Minister was speaking deliberately, the Agriculture man thought — nice and slowly, just right for the transcript being scribbled in the corner.

‘I want an experienced agent in there as fast as you can make it. A good man. If we’ve picked the killer up by then, nothing lost, if not… I know what you’re going to say, General: if the man is discovered I will take the rap. That’s understood. Well?’

The General had heard enough to realize that the interchange of ideas had been over several minutes earlier. This was an instruction by the Head of Government.

‘For a start, sir, you can get the gentleman taking the notes over there by the door to take his last page out of the book, take it over to the fire and burn it. You can also remind everyone in the room of the small print of the Official Secrets Act. Thank you.’

The General got up, flushed high in his cheeks, and, followed hurriedly by the Chief Constable, who was sharing his RAF plane back to Belfast, left the room.

The Prime Minister waited for the door to close, and the angry footsteps to hasten down the corridor.

‘They’re free enough with the advice when they want us to play round with political initiatives, but the moment we come up with a suggestion… That’s the way it’s always been. I’ve had four generals in my time at Downing Street telling me it’s all about over, that the Provisionals are beaten, that they’re finished. They reel off the statistics. How many sticks of gelignite they’ve found, how many rifles, how many houses have been searched, how the back of the opposition is broken. I’ve heard it too often — too often to be satisfied with it.’

His eyes ranged up the shining mahogany table, along the line of embarrassed faces till they locked on to the Minister of Defence.

‘Your people have the wherewithal for this sort of thing. Get it set up, please, and controlled from this end. If our friend the General doesn’t like it, then he won’t have to worry himself.’

That afternoon in an upper room above a newsagent’s shop near the main square in Clones, just over the border in County Monaghan, half of the twelve-man Army Council of the Provisional IRA met to consider the operation mounted two days earlier in London. Initially there was some anger that the killing had not been discussed by all members in committee, as was normal. But the Chief of Staff, a distant, intense man with deep-set eyes and a reputation for success in pulling the movement together, glossed over the troubles. He emphasized that, now the shooting had taken place, the priority in the movement was to keep the man safe. Unknowingly he echoed the British Prime Minister five hundred miles away in Whitehall when he said, ‘Every day we keep the man free is a victory. Right? They wanted to pull two battalions out next month; how can they when they can’t find one man? We have to keep him moving and keep him close. He’s a good man, he won’t give himself away. But at all costs we have to keep their hands off him. He’s better dead than in Long Kesh.’

It was getting dark when the RAF Comet took off from Tempelhof airport, Berlin, with its three passengers. Halfway back and sitting in an aisle seat Harry still felt bewildered. Two hours earlier he had been called to the Brigade commander’s office at HQ under the shadow of the old Nazi Olympic stadium, and instructed he was going to London on urgent military business. He was told he wouldn’t need to go home to get his bag, that was being done, and no, it would not be suitable for him to phone home at this moment, but it would be explained to his wife that he had been called away in a hurry.

Three and a half hours later the plane landed at Northolt and then taxied two hundred yards beyond the main reception area to an unmarked square of tarmac where a solitary set of steps and a civilian Morris 1800 were waiting.

For a captain in transport it was a very remarkable set of circumstances.