Harry's Game

Chapter 6

It was just after seven when Harry woke. He knew soon enough that this was the day he started working and move on to active service. The euphoria of the farewells, the back-slaps and good-luck calls, were over. He had arrived. Now would begin the hard work of moving on to the inside. He checked his watch. Well, twenty minutes more and then it could all begin, then he would get up.

He’d known since his training started that the initial period of infiltration was going to be the difficult part. This was where the expertise and skill entered in his file after Mansoura would count. They had chosen him after going over those files, and those of a dozen other men, because they had thought that he above all of them stood the best chance of being able to adapt in those early critical hours in the new environment.

They’d told him he must take it slowly, not lambast his way in. Not make so much of his presence that he attracted attention and with that, inevitably, investigation. But they also stressed that time was against him. They pointed to the enormous benefits the opposition were gaining from the failure of the vast military force to catch the assassin.

The dilemma was spelled out to him. How much speed could he generate? How fast could he move into that fringe world which had contact with the gunmen? How far into that world must he go to get near the nucleus of the organization where the man he hunted was operating? These were his decisions. The advice had been given, but now he had to control his own planning.

They had emphasized again and again at Dorking that his own death would be bad news all round. Enormous embarrassment to HMG. No risks should be taken unless absolutely essential. It had amused him, drily. You send a man to infiltrate the most successful urban terrorist movement in the world over the last twenty-five years, and tell him if he gets shot it would be awkward. Not much time to mess about with the frills. They’d said if it was going to work out for him it would be in the first three weeks. By then they expected something to bite on… not necessarily the man’s full name but a regular haunt, the address of a friend. A hint. Anything on to which they could turn the huge and formal military and police machine. The great force was poised and waiting for him to tell it where to hit, and that pleased him.

He was starting with little enough to go on. The same available to everyone else in the city — or virtually the same. He had in his mind the photokit picture, with the knowledge that it was superior to the one issued in police stations and army posts. But that was all that tipped the scales in his favour. Nothing else, and not much to set against the disadvantages of arriving as a stranger in a community beset by informers and on its guard against them. His first problem would be the infiltration of the Catholic population, let alone the IRA, and becoming known to people already haunted by the fear of army plain-clothes units cruising in unmarked cars, laundry vans and ice-cream trucks with hidden spy holes, of the Protestant UVF and UFF killer squads. He had to win a degree of confidence among some small segment of these people before he could hope to operate with success.

Davidson had struck a chord when he said, ‘They seem to have the ability to smell an outsider. They close ranks well. It’s like the instinct of a fox that’s learned to react when there’s a hostile being close by. God knows how they do it, but they have a feeling for danger. Much of it is how you look, the way you walk, the way you go along the pavement. Whether you can look as though you belong. You need confidence. You have to believe that you’re not the centre of attention the whole time. The first trick is to get yourself a base. Establish yourself there, and then work outwards. Like an upside-down pyramid.’

The base was clearly to be the good Mrs Duncan. She was in the kitchen and washing up the first sitting of breakfast when Harry came down the stairs.

‘Well, it’s good to be back, Mrs Duncan. I’ve been away a while too long, I feel. You miss Ireland when you’re away, whatever sort of place it is now. You get tired of the travelling and the journeys. You want to be back here. If these bastard British would leave us to lead our own lives then this would be a great wee country. But it can’t be easy for you, Mrs Duncan, running a business in these times?’

The previous evening he had formally given his name as Harry McEvoy. That was what she called him when she replied.

‘Well, Mr McEvoy, they’re not the easiest of times, to be sure. One minute it’s all quiet and the place is full. Then you’ll have a thing like last night, and who is going to come and sleep a hundred yards or so from where a soldier was shot dead? The travellers from the south find all this a bit near. They like it a bit further away from where it all happens. Having it full like it is now is a luxury. What did you say your business was? I was flustered up a bit when you came, getting the teas and all, yesterday.’

‘I’ve been away, ten years or so, just under in fact, at sea. In the Merchant Navy. Down in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, mainly.’

‘There’s a lot you’ll see has changed. The fighting’s been hard these last years.’

‘Our people have taken a bad time, and all.’

‘The Catholic people have taken a bad time, and now the Protestants hate us as never before. It’ll take a long time to sort it out.’

‘The English don’t understand us, never have, never will.’

‘Of course they don’t, Mr McEvoy.’ She flipped his egg over expertly, set it on the plate beside the halved tomatoes, the skinned sausage, the mushrooms and the crisp fried bread. ‘Look at all the ballyhoo and palava when that man of theirs was shot — Danby. You’d think it was the first man who had died since the troubles. Here they are, close to a thousand dead and all, and one English politician gets killed… you should have seen the searches they did, troops all over. Never found damn all.’

‘He wasn’t mourned much over here.’ Harry said it as a statement.

‘How could he be? He was the man that ran the Maze, Long Kesh. He brought all his English warders over here to run the place for him. There was no faith in him here, and not a tear shed.’

‘They’ve not caught a man yet for it?’

‘Nor will they. The boys will keep it close. Not many will know who did it. There’s been too much informing. They keep things like that tight these days. But that’s enough talk of all that. If you want to talk politics you can do it outside the door and on the streets all the hours that God gave. There’s no shortage of fools here to do the talking. I try and keep it out of the house. If you’re back from the sea, what are you going to do now? Have you a job to be away to?’

Before answering, Harry complimented her on the breakfast. He handed her the empty plate. Then he said, ‘Well, I can drive. I hoped I could pick up a job like that round here. Earn enough so that with a bit of luck I can pay you something regular, and we can agree on a rate. I want to work up this end of town if I can, not in the centre of town. Seems safer in our own part. I thought I might try something temporary for a bit while I look round for something permanent.’

‘There’s enough men round here would like a job, permanent or not.’

‘I think I’ll walk around a bit this morning. I’ll do the bed first… an old habit at sea. Tomorrow I’ll try round for a job. Wonderful breakfast, thanks.’

Mrs Duncan had noticed he’d been away. And a long time at that, she was certain. Something grated on her ear, tuned to three decades of welcoming visitors and apportioning them to their birthplace to within a few miles. She was curious, now, because she couldn’t place what had happened to his accent. Like the sea he talked of, she was aware it came in waves — ebbed in its pitch. Pure Belfast for a few words, or a phrase, then falling off into something that was close to Ulster but softer, without the harshness. It was this that nagged as she dusted round the house and cleaned the downstairs hall, while above her Harry moved about in his room. She thought about it a lot during the morning, and decided that what she couldn’t quite understand was the way he seemed to change his accent so slightly mid-sentence. If he was away on a boat so long then of course he would have lost the Belfast in his voice — that must have happened. But then in contradiction there were the times when he was pure Belfast. She soundlessly muttered the different words that emphasized her puzzlement to herself, uncomprehending.

They don’t waste time in Belfast lingering over the previous day. By the time Harry was out on the pavements of the Falls Road and walking towards town there was nothing to show that a large-scale military operation had followed the killing of a young soldier the previous evening. The traffic was on the move, women with their children in tow were moving down towards the shops at the bottom end of the Springfield Road, and on the corners groups of youths with time on their hands and no work to go to were gathering to watch the day’s events. Harry was wearing a pair of old jeans he had brought from Germany, and that he’d used for jobs round his quarters in the base, and a holed pullover that he’d last worn when painting the white surrounds to the staircase at home. They were some of the clothes the officer had collected when he’d called and told his wife that her husband was on his way to the Middle East.

The clothes were right, and he walked down the road — watched, but not greatly attracting attention. The time had been noted when he came out of the side road where Mrs Duncan had her guest house, and into the Falls. Nothing went on paper, but the youth that saw him from behind the neat muslin curtain at the junction would remember him when he came back, and mentally clock him in. There was every reason why he should be noticed, as the only new face to come out of the road that morning. Last night when he had arrived it had been too late to get a decent look at him. All Mrs Duncan’s other guests were regulars, discreetly vetted and cleared by the time they’d slept in her house enough for a pattern to emerge.

Harry had decided to walk this first morning, partly because he thought it would do him good but more importantly to familiarize himself with his immediate surroundings. Reconnaissance. Time well spent. It might save your life, they’d said. Know your way round. He came down past the old Broadway cinema where no films had been shown for two years since the fire bomb exploded outside the ticket kiosk, and the open space of the one-time petrol station forecourt where pumps, reception area and garages had all long since been flattened. Across the road was the convent school. Children were laughing and shouting in the playground. Harry remembered seeing that same playground, then empty and desolated, on West German television when the newsreader had described the attack by two IRA motorcyclists on William Staunton. The Catholic magistrate had just dropped his two girls at school and was watching them from his car as they moved along the pavement to the gate when he was shot. He had lingered for three months before he died, and then one of the papers had published a poem written by the dead man’s twelve-year-old daughter. Harry had read it in the mess, and thought it of rare simplicity and beauty, and not forgotten it.

He was still mouthing the words as the Royal Victoria Hospital loomed up, part modern, part the dark close red-brick of old Belfast. Staunton and scores of others had been rushed here down the curved hill that swung into the rubber doors of Casualty.

Harry turned left into Grosvenor Road, hurrying his step. Most of the windows on either side of the street showed the signs of the conflict, boarded up, bricked up, sealed to squatters, too dangerous for habitation, but remaining available and ideal for the snipers. The pubs on the right, a hundred yards or so down from the main gate of the RVH, had figured in Davidson’s briefings. After a Proddy bomb had gone off the local Provos had found a young bank clerk on the scene. He came from out of town and said he’d brought a cameraman to witness the devastation. The explanation hadn’t satisfied. After four hours of torture, and questioning, and mutilation, they shot him, and dumped him in Cullingtree Street, a little farther down towards the city centre.

Davidson had emphasized that story, used it as an example of the wrong person just turning up and being unable to explain himself. In the hysteria and suspicion of the Falls that night it was sufficient to get him killed.

The half-mile of the street Harry was walking down was fixed in his mind. In the log of the history of the troubles since August 1969 that they’d given him to read, that half-mile had taken up fifteen separate entries.

Harry produced a driving licence made out in the name of McEvoy and the post office counter clerk gave him the brown paper parcel. Harry recognized Davidson’s neat copperplate on the outside — ‘Hold for collection.’ Inside was a.38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. Accurate and a man-stopper. One of nine hundred thousand run off in the first two years of the Second World War. Untraceable. If Harry had shaken the package violently he would have heard the rattling of the forty-two rounds of ammunition. He didn’t open the parcel. His instructions were very plain on that. He was to keep the gun wrapped till he got back to his base, and only when he had found a good hiding place was he to remove it from the wrapping. That made sense, nothing special, just ordinary common sense, but the way they’d gone on about it you’d have thought the paper would be stripped off and the gun waved all over Royal Avenue. At times Davidson treated everyone around him like children. ‘Once it’s hidden,’ Davidson had warned, ‘leave it there unless you think there’s a real crisis. For God’s sake don’t go carrying it round. And be certain if you use it. Remember, if you want to fire the damn thing, the yellow card and all that’s writ thereon applies as much to you, my boy, as to every pimpled squaddie in the Pioneers.’

With the parcel under his arm, for all the world like a father bringing home a child’s birthday present, Harry walked back from the centre of the city to the Broadway. He wanted a drink. Could justify it too, on professional grounds, need to be there, get the tempo of things, and to let a pint wash down the dryness of his throat after what he’d been through the last thirty-six hours. The ‘local’ was down the street from Mrs Duncan’s corner. Over the last few paces to the paint-scraped door his resolve went haywire, weakened so that he would have dearly loved to walk past the door and regain the security of the little back room he had rented. He checked himself. Breathing hard, and feeling the tightness in his stomach and the lack of breath that comes from acute fear, he pushed the door open and went into the pub. God, what a miserable place! From the brightness outside his eyes took a few moments to acclimatize to the darkness within. The talk stopped and he saw the faces follow him from the door to the counter. He asked for a bottle of Guinness, anxiously projecting his voice, conscious that fear is most easily noticed from speech. Nobody spoke to him as he sipped his drink. Bloody good to drink, but you’d need to be an alcoholic to come in here to take it. The glass was two-thirds empty by the time desultory conversation started up again. The voices were muted, as if everything was confidential. The people, Harry recognized, had come to talk, as of an art, from the sides of their mouths. Not much eavesdropping in here. Need to Watergate the place.

Across the room two young men watched Harry drink. Both were volunteers in E Company of the First Battalion of the Provisional IRA, Belfast Brigade. They had heard of the cover story Harry was using earlier in the morning just after he’d gone out for his walk. The source, though unwittingly, was Mrs Duncan. She had talked over the washing line, as she did most mornings, with her neighbour. The neighbour’s son, who now stood in the bar watching Harry, had asked his mother to find out from Mrs Duncan who the new lodger was, where he came from, and whether he was staying long. Mrs Duncan enjoyed these morning chats, and seldom hurried with her sheets and pegs unless rain was threatening. It was cold and bright. She told how the new guest had turned up out of the blue, how he hoped to find a job and stay indefinitely, had already paid three weeks in advance. He was a seaman, the English Merchant Navy, and had been abroad for many years. But he was from the North, and had come home now. From Portadown he was.

‘He’s been away all right,’ she shouted over the fence to her friend, who was masked by the big, green-striped sheet suspended in the centre of the line, ‘you can see that, hear it rather, every time he opens his mouth. You can tell he’s been away, a long time and all, lucky beggar. What we should have done, missus. Now he says he’s come back because Ireland, so he says, is the place in times of trouble.’ She laughed again. She and her friend were always pretending they’d like to leave the North for good, but both were so wedded to Belfast that a week together at a boarding house north of Dublin in the third week of August was all they ever managed… then they were full of regrets all the way back to Victoria Street station.

The son had had this conversation relayed to him painfully slowly and in verbatim detail by his mother. Now he watched and listened, expressionless, as Harry finished his drink and asked for another bottle. In two days’ time he would go to a routine meeting with his company’s intelligence officer, by then sure in his mind if there was anything to report about the new lodger next door.

Harry walked quickly back to Delrosa after the second glass of Guinness. He’d never been fond of the stuff. Treacly muck, he told himself. He rang the doorbell, and a tall, willowy girl opened the door.

‘Hullo, McEvoy’s the name. I’m staying here. The room at the back.’

She smiled and made way for him, stepping back into the hall. Black hair down to the shoulders, high cheekbones, and dark eyes set deep above them. She stood very straight, back arched, and breasts angled into the tight sweater before it moulded with her waist, and was lost in the wide leather belt threaded through the straps of her jeans.

‘I’m Josephine. I help Mrs Duncan. Give her a hand round the house. She said there was someone new in. I do the general cleaning, most days in the week, and help with the teas.’

He looked at her blatantly and unashamed. ‘Could you make me one now? A cup of tea?’ Not very adequate, he thought, not for an opening chat-up to a rather beautiful girl.

She walked through into the kitchen, and he followed a pace or so behind, catching the smell of the cheap scent.

‘What else do you do?’ Perfunctory, imbecile, but keeps it going.

‘Work at the mill, down the Falls, the big one. I do early shift, then come round and do a bit with Mrs Duncan. She’s an old friend of my Mam’s. I’ve been coming a long time now.’

‘There’s not much about for people here now, ’cept work, and not enough of that,’ Harry waded in, ‘what with the troubles and that. Do you go out much, do you find much to do?’

‘Oh, there’s bits and pieces. The world didn’t end, and we adapted, I suppose. We don’t go into town much — that’s just about over. There’s not much point, really. Go to a film and there’ll be a bomb threat and you’re cleared out. The Tartans run the centre anyway, so you have to run for dear life to get back into the Falls. The army don’t protect us, they look the other way when the Tartans come, Proddy scum. There’s nothing to go to town for anyway ’cept the clothes, and they’re not cheap.’

‘I’ve been away a long time,’ said Harry, ‘people have been through an awful time. I thought it time to get back home. You can’t be an Irishman and spend your time away right now.’

She looked hard at him. The prettiness and youth of her face hardened into something more frightening to Harry. Imperceptibly he saw the age and weariness on the smooth skin of the girl, spreading like the refocusing of a lens, and then gone as the face lightened. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans, straining them taut as her fingers found a crumpled handkerchief. She shook it loose and dabbed it against her nose. Harry saw the green embroidered shamrocks in the corners, and fractionally caught the motif in the middle of the square. Crossed black and brown Thompson machine-guns. She was aware he was staring at her.

‘There’s nothing special about these. Doesn’t mean I’m a rebel and that. They sell them to raise funds for the men and their families, the men that are held in the Kesh. ‘‘The Men Behind the Wire.’’ Look. It’s very good, isn’t it — a bit delicate? You wouldn’t think a cowardly, murdering thug would have the patience to work at a thing so difficult, be so careful. They think we’re all pigs, just pigs. ‘‘Fenian pigs’’, they call us.’

She spat the words out, the lines round her face hard and clear cut now, then the tension of the exchange was gone. She relaxed.

‘We make our own entertainment. There’s the clubs, social nights. There’s not much mid-week, but Saturday night is OK. Only the bloody army comes belting in most times. They always say they’re looking for the great commander of the IRA. They take ten boys out, and they’re all back free in twenty-four hours. They stir us up, try to provoke us. We manage. I suppose all you’ve heard since coming back is people talking about their problems, how grim it is. But we manage.’

‘That handkerchief??’ said Harry, ‘does that mean you follow the boyos, have you a man in the prisons?’

‘Not bloody likely. It doesn’t mean a damn. Just try and not buy one. You’ll find out. If you don’t buy one there’s arguing and haggling. It’s easier to pay up. You’ve got to have a snot-rag, right? Might as well be one of these and no argument, right? I’m not one of those heated-up little bitches that runs round after the cowboys. When I settle it’ll be with a feller with more future than a detention order, I can tell you. And I’m not one of those that runs around with a magazine in my knickers and an Armalite up my trousers, either. There are enough who want to do that.’

‘What sort of evenings do you have now? What sort of fun do you make for yourselves?’

‘We have the céilidh,’ she said, ‘not the sort they have in the country or in the Free State, not the proper thing. But there’s dancing, and a bit of a band, and a singer and a bar. The army come lumping in, the bastards, but they don’t stay long. You’ve been away, at sea, right? Well, we’ve got rid of the old songs now… 1916 and 1922 are in the back seat, out of the hit parade. We’ve ‘‘The Men Behind the Wire’’ — that’s internment. ‘‘Bloody Sunday.’’ ‘‘Provie Birdie’’, when the three boys were lifted out of Mountjoy by helicopter. Did you hear about it? Three big men and a helicopter come right down into the exercise yard and lifts them out… and the screws was shouting ‘‘Shut the gates!’’ Must have been a laugh, and all. Understand me, I’m not for joining them, the Provos. But I’m not against them. I don’t want the bastard British here.’

‘On the helicopter, I was going through the Middle East. I saw it in the English paper in Beirut.’

She was impressed, seemed so anyway. Not that he’d been to an exotic sounding place like Beirut, but that the fame of Seamus Twomey, Joe O’Hagen and Kevin Mallon had spread that far.

‘Do the army always come and bust in, at the evenings?’

‘Just about always. They think they’ll find the big boys. They don’t know who they’re looking for. Put on specs, tint your hair, do the parting the wrong way, don’t shave, do shave… that’s enough, that sorts them out.’

Harry had weighed her up as gently committed — not out of conviction but out of habit. A little in love with the glamour of the men with Armalites, and the rawness of the times they lived in, but unwilling to go too close in case the tinsel dulled.

‘I think I’d like to come,’ said Harry. ‘I think it would do me good. I’m a bit out of date in my politics right now, and my voice is a bit off tune. James Connolly was being propped up in his chair in Kilmainham in my time, and they were wearing all their Green. It’s time I updated and put myself back in touch. A lot of brave boys have died since I was last here. It’s time to stand up and be counted in this place. That’s why I came back.’

‘I’ll take you. I’ll pick you up here, Saturday, round half seven. Cheers.’

She was away into the kitchen, and Harry to his room.