Harry's Game (12 page)

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 57

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 farther 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 ut.'

'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.'

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'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 hope 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 to them 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 rhe time Harry was out on the pavements of the Falls Road and walking towards town there was nothing to show that a 59

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 beside 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 motor‐cyclists 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.

'Don't cry," Mummy said 'They're not real.'

But Daddy was

And he's not here.

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'Don't be bitter," Mummy said 'They've hurt themselves much more.'

But they can walk and run‐‐‐‐

Daddy can't.

'Forgive them and forget," Mummy said But can Daddy know I do? 'Smile for Daddy, kiss him well," Mummy said, But can I ever?

He was still mouthing the words as the Royal Victoria Hospital Dinned up, part modern, part the dark close red‐brick of old Belfast, i t;i union and scores of others had been rushed here down the curved nil that swung into the rubber doors of Casualty.

I larry turned left into Grosvenor Road, hurrying his step. Most of lie windows on either side of the street showed the scars of the millict, boarded up, bricked up, sealed to squatters, too dangerous nt habitation, but remaining available and ideal for the snipers. The nibs on the right, a hundred yards or so down from the main gate of he RVH, had figured in Davidson's briefings. After a Proddy bomb uid gone off the local Provos had found a young bank clerk on the m ene. He came from out of town and said he'd brought a camera nan to witness the devastation. The explanation hadn't satisfied. After four hours of torture, and questioning, and mutilation, they Oiot 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 copper‐plate hand on the outside‐‐'Hold for collection." Inside was a 0‐38 calibre Smith and Wesson revolver.

Accurate and a man‐stopper. One of nine hundred thousand ran off in the first two years of World War Two. Unit aceable. 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,

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‐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 around. 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 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 said was confidential. The people, Harry recognized, had come to talk, as of an art, from the side of their mouths. Not much eavesdropping in here. Need to Watergate the place.