Harry's Game (19 page)

Poor bastard.

Frost had seen the body of the Armoured Corps captain, found shot and hooded, dumped outside Belfast. He had been working >vith a full team behind him. All the back‐up he needed.

Time on his side. Now this nameless and faceless man was trying to do what the whole army and police couldn't. Stupid. Idiotic. Irresponsible. All of those things, that's how Frost rated it.

And there'd be a mess. And he'd have to clear it up.

Harry was nearly at his digs by the time the meeting Frost had called was under way. He had decided this was to be his day off. Tomorrow he would chase the job and try to get a bit of permanence into his life.

But today the pubs were closed. Nothing to do but eat Mrs Duncan's mighty roast and sit in his room and read. And listen to the news bulletins.

The platoon commander briefed to go and arrest the girl deep in the network of the Ballymurphy housing estate had stood his ground when asked to take the minimum number of troops needed for the pickup.

'We've had four patrols shot at from that street or the alleys off it in the last eighteen days. If we have to search for her we'll be in there twenty minutes or so, and I can't just leave a couple of men outside to play Aunt Sallys. If I take a Saracen and a pig they'll carry sixteen, and that way I can have enough men round the house, and enough to search the place as well.'

'They've asked for it to be discreet," said his company commander.

97

'Well, what do they want us to do, have the padre drive a Cortina up to the front door and ask her to come for a picnic with him? Who is the girl anyway, sir?'

'Don't know why they want her. We hardly know her. The CO went up to Brigade this morning about something, and then came on the net with the instruction to pick her out.'

'However we do it, the whole street will know inside five minutes. It's Sunday, so we can't take her on the way back from work, wherever that is. If we're going into those streets we ought to have a proper back‐up. Can they wait till dark?'

'No, the instruction is for immediate. That's quite clear. I take your point. Have as many men as you want, but be fast in there, and don't for God's sake start a riot.'

Theresa and her family were at lunch when the army arrived. The armoured troop carriers outside the tiny overgrown front garden, soldiers in fire positions behind the hedge and wall that divided the grass from next door's. Four soldiers went into the house. They called her name, and when she stood up took her by the arms, the policeman at the back intoning the Special Powers Act. While the rest of the family sat motionless she was taken out to the back of the armoured car. It was moving before her mother, the first to react, had reached the front door.

None of the soldiers who surrounded the girl in the darkened steelcased Saracen spoke to her, and none would have been able to tell her why she had been singled out for this specific army raid. From the Saracen she was taken into a fortified police station, through the back entrance, and down the stairs to the cells. A policewoman was locked in with her to prevent any attempt at communication with other prisoners in the row. An hour or so earlier the nine boys taken from the club the previous night had been freed after sleeping in identical cells on the other side of the city. One of their number, pressed to identify someone who would swear he had been in the club all evening, had unwittingly given Theresa's second name and address.

The decision had already been taken that she would be kept in custody at least until the intelligence operation that had produced the information was completed.

TEN

icamus Duffryn, the latest of the intelligence officers of E Company, Third Battalion Provisional IRA, had made Sunday his main work ng day. It was the fourth weekend he'd been in the job, with a long ist of predecessors in Long Kesh and the Crumlin Road prison. )uffryn was in work, a rarity in the movement, holding down mployment as mate to a lorry driver. It took him out of town everal days a week, sometimes right down to the border and iccasionally into the Republic. Being out of circulation he reck >ned would extend his chances of remaining 98

undetected longer than he mean average of nine weeks that most company‐level officers asted. He encouraged those with information for him to sift through o leave it at his house during the week where his mother would put t in a plastic laundry bag under the grate of the made‐up but unlit ront‐room fire. He kept the meagre files he had pieced together >ut in the coal shed. There was a fair chance if the military came md he was out that they would stop short of scattering the old lady's 'uel to the four winds in an off‐the‐cuff search.

On Sunday afternoons his mother sat at the back of the house with icr radio while Duffryn took over the front room table, and under the fading coloured print of the Madonna and Child laid out the messages that had been sent to him. They were a fair hotchpotch, and at this level the first real sorting of the relevant and irrelevant look place. They concerned the amounts of money held at the end of the week at small post offices, usually a guess and an overestimate, the occasions when a recognized man of somee importance drove down the company's section of the Falls, the timetihat patrols came out of the barracks. Then there were the group that fell into no natural pattern, but had seemed important enough for some volunteer to write down and send in for consideration.

He kept this last group for his final work, preferring to spend the greater part "of the afternoon at the detail of the job that he liked best, checking over the information from his couriers and the eyes that reported back on what was happening at street corner level. His

sifted reports would then go to his company commanding officer, a year younger and three and a half years out of school. The best and most interesting would go up the chain to Battalion.

The afternoon had nearly exhausted itself by the time he came to the final group, and the one report in particular that was to take him time. He read it slowly in the bad light of the room, and then went back and reread it looking for the innuendo in the ambiguous message. It was a page and a half long, written in pencil and unsigned by name. There was a number underneath which denoted which volunteer had sent it in. He went through the report of probably only one hundred words for the third time till he was satisfied he had caught its full flavour and meaning. Then he began to weigh its importance.

Strangers were the traditional enemies in the village‐sized Catholic communities of Belfast.

The Short Strand, the Markets, Ard oyne, Divis, Ballymurphy ... all were self‐sufficient, integral units. Small, difficult to penetrate, because unless you belonged you had no business or reason to come. They boasted no wandering, shifting groups, no cuckoos to come and feed off them.

Those who were admitted after being burned out or intimidated away from their homes came because there were relatives who would put roofs over their heads. There were no strangers.

You were either known or not admitted.

What concerned Duffryn now was the report on the stranger in the Beachmount and Broadway area. He was said to be looking for a job and getting long‐term rates at Delrosa with Mrs 99

Duncan. There was a question about his speech. The scribbled writing of the report had the second name of McEvoy. First name of Harry. Merchant seaman, orphaned and brought up in

Portadown. No harm in that and checkable presumably. The interest in the report came later.

The flaw in the set‐up, the bit that didn't ring true. Accent, something wrong with the accent.

Something that had been noticed as not right. It was put crudely, the reason Duffryn read it so many times to get the flavour of the writer's opinion:

'Seems to talk okay, then loses us for a moment, or a word, or sometimes in the middle of a word, and then comes back ... his talk's like us mostly but it comes and goes ... it's not just as if he'd been away as he says. Then all his talk would have gone, but it only happens with odd words.'

It was enough to cause him anxiety, and it took him half an hour to make out a painstaking report for his superiors setting down all

the information he had available on the man called McEvoy. The responsibility would rest higher up the chain of command as to whether or not further action was taken. He would keep up surveillance when he had the manpower.

There were difficulties of communication in the city and it would be some days before his message could be passed on.

Private Jones was on board the 15.30 Trident One back to Heath row. He was out of uniform but conspicuous in his short hair‐cut and neatly pressed flannels. He had been told he would be met by service i ransport at Heathrow and taken to Northolt where he would be put on the first flight to Berlin and his new posting. It had been impressed on him that he was to speak to no one of his encounter the previous night. The incident was erased.

Interrogation was an art of which Howard Rennie had made himself a master, an authority, skilled at drawing out the half‐truth and capitalizing on it till the floodgates of information burst. He knew the various techniques; the bully, the friend, the quiet businesslike man across the table‐‐all the approaches that softened the different types of people who sat at the bare table opposite him. The first session with the girl had been a gentle one, polite and paternal. It had taken him nowhere. Before they went into the interview room for the second time Rennie had explained his new tactics to the officer from army intelligence. Rennie would attack, and the Englishman capitalize from it. Two men, each offering a separate tempo, and combining together to confuse the suspect.

The detective could recognize his own irritability. A bad sign. One that demonstrated the hours he'd put in that week, the sleep he had forfeited. And the girl was playing him up. They'd given her the easy way. If she wanted to play it like the boyos did, then good luck to her. But she was 100

tired now, dazed by the surroundings and the lights, and hungry, having earlier defiantly refused the sandwiches they brought her.

'We'll start at the beginning again, right? ... You were at the dance last night?'

'Yes.'

'What were you wearing? We'll have that again.'

'My pink dress.'

That much was established again by the detective. They'd got that far before. He'd done the talking. The army captain had said

nothing as he sat behind the girl. A policewoman was also in the interview room, seated to the side of tie desk and taking no part in the questioning. The questions came from the big man, directly opposite Theresa, just across the table.

'Your home in Ballymurphy ... it's a hideout?'

'No.'

'It's used as a hideout. We know that. It's more we want. But it's where the boyos lie up?'

'No.'

'We know it is, you stupid bitch. We know they stay there.'

'Why ask me, then?" she shouted back.

'It's used as a hideout?'

'You say you know it is.'

'How often?'

'Not often.'

'How many times in the last month? Ten times?'

'No, nothing like that.'

'Five times, would that be about right? In the last month, Theresa?'

101

'Not as often as that.'

'How about just once, Theresa? That's the one we're interested in, just the once." It was the officer behind her who spoke. English. Soft voice, different to those RUC bastards. She sat motionless on the wooden chair, hands clenched together round the soaked and stained handkerchief from the cuff in her blouse.

'I think we know one man came.'

'How can I tell you...?'

'We know he came, girl, the one man," the big Branch man took over again. "One man, there was one man, wasn't there? Say three weeks ago. For a night or so. One man, yes or no?'

She said nothing.

'Look, girl, one man and we know he was there.'

Her eyes stayed on her hands. The light was very bright, the tiredness was ebbing over her, swallowing her into itself.

'One man, you stupid cow, there was one man. We know it.'

No reply. Still the silence. The policewoman fidgeted in her seat.

'You agreed with us that people came, right? Not as many as five, that was agreed. Not as many as ten, we got that far. Now, understand this, we say that one man came about three weeks ago. One man. A big man. He slept in the house, yes or no? Look at me, now.'

Her head came up slowly now to look at the policeman directly in front of her. Rennie kept talking. It was about to happen, he could sense it. The poor girl had damn all left to offer. One more shove and it would all roll out.

'You don't think we sent out all those troops and pigs just for one girl if we don't have it cast iron why we want to talk to her. Give us a bit of common. Now the man. Take your time. Yes or no?'

'Yes." It was barely audible, her lips framing the word with a fractional fluttering of the chin.

The army man behind her could not hear the answer it was so softly spoken. He read it instead on the face of the detective as he sighed with relief.

102

'Say it again," Rennie said. Rub it in, make the girl hear herself coughing, squealing. That keeps the tap flowing. Once they start keep up the momentum.

'Yes.'

The detective's face lost some of its hostility. He leaned forward on the table. "What was his name? What did you call the man?"

She laughed. Too loud, hysterically.

'What are you trying to do to me? You trying to get me done in? Don't you know I can't... I couldn't anyway, I don't know it,'