Harry's Game (30 page)

In the first twenty minutes that Downs had been in the room, Fiona, who traded on her ability to charm, had attempted to win the stranger with a smile. He looked right through her, gap-toothed grin and all. She'd tried just once, then subsided against her mother.

He's never come out into the light, the elder girl, Margaret, told herself. He's been locked up, and like a creature he's escaped from wherever they've kept him. This man was across the wall, 157

but she knew little of the causes of the separation and the walling‐off. She studied the deepness of his eyes, intent and careful, uninvolved as they took in the room, traversing it like the light on a prison camp watch‐tower, without order or reason but hovering, moving, perpetually expecting the unpredictable. She saw his clothes too. A coat with a darned tear in the sleeve, and buttons off the cuffs, trousers without creases and shiny in the knees, frayed at the turn‐ups and with mud inside the lower leg. To children suits were for best, for work, not for getting dirty and shabby. His shoes were strange to them, too. Cleaned after a fashion by the rain on the winter pavements, but like his face without lustre, misused.

Margaret understood that the gun on Downs's lap was to kill her father. Her sister, twenty months younger, was unable to finish off the equation and so was left in a limbo of expectancy, aware only of an incomprehensible awfulness. Margaret had enough contact with the boys at school who played their war games in the school yard to recognize the weapon as an Armalite rifle.

He'll be a hard bastard, Janet Rennie had decided. One of the big men sent in for a killing like this. Won't be able to distract him with argument or discussion enough to unsettle him. He's hard enough to carry out his threat. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Would have his own kids, breed like rats the Catholics, have his own at home. But he'd still shoot hers. She felt the fingers of her

daughters gripping through her blouse. But she kept her head straight, and her gaze fastened on Downs. There was no response to her stare, only the indifference of the professional, the craftsman who has been set a task and time limit and who has arrived early and therefore must wait to begin. Faster than her children she had taken in the man, searched him for weakness, but the gun across his knees now held her attention. If he were nervous or under great strain then she would notice the fidgeting of the hands or the reflection of perspiration on the stock or barrel of the gun. But there was no movement, no reflection.

He held the gun lightly, his left hand half‐way along the shaft and his fingers loose round the black plastic that cradled the hard rified steel of the barrel. His hand was just above the magazine and her eyes wandered to the engineered emplacement where the capsule of ammunition nestled into the base of the gun. Just after he had sat down, Downs had eased the safety catch off with his right index finger, which now lay spanning the half‐moon of the trigger guard. Like a man come to give an estimate on the plumbing, or the life insurance, she thought. None of the tensions she would have expected on display. Thirty minutes or so before she thought her husband might be arriving home she decided to talk.

'We have no quarrel with you. You've none with us. We've done nothing to you. If you go now you'll be clean away. You know that. You'll be right out of here and gone before my husband gets back.' That was her start. Poor she told herself, it wouldn't divert a flea.

He looked back with amused detachment.

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'If you go through with this they'll get you. They always get them now. It's a fact. You'll be in the Kesh for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?'

'Save it, Mrs Rennie. Save it and listen to the hymns.'

She persisted. "It'll get you nowhere. It's the Provisionals, isn't it? You're beaten. One more cruel killing, senseless. It won't do any good.'

'Shut up." He said it quietly. "Just shut up and sit still.'

She came again. "Why do you come here? Why to this house? Who are you?'

'It's a pity your man never told you what he did when he went to work of a morning. That's late in the day now, though. Quiet yourself and stay where you are.'

He motioned at her with the rifle, still gently, still in control. The movement was definitive.

Stay on the sofa with the children. He

sensed that the crisis was coming for her, and that she knew it. With growing desperation she took up the same theme.

'But you're beaten now. It'll soon be all over. All your big men are gone. There'll have to be a cease‐fire soon, then talking. More killing won't help anything." Keep it calm, don't grovel to him, talk as an equal with something on your side. There's nothing to counterbalance that Armalite but you have to make believe he doesn't hold everything.

'We're not beaten. It's not over. We've more men than we can handle. There'll be no talks, and no cease‐fire. Got the message. Nothing. Not while there are pigs like your man running round free and live.'

The children beside her started up at the way the crouched stranger spoke of their father.

Janet Rennie was an intelligent woman and hardened by her country upbringing. That she would fight for her husband's life was obvious: the problem had been in finding the medium.

For the first time in nearly two hours she believed she stood a chance. She still watched the hands and the rifle. The hands were in a new position on the Armalite. From resting against the gun they were now gripping it. Attack, and how can he hit back before Rennie comes home?

'There's no future for you boys. Your best men are all locked up. The people are sick and tired of you. You know that. Even in your own rat holes they've had enough of you...'

'You don't know a bloody thing about what goes on. Not a bloody thing. You know nothing.

Nothing. Shut up. Shut your bloody face...'

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She taunted him, trying to act it with her voice to overcome the fear. "They don't want you any more. You're outnumbered, living off the backs of people. Without your guns you're nothing...'

He shouted back across to her. "What do you know of the way we live? What do you know of what support we have? All you see is what's on the bloody television. You don't know what life is like in the Falls, with murdering bastards like your husband to beat the shit out of boys and girls. We're doing people a service when we kill fucking swine like that husband of yours.'

'My husband never killed anyone." She said it as a statement of fact. Safe.

'He told you that, did he?" Very precise, low and hissing the words out. "Pity you never asked him what sort of little chat he had with the wee girl what hanged herself in the cells at Springfield.'

She had built herself towards the climax. Now he watched with relish the demolition. She remembered reading about the girl, though it had not been mentioned at home. Work rarely was. The rebuttal caught her hard, draining her. The hands. Hold on to the hands, and concentrate on them. The only lifeline is the hands. The left knuckle was white on the barrel, blood drained out from round the bones. He was holding the rifle with both hands as he brought it up across his face to wipe his forehead with the sleeve on his right arm. He was sweating.

'You're nothing, are you? That's all you're fit for. Sitting in people's homes with guns, guarding women and wee bairns. You're a rat, a creeping, disease‐ridden little rat. Is that what the great movement is about? Killing people in their homes?'

Her voice was battering it out now, watching the anger rise first in his neck and spreading through the lower jaw, tension, veins hardening and protruding. Safe. What can the gun do now that would not rouse the neighbours who lived through the thin brick‐and‐cement walls of the estate just a few feet from her own bungalow?

'You've made it all out wrong, Mrs Rennie. Whatever your bloody man says you don't kill the Provos just by locking a few up. We are of the people. Don't you know that? The people are with us. You've lost, you are the losers. Your way of life, God‐given superiority, is over and finished, not us... We're winning. We're winning because the people support us. Go into Andytown, or the Murph or Ardoyne or Turf Lodge. Go in there and ask them about Provo rule.

Then asks them what they think of RUC scum.'

He was shouting, half‐rising out of the flower‐covered seat of the chair. The rifle was now only in the right hand, but with the finger still close to the trigger. His left arm was waving above his head.

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The hatred between the two was total. His fury was fanned by the calmness she showed in face of the rifle, and the way she had made him shout and the speed with which he had lost his control. Her loathing for the Republicans, bred into her from the cradle, gave her strength.

With something near detachment she weighed the pluses and minuses of rushing him there and then. He was gripping the gun, but it was pointed away from the family. There was no possibility that she could succeed. She felt the children's grip on her arms. If she surged suddenly across the room she would carry them like two anchors half‐way with her.

He was not so calm now, and she saw the hint in his eye that he felt the claustrophobia of the room, that the time he had sat in the

chair had sapped that sense of initiative and control that were so important to him. She remembered a young Catholic boy who had come round her father's store, idling or loitering or just with nothing to do, and how her father had pulled him up by the front of his collar, and shaken him like an animal to find what he was doing there, on the corner outside the shop. And there had been then the trapped‐rodent fear of the youth, of the second‐grade boy, who accepted that this would happen, and ran when released, feeling himself lucky not to be thrashed. In the eyes of the man across from her was the hint that he knew he no longer dominated the situation.

When Rennie turned into the cul‐de‐sac he noted immediately that the garage interior light was not switched on. He stopped his car forty yards from the bottom of the road, and turned off his engine and lights. The bungalow seemed quite normal. The curtains were drawn, but there was a slice of light through the gap where they had been pulled not quite together, from the hall light filtering through the patterned and coloured glass. Everything as it should be.

But no light in the garage. For months now it had been a set routine that an hour or so before he was expected Janet would go into the kitchen and switch on the light in the garage. They kept the garage empty, without the clutter that their neighbours stored there. That way there was no hiding place for an assassin.

The detective sat in the car watching, allowing himself some minutes just to look at the house and search in front of him in detail for any flaw other than the unlit garage. There was no light upstairs. Perhaps there should have been, perhaps not. Usually Fiona would be having her bath by now, but only darkness there. That was another cautionary factor.

Over the years Howard Rennie had been to enough full‐dress police funerals to wonder how it could happen to himself. There was only one way. The epitaphs of the dead men were clear enough. Carelessness. Somewhere, for some time, usually minuscule, they had slackened. Not all, but most, grew over‐confident and fell into the convenience of routine, began to believe in their own safety. A few were killed in closely‐planned attacks, but most as Rennie knew well presented themselves as casual targets.

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This was why he had a light fitted for the garage that should now be on, and why he noticed it was not lit.

His wife was a meticulous and careful person. Not one to make a silly mistake about the garage. It was the dilemma of the life they

led that he wondered constantly how far as a family they should take their personal security.

On the one hand there could be something drastically wrong that had prevented his wife from switching on a light as agreed. On the other she could be next door for sugar or milk, and stayed to gossip while the children played or watched television.

But it was quite out of character for her to forget.

He eased out of the car, pushing the door to but not engaging the lock, and reached to the PPK

Walther in his shoulder‐holster. He had loaded and checked it before starting his drive home from Castle reagh, but he again looked for the safety catch mechanism to see it was in the "on"

position. On the balls of his feet he went towards the front gate. The gate was wrought‐iron and had never hung well‐‐it rattled and needed a lifting, forcing movement to open it. Rennie instead went to the far side of the gatepost before the hedge thickened, through a gap, past the roses and on to the grass. The run up to the front door was gravel and he kept to the grass, fearful of any noise his feet might make. Though the window showed the light from inside the gap between the curtains it was not enough for him to see through.

There were no voices at the moment he reached the window, just the hymn‐singing on the television. Rennie came off the grass and stepped on to the tiled step of the doorway. The Walther was in his right hand, as with the left he found his Yale key and inserted it gently into the opening. Steady now, boy. This is the crucial time. If you're noisy now it's blown‐‐if there's anything to blow. For a fraction he felt sheepish at the stupidity of tiptoeing across his own front lawn. Had the neighbours seen? The door opened, just enough to get him inside. To the lounge door. It was off the latch, and the aperture of an inch or so acted as a funnel to the final crescendo of the programme, and the choir's lusty singing. As the sound tailed away he heard his wife speak. "Great hero, aren't you? With your bloody rifle. Need it to make a man of you...'