Harry's Game (34 page)

Two faces peered back at the intruders. Saucer‐eyed, mouths open, and motionless. The troops patted the bodies of the children and pressed down in the bed clothes round them, isolating the little humps they made with the blankets. They looked under the bed and in the wardrobe. There were no other hiding places in the room, and that effectively exhausted the possible hiding places.

They had come in hard and fast, and now they stopped, halted by the anti‐climax of the moment.

The lieutenant went to the top of the stairs and shouted down.

'Not here, sir.'

'Wait there, I'll come up.'

The major came in and looked slowly round the room.

'Right, not here now. But he has been, or she's a dirty little bitch round the house. There, his pants, vest, socks. I wouldn't imagine they lie round the house too long.'

By the window was the crumpled pile of dirty clothes underneath the chair that Downs used to hang his coat and trousers on at night.

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'Get her up here," said the major. "And get the floorboard chaps. He's been here pretty recently. May still be in the house. If he's about I want him found, wherever he is, roof, basement if there is one, wherever.'

She came into the room, her two youngest children hanging like monkeys over her shoulders, thumbs in mouths. Like their mother they were white‐faced, and shivering in the cold away from their bed clothes.

'We were wondering where we might find your husband, Mrs Downs.'

'He's not here. You've poked your bloody noses in, and you can see that. Now get out of here.'

'His clothes are here, Mrs Downs, you and I can both see that. I wouldn't expect a nice girl like you to leave his dirty pants lying on the floor that many days.'

'Don't be bloody clever with me," she snarled back at him. "He's not here, and you can see that, now get your soldiers out of here.'

'The problem, Mrs Downs, is that we think your husband could still be here. That would be the explanation for his clothes being on the floor. I'm afraid we're going to have to search around a bit. We'll cause as little disruption as possible. I assure you of that.'

'Big heroes, aren't you, when you have your tanks and guns. Big and bloody brave.'

The soldier with the crowbar mouthed an apology as he came past her. He flipped up a corner of the threadworn carpet and with a rending scrape pulled up the boards at the end of the room. In four separate places he took the planks up before disappearing to his hips down the holes he had made. The major and the soldiers waited above for him to emerge with his torch for the last time and announce with an air of professional disappointment that the floor space was clear. Using ladders they went up into the loft shaking the beams above the major and the man's wife, and swinging the light fitting.

'Nothing up there either, sir.'

The ground floor was of stone and tile, so that stayed put, while the expert banged on the walls with his hammer in search of cavities. The coal bunker out in the yard was cleared out, the wooden framework under the sink taken down.

'It's clean, sir.'

That was the cue for her to return to the attack.

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'Are you through now, you bastards? All these men and one little house, and one wee girl alone with her kids, and it takes all of you and your bloody guns and Saracens...'

'You know why we want him?" The major lashed out. "You know what he did? We'll go on till we get him. If we have to rip this house to pieces each week till we get him, we'll do that.

Doesn't he tell you where he's going at night? Doesn't he tell you what he did last month? Try asking him one day.'

He strode out through the house, followed by his search team. It was three minutes after six o'clock. Failure and frustration was how the majority of these raids ended. He knew that, and he'd never lost

his temper before, never gone overboard as he'd done with the woman in No. 41. He comforted himself on two points. It needed saying; and the intelligence officer who had tagged along hadn't heard it.

Once the army had gone a clutch of neighbours moved into the house to gather round the woman and commiserate on the damage left behind. None knew of the importance of Billy Downs amongst the Provisionals and so news of the army outrage at the house would travel fast through the community. Yet those that came to dress the children and help in the clearing up and the making of tea and breakfast noted how subdued was their friend. Cowed by what had happened. That was not the usual way. The familiar reaction was to greet the going of the soldiers with a hail of insults and obscenities at their backs. But not this woman.

Once the friends and neighbours had left her to get their own families ready for work or school or just dressed and fed, the words of the officer returned to ring in her ears. Quietly she padded about the house, her children in a crocodile procession behind her, checking to see which of her few possessions were damaged or tarnished or moved.

This was the confirmation. God, this was what she had feared. Right back to the first night back home after London, she had been waiting. So much wind this confidence he had, that no one knew him. Like a rat he was, waiting in a barn with the door shut for the farmer to come in the morning with his gun and his dogs. The big, fresh‐faced officer, with the smears on his cheeks, with his suspicion of a moustache and posh accent, who hated her, he had laid down the future. He had mirrored her nightmares and hallucinations while she lay sleepless beside her man. They would come, and come again for him, and keep on till they found him.

Last night he had not slept beside her. On the radio in the back room she heard the early news.

A policeman shot at... an intruder hit ... in the middle evening. That was the top story. Whoever had been involved should have been home now. Her man was usually home by now, or he would have said something.

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Around the passage and stairs and landing of the house she thought of her man. Wounded, maimed, alone in the dawn of the city. What hurt most was that she was so unable to influence events.

News carried across the city. With the efficiency of tribal tomtoms word passed over the sprawling urban conglomeration that the terraced house in Ypres Avenue had been raided.

Less than an hour

after the major had walked through the front door and to his armoured Land‐Rover Billy Downs would hear of it. Brigade staff had decided that he should know. They felt it could only enhance his motivation for the job at hand.

Harry's alarm clock dragged him from the comfort of his dreaming, and woke him to the blackness of his room. His dreams had been of home, wife and children, makeshift garden behind his quarters, holidays in timber forest chalets, fishing out in the cool before the sun came up, trout barbecued for breakfast. With consciousness came the knowledge of another Monday morning. It was three weeks to the day that he had left the house at Dorking with the view of the hills and vegetable garden. Twenty‐one days exactly. "Must have been out my mind," he muttered to the emptiness of the room.

Over the weekend he had thought of what Josephine had said to him. She'd accused him of interference in something that was basically none of his concern, of causing death when he should have stayed uninvolved. Stupid bitch should have passed the same message to the man who came to London with the Klashnikov.

He examined his position and its natural courses. He wanted to finish it. End it properly. End it with a shooting with the man in the picture with his black and white‐lined face, dead. That was not emotional, there was no wild spirit of revenge, just that such an ending was the only finite one, otherwise the job was incomplete.

In Aden, good old Aden, it had been so much more simple. British lives at stake, the justification of everything, with the enemy clearly defined‐‐Arabs, gollies. But here, who was the enemy? Why was he the enemy? Did you have to know why to take his life? It churned over and over, unanswered, like pebbles in a coffee machine, grating, ill‐fitting and indigestible.

In spite of the fact that Harry came originally from the country town an hour or so's drive from Belfast the army's mould had been the real fashioning influence over‐reaching his childhood.

Like his brother officers in the mess he was still perplexed at the staying power of the opposition. But here he parted company. To the others they were the enemy, to Harry they were still the opposition. You could kill them if it was necessary, or if that was demanded for operational reasons, but they remained the opposition. They didn't have to be the enemy to make them worth killing.

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But how did they keep it up? What made them prepared to risk their lives on the streets when they took on the power of a British

army infantry section? What led them to sacrifice most of the creature‐comforts of life to go on the run? What made them feel the God‐given right to take life, and torture a man in front of his family?

They're not heroes. Bloody lunatics, he said to himself as he pulled his sweater over his head.

They rejected all the ordinary things that ordinary people search for, and chose to go on against these massive odds. It didn't involve Harry. The man he was searching for was quite straightforward. He was a killer. He was a challenge. Simple and clean. Harry could focus on that.

'A cup of tea, Mr McEvoy?" Mrs Duncan at the door cut short his thoughts. "What would you be wanting for breakfast? There's the lot if you can manage it. Sausages, bacon, tomatoes, eggs, and I've some soda bread?‐‐‐‐'

'Just toast and coffee, thanks. I'll be away down in a moment.'

'That won't get you far. It's a raw day, right enough.'

'Nothing more, thank you, Mrs Duncan. Really, that's all I want. I'll be right down.'

'Please yourself then. Bathroom's clear. Coffee's made, and remember to wrap up well. It's a cold one.'

After he'd shaved there was not much to the dressing. Sweater already on and damp from the soap and flannel, faded jeans, his socks and boots and his anorak. He took the face towel from the rail in the bathroom, brought it back into his room and when he had finished dressing laid it out on the bed. About two feet by one and a half, it was bigger than the one the Smith and Wesson was already wrapped in, and he changed them over, putting the revolver in the new towel.

'Silly bugger," he thought, "clean towels just to wrap a gun in." He needed a towel to disguise the outline of the weapon when it sat in the deep pocket of his anorak on the way to work. But he didn't need a clean towel. That's the army for you: everything clean on a Monday morning.

Funny if he got stopped at a road block. He thought of that and a whole band of disappointed squaddies having to hand him over. Wouldn't have cried overmuch either. Last night, late, he'd decided to put the gun in his coat, easier access than the food bag slung over his shoulder, and the bag with the sandwiches and flask would be lying about in the rest hut through the day, and God knows who could be rummaging around in there. When the revolver was wrapped it

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was light and blunt, though still bulky and hard to ignore, bigger than a spectacle case, bigger than twenty cigarettes and the large box of matches that most men carried.

He breezed into the kitchen.

'Morning, Mrs Duncan, all right then?'

'Not so bad, little enough to complain about. You're sure about the toast and coffee?"

Disappointment clouded her face when he nodded. Harry had been in the bathroom during the seven o'clock news bulletins, and through the closed door he had heard her radio playing faintly downstairs, loud enough to be aware of it, but too indistinct to hear the actual words.

'Anything on the news, then?'

'Nothing to note, just the usual. It goes on. A policeman chased a man out of his house and shot him. That's his version, anyway, up Dunmurry way, more trouble in the Unionists. Never change their spots, that crowd. They've given nothing to us without it being wrung out...'

Harry laughed. "They haven't caught the big man yet then, top of the Proves?'

'Well, Mr McEvoy, if they have, they didn't say so, which means they haven't. They'd be trumpeting it if they had, but that's all the news is, the troubles. Makes you wonder what they used to put in before it all started. I can hardly remember. There must have been something else for them to talk about, but they've forgotten it now, right enough.'

'Well, then, no big man in the net‐‐‐‐'

'They don't get the real big men, only the shrimps.'

'No, it's just that I read in one of the papers I saw up at the yard that they were mounting an effort to rake in the bigfish.'

'They say they're doing that each week, and nothing comes of it.'

Harry had banked a lot on the man being in custody. It was twenty‐one hours after the call to London, to Davidson. Couldn't be that difficult to pick the bastard up. Shouldn't be taxing the might of the British army. They must have him, but they weren't saying yet, had to be that way. They wouldn't say yet, too early, of course it was. The explanation was facile but enough to tide him over his breakfast.

It was Monday morning and he was the only guest. Tonight, round tea time, the travellers and the others would be back in the front room. The place then was not quite his own as on 184

Saturdays and Sundays. Lord and master of the household was how he felt over the weekend.

Delusions of grandeur.

'Will Josephine be in this afternoon?" He sounded casual, matter of‐fact.

'Should be, Mr McEvoy. Should be here in time to help me with the teas and a bit of tidying up that I haven't got round to. She's back on early shift this week. You wanted to see her?'