Harry's Game (38 page)

'Who is he?" he said.

Harry looked at him, didn't reply and bolted from the car. He ran across the road and disappeared from McKeogh's view through the gap in the silver corrugated fence. Downs had a start of less than a hundred yards.

Talk of the initial shooting straddled the city. The first officer into the road was taken by a lance‐corporal to meet the tear‐swamped Mrs Duncan. Between gulps and pauses to blow her nose she told the immediate story that formed the basis of the situation report.

'He'd just left for work, Mr McEvoy, and I heard the shooting, and I ran to the door. Up the end of the street was Mr McEvoy with a gun, and one man seemed to run down the street towards this end, and he was shot. Mr McEvoy just aimed and shot him. Then another man got into the car and started to drive away, and Mr McEvoy fired at him too, and I don't know whether he 201

was hit or not. It was so fast. Then Mr McEvoy ran into the road waving and shouting at people in cars. Then I came indoors.'

'Who is this Mr McEvoy?" the bemused subaltern asked automatically.

'He's my lodger, been here three weeks. Quiet as a mouse, and a gentleman, a real proper man. Never spoke to anyone, and then there he was crouched behind his gun and shooting it over and over.'

The ambulance took Duffryn to hospital, and bulletins later in the day spoke of his condition as

"critical'.

Frost, still in the 39 Brigade Operations Room at Lisburn, saw the reports coming in over the teletype. In rapid succession he spoke to the GOC, the Brigade commander in Londonderry‐‐in order that the Secretary of State could be briefed when he arrived there‐‐and finally to Davidson in London. In each case the message was substantially the same.

'At first sight it looks as though they mounted some sort of ambush for McEvoy this morning.

There was a balls‐up on the job, and our fellow ended up shooting at least one of theirs. He's in hospital injured. Another chap escaped in a car, and when last seen McEvoy was standing out in the Falls trying the old tack of waving down a spot of transport, civilian, for hot pursuit. It gets a bit more droll each stage. He'd holed up in a small guest house just off the Falls in the Broadway section. So he's on the loose again, and it's my wager that by lunchtime the place will be buzzing a bit.'

Four minutes later the teletype was chattering again. A shot‐up car had been discovered in Carlyle Circus, and a man had been taken from the back with serious gunshot wounds.

'This McEvoy, he's one of ours," said Frost to the major from his department who stood beside him.

'Working for us?" said the other man in astonishment. The clerks and corporals and duty officers strained to listen.

'Not as simple. Working for our side, but not working for us, not for this department. It's involved and complicated and a cock‐up. The guts are that the Prime Minister wanted an outsider with good cover and uncompromised, to move in and operate while controlled from London. He had a specific task, to locate the man that killed Danby. I think he did it and all the trimmings as well. It's a boy called Billy Downs, from Ardoyne. The place is watched now, and we did a raid this morning but that was negative. But the whole thing went sour. This man, McEvoy, had little faith in his controller and not much more in us. Can't blame him for that. The talk I've had with his controller shows him as stupid as they come. So we had a ludicrous 202

situation, lunatic, with McEvoy phoning his controller and passing over information but not saying where he could be contacted. In between his weekly messages not a word from him.

Revolutionary tactics, okay. Then it leaked to the opposition‐‐how they got hold of it I don't know‐‐complete secrecy was supposed to be the strength of the whole enterprise, and the Proves still heard about it. There was the bit in the papers this morning, that was the tip of it.'

The major nodded. He'd seen the cutting already, snipped out and noted.

Frost went on,

'Well, it seems the boyos went for McEvoy this morning to try to get him on the way to a job he'd picked up. He's cool enough, this lad. There's been quite a shoot out. McEvoy shot at least one of them. Maybe more, there's another half stiff turned up beside the Mater in a car with guns in it. It may be something to do with it. Could well be.'

One of the desk sergeants came towards the colonel pushing a

telephone trolley across the floor of the ops room, a light set in the handle flashed brilliantly.

'Call for you, sir.'

Frost took the phone, identified himself, and listened rather more than a minute. Then he thanked the caller, asked him quietly not to move anything, and said he would be on his way.

'There's been shooting in Ypres Avenue, that's Billy Downs's street. Looks a bit like High Noon apparently, bodies and plenty all over the place." Frost rattled it out, hard and composed. "I think I'll go down there, so hold the fort please. And call RUG HQ, Special Branch. Ask for Rennie, Howard Rennie. He might want to come up there. It'll take me about fifteen minutes to get there. But if there's any word of McEvoy let me know right away.'

And he was gone before the major could stand on any of his dignity and complain about being kept in the dark. That Frost traditionally kept things close to his chest was small consolation.

Suddenly the operations room was alive. It was seldom the staff on the first floor of headquarters were able to feel the tension of street level operations. Frost had brought them into it, though at the expense of his famous discretion. The sergeant brought the trolley over once more.

'It's a call for Colonel Frost, sir. They say it's London and personal and urgent. A Mr Davidson.

The colonel called him a few minutes ago. Will you take it?'

The major took the phone. "It's his deputy here." He waited while the question was framed at the other end, then went on, "we have another wounded man, and a shooting in Downs's street in Ardoyne. Bodies but no names to match them with is the order of the morning so far.

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You'll have to wait half an hour or so, and then we might have the answers. Sorry, old chap, but that's the way it is.'

NINETEEN

Feverish in the torment of her uncertainty, Billy Downs's wife had sent two of her children to the community infant creche, and dumped the others with her neighbours. In her threadbare green coat and with her bag and purse she had taken herself to the shops at the top of Ardoyne. The screw had been well twisted on her exhausted nerves.

The news programme less than two hours earlier had carried reports of the shooting at the policeman's house, amplified by eyewitness accounts. The BBC had sent a man to the house, and his story made much of the gunman who hesitated, the intervention of the child, and the wounding of the gunman. There had been a trail of blood and the policeman was a trained marksman, the report said. The Irish News, which she had seen when she took the young ones three doors down, had shown a floodlit picture of the neat bungalow and white‐faced detectives working with their fingerprint kits by the front door. The paper had also spoken of the wounding of the would be assassin.

Men from the community association would come in later in the day to help repair the boards pulled up at dawn by the army, but for now the debris and confusion in the house and the noise of the children coupled with the danger to her husband to defeat her.

But the single factor that weighed most with her was the knowledge that the military knew of her husband, had identified him, and that their life together was effectively over. If he had survived last night then he would be on the run and go underground, otherwise the future held only the prospect of years in the Kesh or the Crumlin.

And for what?

She was not one of the militant women of the streets who blew the whistles and beat the dustbins, and marched down the Falls, and screamed at the soldiers and sent food parcels to the prisons. At the start the cause had not interested her, till parallel with the growing involvement of her husband she had become passively hostile to the movement. That a cabinet

minister

should

die

in

London,

a

soldier

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in Broadway or a policeman in Dunmurry was not the fuel that fired her. Her conviction was of far too low a grade to sustain her in her present misery.

Her purse had been full from the social security last Thursday. Now most of it was spent, with only enough for the basics of bread and milk bolstered by sausages and baked beans and tins.

At the shops as she queued many eyes were on her. Word had passed in the streets that the army had raided her house, that they were looking for her man, that he had been out all night.

Over the years it had become a familiar enough situation in the little community, but that it was this family that was at the centre of the morning's swoop caused the stares, the muttered comments and the pulling aside of the front window curtains.

She glared back at them, embarrassing the lookers enough to deflect their eyes. She paid for her food, pecking in her purse for the exact money, and swung out of the door and back on to the street. She had forty yards to walk to the top of Ypres Avenue.

When she turned into the narrow long street the observation post spotted her. The soldiers were concealed in the roof of the mill, disused and now converted into warehouse space. They came and went by the back stairs, and where the boards were too rotten hauled themselves up by rope ladder. Once in position they put a heavy padlock on the door behind them, locking themselves in the roughly fashioned cubicle, constructed out of sandbags, blankets and sacking. They had some protection and some warmth: that was all. To see down the Avenue

they lay on their stomachs with their heads forward into the angle of the roof with a missing tile providing the vantage point. The two men in the post did twelve hours there at a stretch, and with three other teams would rotate in the position, familiarizing themselves enough with the street so that eventually they would know each man and woman and child who lived there.

The comings and goings were logged, laboriously, in a notebook in pencil, then sifted each evening by their battalion's intelligence officer. A synopsis of life in the street was sent each week to headquarters for evaluation. It was a process repeated in scores of streets in the Catholic areas of Belfast, as the security forces built up their enormous and comprehensive dossiers on the minority community.

Lance‐Corporal David Burns and Private George Smith had been in the mill since six that morning. They arrived in darkness and would leave long after the few street lights had come back on. They

had been in Belfast eleven weeks on this tour, five more to go. Thirty four days to be exact.

To the OP they'd brought sandwiches and a flask of sugared tea plus the powerful German binoculars they used, a folded card that expanded to show a montage of the faces of wanted men, the rifles with daytime telescopic sights and also the bulging image intensifier for night work. They carried everything they needed for the day up the rope ladder to the roof. Only the radio telephone and the bulk treacle tin for emergency nature calls were permanent fixtures.

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Burns, face intent behind the glasses, called out the details on the slight woman walking towards him.

'The bird from forty‐one. Must have been shopping. Didn't go for long. Can't be ten minutes since she went. Looks a bit rough. Didn't find her husband, did they?'

The soldier squirmed closer to the aperture, pressing the glasses against his eyebrows, face contorted with concentration.

'Hey, Smithie, behind her. I think he's coming. Right up the top there. Sort of running. That is her old man, isn't it? Looks like him. Have a squint yourself.'

Tm not sure, not at this range. We'll be definite when he gets down the road a bit." Smith had taken over the hole. "Is he a shoot on‐sight, or what?'

'Don't know. They didn't say nothing about that. I'm sure enough now it's him. Get HQ on the radio. Looks like he's run a bloody marathon. Knackered, he is.'

It was the pounding of his feet that first broke through her preoccupations. The urgency of footsteps dragged the woman away from the images of her wounded husband and the breaking of her home. She turned towards the noise, and stopped still at the sight.

Downs was struggling to run now, head rolling from side to side and the rhythm of his arm movements lost. His legs flailed forward over the last few paces to her, unco‐ordinated and wild. The stitch in his right side bit into the stomach wall. The pallor of his face was slug‐like, excavated from under something of permanence. His face was hollow at the cheeks as he pulled the air inside his lungs, eyes fearful and vivid, and round them the skin glistened with a sheen of sweat. He was shapeless, the big sweater worn over the left shoulder and arm giving him a grotesque breadth. But as he came towards her it was the eyes that held her. Their desperation, loneliness and dependence.

She put down her shopping bag on the paving, careful that it should not topple over, and held out her arms for her man. He fell against her, stumbling, and she reeled with the sudden weight as she took the strain. Against her he convulsed as his lungs forced down the air they needed. There were words, but she could not understand them as they buried themselves in the shoulder of her coat. Far distant, on the top street corner a knot of women had gathered.