Could she comprehend it even if she did know? Could she assimilate this tatty, rotten job? Could she understand the man that was hunted, and the need to kill him? Could she accept what might happen to Harry? ‘I don’t know,’ Harry said to himself. ‘God knows how many years we’ve been married, and I don’t know. She’d be calm enough, not throw any tantrums, but what it would all mean to her, I’ve not the faintest idea.’
That would all sort itself. And when the answers had to be given then Josey would be a fantasy, and over.
Billy Downs was in his bed now, and asleep. He’d come back to find his wife sobbing into her pillow, disbelieving he could be freed, still suffering from the strain of the phone call she had made hours earlier. Many times he told her it was just routine, that there was nothing for them to fear. Relax, they know nothing. It’s clean. The trail is old and cold and clean. She held onto him as if uncertain that he was really there after she had mentally prepared herself for not seeing him again as a free man. The terror of losing him was a long time thawing. He put a brave face on it, but didn’t know himself the significance of his arrest. But to run now would be suicide. He would stay put. Act normally. And stay very cool.
As soon as he came off duty, in the small hours of Sunday morning, Jones asked to see his commanding officer. His platoon lieutenant asked him why, and about what, but the shuffling private merely replied that it was a security matter and that he must see the colonel as soon as he woke. He was marched up the wide steps of the mill, enclosed with the dripping walls festooned with fire- and parcel-bomb warnings and urging the soldiers to be ever vigilant, and shown into the colonel’s office. The colonel was shaving electrically and continued with the modern ritual as the soldier put together his report. Jones said that while searching a social club the previous night he had seen a man he definitely recognized as having been the transport officer at a base in Germany where his unit had refitted after a NATO exercise. He said that the man had given his name as McEvoy, and he explained about the kicked ankle, and the instruction to forget what he had seen. There was a long pause while the officer scraped the razor round his face, doubtful what action to take, and how he should react. The minute or so that he thought about the problem seemed to the young private an eternity. Then he gave his orders. Jones was to make no further mention of this incident to any other soldier, and was confined to barracks till further notice.
‘Please, sir. What do I tell the sergeant-major?’
‘Tell him the MO says you’ve a cold. That’s all, and keep your mouth shut. That’s important.’
When the soldier had about-turned and stamped his way out of the office the colonel asked for his second in command to come and see him. Sunday was normally the quiet morning, and the chance of a modest stay in bed. The second in command came in still wearing his dressing gown. To the colonel the position was now clear.
‘There’s all these chaps running round in civvies. I think we’ve trampled on one. If we say we’ve done it, there’s going to be a hell of a scene all the way round, lot of fluff flying and problems. I’m going to ship Jones out to Germany this afternoon and have the page of his log destroyed. We can take care of this our own way and with rather less palava than if it goes up to old Frost at HQ.’
The second in command agreed. He would ask for the log book, and deal with the offending page personally. Before his breakfast.
Early Sunday morning in Belfast is formidable. To Harry it was like the set of one of those films where there has been a nerve gas attack and no-one is left alive. Nothing but grey, heavy buildings, some crazily angled from the bomb blasts, others held up at the ends by huge timber props. Outside the city hall, vast and enormous and apparently deserted, the pigeons had gathered on the lawns. They too were immobile except when they ducked their heads while searching for imaginary worms in the ground. No buses. No taxis. No cars. No people. Harry found himself scurrying to get away from so much silence and emptiness. It was almost with a sense of relief that he saw a joint RUC and Military Police patrol cruising towards him. This typified the difference for him between Aden and here. When he was on his own in Mansoura he had shut himself away from the safety of the military and accepted that the run for home would be way too long if his cover was blown or he gave himself away. Now he had the army and police all round him. He was part of their arm, an extension of their operations.
Yet he felt the very closeness of the security forces was unnerving. The agent operating in hostile territory has to be self-sufficient and self-supporting. All just as applicable to the British agent working in Great Britain. Can’t be like the little boy with the bloody nose running home to Mum. In Mansoura it had been quite conventional and therefore more acceptable.
Not only was the city deserted of people. It was battened down for the day. Iron railings, their tops split into sharp tridents, blocked off the shopping streets that fanned off Royal Avenue. The turnstile gates into the security precincts were padlocked. Shops inside and outside the barricades had their windows barricaded and shuttered.
Down near the post office he found a bank of empty phone boxes, with only the work of vandals to prevent him taking his pick from a choice of six. It was cold inside the booth, with the wind cutting through the gaps left where the kids had kicked out the glass in the days before the army operated in strength in the city centre.
He took from his pocket a pile of ten-pence pieces and arrayed them in formation like fish scales on the top of the money box, and dialled the London number he had memorized in Dorking. If he had gone through an operator some of his call might have been overheard. This was the safe way. The phone rang a long time before it was answered.
Davidson heard the ringing when he was at the bottom of the stairs.
Against its shrill persistence he fumbled with his key ring to release the three separate locks on the heavy door, and stumbled across the darkened room where the blinds were still down. He picked up the receiver.
‘Four-seven-zero-four-six-eight-one. Can I help you?’
‘It’s Harry. How are the family?’
‘Very well, they liked the postcards, I’m told.’
That was the routine they had agreed. Two sentences’ chatter to show the other that he was a free agent and able to talk.
‘How’s it going, Harry boy?’
‘Middling. I’ll get the report over first. Then we’ll talk. Going in ten from now.’
That was time enough for Davidson to get the drawer in the leg of his desk open, switch on the cassette recorder and plug in the lead to the telephone receiver.
‘Going now, OK? The man is in Belfast still. I’m sure of that. He is apparently under great stress and while on the run shortly after the shooting was with a girl called Theresa. No second name. She’s from the Ballymurphy area. He tried to screw her, and she’s telling her friends that he couldn’t make it, because he was so wound up about the shooting. She’s late teens or early twenties. She was at a dance last night in a green-painted hut in the Ardoyne. She was wearing pink, tight skirt. The army heifered their way in, and picked up about a dozen blokes, some of them in Theresa’s group. They should be holding them still, unless they work bloody fast. One of them can identify her. So she’s worth a bit of chat and then I think we’ll be homeward bound. Seems straight sailing from here. That’s the plus side. Now the anti. In the club I was lined up for an ID check. Lance-Corporal from Wales asking questions, a young boy writing down the answers. The boy recognized me. God knows from when, but he did. I’d like it sorted out. I’m going to lie low for today, but I may have a job of sorts coming up. That’s about it, basically.’
‘Harry, we were worried when we didn’t hear anything.’
‘I didn’t want to call in till I had something to say.’
‘I won’t mess you about. But I know you’re not staying where we planned for you.’
‘Too bloody right. Right little army rest house. Right out of the interesting areas, and I take a peep at the place and
out comes some squaddie in plains. Shambles that was. You should crucify whoever sold you that pup.’
‘Thanks, Harry. I’ll kill them for it. I’ll go high on it.’
‘I’ve made it on my own. Quite snug, on the other side of town. Let’s leave it that way. I’ll call you if anything else shows up.’
‘We’ll do it your way. It’s not usual, but OK. Nothing more?’
‘Only tell the people who pick the girl up to go a bit quietly. Don’t ask me what the source of this is, but I don’t want it too obvious. If you can get her in without a razzamatazz you should have your man before anyone knows she’s gone, and can link her to him.’
‘I’ll pass that on. Anything else?’
‘Nothing more. Cheers. Good hunting.’
Davidson heard the phone click down. The call had lasted one minute and fifty-five seconds.
Harry let the receiver stay a moment in his hand after he’d pressed down the twin buttons with his fingers to end the call. He would have liked to talk with Davidson, unimportant small talk. But that would be unprofessional. Dangerous. Soft. Diverting. Pray God they would get the bastard now. He began to walk back to a lonely day at Delrosa, as the city on half-cylinder sparked to life.
Davidson had been surprised that Harry had rung off so fast. He reached down into his drawer and spun back the spools of his tape a few revolutions to check that the recording had operated correctly. He then wound the tape back to the beginning and played it from start to finish, taking a careful shorthand note of the conversation. He then rewound the tape again and played it once more, this time against his shorthand. Only when he was satisfied that he had correctly taken down every word spoken by Harry did he disconnect the leads between the tape and the telephone. He searched in his diary, at the back in the addresses and useful numbers section, for the home phone number of the Permanent Under-Secretary.
‘I thought you’d want to know, after our talk the other day. He’s surfaced. There’s some quite useful stuff. Should give a good lead. He sounded a bit rough. Not having much of a joyride, I fancy. I’ll call you in the office tomorrow. I’m quite hopeful we may be on to something. Yes . . . I’m going to pass it on now.’
His next call was to an unlisted extension in the Ministry of Defence.
Minutes later Harry’s message was on a coded tele-type machine in the red-brick, two-storey building that housed the intelligence unit at army headquarters, Lisburn. It was of sufficient immediate importance for Colonel George Frost to be called from his breakfast. Cursing about amateurs and lack of consultation he set up an urgent and high-level conference. He summoned his own men, the 39 Brigade duty operations officer, Police Special Branch, and the army officer commanding the unit that controlled the Ardoyne. The meeting was called for nine, and the unit officer was given no information as to why he was wanted at HQ, only told that on no account were any of last night’s suspects to be released. Davidson had somewhat shortened Harry’s message. Believing that an arrest was imminent now, he too had decided that the report of the recognition should be suppressed and should go no further. A million-to-one chance. It could happen again. Could be forgotten. Only cause a flap if it went official.
Whilst he was waiting for the meeting Frost reflected on the punched capitals in front of him, deciphered from the code by one of the duty typists. It was detailed enough to impress him, improbable enough to sound likely, and the sort of material you didn’t pick up sitting on your backside in the front lounge. When he had read his riot act at the General about being kept out of the picture he’d heard of the three weeks’ crash training course, and been told the arrival date. The source was now about to start his second week. Five lines of print that might be the breakthrough – and might not.
It was the sort of operation Frost detested. Ill-conceived and, worst of all, with the need for fast results dictated by political masters. If he’s working at this pace, involved enough to get his nose stuck into this sort of stuff, then Frost reckoned he had about another week to go. That would be par for the course on a job like this. That was always the way. Crash in hard while the trail is still warm. You might get something when you stir the bottom up. But not discreet. No, and not safe either.
Poor bastard.
Frost had seen the body of the Armoured Corps captain, found shot and hooded, dumped outside Belfast. He had been working with 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 pick-up.
‘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.
‘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 steel-cased 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.
Chapter 10
Seamus Duffryn, the latest of the intelligence officers of E Company, Third Battalion Provisional IRA, had made Sunday his main working day. It was the fourth weekend he’d been in the job, with a long list of predecessors in Long Ke
sh and the Crumlin Road prison. Duffryn was in work, a rarity in the movement, holding down employment as mate to a lorry driver. It took him out of town several days a week, sometimes right down to the border and occasionally into the Republic. Being out of circulation he reckoned would extend his chances of remaining undetected longer than the average of nine weeks that most company-level officers lasted. He encouraged those with information for him to sift through to leave it at his house during the week where his mother would put it in a plastic laundry bag under the grate of the made-up but unlit front-room fire. He kept the meagre files he had pieced together out in the coal shed. There was a fair chance if the military came and he was out that they would stop short of scattering the old lady’s fuel to the four winds in an off-the-cuff search.
On Sunday afternoons his mother sat at the back of the house with her 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 hotch-potch, and at this level the first real sorting of the relevant and irrelevant took 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 some importance drove down the company’s section of the Falls, the times that patrols came out of the barracks. Then there was 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 on 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.
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