Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  ‘My name’s Frost. Army intelligence in Lisburn. It’s a hell of an hour but something has come up which you should be aware of. This is not a secure line, but I’ll tell you what I can. We were passed some information from a section of yours about a girl. That was yesterday morning. She was brought in yesterday afternoon and questioned twice. You know what about. She knew the man we want, identified the picture, and said he’d stayed in her house within the last month. Found her about three-quarters of an hour ago hanging in her cell. Very dead. That’s all I have. But I wouldn’t care to be in your man’s shoes when the opposition find out about all this. Thought you ought to know. Sounds a bit of a cock-up to me. Cheers.’

  The Permanent Under-Secretary had thanked him for the call and rung off.

  Frost locked away his directory and pocketed the keys as Fairclough came in a fraction behind his knock.

  ‘Let’s have it, Arthur.’

  ‘We got it out of her that the man stayed at her old man’s place. She said they weren’t given his name, and that she never knew his name. I think she was levelling with us. We left her for a couple of hours and when they came to get her out to bring her back up she’d strung herself up with her stockings. One thing should be straight, sir. She was treated quite correctly. She wasn’t touched, and there was a policewoman present the whole time.’

  ‘Right. Put it all down on paper, and soon. I want our version on this out fast. The information from London, on which we pulled her in. It seems to have stood up? It was real stuff ?’

  ‘No doubt about that. She’d been with him, all right. No doubt.’

  Fairclough went out of the colonel’s office to type his report. Frost went back on the phone to army public relations, another bedside telephone waking the early morning sleeper-in. He suggested that when the press enquiries started coming the men on the information desk should treat this very much as a police matter involving a girl picked up by the army for routine interrogation. He then called the head of Special Branch, first at his home where he was told he was already at Knock Road headquarters, and then at his office there. His own people had briefed him. With the slight diplomacy that he could command he made the same suggestion about press desk treatment as he had made to his own people.

  ‘You want our people to take the can?’ said the policeman.

  ‘Inevitable, isn’t it? Your police station, your interrogation. Don’t see how we can end up with it.’

  ‘Your bloody info set the thing up.’

  ‘And good stuff it was too. There should be an enquiry at that damned station as to how it happened.’

  ‘The Chief Constable in his wisdom had made that point. I think we should meet for a talk about the next move, if there is one, or this trail will be dead in no time.’

  ‘I’ll call you back,’ said Frost, and rang off.

  Half-cock operation and the poor sod, whatever his name is, puts it right under our noses. And we drop it. Poor devil. And on top of that we let the girl kill herself, which puts a noose round his neck and a bag over his head. We’ve done him well today. Desertion’s the least he’s justified in doing.

  Harry heard about the girl, with the rest of the province, on the early morning radio news bulletin. It was second story after the European Economic Community all-night talks. The item was brief and without explanation.

  ‘In Belfast a girl has died after being taken to a police station in the Falls Road area. She was found early this morning hanging in her cell and was dead by the time she reached hospital. Police named her as nineteen-year-old Theresa McCorrigan from Ballymurphy. An investigation is being carried out to find what happened. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association have issued a statement calling for a full and independent enquiry into the death. They allege two armoured cars and troops were used yesterday afternoon to arrest the dead girl from her home.’

  Harry switched off the radio. He felt numb. No more playing about. No more kindergarten. These were the powers of the forces at work. A simple, ordinary, decent girl. Wants to get screwed by a bloke who cannot make it. Tells the girls in the loo about it, bit of a giggle, have a laugh together. Thirty hours later she’s so terrified that she puts something round her neck and steps off. Throttled. A bit randy, and talks too much . . . and now she’s dead. Harry remembered her. Across the far side of the club: in with the toughies and the big kids near the bar. Rolling a bit. Too much gin, and not enough chips to soak it up.

  He was the cause of the fear. He was responsible for the agony of the girl, before she slung whatever it was underneath her chin, and swung off into the void. Had she even been questioned by then, he wondered? Had she been able to say anything? Or was it all a lot of boasting?

  They all listen to those bulletins, Harry reflected, every last one of them, catching up on the night’s disasters, funding themselves with conversation for the day. Josephine would be no different. She would hear it, making her face up, having her breakfast, washing her smalls, but the transistor would be somewhere in her home. She’d hear it, and she’d put it together. Was she that fast, that clever? Had to be, it was there on a plate, and what then?

  Harry would have to wait to find out. She wasn’t doing tea this week, had a different shift at work. He’d have to wait till the weekend and their next date. Have to sit it out, Harry boy, and sweat it out, and see how bright she is, and if she is bright what’s she going to do about it.

  He went down the staircase, across the hall, and out to the street. He heard Mrs Duncan calling after him about his breakfast, and ignored her as he kept on going up the pavement and turned left towards Andersonstown. It took him a good hundred yards to swallow the emotion and regain control. As he walked he set out the position, making in his mind a chess-board of his job. Pawns, that’s where she rated, and pawns were expendable. Bishops and knights hurt more but they could also be lost. He and the man he was hunting were the queens of his game. The superstars, and second only to the kings, who were sacred and inviolate. If, as the queens were moved round the board, the pawns toppled over, then that was the nature of the game he and the man played. There was no time to lament the loss of pawns.

  The old theme song. It had been different in Aden. There had been no involvement there. Nothing personal. A clear enemy, all that was on the board was black or white but definite. Now all the squares were grey, and the figures too. Even the two queens. There would be a problem for an outsider in picking one set of pieces from another.

  Chapter 11

  Within four hours of the first broadcast of Theresa’s death a soldier had been killed and heavy rioting had broken out in the Ballymurphy, Whiterock, Turf Lodge and New Barnsley estates.

  The soldier had died when he was hit by a burst of shots fired at close range from a Thompson sub-machine-gun. He was last man in a patrol in Ballymurphy, and the gunman was apparently operating from the top floor of an empty council house. Some of the photographers who had gathered outside Theresa’s house to get a picture of her parents and collect a holiday snapshot of the girl herself ran in the direction of the shooting. The fleetest managed a few hurried frames as the soldiers lifted the body of their colleague into the back of a Saracen.

  In the Falls and Springfield Roads, groups of youths had hijacked buses, driven them into the middle of the street, and set fire to them. After that the army moved in. Armoured cars and Land-Rovers were pelted with milk bottles and rocks by the crowds who had gathered on the pavements. The army responded by driving at them, firing volleys of rubber bullets from mountings beside the driver. At one building site a barricade of rocks and oil drums had been assembled by the time the Saracens arrived. They’d crashed into the flimsy wall, fracturing it and scattering the drums crazily across the street, when a lone youth, at the controls of a brilliant-yellow excavator-digger machine, charged back defiantly. The troops, who had been advancing behind the cover of the armoured cars, fell back as the mechanical dinosaur accelerated down a slight hill towards the toad-like armoured cars. A few
feet from the impact the youth jumped clear, leaving his runaway digger to collide head on with the Saracens. The armoured cars, acting in strange concert for things so large, edged it against a wall, where it spent its force revving in demented futility.

  The stoning went on a long time. Unit commanders made it clear in their situation reports to Brigade headquarters at Lisburn that they detected a genuine anger among people. Those who over the last months had shown disinclination to abuse and pelt the military were back with a vengeance. There were rumours, they said, sweeping the Catholic areas, that the girl who had killed herself in the police station had been tortured to a degree that she could stand no more, and that she had then killed herself. Provisional sympathizers were on the move off the main roads where the army patrolled, and behind the crowds, giving instructions.

  Theresa’s parents were on lunchtime television, maintaining that their daughter had never belonged to any Republican organization. They described graphically how she had been taken from the lunch table the previous day. The army press desk received scores of calls, and stalled by saying this was a police matter, that the army was not involved, and pointing out that the girl had died in a police station. At police headquarters the harassed man on the receiving end told reporters that an investigation was still going on, and that the officers who were carrying out that investigation had not called back yet.

  Both at army headquarters and amongst the Secretariat that administered the Secretary of State’s office at Stormont Castle there was a realization that something rather better by way of explanation was going to have to come out before the day was over.

  Faced with crises the Prime Minister had a well-tried formula to fall back upon. Identify the problem. Focus all attention on it. Solve it, and then leave it alone. When he finally concentrated on any one subject his aides found he had enormous capacity to wrestle with whatever political abscess was causing the pain. But they also found that once he thought the situation dealt with then his interest faded as fast as it had risen. Northern Ireland, comparatively quiet for months, was now on the shelved list. It teetered close to what a politician had once called the ‘acceptable level of violence’. So the transcripts of the lunchtime news bulletins that were brought to him he resented as an intrusion. Violence back again. Streets closed. Casualties. The distasteful death of a young girl in the police cell. It was his habit to be direct.

  From the back room office overlooking the Downing Street gardens, insipid in the November light, too many leaves left around, he called the army commander in Lisburn. Without any interruption he listened to a rundown of the morning’s events, and made no comment either when the General launched into the background of the girl’s arrest. He was told for the first time of the intelligence reports that had been fed in from London, of her questioning, what little she had admitted to knowing, and then of the finding of the body.

  ‘Is this the first we’ve had from our chap?’

  ‘First that I’ve heard of. Certainly we’ve received nothing else we could act on.’

  ‘And it was good stuff, accurate. Something we hadn’t had before, right?’

  ‘The information was factual. It didn’t take us as far as we’d hoped it might at first. I understand, though, that this is the first positive line we’ve had on the fellow we’re looking for.’

  ‘Seems we set a bit of a trap, and it’s rather missed its target. We’ll have to decide whether our chap’s had as much out of the pot as he’s going to get. Problem is at what stage to get him out, whether we’ve compromised him already.’ He was enjoying this, just like the way it was in the war. SOE and all that. The general cut across the line.

  ‘It’s not so easy, Prime Minister. It’s faintly ridiculous, but I’m told his controllers don’t know where he is, don’t even know where to get in touch with him. You appreciate that this chap is not being controlled from here. Your instructions were interpreted very strictly on this point. It’s London’s responsibility. He calls in, they don’t call him. But my advice would be that he stays. For the moment, at least. When you begin this sort of thing you stick with it. There’s no out, in, midstream, because it’s a bit too hot. He’ll have to finish it, or dry up completely.’

  The Prime Minister came back, ‘We’ve no reason to believe yet that he’s been compromised? But it would be difficult, very difficult, if he were to be identified in this context.’

  ‘Those were the sorts of questions I assume had been answered before the instruction was given to launch this operation, Prime Minister.’

  The sarcasm bit down the line.

  The Prime Minister banged the phone down, then immediately flipped the console button on his desk and asked abruptly for the Secretary of State in Stormont Castle. After forty-one years in politics he could see the storm clouds gathering long before they were upon him. He knew the time had come to pull in some sail, and close down the hatches. The combination of an agent working to the Prime Minister’s orders and a teenage girl hanging herself in a cell were better ingredients than most for a political scandal of major proportions. He must start to plan his defensive lines if the worst should happen and the chap they’d sent over there should be discovered. That bloody General, not much time to run over there and his next appointment already confirmed. Entrenched, which was why he was so free with the advice. But all the same, in spite of his eminence, it must have hurt him to admit that this was the best information they’d had so far . . . and for all that they’d loused it up.

  ‘He won’t have liked it. One bright thing today,’ and then he turned his attention to the search for a fail-safe system. Call the Under-Secretary, the man in charge of this incredible non-communication set-up. In the event of catastrophe no statement till the civil servant had cleared it, and get that away to Lisburn. No acknowledgement for the agent, of course, if all goes wrong . . . deny all knowledge of the mission.

  The Secretary of State was on the line. The Prime Minister wasted no time on pleasantries.

  ‘I’ve been hearing about the troubles today, and the girl. Difficult situation. I thought we were weak at lunchtime, too defensive. We need to be more positive. I’ve a suggestion to make. It’s only a suggestion, mind you, and you should bounce it off your security people and see how they react. But I think you should say something like this – get a note of it and I’ll read over what I’ve drafted. Along these lines, now. That the girl was a known associate of the man we are hunting in connection with the killing of Danby. That she was brought in quite correctly for questioning, and had been spoken to briefly before being left in the cells for the night. You must emphasize that she was not touched. Leak it that you’re prepared to offer an independent post-mortem from one of the hospitals, if you think that’ll help. But my thought is to bring it back to Danby. By the by, his memorial service is at St Paul’s this week. You’ll be there, I hope. It’ll all be in the public gaze again. We’ll be all right if we play a bit bold, and attack. Worst thing we can do is to get on the defensive.’

  The linking of the killing of the British Cabinet Minister with the death of the teenager in the Falls Road police station was splashed across the last edition of the Belfast Telegraph, and extensively reported on later television and radio news bulletins. The few men in the city who knew of Harry’s existence were uncertain what effect the disclosure would have on the agent’s work and safety. They acknowledged an immediate lifting of the pressure on their public relations set-up for more information concerning the circumstances of the death.

  Harry was not the only man in the city with pawns on the chequerboard.

  The scrap merchant would take Harry on to his payroll. He’d obviously liked the look of him. He said he had a brother at sea, and asked Harry if he could start there and then. There was not a word about National Insurance cards or stamps, and twenty pounds a week was offered as pay. Harry was told he’d need to spend a month or so in the yard to see the way the place was run. There was to be expansion, more lorries. When they ca
me, if it all worked out, there would be a driving job, and more money.

  On his first morning Harry prowled round the mountains of burned and rusted cars. These were the stock-in-trade of the scrapman, heap upon heap of rough, angled metal.

  Harry said to the neat dapper little man who was his new boss, ‘Is this what the business is? Just cars? You’ve enough of them.’

  ‘No problems with the supplies of that. You must have seen it, though you’ve been away. Terrible driving here. If you take the number of cars, they say, and work it out against a percentage of all the people that own them, and the number of accidents . . . then it’s worse than anywhere else in the whole of England or Ireland. Maniacs they are here. The boyos down the road do the rest. We’ll have a dozen wrecks in tomorrow morning. There’ll be a double-decker, as well, like as not, but they’re bastards to cut up.’

  He smiled. Small, chirpy, long silk scarf round his neck, choker style, hat flat on his head. They’re all the same, thought Harry, likeable rogues.

  The scrap merchant went on, ‘It’s an ill wind. Scrapmen, builders, glaziers . . . we’re all minting it. Shouldn’t say so, but that’s how it is. The military dump the cars that are burned out, up there on the open ground. We send a truck up and pull them down here. Not formal, you know. Just an understanding. They want them off the street and know if they put them there I’ll shift them. We’ll have a few more today, and all.’

  He looked up at Harry, with the brightness evacuating his eyes. ‘People are powerful angry about this girl. You’ll find that. They get killed in hundreds here. Most of the time it doesn’t mean a damn, however big the procession. But this girl has got them steamed again.’