Harry said, ‘It’s a terrible thing pulling a girl like that out of her house.’
‘Poor wee thing. She must have been awful scared of something to want to do that to herself. Mother of Jesus rest her. Still, no politics in this yard, and no troubles. Those are the rules of the yard, Harry boy. No politics, and that way we get some work done.’
He walked round with Harry and introduced him to the other men in the yard, six of them, and Harry shook hands formally. They greeted him with reserve, but without hostility. When his escort went back to the office to look to the papers Harry was free to browse. At one stage as he meandered amongst the cars he was within eight feet of a Russian-made rocket launcher. It was the RPG7 variety, complete with two missiles and wrapped in sacking and cellophane, locked into the boot of a car. There were always people coming into the yard, and the cover was good. Access was easy at night. The launcher, sealed against the wet, had been placed there after the Provisional unit to whom it had been issued had found it inaccurate and unreliable. It had been abandoned until they could come across a more up-to-date manual of operation, preferably not written in Russian or Arabic.
As the little man said, no politics, no troubles. That first day Harry abided faithfully by it, taking his cue from the other men in the yard. Slowly does it here. The high column of black smoke from a blazing Ulster bus was ignored.
The rest of the first week that Harry was there was quite uneventful. He was accepted to a limited degree as far as small talk went, and nothing more. His few attempts to broaden the conversation were gently ignored and not pressed on his part. The death of Theresa and the start of the job probably meant, thought Harry, the start of the next phase. No immediate pointers for him to follow, only the long-term penetration remaining. Three weeks. What idiot said it could be done in three weeks? Three months if he was lucky. And it relaxed him. Going up the road each day and having the work to occupy his mind would ease him. Better than sitting in that bloody guest house. Claustrophobia.
And each day he was watched by Seamus Duffryn’s volunteers from Delrosa to the yard, and back again.
Downs was in the kitchen swilling his face in the sink, Monday-morning wash, when his wife came in white-faced, shutting the door behind her on the noise of the playing children.
‘It’s just been on the radio, about you. About a girl. The girl who killed herself.’
‘What do you mean? What about me?’
‘This girl from the Murph, it says she was linked with the man that did the London killing.’
‘It didn’t actually mention me?’
‘Said you was linked. Connected.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Theresa something. I didn’t catch it.’
‘Well, I don’t know her.’
‘It said she was being questioned about him because she was a known associate. That was another word they used – “associate”. God rest her, poor kid. She was just a child.’
‘Well, I don’t know her, and that’s the truth.’
‘That’s what they’re saying on the radio . . . loud and clear . . . where any bloody ape can hear it.’
‘Well, it’s all balls, bullshit.’
‘When you’re shouting, you’re always lying. Who was she? What was she to do with it?’
‘I don’t know her. I tell you, I just don’t know her.’
‘Billy, I’m not daft. You were in town a long time before you came back here. I haven’t asked you where you were, before you came home. Who is she?’
‘What did you say her name was?’
‘Don’t play the fool with me. You heard the first time.’
‘If it’s Ballymurphy, I stayed there one night. I came in darkness while the family was round the box. There was a girl there. Just a kid who brought me some food in the room. I was away by five-thirty.’
‘Just brought some food, did she?’
‘Course, she did . . . don’t bloody question me . . . like the fucking Branch.’
‘Just on the strength of that, brought her in and questioned her, just because she brought you some grub? Didn’t get her father in – he’s giving interviews. Just took her in.’
‘Leave it,’ he snapped at her. He wanted out. Escape.
‘Just tell me who the little bitch was and what she meant to you.’
‘She’s just a child a minute ago, now she’s a little bitch. She was nothing. Nothing. Must have blabbed her mouth off. Squealed, the little cow.’
‘How did she know who you were?’
She shouted the last question at him. She would have taken it back once the words were out and had crumpled against him. The noise and aggression slewed out of him. Beseeching. Pleading. Don’t make me answer. The found-out child and the hollow victory.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Just forget it.’
She turned away, back towards the door into the living room where the children were fighting, and one was hungry, and another crying.
‘I’ll tell you what happened . . .’ She shook her head, but he went on, ‘This is once and for all, never ask again. If I’d wanted her I couldn’t have done anything about it. I was so screwed up. I was sort of cold, frozen, shivering. I couldn’t do anything for her. She asked if it was me in London. I hit her. Across the face. She went back to her room. I’ve only seen her once since then. She was at the dance at the club on Saturday night. I suppose she saw me.’
He walked across to his wife and put his arms round her. The children still cried and the pitch was growing. He pulled her head against his shoulder. There was no response, but she was pliant against him, totally passive.
Downs went on, ‘That’s when she must have talked. Going home after the dance. Must have said that she knew the man that had been in London. Then some rat, some bastard, squealed. A fucking spy, a tout. Right there at one of our dances, some bastard who’ll shop you. That’s what must have happened.’
‘Forget it. We have to forget all these things. There’s nothing left otherwise.’
He held her for a long time in the darkened kitchen, lit by the inadequate bulb hanging without a shade from the wire flex. At first she wept silently and without dramatic effect, keeping her grief private, not using it as a weapon to cudgel him with. She controlled herself, and clung to him. Nothing would be different, nothing in his way of life would change.
‘You’ll go back?’
‘When they want me.’
‘You could end it all now. You’ve done your share.’
‘There’s no way that could happen.’
He needed her now, to recharge him. When the dose was enough he would go back into his own vicious, lonely world. Of which she was no part.
She was one of the crowd. The crowd of women who had so little influence over their men that it was pointless, indecent, to beg them to stay off the streets. She was still luckier than most. Her man was still with her. The bus that came each Thursday lunchtime to the top end of Ypres Avenue was well enough known. It took the women to Long Kesh to talk to their men for half an hour, across a table.
That night Billy Downs opened his door to a treble knock. He was given an envelope by a youth and saw him scurry away into the darkness. His wife stayed in the kitchen, as she too had recognized the call sign of the fist against the door. She heard him switch the hall light on, pause a few moments and then the sound of tearing paper, over and over again.
He went into the front room and threw the half-inch squares of paper that had made up the single sheet of writing into the fire. The message was from Brigade. It was short and to the point. For the moment he was to stay at home. It was believed that the girl had hanged herself before identifying him.
Davidson had had a bad week. He admitted it to the young man who was drafted in to share the office with him. The fiasco of the girl had started it off. The Permanent Under-Secretary had been on as well, laying the smokescreen that would be used if the operation went aground. Davidson had tried to counter-attack with compla
ints about the original lodgings and then the foul-up over the girl, but had been rejected out of hand. There was silence from Harry himself for six days after his first call. Davidson and the aide sat in the office reading papers, making coffee, devouring takeaway fish and chips, takeaway Indian, takeaway Chinese. The number that had been given to Harry was kept permanently free from all other calls.
When he did call, on the Saturday afternoon, the effect was electric. Davidson started up from his easy chair, pitching it sideways, tipping a coffee beaker off his desk as he lunged for the telephone. Papers drifted to the floor.
‘Hello, is that four-seven-zero-four-six-eight-one?’
‘Harry?’
‘How are the family?’
‘Very well. They liked the postcards, I’m told.’
Davidson was on his knees, his head level with the drawer where the recording apparatus was kept. He pulled up the lead and plugged it into the telephone’s body. The cassette was rolling.
‘Anything for us?’
‘Nothing, old chap. No, I’m just digging in a bit. I think it may go all quiet for a few days, so I’m settling into some sort of a routine.’
‘We’re worried about you in the wake of that bloody girl. We’re wondering whether we should pull you out.’
‘No way. Just getting acclimatized.’
‘I think we all feel at this end that you did very well last weekend. But we want some way to get in touch with you. This may suit you, but it’s ridiculous for us. Quite daft. We’re sitting here like a row of virgins waiting for you to call us up.’
‘It’s the way I’m happiest. I’ve been bitten, remember. On the first house. It’s going to be a touch trickier getting something further out of this, and this is the way I want it to be. Bit silly, you might say, but that’s the way it is.’
Davidson backed down and switched the subject.
‘Are they sniffing round you at all?’
‘I don’t think so. No particular sign of it yet, but I don’t know. More of a problem is that I don’t see where the next break is going to come from – what direction. I was very lucky last time, and look where the thing got us. It can’t be on a plate like that again.’
‘You’re not following anything particular at the moment, then?’
‘No, just entrenching. Getting ready for the siege.’
‘Perhaps it’s time you should come out. Like this weekend. I don’t want you hanging about wasting time. Look, Harry, we know it’s bloody difficult in there, but you’ve given the military and security people a lead that they ought to be able to do something about . . . Come out now. Get yourself up to Aldergrove and get the hell out . . .’
The phone clicked dead in his hand, before the dialling tone purred back at him. Despairingly he flicked the receiver buttons. The call was over.
Bugger. Played it wrong. Unsettled him. Just when he needs lifting. Silly, bloody fool. Should have made it an order, not a suggestion, or not mentioned it at all. The military should be following this now. The girl must have left a trail a mile wide.
Davidson could see through his uncurtained window that it was now dark outside. He thought of Harry walking back up the Falls to his digs. Past the shadows and the wreckage and the crowds and the troops, the legacy of the spluttering week-long street fighting he had been the spark to. Keep your head down, Harry boy.
Chapter 12
It was acknowledged at the highest levels of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade command that the campaign was at a crucial stage, the impetus of the struggle consistently harder to maintain. The leadership detected a weariness among the people on whom they relied so greatly for the success of their attacks. But the differences between the people at street level and their protectors, as the Provisionals saw themselves, were growing. Money was harder to collect for the families of those imprisoned, doors generally left unlocked for the gunman or blast bombers to escape through were now bolted, and the confidential phones to police headquarters where the informers left their anonymous messages were kept busy with tip-offs that could only come from the Catholic heartland.
As the pressure grew to a near intolerable degree on the shoulders of the Provisionals’ leadership so it was understood that the days of gallantry and chivalry were gone, too. Once a British officer had stood in the turret of his armoured car, stiffly upright with his right arm in the salute position as the coffin of an IRA man was carried past him, draped in the tricolour. Once British officers after an evening’s celebration and in their slacks and sports jackets found they had wandered into the Bogside, were captured and returned safely to their embarrassed seniors.
That was all over now. As the IRA fought back against the growing strength and experience of the security forces arrayed against them, so the attacks became more vicious and more calculated to shock.
It was the Brigade commander who made the reluctant decision to call Billy Downs out from the Ardoyne and from inactivity. It was accepted that he was of greatest value when used sparingly, but within seventy-two hours of the earlier instruction he was given new orders.
The subject of the Brigade’s death sentence was an RUC inspector. A priority was put on his death, and it was reckoned important enough to risk the exposure of one of the movement’s top cards.
The policeman they wanted shot was Howard Rennie, CID, transferred to Special Branch. Their dossier reported him as coming from the hills of Country Antrim, near the coast. He had been unknown in Belfast till recently when word had begun to seep into the information system from the holding centres and prisons about a detective with sufficient ability as an interrogator that he was directly responsible for the failure of several suspects to keep their mouths shut.
It had taken a long time once they’d started for the Brigade intelligence section to identify Rennie, locate his headquarters at the holding centre in Castlereagh barracks, and put a plan into operation against him. The final decision to eliminate him was taken after a company intelligence officer reported on the list of police cars’ number plates and models that had left the police station after the death of the girl in her cell. One was similar in model and colour to that driven by the detective. His association with the events of that night was sufficient to put him several places up the list of priorities, and would win the movement nothing but support when he was killed.
Billy Downs was given a dossier to read but not to keep. The caller who came to his house late, after the wife and the children had gone upstairs, was to bring it away with him when Downs had done his reading. His wife came down the stairs to see who the visitor was, paled at the sight of the long-haired youth in jeans and heavy quilted anorak who returned her stare and then turned away without speaking to her. She went into the kitchen, aware that the front room was no place for her. When she moved upstairs again she could hear the voices, talking hurriedly, hushed and with urgency.
Downs was shown a picture of Rennie. Taken five years ago, and one of a group. It had been gained from the copious files of a photographer in the small town where Rennie had then been stationed. It was a fair bet they’d find such a picture when they went into the photographer’s shop with guns in their hands, and the competence of the filing system saw them through. The picture was of a group of policemen all celebrating their promotion to sergeant. The picture would not help Downs that much, as it suffered seriously in the enlargement, but it gave him an idea of the build, the hair and the shape of the face of the policeman that he had been ordered to kill. The car the detective would be using was a Triumph 2000 and bottle-green, but the file on Rennie carried a list of a minimum of eight number plates that he might use. He read that Rennie lived in a small, detached house in Dunmurry, down a cul-de-sac. The house right at the bottom of the ‘U’ of the close. Difficult for surveillance and for ambush. The dossier said he used a door direct into the garage. Wife opened the garage doors from the inside and he drove straight out in the mornings. They would be open when Rennie came home. The policeman would be armed.
The problems of the ambush were made clear to him.
‘It’ll not be easy to get the whore. None of them is easy. They often go together – lift each other to work. They’ll be using different routes and all. They’ve guns, too. One of them would get a shot in if you try it then. They know how to use them. Rennie’s a trained shot. And clever – won’t be easy to nail the bastard. No chance of sitting down his road: all those women flappin’ their curtains from not enough to do, they’d see you and be on the phone straight off. And you don’t have time to set it up, next week, next month, when you like. They want it, and fast. Brigade’s order. It’s a special one, and they want you for it.’
His unpolished ankle-length boots were beside the chair. Jeans crumpled and not washed nor ironed since he came home. Shirt was off-white and dirty, collar frayed. The fire was small now, needing help to stay alive. He had put the light out when the courier had gone, so that he could concentrate the better on the policeman, Rennie, that they had put him against. He had memorized much of the detail of the file and now he savoured the problem they had set him, seeking out a plan of action. Like a mathematician attempting the answer to a complex formula, he stayed in the chair thinking on the method and the manner by which Rennie would be assassinated. He was surprised to have been called out, but the implication was clear. This was a vital and important operation, he was a vital and important operator.
His wife stayed upstairs, aware that this was no time for her to go down to the front room and try to break the spell her husband was weaving for himself as his mind took up attack tactics and the weapons he would use.
She drifted into an uneasy sleep that night, tossing through an immediate nightmare. She saw her man cut down by a burst of bullets, caricatures of grotesque soldiers standing over him. Life throbbing away in the gutter. Feet pushing and manœuvring him. When she reached across to see if he had come upstairs she found only the emptiness of the sheets beside her. Back in her half-sleep she witnessed over and over again the firing of those perpetual rifles, and the agony and throes of her man. And then exhaustion and fear took her beyond the stage of the dreams and left her in deep sleep till the morning.
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