Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  That was how he found her when he came upstairs with a plan maturing well in his mind. He was impressing himself with the cleverness of what he would do. Excited and pleased with his solution to a technical problem.

  He lay on his back, elbows outstretched on the pillow, his hands under his neck, going back over his plan, testing each point in it for flaws. He was tired but elated enough to find none as he checked over each aspect of the killing, each aspect bar the final one – the killing itself. He shut that out of his mind. The actuality of the killing, the pulling and squeezing of the trigger.

  He seldom tried to work out the values of the killings he performed to the movement that he served. Tasks and projects set for him by his superiors. Others determined the morality. Others had the hatred. Others turned his work into victories. He did as he was told, expertise his trade mark. The soldier in his army.

  There were some in the movement, men that he had met or, in other cases, heard of, who were said to relish the physical side of the killing. There were stories that they tortured the demented minds of their victims after the sentence of the kangaroo court. Demonstrate the firearm. Go right up to the moment of shooting and then fire with an empty gun. There were beatings-up, knifings and cigarette burnings. That was no part of Billy Downs. His killing was different. Clever. Organized. Against major targets. His feelings were known and respected by the top men. The ritual was for others. He belonged in the field. His mind reverted to the reconstruction and progress of the murder of Rennie, his plans racing far ahead. It was close to dawn before he slept.

  In a room above a chip shop in Monaghan town, just over the border into the Republic, the Army Council met for the first time in a fortnight. Eight men round a table. Businesslike, with their pencils and notebooks round them. There was much talk of what they had seen on the earlier television news bulletins, of the film taken on the steps of St Paul’s of the arrival of government ministers and Cabinet members to the memorial service for Henry Danby.

  ‘Hardly what you’d call security. Sod-all protection.’

  ‘They all had ’tecs with them, but by the look of it only one each. Not the big man, though. He had a couple. Little film stars, you get to know them.’

  ‘Right open, if we wanted to put a man in again.’

  ‘Wide open. What those bloody papermen call a wall of steel. Nothing.’

  ‘It would only be a repetition. Took a lot of planning last time. Manpower. What do we achieve? There was good reason for that bastard Danby, but another man, what for?’

  ‘It did a fair bit for us when we got Danby. Keeping our man on the loose, that’s not done us bad.’

  ‘There was no sympathy for Danby. There’s no-one else we can get who is in that crowd where we would get the same reaction. The bastard was hated. Even the Prods loathed him.’

  ‘In London there’s no way they can guard the politicos, no way at all. They have to be out and be seen to be about. They can’t lock themselves away. You can do that from the White House, but not from Downing Street.’

  ‘Let’s have some talk about what we’d get from hitting them again in London.’ It was the Chief of Staff who spoke, terminating the knockabout round the table.

  He made only rare incursions into the talk, preferring to let it ripple round him while he weighed the ideas before coming down in support of any one in particular. He was a hard man with few feelings that did not involve the end product. Like some cost-effectiveness expert or a time-and-motion superman, he demanded value for effort. His training in military tactics had been thorough, and he had risen to corporal in the parachute regiment of the British army. He was in his mid-thirties now and had seen active service in Aden and Borneo. He’d bought himself out at the start of the troubles and set up briefly as a painter and decorator, before going underground. When he had been voted into the number one position in the Provisionals by his colleagues it was because they knew they could guarantee he would pursue a tough, ruthless campaign. Those who believed in the continuation of the war of attrition on British public opinion had felt threatened by those they thought might compromise. The new commander was their safeguard. He was no strategist, but had learned enough of tactics on the streets of the Lower Falls where he came from. He had sanctioned the killing of Danby, and was well pleased with the dividends.

  The quartermaster took it up. ‘It’s the trouble with all spectaculars. You launch them, and they succeed, and where do you go from there? Only upwards.’

  The older man in the group, a veteran of ’56, who lived now in Cork, said, ‘It stirs the pot well and truly. How many bombs, how many “another soldier tonight” add up to a British Cabinet Minister?’

  The quartermaster across the table was not impressed. ‘But what’s the reaction? If we did it again, they’d tear the bloody place apart. We’d not survive it. They’d be all over us. Down here as much as in the North.’

  ‘That’s what we have to weigh. What would happen to the whole structure? They’d go mad, knock bloody shit out of us.’ The speaker was from Derry. Young, from the Creggan estate. Interned once and then released in an amnesty to mark the arrival of a new Secretary of State. He had been in the Republic’s prisons as well, and now lived on the run as much in Country Donegal as in the maze of streets in the Creggan housing estate. ‘Our need at this moment is not to go killing Cabinet Ministers from Westminster, but winning back what we lost at Motorman when the army came into Bogside and Creggan. We have to play on the tiredness of those people across the water. There’s no stomach there for this war. They’re soft there, no guts. They’ll get weary of hearing another soldier, another policeman, another bomb, another tout. It’s the repetition that hurts them. Not another big killing. All that does is get them going. It affronts their bloody dignity. Unites them against us. We have to bore them.

  ‘The bigger man you get the better.’ It was a Belfast man. He was of the new school, and had come a long way since Long Kesh opened. He had pitiless eyes, wide apart above his ferret nose, and a thin, bloodless mouth. He chain-smoked, lighting cigarettes one after another from the butt of the one he was discarding. ‘The big man himself wouldn’t hurt. They never believe we mean it over there. Somehow the fucking Micks won’t actually get round to it, they say. Get the old bugger, himself, that would sort them.’

  That quietened it. Then the Chief of Staff chipped in, cutting through the indecision of the meeting as he brought it to heel and away from the abstract.

  ‘We’ll think about it. It has attractions. Big attractions. Total war, that’s what it would mean. Davie and Sean, you’ll work for a bit on it. Have something for us in a fortnight with something concrete. I don’t want it done hasty . . . something in a bit of detail. Right?’

  They moved on to other business.

  The process of arrests went on with seeming inevitability, with frequent reunions in the Crumlin and Long Kesh. The Provisionals’ intelligence officer, who should have seen the report of that conversation between the army Brigadier and the policeman overheard at their hotel lunch, was taken into custody before the message reached him. When there was an arrest those still in the field shifted round their weapons, explosives, equipment and files, lest their former colleague should crack under interrogation and reveal the hiding places.

  That message, closely written on two sheets of notepaper, remained in a safe house in the communication chain while the Third Battalion worked round to an appointment for the vacant position. The clogging in the system lasted more than a week, and when the new man came to sort through the backlog he had a table covered with reports and documents to wade through. He was into his second day before he got to the paper written by the waiter.

  He was sharp enough to sense immediately the importance of what was in front of him. He read it carefully.

  The man with the thin moustache looked like an army man, and from the kitchens I could see the big Ford out in the car park with the uniformed escort sitting there in the front. The other one was talkin
g when the music stopped. He was a policeman, I think. That’s when I heard him say, ‘Special operator on the ground without telling.’ He must have realized I was standing there, and he just stopped and didn’t say anything else until I was right away from him. He looked very bothered . . .

  That was the guts of the message. The intelligence officer had read it once, gone slightly beyond and then rapidly coursed his eyes back over it. He could imagine the situation. Military and police, not taken in on the act, and feeding their bloody faces, weeping on each other’s shoulders, stuffing the food in far away from the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ bit. It was the sort of place you’d expect to hear a major indiscretion uttered, when they couldn’t keep their big mouths shut. That was why the waiter had been introduced onto the staff of the hotel.

  Undercover men working for the army or D16 were the particular dislike of the Provisionals. They believed there was a much greater secret intelligence and surveillance operation against them than in fact existed. Their traditional hatred was for the plain-clothes army squads who cruised at night round the backstreets of the ghettos in unmarked cars, looking for the top men in the movement. But this had a more important ring about it to the intelligence officer than squaddies out in jeans and sweaters and armed. If a Brigadier and a top copper were not in on the act, and thought they ought to have been, it meant first it was top secret, and second that they considered it important enough for them to have been briefed. Something of critical value to those English swine, so sensitive that top-ranking men had been left out in the cold.

  Farther down the waiter’s report was a paragraph explaining that the tone of the exchange across the lunch table had been critical.

  The officer wrote a three-line covering note on a separate piece of paper, clipped it to the original report and sealed it in a plain brown envelope. A courier would take it that night to the next man up the chain, someone on the Brigade staff.

  Twenty-two hours later he met Seamus Duffryn for the first time. Duffryn had originally intended that his message should go by hand, but the combination of the new appointment and the nagging worry about this man, Harry McEvoy, had led to the direct meeting, risky as it was.

  They met in a pub in the heart of the broken-up and ravaged triangle of the Lower Falls. Taking their pints of beer with them, Duffryn led the other to a corner table. With their heads huddled together he spoke of the stranger that had come to the guest house farther up the Falls. Looking for work. Said he’d been away a long time. Had this strange accent that was noted by those when he first came, but which his latest reports said was not so pronounced. When Duffryn mentioned the accent, the Battalion officer looked at him intrigued, and the junior man explained the apparent lapses in speech. Duffryn said that his men who followed McEvoy and heard him talk in the pubs, said the oddness about the speech was something very much of the past. Ironed out, muttered Duffryn. He had come to the end of his patience on the matter and wanted a decision. Either the man should be cleared or there would have to be authorization for more surveillance with all its problems of manpower. Duffryn himself had personally tried to observe McEvoy by spending three successive evenings in the pub on the corner where it was reported that the stranger came to drink, but he’d stayed alone these evenings, and the man he wanted to see had not shown himself.

  ‘I’m not sure what it means,’ said the man from Battalion. ‘You never know about these things. It could mean he’s a man put in to infiltrate us. It could be nothing. It counts against the bugger that his accent is improving. Would do, wouldn’t it? With each day he spends here, it would improve. There’s something else we have that indicated a few days ago that they could have put an undercover man in. He’ll be a big bloody fish if it’s right. He’ll be a bloody whale if what we think about him is right.’

  He hesitated as to whether he should bring the young Duffryn further into the web of reports and information that was forming in his mind. He dismissed it. The golden rule of the movement was ‘need to know’. Duffryn needed to know no more than he already knew.

  ‘That’s enough. From now on – and this is important – and I want it bloody well obeyed to the letter – no more following this McEvoy. Let him ride on his own a bit. I don’t want the bugger flushed before we’re ready for him. We’ll just leave him alone for a bit, and if we have to we’ll move when it’s all nice and relaxed. I want it taken gently, very gently, you see? Just log him in and out of the guest house, and that’s the lot.’

  Harry had not been aware of the watchers before they were called off, and therefore had no idea that he had thrown off a tail when he had gone through the city centre shopping crowds to a telephone kiosk to call Davidson. On the Friday night when he had been in the city nearly three weeks he came down past the cemetery towards Broadway with his wage packet in his hip pocket, and the knowledge that there seemed to be no sign of suspicion towards him from the men he was working with. He had a hired car booked for Saturday for his date with Josephine.

  There was a Sinn Fein meeting that Friday night up on the junction of the Falls, and after he’d had his tea Harry wandered up to listen to the speeches. There were some familiar faces on the lorry that was being used as a speaker’s platform. The oratory was simple and effective and the message brutally clear. Amongst the committed there would be no easing in the struggle, the war would go on till the British were gone. The crimes of the British army, the Stormont administration and the Free State government were catalogued, but the crowd of three or four hundred seemed lukewarm to it all. They’d been listening to this stuff for five years or so now, Harry reflected. He’d be a bloody good orator to give them something new at this stage. The army stayed away and after hearing the first four speeches Harry left. He’d clapped with the rest, and cheered by consensus, but no-one spoke to him. He was just there, ignored. God, how do you get into this bloody mob? How does it all happen like Davidson said, in that magic three weeks? It’ll take months, till the face is known and the background and every other bloody thing.

  A long haul. He wouldn’t call Davidson this weekend. Nothing to say. Those buggers had sent him here, they could sit and stew for a bit and wonder what was going on. The trail of the man he sought was well chilled now. It would be very slow, and his own survival would take some thinking about. But there’d be no coming out, no trotting up to Aldergrove. One-way to Heathrow please, my nerve’s gone and so has that of my controller, thank you very much.

  No way. You stay in for the whole way, Harry boy.

  Chapter 13

  She was waiting at the lights at the junction of Grosvenor and the Falls when he pulled up in the hired Cortina. Tall in the brittle sunlight, her hair blown round her face, and shivering in the mock sheepskin coat over the sweaters and jeans he’d told her to wear.

  ‘Come on, get that door open. I’m frozen out here.’ A bit distant, perhaps too off-hand, but not the clamouring alarm bells Harry had steeled himself to face.

  He was laughing as he reached across the passenger seat and unlocked the nearside door, and pushed the handle across to open it. She came inside, a bundle of coat and cold air, stealing the warmth he had built up since he had collected the car.

  ‘All right then, sunshine?’ He leaned over to kiss her, but she turned her head away, presenting her cheek for what he hadn’t intended to be the brotherly peck they ended up with.

  ‘Enough of that. Where are we going?’ she said. She straightened her back in the seat, and began to fasten her seat belt.

  ‘You said you wanted some country. Somewhere we can stretch ourselves a bit, walk around. Where do you suggest?’

  ‘Let’s off to the Sperrins. About an hour down the Derry and Dungiven road. That’s wild country, real Ulster stock. You’ve seen the slogans on the Proddy walls before the troubles started, “We will not exchange the blue skies of Ulster for the grey mists of the Republic,” well, the blue skies are over the Sperrins.’

  ‘Well, if it’s OK for the Prods it’ll do for u
s second-class Micks.’

  ‘I was brought up down there. My Dad had a bit of land. Not much but enough for a living. It’s a hard living down there. It’s yourself and that’s all, to do the work. We cut peat down there and had some cows and sheep. Stupid bloody creatures. We were always losing the little buggers. There was no mains, no gas, no electricity, no water when I was born. He’s dead, now, the old man, and my Mam came to Belfast.’

  ‘Were you involved at all, with the politics? Was the old man?’

  ‘Not at all. Not a flicker. Most of the farmers round were Prods but that didn’t make much difference. The market was “non-sectarian”, as they’d say these days. Different schools, different dances. I couldn’t walk out with Prod boys when I lived at home. But that’s years back now. There was no politics down there, just hard work.’

  He drove slowly out of town, on to the M2 motorway which runs within minutes into the open countryside, leaving the city with its smoke and its gibbet-like cranes and its grey slate roofs away behind the Black Mountain that dominates the south of the city. It was the first time Harry had seen the fields and hedgerows, farms and cottages since he came in on the airport bus. The starkness of the contrast staggered him. It was near-impossible to believe that this was a country ravaged by what some called civil war. For a moment the impressions were tarnished by the rock-filled petrol drums outside a pub, but that was a flash of the eye, near-subliminal, and then was gone in favour of the hills and the green of well-grassed winter fields.

  Josephine slept in her seat, head back against the column dividing the front and rear doors, her seat belt like some pompous decoration strapped across her breasts. Harry let his eyes stray from the endless, empty road to her.