Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  The boys ran intricately between the towering regimented lines of the pine trunks, hurtling their way over the bending carpet of needles and cones in perpetual games of chase and hide and seek. Their voices were shrill, loud as if to fight off the cold attacking wind that heralded the real winter of the great plain east of Hanover. This was where Harry liked to bring them, to search for trout in the streams in high summer and spend weekends in a wooden chalet, to run round to keep warm in the early winter, and then, when the snow came, to bring their toboggans. Sometimes they would set up a fox that had hidden in the sparse, stunted undergrowth under the pine umbrella hoping to avoid detection, then when its nerve went and it bounded clear there would be the noisy, clumsy chase, the ground giving under their boots before the quarry made its escape. It would take them deep into the forest, and when the brown flash was well lost they would stop and ponder and think of the direction of the fire-break path where they had left their mother, Mary Brown.

  She had brought sandwiches full of sausage and a Thermos of tomato soup today, and they would have that later sitting at a wooden table in the picnic area beside the car park.

  From the wide path she could hear the distant noise of their voices, as she walked with a taller, older woman, her mother. A week after Harry had gone she had written to her home in the English midlands countryside. There the three-page letter had been recognized as a distress flare, a call for help. Arrangements had been made. Father could look after himself for a week, cook his own meals, get the garden into shape for the long winter lay-off.

  When the children were in bed the conversation often, and hardly accidentally, strayed to Harry’s abrupt departure, and now that they were again out of earshot it continued.

  ‘It’s just so difficult to understand,’ said Mary’s mother, ‘that no-one should be able to tell you anything about it. You’d have thought someone could have had the gumption, even the courtesy, to say something to you.’

  ‘There’s been nothing,’ said Mary, ‘not a word from anyone since they came and packed his case. Rummaged around in the wardrobe, right down the bottom where his old things are – half of them should have gone this week to the sergeants’ wives’ jumble sale – things he’d only wear if he was gardening or painting or cleaning out the cellar, or something like that. We’ve had two postcards from somewhere down the Gulf, and otherwise nothing.’

  The postcards had shown a camel corps contingent of the Sultan, and a gold-domed mosque. The messages had been brief and facetious. ‘Having a wonderful time, got a very red nose from the heat, don’t think there’ll be snow here this Christmas, love to the boys and to you, my darling, Harry,’ and ‘Giving church parade a miss this week. Missing you all. Sorry about the nonsense but it will all seem clear when I’m home. Love you all, Harry.’ They’d taken a long time to arrive, and now they decorated the mantelpiece above the fire in their front room.

  ‘But tell me again, dear, exactly what they said when you asked the people in the office.’ Mother had the infuriating habit of demanding endless, word-by-word repetitions of conversations she’d already heard umpteen times.

  ‘Just what I told you. That it was as a result of a signal from London, that everyone here was as much in the dark as I was. That Harry would be away six weeks’ minimum, probably not more than eight. And that if I were short of anything or having problems not to hesitate to call the Families Officer. He’s an awful old bore – a passed-over major. I’d really be on my last legs if I called him. I just don’t think they know.’

  ‘It must be to do with the Aden business, I suppose. The thing he was awarded the Military Cross for. Your father and I were very proud for you—’

  Mary cut in, ‘I cannot believe it’s anything to do with that. It was years ago, and Harry was really knocked out by that. He had weeks of sick leave. He doesn’t talk much about it. But it must have been awful from what I was told. He just lived in amongst them then, wasn’t even fluent on Arabic. Passable but not fluent.’

  ‘Well, it has to be something secret.’

  ‘Has to be.’ She was wearing her hair up, and the wind was pulling it away from the big tortoiseshell clip at the back of her head. It was whisping away – she hadn’t taken enough time to settle it properly in the hurry to get the food ready and the kids dressed for the expedition. She had little make-up on, lipstick untidy. Not how she’d want Harry to see her. ‘But I don’t think he’d volunteer for anything like this now, and I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would just pick him out over all the people they’ve got and rush him down to the Gulf. It just doesn’t make sense. I thought he’d burned all the spook stuff out of him.’

  ‘Still, it’s not long now, only a fortnight or so,’ comforted her mother.

  ‘That’s what they said. We’ve no option but to believe them.’

  Mary Brown could not confide the depth of her unhappiness to her mother. Too many years of marriage and before that secretarial college in London had dulled the relationship. Their marriage was too confidential to gossip about. What hurt most was that she had thought she had understood the man she had been living with for so long, and now she had discovered that there was a different compartment in his make-up.

  ‘Well, at least we know he can look after himself?,?’ said her mother, sensing the barriers going up.

  ‘Let’s hope he doesn’t have to. We’ll get the kids back and have lunch.’

  She called for them, and when they emerged filthy from the forest they all walked back to the car.

  That same lunchtime Seamus Duffryn was summoned to a house in Beachmount and told by the Battalion intelligence officer to resume close surveillance on McEvoy. Duffryn was told a squad was going out in the afternoon to find a friend of McEvoy, a girl who had been out with him. Josephine Laverty from Clonard.

  A few hundred yards away in the Springfield Road the British army unit that had been asked to find the girl was puzzled that it had no record of her or her mother living in the area. There was no reason why they should have done, as the house was in the name of Josephine’s uncle, Michael O’Leary. A little after three o’clock the unit reported in that it had been unable to locate the girl. By then a critical amount of the available time had run out.

  It took more than two hours from the time Frost called the army headquarters dominating the Ardoyne and told them of the tip to the moment Billy Downs was identified. First the troops who had taken part in the search operation at the céilidh had to be located. The lieutenant who had led the raid was in Norfolk on weekend leave, and there was no answer to his telephone. The sergeant, the next senior man out, recalled that he had busied himself near the door on security, but he was able to name the six soldiers who had carried out the split-up question-and-answer work. Private Jones was now in Berlin, but Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn was picked up by a Saracen from a foot patrol on the far side of the Battalion area. There was no written record, of course. That, along with Jones, were the only two pieces of evidence of the confrontation, and both had now disappeared. Llewellyn stared at the photokit issued in London that had been brought up from the guardroom.

  ‘That’s the one it’s like, if it’s any of them. It’s Downs. It’s not a great likeness. It’s not easy to pick him on that picture. But if he was there that’s the one it was. There was his woman there, in yellow. She ran out across to him.’

  With the name they attacked the filing system. Billy Downs. Ypres Avenue, number 41. There’d been a spot-check on his story about being down in Cork with his mother. The Garda had been fast for a change, and had cleared him of involvement. They said he’d been there through that period. There’d been a query about him because he was away from home. Otherwise, clean with nothing known. The net inside the headquarters spread wider, to include the policeman who had seen him that night in the small hours.

  ‘He was very cool. Not even sweat on his palms. I know, as I looked.’

  It was into the afternoon that they called Frost back.

&nbs
p; ‘We think we’ve located the man you want. He’s Billy Downs, without an “e” on the end. Ypres Avenue, wife and kids. Very quiet, from what we’ve seen of him. Unemployed. His story stuck after the Garda ran a check on the alibi he gave us to account for his long absence from the area. There was no other reason to hold him. Like to point out that the chaps that have actually seen this fellow say that he’s not that like the pics you put out. Much fatter in the face, I’m told. Perhaps you’ll let us know what you want done. We’ve a platoon on immediate. We can see pretty much down that street: I’ve an OP in the roof of a mill, right up the top.’

  Frost growled back into the phone, ‘I’d be interested in knowing if Mr Downs is currently at home.’

  ‘Wait one.’ As he held on for the answer Frost could hear the distant sounds of the unit operations room as they called up the OP on a field telephone. ‘Not quite so hot, I’m afraid. They log comings and goings. We think Downs left his home, that’s number forty-one, around twenty-five minutes ago. That’s fifteen-o-five hours precisely that he went out. But he goes in and out pretty regularly. No reason to think he won’t be back in a bit.’

  ‘I’d like it watched,’ said Frost, ‘but don’t move in yet, please. This number will be manned through the evening and the night. Call me as soon as you see him.’

  Downs was on his way by car up the Lisburn Road at the time that the observation post overlooking Ypres Avenue was warned to look out for him. There were several subsequent entries in the exercise book the two soldiers kept for logging the comings and goings in the street. They had noted him as soon as he came from his front door and began the walk up the hill away from them to one of the decreed exits from the Ardoyne. When the message came through on the radio-telephone to the troops, Downs was just out of the heartland, standing in the no-man’s ground at the top of the Crumlin waiting for his pick-up. This was neither Protestant nor Catholic territory. Side streets on either side of the road shut off with great daubed sheets of corrugated iron. Two worlds split by a four-lane road with barricades to keep people from each other’s throats. Scrawled on one side was ‘Up the Provos’, and ‘British Army Out’, and beyond the opposite pavement the messages of ‘Fuck the Pope’ and ‘UVF’.

  He was edgy waiting there in daylight beside such a busy road, one used heavily by military traffic, and the relief showed in his face when the Cortina pulled up alongside him, and the driver bent sideways to open the passenger door. The car had been hijacked in the Falls thirty-five minutes earlier.

  A moment later they moved off, weaving their way through the city. By the crossroads in the centre of the sprawling, middle-class suburb the car turned left and up one of the lanes that lead to the Down countryside through a small belt of woods. They turned off among the trees.

  The driver unlocked the boot and handed over the Armalite. It was wrapped in a transparent plastic bag. Downs checked the firing mechanism. It was a different weapon to the one that he had used before in his attack on the patrol, and was issued by a quite unconnected quartermaster. But the rifle came from the same original source – Howa Industries, of Nagoya in Japan. It had been designed as a hunting weapon, and that astonished him. What sort of animal did you take a killing machine of this proven performance to hunt? He released the catch on the stock to check that the folding hinge was in working order. That reduced the length of the weapon by eleven inches, bringing it down to less than two-and-a-half feet, so that it would comfortably fit into the padded inside pocket of his coat. He was passed the two magazines, glanced them over and fitted one deep into the attachment slot under the belly of the gun. He activated a bullet up into the breach, and flicked with his thumb at the safety catch to ensure it was engaged. The volunteer at the wheel watched the preparations with fascination.

  With the stock folded, Downs pushed the rifle down into the hidden pocket.

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ he said. ‘For God’s sake don’t suddenly clear off or anything smart. Stick here. At least till midnight.’

  They were the only words Downs spoke before he disappeared into the growing darkness to walk the half-mile towards Rennie’s house. The only words of the whole journey. The teenager left behind with the car amongst the trees subsided, shivering, into the driver’s seat to wait for his return.

  The regular Sunday afternoon visit to the office to clear the accumulation of paper work off his desk was no longer a source of controversy between the policeman and Janet Rennie. It had been at first, with accusations of ‘putting the family into second place’ being levelled. The increasing depression of the security situation in the province had caused her to relent.

  It was now understood that she and the two girls, Margaret and Fiona, would have their tea, watch some television and then wait for him to get home before bedtime.

  Over the last four years Janet Rennie had become used to the problems of being a policeman’s wife. A familiar sight now was the shoulder holster slung over the bedside chair when he had an extra hour in bed on Saturday mornings, before the weekly trip to the out-of-town supermarket. So too were the registration plates in the garage, which he alternated on the car, and around the house the mortise locks on all the doors, inside and out. At night all these were locked with a formal ritual of order and precedence, lest one should be forgotten, and the detective’s personal firearm lay in the half-opened drawer of the bedside table, on which rested the telephone which, as often as not, would ring deep into the night.

  Promotion and transfer to Belfast had been hard at first. The frequency of the police funerals they attended along with the general level of danger in the city had intimidated her. But out of the fear had come a fierce-rooted hatred of the IRA enemy.

  Janet Rennie had long since accepted that her husband might not last through the troubles, might be assassinated by one of those wild-eyed, cold-faced young men whose photographs she saw attached to the outside of the files he brought home in the evenings and at weekends. She didn’t shrink from the possibility that she might ride in the black Austin Princess behind the flag and the band to a grey, country churchyard. When he was late home she attacked her way through the knitting, her therapy along with the television set. He was often out late, seldom in before eight or nine – and that was a good evening. But she felt pride for the work he did, and shared something of his commitment.

  The girls, seven and four, were in the bright, warm living room of the bungalow, kneeling together on the treated sheepskin rug in front of the open fire, watching the television, when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Mama! Mama! Front-doorbell!’ Margaret shouted to her mother at the back, too absorbed to drag herself away from the set.

  Janet Rennie was making sandwiches for tea, her mind taken by fish-paste fillings and the neatness of the arrangement of the little bread triangles. They had become a treat, these Sunday teas, the girls and their mother playing at gentility with enthusiasm. With annoyance she wondered who it could be. Which of the girls from the close was calling right at teatime?

  The bell rang again.

  ‘Come on, Mama. It’s the front door.’ Margaret resigned herself. ‘Do you want me to go?’

  ‘No, I’ll do it. You stay inside, and you’re not going out to play on your bikes at this time of night.’

  She wiped her hands on the cloth hanging beside the sink. Right from the start she ignored the basic rule of procedure that her husband had laid down. As her hand came up towards the Yale lock that was always on, she noticed that the chain had been left off since the children came back from playing with their friends of three doors down. It should have been fastened. She should have fastened it before she opened the door. But she ignored the rules and pulled the door back.

  ‘Excuse me, is it Mrs Rennie?’

  She looked at the shortish man standing there on her front doorstep, hands in his coat pockets, an open smile round his face, dark hair nicely parted.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  Very quietly he said, ‘Pu
t your hands behind your head, keep them there and don’t shout. Don’t make any move. I know the kids are here.’

  She watched helplessly as through his coat, unbuttoned and open, he drew out the ugly squat black shape of the Armalite. Holding it in one hand, with the stock still folded, he prodded her with the barrel back into the hallway. She felt strange, detached from what was happening, as if it were a scenario. She had no control over the situation, she knew that. He came across the carpet past the stairs towards her, flicking the door closed with his heel. It clattered as it swung to, the lock engaging behind him.

  ‘Who is it, Mama?’ From behind the closed door of the lounge Fiona called out.

  ‘We’ll go in there now. Just remember this. If you try anything I’ll kill you. You, and the children. Don’t forget it when you want to play the bloody heroine. We’re going to sit in there, and wait for that bastard husband of yours. Right? Is the message all plain and clear and understood?’

  The narrow barrel of the Armalite dug into her flesh just above the hip as he pushed past her to the door and opened it. Their mother was half into the room before Fiona turned, words part out of her mouth but frozen when she saw the man with the rifle. Even to a child three months off her fifth birthday the message was brilliantly obvious. The girl rose up on her knees, her face clouding from astonishment to terror. As if in slow motion her elder sister registered the new mood. Wide-eyed, and with the brightness fading from her, she saw first her sister’s face then her mother standing hunched, as if bowed down by some great weight, and behind her Downs with the small shiny rifle in his right hand.