Too frightened to scream the elder girl remained stock-still till her mother reached her, gathered the children to her, and took them to the sofa.
The three of them held tightly to each other as on the other side of the room Downs eased himself down into Rennie’s chair. From there he was directly facing the family, who were huddled away in the front corner of the sofa to be as far as possible from him. He also had a clear view of the door into the room, and of the window beyond it at the far edge of the lounge. It was there that he expected the first sign of Rennie’s return, the headlights of the policeman’s car.
‘I’ll warn you for the last time, missus. Any moves, anything clever, and you’ll be dead, the lot of you. Don’t think, Mrs Rennie, when it comes to it, that you’re the only one at risk. That would be getting it very wrong, a bad miscalculation. If I shoot you I do the kids as well. We’ll leave the TV on, and you’ll sit there. And just remember I’m watching you. Watching you all the time. So be very careful. Right, missus?’
Billy Downs paused and let the effect of his words sink in on the small room.
‘We’re just going to wait,’ he said.
Chapter 15
The four men sent to question Josephine Laverty had none of the problems finding her that the British army unit in the Springfield Road had encountered. Smiling broadly, the oldest in the group, and the leader, suggested that old Mrs Laverty might care to go into the kitchen and take herself a good long cup of tea.
They took Josephine up to her bedroom far from the mother’s ears. One of the younger men drew the curtains, cutting out the frail shafts of sunlight, and took up his position by the window. Another stood at the door. The third of the volunteers stood behind the chair they suggested Josephine should sit in. The older man they called Frank, and they treated him with respect and with caution.
The girl was poorly equipped to handle an interrogation. Frank’s opening question had been harmless enough, and he was as astonished as the other three boys in the room at the way she collapsed.
Perhaps it was because she was one of the uninvolved, those few in the city who tried to weave a life outside the troubles. Her lack of commitment had built up a fear of violence, second nature to so many, and therefore not so terrifying. Without loyalties there was only self-preservation, and there was little anyone could do now to help her in the face of the unspoken brutality of the men who had crowded round her. Cold, cruel faces, pallid, expressionless, used and trained in begetting pain. There was only one reason they would come to her . . . because of Harry, sweet and beautiful and chatty Harry. She looked at their hands, big, dirty, broken fingernails, roughened with usage. Their boots, hard and bruised from wear, drab from the rain outside. Men who would hurt her, punch her, kick her. And for what? For a few minutes’ delay in the inevitable. She would tell them what they had come to find out. They were far outside her experience, the men who stood around her, moving among her possessions as if there by right. They did have the right, she thought. Yesterday on the Sperrins she had become involved in their territory, and that was why they had come.
‘This fellow McEvoy, that you’ve been going with. Who is he?’
There had been no reply, only a dissolve as her head went down to her lap and she buried her cheeks and her eyes and ears into the palms of her hands.
‘Who is he?’ Frank was insistent. ‘Who is he, where does he come from?’
‘You know who he is. Why come to me for it? You know well enough.’
Frank paced up and down, short steps, continually twisting round towards the girl when he lost sight of her, moving back and forward between the window and the door, skirting the single bed littered with the girl’s clothes.
‘I want you to tell me.’ He emphasized it. Like an owl with a scarce-whelped mouse, a stoat with a rabbit, he dominated the cringing girl on the wooden chair before him.
‘I want it from you. D’yer hear? I’ve not much time.’
Josephine shook her head, partly from the convulsion of her collapse, and reeled away from him as he swung his clenched fist back-handed across her face. Her knuckles took much of the force of the blow, but through the splayed fingers across her eyes she saw the blood welling close and then breaking the skin at the back of her hands.
Frank could see that what had been put to him as somewhat of a routine questioning had become rather more complex. The fear and hesitation of the girl had alerted him. Her inability to answer a simple explicit question. Frank knew McEvoy only as a lodger at the girl’s employer’s guest house . . . been out with him once or twice. A fair-looking piece, he’d probably knocked her off, but that wouldn’t be enough to put her there doubled up and sniffling.
‘I’m getting impatient, girl. To him you owe none of the loyalty you should give to us.’
He weighed up whether he would need to hit her again.
She nodded her head, very slightly at first, then merging into the positive mood of acquiescence and surrender. Frank held back. He would not have to hit her again.
She straightened up, steadying herself as she prepared the words.
‘He’s with the British, isn’t he? You knew that. He’s British. I don’t know what he does, but he’s been sent to live amongst us. He’s looking for the man that killed the politico. Over in London. That’s his job. To find that man. He said when he found him he’d exterminate him.’
She stopped, leaving the shadowy little room quiet. Below she could hear her mother about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down.
Josephine saw the enormity of what she had said. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that his truth was safe with her. One backhander and she spilled it all. She remembered it, outside the pub on the hill at Glenshane. She’d promised it then, when she’d told him to quit.
Frank stared intently at her.
‘His job was as an agent in here? He’s a British agent? Sent in to infiltrate us? . . . Holy Jesus!’
‘You knew? You knew, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t known.’
The room was near-dark now. Josephine could barely make out the men in the room – only the one silhouetted at the window by the early street light. Her mother called up for tea for her visitors. No-one answered. The old lady lingered at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the reply, then went back to the kitchen, accepting and perhaps understanding the situation and unable to intervene.
The girl wavered one last time in her loyalties and her allegiance. Upbringing, tradition, community all came down heavily on the scales against the balance of the laugh and adulthood and bed of Harry. But there was the wee girl with the tossing feet and the tightening stocking, and the obscenity and the misery of death in the police cell, and that wiped Harry from the slate. She spoke again.
‘He was the one that shopped Theresa, the girl that hung herself. She said she’d been with the man that did the London killing, but he couldn’t perform. Harry tipped the army about it. He said the killing was a challenge to the British, and they had to get the man who did it, and kill him. Something like that, just to show who ran things. He told me this yesterday.’
The volunteers said nothing, their imagination stretched by what the girl said. Frank spoke. ‘Was he close to the man he was looking for? Did he know his name? Where he lived? What he looked like? Just how much did the bastard know?’
‘He said he thought he knew what he looked like.’ She saw Theresa again in her mind, heard her giggling in the small space round the basin outside the lock-up closet. That was the justification, that was enough . . . to see the girl’s face. Hear her choking. ‘He said he was a good shot, and a cool bugger, that’s what he called him. And, yes, they were looking, he said, for a man who would be out of the main eye of things. That was the exact phrase he used.’
‘And you, how did you spot this highly-trained British assassin, little girl?’
‘I spotted him because of a silly thing. You have to believe me, but we were on the Sperrins yesterday. He said
he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and sailed all over, but the gale on the mountain seemed to shake him a bit. I said to him it wasn’t very good if he’d been to sea as much as he said. Then he didn’t hide it any more. He seemed to want to talk about it.’
Clever little bitch, thought Frank.
‘Is he in regular touch, communication, with his controller?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is he armed?’
‘I don’t know that either. I never saw a gun. I’ve told you all I know. That’s God’s truth.’
‘There’s one little problem for you, Miss Josephine.’ Frank’s voice had a cutting edge to it now, something metallic, cold and smooth. ‘You haven’t explained to me yet how this British agent came to hear about Theresa and what she was saying about the London man. You may need a bit of time for that, you bastard whore. Treacherous little bitch.’
He came very close to her now. She could smell the tobacco and beer on his breath and the staleness of sweat on his clothes. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his face was a prickled, lumpy mass.
‘Just work it out,’ he said. ‘Then tell the lads, because they’ll be waiting for an answer. To us you’re nothing, dirt, scum, shit. You’ve shopped one of your own . . . a wee girl who hanged herself rather than talk to the fucking British. You betrayed her. You betrayed your lover boy as well. We’ll put it about, you know, and we’ll let the military know as well. You’ll find somewhere to run, but there’ll be sod-all people to help you get there, you little cow. But then, when these lads have finished with you, you’ll be thinking twice before you go drop your knickers to another Britisher.’
Frank turned away and walked to the door. He said to the man who was standing there, ‘It’s just a lesson this time, Jamie. Nothing permanent and nothing that shows. Something just for her to remember, to think about for a long time. Then lose yourselves. If we need you later we know where you’ll be, so split from here. And, little girl, if you’ve half an inch of sense in your double-dealing painted head you’ll not mention what’s happened here tonight, nor what’s going to.’
He went out of the door and down the steep staircase. In the hall the old woman saw him, as she turned in her chair by the fire and looked at him. He smiled at her.
‘Don’t worry, lady,’ he said, ‘I can find my way out. You just stay where you are.’
The three younger men followed him through the door fifteen minutes later. They left Josephine doubled up on the bed wheezing for air and holding the soft solar plexus of her stomach. She lay a long time in the room, fighting the pain and willing it away. Her clothes lay scattered in the corner of the room where the men had ripped them from her.
‘Right on your bloody flesh, you little bitch, where it hurts, and where it’ll last.’
She’d thought they were going to rape her, but instead they simply beat her. She curled herself up, foetal position, her arms protecting her breasts and lower stomach, thighs clamped together. That was how she stayed after they’d gone. Her breath came back to her soon, and after that there was the long, deep aching of the muscles, and, mingled with it, the agony of the betrayal. Betrayal of Theresa. Betrayal of Harry.
Perhaps the men had been sensitive about beating up a girl, perhaps it was the sight of her nakedness, but the job was not thoroughly done. The effect soon faded. There was time to think then. Frank would have gone straight to the house to find Harry. He’d be taken, tortured, and shot; that would come later, or tomorrow morning. Her reasoning made any thought of warning Harry irrelevant. They would have him already, but did she want to warn him? One good screw, and what had he done? Lifted her bedroom tattle from pillow confidence to military intelligence information. Let him rot with it.
When her mother came up the stairs late in the evening she was still doubled up, still holding her stomach, and cold now on her skin. The old lady looped the girl’s nightdress over her head, and twisted her feet under the clothes. She spent some minutes picking the clothes up from the floor, showing no more interest in those that were torn than in those that formed the general muddle on the floor.
Twice during the Sunday evening Davidson phoned through to Frost. The first-floor office had, with the coming of darkness, taken on the appearance of a bunker. The telephone that was specified for outgoing outside calls was on the floor beside the canvas camp bed, now erected.
Davidson was curtly told there was no information, and reminded that he’d already been told that he would be notified as soon as anything was known. The earlier elation had left him, and he allowed Frost the last word on an operation so inefficient that you cannot even get in touch with your man when you need to get him out.
But for all his bark Frost was now sufficiently involved in the operation to call Springfield Road, wait while the commanding officer was brought to speak to him, and stress the urgency with which the girl Laverty should be found.
In their eyrie high above the Ardoyne two soldiers looked down on Ypres Avenue. There were no street lights, old casualties of the conflict, but they watched the front door of No. 41 from the image intensifier, a sophisticated visual aid that washed everything with a greenish haze and which enabled them to see the doorway with great clarity. On the hour they whispered the same message into their field telephone. No-one had used the front door of the house.
Frank did not go near Delrosa that night. On his bicycle he had ridden up to Andersonstown in search of his Battalion commander. It was arranged that at midnight he would be taken to meet the Belfast Brigade commander. Frank knew his name, but had never met him.
From his home the Permanent Under-Secretary had authorized the sending of a photograph of Harry to Belfast. The next morning, Monday, it was to be issued to troops who would raid the various Andersonstown scrap merchants’. Less than half a dozen people in the province would know the reason for the swoops but each search party would have several three-inch-by-four pictures of Harry. It had originally shown him in uniform, but that had been painted out.
The big television in the corner of the room droned on, its Sunday message of hope and charity, goodwill and universal kindness expounded by ranks of singers and earnest balding parsons. The family sat quite still on the sofa watching the man with the Armalite.
The pictures claimed no part of the attention of Janet Rennie as she stared, minute after minute, at the man with the rifle across his knee, but for long moments the children’s concentration was occasionally taken by the images on the screen before being jerked to the nightmare facing them across the carpet. It was a new degree of fear that the children felt, one they were not able to cope with or assimilate. They held fast to their mother, waiting to see what would happen, what she would do. To the two girls the man opposite represented something quite apart from anything they had experienced before, but they recognized him as their father’s enemy. Their eyes seldom left his face, held with fascination by the greyness of his skin, its lack of colour, its deadness. This was where they saw the difference between the intruder and their world. There was none of the ruddiness and weight, the life and colour that they knew from their friends’ fathers and the men that came home with their father.
In the first twenty minutes that Downs had been in the room, Fiona, who traded on her ability to charm, had attempted to win the stranger with a smile. He looked right through her, gap-toothed grin and all. She’d tried just once, then subsided against her mother.
He’s never come out into the light, the elder girl, Margaret, told herself. He’s been locked up, and like a creature he’s escaped from wherever they’ve kept him. This man was across the wall, but she knew little of the causes of the separation and the walling-off. She studied the deepness of his eyes, intent and careful, uninvolved as they took in the room, traversing it like the light on a prison camp watchtower, without order or reason but hovering, moving, perpetually expecting the unpredictable. She saw his clothes too. A coat with a darned tear in the sleeve, the buttons off the cuffs, trousers without creases and shi
ny in the knees, frayed at the turn-ups and with mud inside the lower leg. To children, suits were for best, for work, not for getting dirty and shabby. His shoes were strange to them, too. Cleaned after a fashion by the rain on the winter pavements, but like his face without lustre, misused.
Margaret understood that the gun on Downs’s lap was to kill her father. Her sister, twenty months younger, was unable to finish off the equation and so was left in a limbo of expectancy, aware only of an incomprehensible awfulness. Margaret had enough contact with the boys at school who played their war games in the school yard to recognize the weapon as a rifle.
He’ll be a hard bastard, Janet Rennie had decided. One of the big men sent in for a killing like this. Won’t be able to distract him with argument or discussion enough to unsettle him. He’s hard enough to carry out his threat. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Would have his own kids, breed like rats the Catholics, have his own at home. But he’d still shoot hers. She felt the fingers of her daughters gripping through her blouse. But she kept her head straight, and her gaze fastened on Downs. There was no response to her stare, only the indifference of the professional, the craftsman who has been set a task and time limit and who has arrived early and therefore must wait to begin. Faster than her children she had taken in the man, searched him for weakness, but the gun across his knees now held her attention. If he were nervous or under great strain then she would notice the fidgeting of the hands or the reflection of the perspiration on the stock or barrel of the gun. But there was no movement, no reflection.
He held the gun lightly, his left hand halfway along the shaft and his fingers loose round the black plastic that cradled the hard rifled steel of the barrel. His hand was just above the magazine and her eyes wandered to the engineered emplacement where the capsule of ammunition nestled into the base of the gun. Just after he had sat down, Downs had eased the safety catch off with his right index finger, which now lay spanning the half-moon of the trigger guard. Like a man come to give an estimate on the plumbing, or life insurance, she thought. None of the tensions she would have expected on display. Thirty minutes or so before she thought her husband might be arriving home she decided to talk.
Harry's Game Page 22
