‘We have no quarrel with you. You’ve none with us. We’ve done nothing to you. If you go now you’ll be clean away. You know that. You’ll be right out of here and gone before my husband gets back.’ That was her start. Poor, she told herself, it wouldn’t divert a flea.
He looked back with amused detachment.
‘If you go through with this they’ll get you. They always get them now. It’s a fact. You’ll be in the Kesh for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?’
‘Save it, Mrs Rennie. Save it and listen to the hymns.’
She persisted. ‘It’ll get you nowhere. It’s the Provisionals, isn’t it? You’re beaten. One more cruel killing, senseless. It won’t do any good.’
‘Shut up.’ He said it quietly. ‘Just shut up and sit still.’
She came again. ‘Why do you come here? Why to this house? Who are you?’
‘It’s a pity your man never told you what he did when he went to work of a morning. That’s late in the day now, though. Quiet yourself and stay where you are.’
He motioned at her with the rifle, still gently, still in control. The movement was definitive. Stay on the sofa with the children. He sensed that the crisis was coming for her, and that she knew it. With growing desperation she took up the same theme.
‘But you’re beaten now. It’ll soon be all over. All your big men are gone. There’ll have to be a cease-fire soon, then talking. More killing won’t help anything.’ Keep it calm, don’t grovel to him, talk as an equal with something on your side. There’s nothing to counter-balance that Armalite but you have to make believe he doesn’t hold everything.
‘We’re not beaten. It’s not over. We’ve more men than we can handle. There’ll be no talks, and no ceasefire. Got the message? Nothing. Not while there are pigs like your man running round free and live.’
The children beside her started up at the way the crouched stranger spoke of their father. Janet Rennie was an intelligent woman and hardened by her country upbringing. That she would fight for her husband’s life was obvious: the problem had been in finding the medium. For the first time in nearly two hours she believed she stood a chance. She still watched the hands and the rifle. The hands were in a new position on the Armalite. From resting against the gun they were now gripping it. Attack, and how can he hit back before Rennie comes home?
‘There’s no future for you boys. Your best men are all locked up. The people are sick and tired of you. You know that. Even in your own rat holes they’ve had enough of you—’
‘You don’t know a bloody thing about what goes on. Not a bloody thing. You know nothing. Nothing. Shut up. Shut your bloody face . . .’
She taunted him, trying to act it with her voice to overcome the fear. ‘They don’t want you any more. You’re outnumbered, living off the backs of people. Without your guns you’re nothing—’
He shouted back across to her. ‘What do you know of the way we live? What do you know of what support we have? All you see is what’s on the bloody television. You don’t know what life is like in the Falls, with murdering bastards like your husband to beat the shit out of boys and girls. We’re doing people a service when we kill fucking swine like that husband of yours.’
‘My husband never killed anyone.’ She said it as a statement of fact. Safe.
‘He told you that, did he?’ Very precise, low and hissing the words out. ‘Pity you never asked him what sort of little chat he had with the wee girl that hanged herself in the cells at Springfield.’
She had built herself towards the climax. Now he watched with relish the demolition. She remembered reading about the girl, though it had not been mentioned at home. Work rarely was. The rebuttal caught her hard, draining her. The hands. Hold on to the hands, and concentrate on them. The only lifeline is the hands. The left knuckle was white on the barrel, blood drained out from round the bones. He was holding the rifle with both hands as he brought it up across his face to wipe his forehead with the sleeve on his right arm. He was sweating.
‘You’re nothing, are you? That’s all you’re fit for. Sitting in people’s homes with guns, guarding women and wee bairns. You’re a rat, a creeping, disease-ridden little rat. Is that what the great movement is about? Killing people in their homes?’
Her voice was battering it out now, watching the anger rise first in his neck and spread through the lower jaw, tension, veins hardening and protruding. Safe. What can the gun do now that would not rouse the neighbours who lived through the thin brick-and-cement walls of the estate just a few feet from her own bungalow?
‘You’ve made it all out wrong, Mrs Rennie. Whatever your bloody man says you don’t kill the Provos just by locking a few up. We are of the people. Don’t you know that? The people are with us. You’ve lost, you are the losers. Your way of life, God-given superiority, is over and finished, not us . . . We’re winning. We’re winning because the people support us. Go into Andytown, or the Murph or the Ardoyne or Turf Lodge. Go in there and ask them about Provo rule. Then ask them what they think of RUC scum.’
He was shouting, half-rising out of the flower-covered seat of the chair. The rifle was now only in the right hand, but with the finger still close to the trigger. His left arm was waving above his head.
The hatred between the two was total. His fury was fanned by the calmness she showed in face of the rifle, and the way she had made him shout and the speed with which he had lost his control. Her loathing for the Republicans, bred into her from the cradle, gave her strength. With something near detachment she weighed the pluses and minuses of rushing him there and then. He was gripping the gun, but it was pointed away from the family. There was no possibility that she could succeed. She felt the children’s grip on her arms. If she surged suddenly across the room she would carry them like two anchors halfway with her.
He was not so calm now, and she saw the hint in his eye that he felt the claustrophobia of the room, that the time he had sat in the chair had sapped that sense of initiative and control that were so important to him. She remembered a young Catholic boy who had come round her father’s store, idling or loitering or just with nothing to do, and how her father had pulled him up by the front of his collar, and shaken him like an animal to find what he was doing there, on the corner outside the shop. And there had been then the trapped-rodent fear of the youth, of the second-grade boy, who accepted that this would happen, and ran when released, feeling himself lucky not to be thrashed. In the eyes of the man across from her was the hint that he knew he no longer dominated the situation.
When Rennie turned into the cul-de-sac he noted immediately that the garage interior light was not switched on. He stopped his car forty yards from the bottom of the road, and turned off his engine and lights. The bungalow seemed quite normal. The curtains were drawn, but there was a slice of light through the gap where they had been pulled not quite together, from the hall light filtering through the patterned and coloured glass. Everything as it should be.
But no light in the garage. For months now it had been a set routine that an hour or so before he was expected Janet would go into the kitchen and switch on the light in the garage. They kept the garage empty, without the clutter that the neighbours stored there. That way there was no hiding place for an assassin.
The detective sat in the car, watching, allowing himself some minutes just to look at the house and search in front of him in detail for any flaw other than the unlit garage. There was no light upstairs. Perhaps there should have been, perhaps not. Usually Fiona would be having her bath by now, but only darkness there. That was another cautionary factor.
Over the years Howard Rennie had been to enough full-dress police funerals to wonder how it could happen to himself. There was only one way. The epitaphs of the dead men were clear enough. Carelessness. Somewhere, for some time, usually minuscule, they had slackened. Not all, but most, grew overconfident and fell into the convenience of routine, began to believe in their own safety. A few were killed in closely-planned a
ttacks, but most as Rennie knew well presented themselves as casual targets.
This was why he had a light fitted for the garage that should now be on, and why he noticed it was not lit.
His wife was a meticulous and careful person. Not one to make a silly mistake about the garage. It was the dilemma of the life they led that he wondered constantly how far as a family they should take their personal security. On the one hand there could be something drastically wrong that had prevented his wife from switching on a light as agreed. On the other she could be next door for sugar or milk, and stayed to gossip while the children played or watched television.
But it was quite out of character for her to forget.
He eased out of the car, pushing the door to but not engaging the lock, and reached for the PPK Walther in his shoulder holster. He had loaded and checked it before starting his drive home from Castlereagh, but he again looked for the safety-catch mechanism to see it was in the ‘on’ position. On the balls of his feet he went towards the front gate. The gate was wrought-iron and had never hung well – it rattled and needed a lifting, forcing movement to open it. Rennie instead went to the far side of the gatepost before the hedge thickened, through a gap, past the roses and onto the grass. The run up to the front door was gravel and he kept to the grass, fearful of any noise his feet might make. Though the window showed the light from inside, the gap between the curtains was not enough for him to see through.
There were no voices at the moment he reached the window, just the hymn-singing on the television. Rennie came off the grass and stepped onto the tiled step of the doorway. The Walther was in his right hand, as with the left he found his Yale key and inserted it gently into the opening. Steady now, boy. This is the crucial time. If you’re noisy now it’s blown – if there’s anything to blow. For a moment he felt sheepish at the stupidity of tiptoeing across his own front lawn. Had the neighbours seen? The door opened, just enough to get him inside. To the lounge door. It was off the latch, and the aperture of an inch or so acted as a funnel to the final crescendo of the programme, and the choir’s lusty singing. As the sound tailed away he heard his wife speak. ‘Great hero, aren’t you? With your bloody rifle. Need it to make a man of you . . .’
The voice, shrill and aggressive, was enough to deaden the tiny amount of sound Rennie made as he leaned into the door, and the man in his chair was aware of nothing till the door started swinging on its hinges towards him.
Downs saw the door moving long before the woman and her children.
His body stiffened as he fought to take hold of himself, and for concentration after seeing his control debilitated long before by the argument across the room. He was still raising his rifle into the fire position when Rennie came in, low and fast, to hit the carpet and roll in one continuous action towards the heavy armchair between the fireplace and the window.
The movement was too fast for Billy Downs, who fired three times into the space by the door before checking to realize that the policeman was no longer there. He struggled up from the sitting position in the deep soft armchair, flooded with the sudden panic that he had fired and missed, and didn’t know where his target was.
The metallic click of Rennie’s safety catch, and the single shot that howled by his ear and into the French windows behind, located the target.
Rennie was not a marksman. He had been on pistol-shooting courses, most of which simulated a street situation. Only once they’d practised storming a room. When you go in, they’d said, dive and roll as soon as you hit the floor, and keep rolling till you find cover. You’re difficult to hit while you’re moving. The first shot came as he balanced momentarily on his left side, his right arm free to fire in the general direction of the dark shape across the carpet. But his momentum carried him on till he cannoned into the solid bulk of the big chair. He was on his right side, the Walther driving into the softness of his thigh when he realized his impetus had wedged him between the wall and the chair. He twisted his head, seeing for the first time with agonizing clarity the man, his wife and the children, as he struggled helplessly to swivel his body round. His survival depended on that movement.
The rifle was against Downs’s shoulder now, eye down the barrel, not bothering with the complicated sight device, just using the barrel to give him a line. He poised himself to fire. Wait for it, you bastard copper, wait for it, now. The triumph of the mission was there now, the bloody slug of the copper on the deck, soft, fat and vulnerable. And dead.
Rennie was screaming. ‘No, no. Keep away.’
For the two children the room had disintegrated in speed and noise. When Fiona saw her father some four seconds after he had come through the door she fled from the sofa across the middle of the room towards him.
It was the moment that the man had chosen to fire.
Fractionally his vision, misted and unclear, of the man that he had come to kill was blocked by the chequered dress and the long golden hair.
He hesitated. Staring at the body feverishly trying to get the child behind it and away. It was the time to shoot, a perfect target. Still he hesitated.
He saw the child with pin-point clarity, as sharp as the mummified kids back in the street in London. Not part of the bloody war. He couldn’t see the face of the girl as she writhed closer to her father, only the brightness of her dress, the freshness of the white socks, the pink health of the moving skin on the small legs. Couldn’t destroy it. Rennie was struggling to pull the child under him to protect her. Downs could see that, and when he’d done so the big policeman would be free to fire himself. Downs knew that. It had no effect. Not shoot a child, no way he could do it. He felt himself drifting away from the reality of the room, concentrating now on his wife. Kids at home, not as clean, scrubbed as these, but the same. If his wife knew he’d slaughtered a small one . . . He saw the slight body fade under the shape of the detective, and the other man’s firing arm come up to aim.
Behind the man were the French windows and the light framework of wood. He spun and dived at the centre of one of the glass panels. The wall of wood and glass squares gave way. Rennie, the child spread-eagled under him, emptied the pistol in the direction of the window.
It was the fifth or sixth shot that caught Downs in the muscle of the left arm, just above the elbow. The impact heaved him forward through the obstacle of wood and glass splinters and across the neat patio towards the well-cut back lawn.
The pain was searing hot as Downs ran across the lawn. At the bottom, among the vegetables still in the ground, he crooked the rifle under his injured arm and with his right levered himself over the fence and into a cut-through lane.
Struggling for breath he ran down the lane and then across a field to get to the road where the car was parked. Pushing him forward was the fear of capture, and the knowledge that the failed shooting would bring massive retaliation down on him. Like the fox discovered at work in the chicken coop who flees empty-handed, the sense of survival dominated. The experience in the house, coupled with the exhaustion of the running and the pain in his arm combined to create a confusion of images all returning to the looming blond head of the child thrust into his line of fire as the detective lay on the ground. It merged with the memory of the muted stunned children in London as he fired at their father. Again and again, though, as with a film loop, came the face of the child across the room, throwing herself at her prone father. And after that, as he neared the car, was the knowledge that if he had fired he would have killed the policeman. He might have hit the child, that was the area of doubt: he would have killed the policeman, that was certainty. He had hesitated, and through his hesitation his target was alive. It was weakness, and he had thought himself above that.
The young driver was asleep when he felt his shoulder shaken violently and above him the frantic and blood-etched face of the man.
‘Come on. Get the fucking thing moving. Don’t hang about. Get it out of this bloody place.’
‘Aren’t you going to do something about that—
?’ the youth pointed to the still-assembled Armalite, but cut off when he saw the blood on the arm that was holding the rifle.
‘Just get moving. Mind your own bloody business and drive.’
The boy surged the car forward and out onto the road in the direction of Andersonstown.
‘Did it go OK?’ he asked.
Chapter 16
The Belfast Brigade still met in a semi-detached corporation house in the centre of the conglomeration of avenues, crescents, walks and terraces that make up the huge housing estate of Andersonstown. It was very different country to the Falls and the Ardoyne. Landscaped roads, and flanking them a jigsaw of neat red-brick homes. Ostensibly the war had not come here with the same force as in the older battlegrounds closer to the city centre, but such an impression would be false. This was the Provo redoubt, where the Brigade officers and top bomb-makers had their hideouts, where the master snipers lay up between operations, where five thousand people voted for a Provisional supporter in a Westminster election. Cups of tea were rare for the troops here, and it was the tough and experienced battalions who were asked to hold the ring with the most dedicated and intransigent of the enemy.
The particular house where the Brigade met had been chosen with care. It had been noticed that the combination of a twist in the road and a slight lip shielded both the front and rear doors of the house from the army camp some three hundred yards away. The house could be approached from the rear with virtual impunity.
The Brigade commanders were key figures in the campaign in the main urban area of Northern Ireland. Some, like Joe Cahill and Seamus Twomey, had become household names round the world, famous as the men who had converted the guerrilla wars of South East Asia and the Middle East and Latin America into West European terms. Promotion had exposed younger men to the job, none of them any the less hardliners for their youth . . . Adams, Bell, Convery. All had learned assiduously the arts of concealment and disguise. Their capture called for rounds of drinks and celebration toasts in the mess of the army unit concerned, and articles in the national press maintaining that the Provos were about to fold up. But within a week of the one-time commander being carried off to Long Kesh so another young man moved forward into the scene to take over. During their reign in office, however short, they would set the tone of the administration. One would favour car bombs, another would limit attacks only to military and police targets, or direct operations towards spectaculars such as big fires, major shoot-outs and prison escapes.
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