Chapter 19
Feverish in the torment of her uncertainty, Billy Downs’s wife had sent two of her children to the community crèche, and dumped the others with her neighbours. In her threadbare green coat and with her bag and purse she had taken herself to the shops at the top of the Ardoyne. The screw had been well twisted on her exhausted nerves.
The news programme less than two hours earlier had carried reports of the shooting at the policeman’s house, amplified by eye-witness accounts. The BBC had sent a man to the house, and his story made much of the gunman who hesitated, the intervention of the child, and the wounding of the gunman. There had been a trail of blood and the policeman was a trained marksman, the report said. The Irish News, which she had seen when she took the young ones three doors down, had shown a floodlit picture of the neat bungalow and white-faced detectives working with their fingerprint kits by the front door. The paper had also spoken of the wounding of the would-be assassin.
Men from the community association would come in later in the day to help repair the boards pulled up at dawn by the army, but for now the debris and confusion in the house and the noise of the children coupled with the danger to her husband to defeat her.
But the single factor that weighed most with her was the knowledge that the military knew of her husband, had identified him, and that their life together was effectively over. If he had survived last night then he would be on the run and go underground, otherwise the future held only the prospect of years in the Kesh or the Crumlin.
And for what?
She was not one of the militant women of the streets who blew the whistles and beat the dustbins, and marched down the Falls, and screamed at the soldiers and sent food parcels to the prisons. At the start the cause had not interested her, till parallel with the growing involvement of her husband she had become passively hostile to the movement. That a Cabinet minister should die in London, a soldier in Broadway or a policeman in Dunmurry was not the fuel that fired her. Her conviction was of far too low a grade to sustain her in her present misery.
Her purse had been full from the social security last Thursday. Now most of it was spent, with only enough for the basics of bread and milk bolstered by sausages and baked beans and tins. At the shops as she queued many eyes were on her. Word had passed in the streets that the army had raided her house, that they were looking for her man, that he had been out all night. Over the years it had become a familiar enough situation in the little community, but that it was this family that was at the centre of the morning’s swoop caused the stares, the muttered comments and the pulling aside of the front window curtains.
She glared back at them, embarrassing the lookers enough to deflect their eyes. She paid for her food, pecking in her purse for the exact money, and swung out of the door and back to the street. She had forty yards to walk to the top of? Ypres Avenue.
When she turned into the narrow long street the observation post spotted her. The soldiers were concealed in the roof of the mill, disused and now converted into warehouse space. They came and went by the back stairs, and where the boards were too rotten hauled themselves up by rope ladder. Once in position they put a heavy padlock on the door behind them, locking themselves in the roughly-fashioned cubicle, constructed out of sandbags, blankets and sacking. They had some protection and some warmth: that was all. To see down the Avenue they lay on their stomachs with their heads forward into the angle of the roof with a missing tile providing the vantage point. The two men in the post did twelve hours there at a stretch, and with three other teams would rotate in the position, familiarizing themselves enough with the street so that eventually they would know each man and woman and child who lived there. The comings and goings were logged, laboriously, in a notebook in pencil, then sifted each evening by their battalion’s intelligence officer. A synopsis of life in the street was sent each week to headquarters for evaluation. It was a process repeated in scores of streets in the Catholic areas of Belfast, as the security forces built up their enormous and comprehensive dossiers on the minority community.
Lance-Corporal David Burns and Private George Smith had been in the mill since six that morning. They arrived in darkness and would leave long after the few street lights had come back on. They had been in Belfast eleven weeks on this tour, five more to go. Thirty-four days to be exact.
To the OP they’d brought sandwiches and a flask of sugared tea plus the powerful German binoculars they used, a folded card that expanded to show a montage of the faces of wanted men, the rifles with daytime telescopic sights and also the bulging image intensifier for night work. They carried everything they needed for the day up the rope ladder to the roof. Only the radio telephone and the bulk treacle tin for emergency nature calls were permanent fixtures.
Burns, face intent behind the glasses, called out the details on the slight woman walking towards him.
‘The bird from forty-one. Must have been shopping. Didn’t go for long. Can’t be ten minutes since she went. Looks a bit rough. Didn’t find her husband, did they?’
The soldier squirmed closer to the aperture, pressing the glasses against his eyebrows, face contorted with concentration.
‘Hey, Smithie, behind her. I think he’s coming. Right up the top there. Sort of running. That is her old man, isn’t it? Looks like him. Have a squint yourself.’
‘I’m not sure, not at this range. We’ll be definite when he gets down the road a bit.’ Smith had taken over the hole. ‘Is he a shoot-on-sight, or what?’
‘Don’t know. They didn’t say nothing about that. I’m sure enough now it’s him. Get HQ on the radio. Looks like he’s run a bloody marathon. Knackered, he is.’
It was the pounding of his feet that first broke through her preoccupations. The urgency of footsteps dragged the woman away from the images of her wounded husband and the breaking of her home. She turned towards the noise, and stopped still at the sight.
Downs was struggling to run now, head rolling from side to side and the rhythm of his arm movements lost. His legs flailed forward over the last few paces to her, unco-ordinated and wild. The stitch in his right side bit into the stomach wall. The pallor of his face was slug-like, excavated from under something of permanence. His face was hollow at the cheeks as he pulled the air inside his lungs, eyes fearful and vivid, and round them the skin glistened with a sheen of sweat. He was shapeless, the big sweater worn over the left shoulder and arm giving him a grotesque breadth. But as he came towards her it was the eyes that held her. Their desperation, loneliness and dependence.
She put down her shopping bag on the paving, careful that it should not topple over, and held out her arms for her man. He fell against her, stumbling, and she reeled with the sudden weight as she took the strain. Against her he convulsed as his lungs forced down the air they needed. There were words, but she could not understand them as they buried themselves in the shoulder of her coat. Far distant, on the top street corner a knot of women had gathered.
‘They came for you, you know, this morning.’
‘I know.’
‘They searched all over, and they said they’d come again. Again and again till they got you.’ He nodded, numbed and shocked by the pain of the running and the throbbing in his arm. ‘They know, don’t they? They know it all. They’re not so daft as you said.’
‘I was told.’ The voice, the speaking, was a little easier now. The air was there, coming more naturally, and the legs steadied.
As she twisted herself against him, working away from the sharpness of his collarbone against her cheek, she felt him wince and tear away his left arm.
‘Is that where they hit you? Last night it was you. At the policeman’s home. Did he hit you?’ The pain came and went, surging and then sagging. ‘Has it been looked at? Have you seen a doctor?’ Again he nodded.
‘Where are you going now? What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going home. It’s over, finished. I just want to go home.’
‘But they c
ame this morning for you,’ she screamed, her voice high, hysterical that he could not understand something so simple. ‘They’ll be back as soon as you walk through the door. They’ll take you. They were crawling all through, under the floorboards and into the roof, looking for you. They took the place apart trying to find you.’
He wasn’t listening. ‘They put a man in, just to find me.’ He said it with wonder, as if surprised that the enemy would classify him of such importance that they would take a step so great. ‘We found him first. We went to get him this morning, and it just ballsed-up. There’s two boys shot by him, the Englishman. And last night that was another cock-up. That bloody copper, he—’
‘I heard it on the radio.’
‘Well, there’s no point in running now. I’m finished with it. There’d be a reason to run if I was going on, but I’m not.’
‘You mean all this? It’s not just because you’re hurt? We can get you away from here, the boys will shift you.’
‘It’s definite,’ he said. He was very tired now, deeply tired and needing to sit down, to take the great weight from his legs. He picked up her shopping bag with his right hand, and draped the injured left arm over the small woman’s shoulder. They began to walk by the terraced doors and the chipped and daubed red brick of the street. It was a grey Belfast morning, rain threatening, wind cold and from the east, coming in over the Lough. The two threaded a path over the fractured paving stones, past the endless heaps of dogs’ mess towards the house that had become Downs’s goal.
The moment the two had created for each other was broken by the footsteps behind. Instinctively both knew the noise of pursuit. In the Ardoyne the knack of recognizing it was inbred.
The women on the corner were silent as Harry ran by them down the gentle incline towards where the man and his wife were walking away from him. He held the revolver close to him, reassured by the hardness of the wooden handle, roughened with age and usage. He pulled up twenty feet short of them. The pair swung round to face him.
‘Don’t move. Don’t try to run or get your firearm. If you do I’ll shoot.’
Harry barked the instructions. The harshness of his tone and its assurance surprised him. He felt almost detached from the orders he was shouting.
‘Put the bag down and begin to walk towards me, and slowly. Your hands on your head. The woman – she stays where she is.’
Be strong. Don’t mess about with him. You’ll be a long time before you shift the bastard. Don’t let him dominate you. Keep the gun on him, look at his hands the whole time. Watch the hands, and keep the gun in line. Keep it so it’s only got to come straight up to fire, and the catch off. Check with the thumb that the catch is off. It is, certain. Now separate them, don’t let them be together so she can shield him. She’ll do that, they all will, throw themselves at you to give him a yard. And shoot. If he moves shoot him. Don’t hesitate. Stay still yourself. Don’t march about. That disorganizes the shot you may make. Two bullets only. One up the spout, and the other in the next chamber, that’s all.
Harry studied him hard. The other man, the opposition. Dirty, cowed and frightened – is that the terrorist? Is that all he is? Is that the killer in all his glory? Not much to look at, not much without his Kalashnikov.
‘Start walking now, and remember: keep it very cool, or I shoot. What’s your name?’
‘Billy Downs. You’re the Englishman they sent for me? The one that had the girl killed?’ ?They’d told him the Britisher hadn’t come to take him, not to put him in the Kesh, but to kill him. The fight of survival was returning, steadily and surely. ‘You won’t get out of here, you know. Not with me on the end of your pistol, you won’t.’
He looked past Harry and seemed to nod his head into the middle distance. It was cleverly done. Good try, Billy boy. But you’re with the professionals now, lad. A squaddie might have turned and given you the third of a second you needed to jump him. Not Harry. Pivot round. Get your back to the wall. Keep going till you feel the brickwork. But watch the bastard. All the time keep your eyes on his hands.
Faced with troops in uniform, Downs would probably have submitted without a struggle and climbed into the armoured car to start whatever segment of his lifetime in captivity they intended for him. But not this way. No surrender to a single hack sent from London to kill him watched by his wife and in his own road. For a year it would be talked about – the day when a lone Englishman came into the Ardoyne and shot down meek little Billy Downs. The day the boy’s nerve went.
He was formidable, this Englishman, in his old jeans and dark anorak, with the clear-cut face, softer than those fashioned in the bitterness of Belfast. He had not been reared through the anguish of the troubles, and it showed in the freshness of his features. But he was hard, Downs had no doubt on that. They’d trained him and sent him from London for this moment, and Downs knew his life rested on his capacity to read the expressionless mouth of his enemy. When he made his break all would depend on how well the Englishman could shoot, and, when he fired, how straight. Downs made his assessment . . . he’ll fire, but fire late, and he’ll miss. He turned himself now from the waist only, and very slowly, towards his wife. He was close to her, much closer than Harry, and with his face in profile he mouthed from the far side of his lips, the one word:
‘Scream.’
She read it in the shape of his mouth, the way the lips and gums twisted out the message. Harry didn’t see the instruction, and was still concentrating on the man’s hands when she yelled. It came from deep down, a fierce noise from so small a woman. Harry jerked from his preoccupation with Downs as he searched for the source of the noise, his eyes shifting direction.
Downs had made his decision. Now or not at all, either now or the bastard has you in his own time, to shoot like a rat in a cage. He pushed his wife violently towards Harry and started for the freedom of the open street down the hill. His first two strides took him to the edge of the pavement. A flood of adrenalin . . . anticipating the shot, head down, shoulders crouched. This was the moment. Either he fires now or I make it, three, four more paces then the range and accuracy of the revolver is stretched. His eyes half closed, he saw nothing in front of him as his left foot hit hard on the steep edge of the pavement. For his heel there was support, for his sole there was nothing, only the gap between the flagstones and the gutter eight inches below. His weight was all there, all concentrated on that foot, as he catapulted himself forward, the momentum taking over.
He realized the way he was falling, and tried to twist round onto his back, but there was no time, no room. He hit the rough gravel of the road on his left arm, right on the spot where the flesh had been twice torn open by Rennie’s bullet. The frail lint bandage gave no protection. With his right arm he clawed at the road surface trying to push himself up and away from Harry, who was coming to him, revolver outstretched . . .
Harry saw the pain reach over and cover the man’s face. He saw the hand scruffing under the body. If the man had a gun that was where it would be, down by the waist, where the hand was fumbling now. It wasn’t a difficult decision any more. He raised the revolver so that the line went down from his right eye, down his right arm to the ‘V’ of the back sight and along the black barrel to the sharp foresight, and then on to the man’s upper chest. He held the aim just long enough for his hand to steady, then squeezed the trigger gently into the cup of his forefinger. The noise was not great. The revolver gave only a slight kick, jolting down the rigid arm to Harry’s shoulder. Below him Downs’s body began to twitch, giving way to spasmodic convulsions. The blood found its own pathway from the side of his mouth out onto the greyness of the road. Like water tracking across dry earth it kept its course, faster, thicker, wider as the road discoloured with its brightness.
There was no need for the second bullet, Harry could see that.
‘Why did you shoot him? He had no gun. Why did you kill him?’ She was moving towards Downs, looking at Harry as she spoke. ‘You didn’t have to shoot. You coul
d have run after him, and caught him. You know he was shot last night, and hit. He wasn’t much opposition to you, you Britisher sod.’
She knelt down beside her husband, her stocking dragging on the harsh surface of the road. He lay on his side, and she could not cradle him as she would have wanted. Both her hands touched the face of her man, unmarked in his death, fingering his nose and ears and eyes.
Harry felt no part of the scene; but something was demanded of him, and painstakingly he began to explain.
‘He knew the rules. He knew the game he was playing. He came to London and murdered the Cabinet Minister. In cold blood. Shot him down in front of his house. Then he went to ground. It was a challenge to us. He must have known we had to get him – you must have known that. It was a test of will. There was no way we could lose – we couldn’t afford to.’
Harry had wondered how this moment would be. How he would feel if the man were dead, destroyed. There was no hatred, no loathing for the slight body that lay on the grit of the tarmac. There was no elation, either, that his world and his system had beaten that of the young man who they had told him was the enemy, evil, vermin. Harry felt only emptiness. All the training, all the fear, all the agony, directed to killing this awkward, shapeless nonentity. And now nothingness. He looked again at the wife as she stayed bent over her lifeless man, and began to walk up the hill out of the Ardoyne.
She was watching him, hands still on the man’s body, when the shot came. Simultaneously with the crack she saw Harry stagger, appear to regain his balance, and then career backwards, before thudding against the front wall of a house. His arms were pressed against the middle of his chest. Then he toppled in slow motion over onto the pavement.
In the OP it was Smith who was at the aperture, giving a continuous description to the lance-corporal who relayed the message back to headquarters over the radio telephone.
‘There’s a man running up behind Downs. With a shooter. A revolver, looks like, a little one. Tell ’em to shift ’emselves back at HQ. Downs has his hands up, and they’re talking. Not much, but saying something.’
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