Harry's Game

by Gerald Seymour

  From the telephone set Burns called, ‘What about the other bloke, they want to know, what’s he look like?’

  ‘Civvies, anorak and jeans. It’s a short-barrel revolver he’s got, not Downs . . . the other man. Scruffy-looking. He’s making a run for it, Downs is. Bloody hell, he’s down, tripped himself. Fuck me, he’s going to shoot him, he’s going to shoot him!’

  High in the hidden observation post Burns heard the single shot.

  ‘I can get the bugger, can’t I, Dave? He just shot the other bastard. Waving a gun about and all that, it’s enough.’

  Smith was manœuvring his rifle into position. The old Lee Enfield with the big telescopic sight, the sniper’s weapon, the marksman’s choice.

  ‘I’ve a good line on him from here. No problem.’ Smith was talking to himself, whispering into the butt of the rifle. Burns was motionless and watched from the back of the OP, nestled among the blankets and sacking as Smith drew back the bolt action, and settled himself, shifting his hips from side to side to get comfortable for the shot. He was a long time aiming, wanting to be certain the first time. The firing echoed round under the roof of the mill.

  ‘Did you get him?’ urged Burns.

  ‘A real bloody peach.’

  The sharpness of the pain numbed Harry. As he lay, stomach down on the pavement, he could feel nothing, his head was facing the walls of the houses away from the street. Green moss rubbed close to his nose, and beyond that lay the jagged edge of a milk bottle, and, huge and high, a front doorstep. There was no understanding of what had happened. Just the noise, and the helpless collapse, the blow that had carried him from his feet.

  He worked his right hand slowly from under him where it had gripped his chest. The fingers were scarlet and shiny. The effort was so great. No strength left, no power, and endless labour just to move an arm. The action of all the muscles, all working in his biceps, his heavy shoulders, and deep behind the ravaged rib cage, combined to bring on the first stabs of agony. Bruised from his fall, his face contorted with pain, the upper teeth clamping on the softness of his lip, he struggled to control the spasms.

  And with the pain came the realization of what had happened. They’ve had you, Harry. As you stood there like a big idiot, consumed in your inviolability, they took you. So silly. Just standing there, in the heart of the Ardoyne, standing and waiting, and they obliged. His mind was clearing as the flesh and tissue round the great wound torn by the bullet throbbed out its protest. This is the way it ends, he knew that. Here against the dampened pavings, by the weeds and the fractured glass, among hatred and loathing. Some little swine out there with a rifle, taking a long time, waiting for the moment, not hurrying. That was the way death comes, Harry. Billy Downs already dead, the woman beside him; that was somewhere in the greater distance, away beyond.

  Other faces were closer, sharp-etched now . . . Davidson, in the garden near Dorking – it’ll be dangerous, he had said. Hadn’t wanted to say it, thought it might frighten . . . Mary came closer to him, and the boys, big faces happy with laughter, all noise and running to him. Take hold, Harry, fight it.

  The impact of the shot had flung Harry several feet back before it felled him. His hands with animal instinct had closed on his stricken body, the revolver careering from his fist and bouncing into the roadway where it rested.

  Harry forced himself upwards, using his right hand to provide the lever till he could jackknife his lower body under him and spread the great weight from the arm onto his knees. The first time he failed, collapsing back into the pool of blood. Again he attempted it, this time with greater success, till, like a pantomime dog, he began to work his way up the hill. There were people at the doorways now, but none moved or spoke as the Englishman dragged his way past. A single child screamed as his opened coat slipped from his left hand fingers, and permitted a flow of blood down onto the ground and over the hardness of the pavement before his knees smeared its ordered passage.

  A hundred pairs of eyes watched Harry move away, aware that this was the effort of a man already doomed but unable to accept it. These people knew the inevitability of death, knew how a man fought to stave off its coming, and knew from the signs when he would win, and when lose. The Englishman they knew would lose, the blood told them that, the whiteness of his face, the breathing, irregular and bubbling. And then they saw Billy Downs’s wife rise up from the road where her man lay and walk with quick, neat steps towards Harry. They saw that in her path was the revolver.

  She bent down and picked it up. It was heavy, cumbersome in her small hand. Her index finger had to strain forward to find by feel the metal coldness of the trigger arm. She didn’t look at the gun, or check it as a man used to handling firearms would have done. Those people at their doors who saw themselves in line with her and Harry backed away, seeking the safety of their front doors, but the uninvolved stayed to see what would happen.

  Eighteen inches from his head a door slammed, its noise breaking Harry’s thought, diverting his attention from his sole preoccupation of taking himself beyond the pain of Ypres Avenue, and then he heard the brush of her feet, scurrying closer to him. She walked on past him and then spun round, blocking his way till his face was close to her legs. Harry subsided backwards, his hand still holding his body up, but his weight down on his hips. He could see all of her from there, not just the legs and the feet, but her coat that was old and tired, her face once pretty and now hideous from the grief and shock of the last few minutes, and her short narrow arm, and the tight, pale-skinned clenched fist. And the revolver, too big for her, grotesque.

  The barrel of the gun was steady, so were her eyes, nothing distracting her from the man near-prone in front of her.

  She said, ‘You didn’t have to shoot my man. What was Billy to you? What did it matter to you, what happened to him? He was finished, broken, and you cut him down like a rat in the gutter. And you talk about rules and challenges. What rule was that, to kill Billy, hurt and unarmed?’

  There was no fear in Harry now. It had all evaporated a long time back. The words came hard to him. ‘You know why he died, what he did. He was against us. Each was determined to destroy the other. He understood that.’

  ‘You never knew anything of him – what sort of man he was, how good he was to us. And yet you come to our street, and shoot him down, defenceless.’

  Harry struggled to speak again to her. So difficult, so exhausting, this twisted, shattered face above him, not understanding the world of her man, not understanding the war that was being fought out on her own streets. It was all so simple, so easy, but Harry felt the waves of tiredness pouring over him, and no longer had the strength to reason with the woman.

  She went on: ‘You think we’re all animals over here. But what’s it to you if Danby gets killed, or a soldier, or a policeman, what’s it to you, over from England? Do you think you’re any better than our people?’

  Harry stayed silent a long time as he struggled to concentrate his thoughts.

  ‘He deserved to die. He was an evil little bastard. He’s better off—’

  The fingers wrenched at the trigger. The noise mingled with her sobs as Harry rolled slowly and with precision over onto his back. At the top of Ypres Avenue the first two Saracens were arriving.

  The soldiers looked over the two bodies, made the decision that both were beyond medical help, and left them where they had fallen. Both Harry Brown and Billy Downs were in the awkward, sack-like form that the troops could recognize as death. Downs lay a few feet from the kerb, out in the road. The blood had run from him to create a lake, dammed from escaping farther by the debris of the gutter. His wife was beside him again, and still holding the revolver loosely and without interest. The sergeant of the platoon walked towards her and, with nervousness showing in his voice, asked her to hand over the gun. She opened her fingers and it clattered noisily on the road. When the soldier spoke again to her there was no reply. She stood, quite still, swamped by her emotions.

  Harry was s
prawled face up close to the wall of a house, his head beneath the front room window from which a face, old but without the softness of compassion, looked down on him. The women of the street edged their way closer to Billy Downs’s wife, the men gathered in clumps, leaving the business of comforting and abusing to their women.

  In their shawls and head scarves and short skirts they shouted at the officer who came with the platoon. ‘He’s one of yours. That bastard dead over there.’

  ‘He’s a fucking Englishman.’

  ‘Shot a man without a gun.’

  ‘SAS killer squads.’

  ‘Killed an unarmed man. In front of his wife, and he never in trouble before.’

  The crescendo gathered round the young man. In a few moments his Company commander and Battalion commander would be there, and he would be spared, but till then he would take the brunt of their fury. Faced with the accusation that Harry was one of theirs the soldiers looked curiously at the body of the big man. They knew a certain amount about the undercover operations of the army, particularly the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF), but to the men in uniform it was a different and basically distasteful world. The soldiers had their rules and regulations to abide by. The book was near to God.

  In exasperation the lieutenant shouted above the babble:

  ‘Well, if you say the chap who shot Downs is one of ours, who shot him then?’ He’d phrased it clumsily, said it in anger and expected no answer.

  The chorus came back, gloating, satisfied. ‘The Provies got him. A Provie gunman. One shot. From the bottom of the street.’

  The far end of the street down the hill was deserted, dominated only by the massive red-brick wall and grey-slate roof of the old mill. The lieutenant looked up at it, and winced.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

  His sergeant, who had been examining Harry, came over to him. ‘The chap on the pavement, sir. He’s been hit twice. First I would say was high velocity, there is an entry and exit wound and a big blood marker, looks as if he tried to get away, you can follow the trail, about fifteen yards to where he is now. He was shot again then, right in the head, no exit, and it must have been a hand gun or something, that killed him.’

  ‘Thank you, sergeant. The woman who was holding the pistol, you’d better put her in the Saracen. Go easy with her, she’s in shock, and I don’t want a riot here.’

  ‘It’s just as we found it, as you requested,’ they told Frost when he arrived.

  The Battalion commander briefed him. ‘The chap by the wall shoots Downs and then is shot himself. I’m not a hundred per cent sure where the second shot comes from. Still waiting for all the reports. Indications are that it’s my OP in the mill roof. We’re rather quiet about that position, but I haven’t spoken to the men up there yet. Seems they wounded the fellow, then Downs’s wife, she’s in the Saracen now, came in and finished him off.’

  There was no reaction on Frost’s face. His eyes travelled round the street taking in the faces and the scene. He walked over from one body to the other, his bodyguards hovering at each shoulder. He recognized Harry from the photograph that had been sent the previous evening from England. It should never have worked, but it had. And now right at the end was all loused up. Poor devil.

  He paused where Downs lay, looking into the profile of the face and running a check against the picture they’d issued. We’d have been lucky to spot him from that, the colonel thought, not really good enough, something to be learned from that. He went past the open door of the Saracen. Mrs Downs sat huddled deep in the shadow of the interior. She sat totally still, staring at the armour-plated sides, festooned with pick-axes, CS gas-grenade canisters, ammunition boxes. Two soldiers guarded her.

  ‘It’s not for general release,’ he said to the Battalion commander, ‘but you’ll hear about it soon enough anyway. The Prime Minister ordered a special man put in, with the sole job of finding Danby’s killer, right? The Cabinet Minister shot in London, what is it? six or so weeks ago. Downs was the assassin. By something of a miracle, and a quite unaccountable amount of good luck, the agent tracked him down. That’s not a generous assessment, but that’s how I evaluate it. He tracked him and shot him dead about fifteen minutes ago. I think your OP has just shot the Prime Minister’s man.’

  Frost knew how to play his moment. He stopped there, let it sink, then went on.

  ‘We’ll deflect it as much as we can, but I suggest you leave it to Lisburn to make the statements. It may be some consolation to you, but I didn’t know much about the agent either. He wasn’t working to me. I wouldn’t worry about the role of the OP in all this.’

  ‘I wasn’t worrying—’

  Frost cut across him.

  ‘It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. Marines shot their own crowd in the New Lodge. RUC have shot our people, we’ve killed theirs. Bound to happen.’

  The other man considered. They stood alone in the street away from the people of Ypres Avenue, with the bodyguards and troops giving them room to talk. He remembered now the soldier they had sent to Berlin; what he had seen in the green-topped social club less than three hundred yards from where they stood. There was nothing to say, nothing that would help the prone figure by the wall, nothing that would achieve anything beyond unnecessary involvement. Business-like, brisk as always, he said to Frost:

  ‘Is there any reason for us not to clean this lot up now? Our photographer has done his stuff, and the RUC people won’t want to come in here.’

  ‘No reason at all. Get it out of the way before the press and cameras start showing up.’

  ‘Will there be much aggro, the fact that this fellow Downs wasn’t armed when he was killed?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Frost, ‘there isn’t usually when we get one of the real ones. They seem to accept that, part of the game. Right at the beginning there used to be mayhem. But they’ve become tired of saying it. They’re all unarmed men – that’s the charm. Doesn’t work them up any more. Be interesting to see what sort of show he gets in the death notices in the press tomorrow morning. We’ll see how highly they regarded him then. A big man can get three or four columns. Be interesting. Come from the Brigade command, their Battalions, Companies and a good number from the Kesh. Costs them a fortune – and keeps the papers going.’

  They walked together back towards Frost’s Land-Rover.

  Frost was gone by the time Rennie was brought to Ypres Avenue in a Saracen from Battalion headquarters. He climbed gingerly out of the protection of the personnel carrier and jumped down onto the road. First time in the Ardoyne for sixteen months. The Special Branch had no love for parading their faces on the streets of the Provisional heartland. He was conspicuous, he knew that. Anyone in civilian clothes who needed five soldiers and a three-ton armoured car to take him in and out would attract attention. He was conscious of the eyes at the doors, blank and subdued but watching him.

  ‘Are the bodies still here?’ he asked the Battalion commander.

  ‘We’ve shifted them, I’m afraid. My people have taken the necessary pictures. There’s not much to see now. That’s where Downs died, the blood on the road. The other fellow, McEvoy, he was shot on the pavement by number twenty-nine. There’s a small blood pool there.’

  ‘Who’s McEvoy?’ said the detective.

  ‘I fancy you’ll hear more of him from your own office. But he’s a rather sensitive creature right now. One of ours, they tell me. Trailed Downs back here and shot him. I’m still waiting for the details on the rest. Looks a bit black, though. I think one of my OPs shot him. McEvoy was waving a gun round, in civilian clothes. It’s pretty definite.’

  He had no need to ask about Downs. The wild, staring face that had confronted him fourteen hours earlier across the width of his bright living room remained vivid in his mind.

  But Downs was dead now. Rennie thanked the officer and hurried back to the Saracen.

  The press statement from Lisburn was short and took something more than two hours to
prepare. It was the result of a series of compromises but owed most of its drafting to the civilian deputy head of the army public relations department who had recently transferred from the Treasury, and had experience of the art of communiqué writing.

  Billy Downs, a known IRA gunman, was shot dead at 09.10 hours in Ypres Avenue where he lived. He was involved in an exchange of shots with a member of the security forces, an officer engaged in plain-clothes surveillance duties. The officer, who will not be named till his next of kin have been informed, was hit by a single shot in the chest and died before medical treatment reached him. Downs was high on the army’s wanted list in Northern Ireland, and was also wanted in London for questioning by detectives investigating the murder of Mr Henry Danby.

  The main object was to keep it short, pack it with information and deflect the press away from the sensitive bit. There was, he said when he had finished typing it, more than enough for the scribes to bite on without them needing to go digging round any more.

  A solitary journalist moved towards the delicate area that first day, but without knowing it, and was easily put off.

  ‘Then this man Downs was carrying a gun?’ he asked the duty press officer.

  ‘Obviously, old man, it says in our statement that there was an exchange of shots. Have to be armed, wouldn’t he?’

  There were no other questions to be asked. Amongst the resident reporters in McGlade’s pub that night interest was warm but not exceptional, and the treatment of the story was straight and factual.

  Locally it was denied that Downs had been armed, and three hours of rock-throwing followed the news bulletin that contained the army statement. By then it had started to rain.

  Chapter 20

  The Prime Minister learned the news at lunchtime. The message had been framed by the Under-Secretary, Ministry of Defence, with an eye to the political master’s taste, and the order in which he would read of the events in Ypres Avenue had been carefully thought out. First, Billy Downs as the killer of Henry Danby had been shot dead. Second, he had been identified by the agent specifically sent to Northern Ireland by the Prime Minister. Third, and unfortunately, the agent had been shot in the chest during the incident and had died.