Harry's Game Read online

  But can Daddy know I do?

  ‘Smile for Daddy, kiss him well,’ Mummy said,

  But can I ever?

  He was still mouthing the words as the Royal Victoria Hospital loomed up, part modern, part the dark close red-brick of old Belfast. Staunton and scores of others had been rushed here down the curved hill that swung into the rubber doors of Casualty.

  Harry turned left into Grosvenor Road, hurrying his step. Most of the windows on either side of the street showed the signs of the conflict, boarded up, bricked up, sealed to squatters, too dangerous for habitation, but remaining available and ideal for the snipers. The pubs on the right, a hundred yards or so down from the main gate of the RVH, had figured in Davidson’s briefings. After a Proddy bomb had gone off the local Provos had found a young bank clerk on the scene. He came from out of town and said he’d brought a cameraman to witness the devastation. The explanation hadn’t satisfied. After four hours of torture, and questioning, and mutilation, they shot him, and dumped him in Cullingtree Street, a little farther down towards the city centre.

  Davidson had emphasized that story, used it as an example of the wrong person just turning up and being unable to explain himself. In the hysteria and suspicion of the Falls that night it was sufficient to get him killed.

  The half-mile of the street Harry was walking down was fixed in his mind. In the log of the history of the troubles since August 1969 that they’d given him to read, that half-mile had taken up fifteen separate entries.

  Harry produced a driving licence made out in the name of McEvoy and the post office counter clerk gave him the brown paper parcel. Harry recognized Davidson’s neat copperplate on the outside – ‘Hold for collection.’ Inside was a .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. Accurate and a man-stopper. One of nine hundred thousand run off in the first two years of the Second World War. Untraceable. If Harry had shaken the package violently he would have heard the rattling of the forty-two rounds of ammunition. He didn’t open the parcel. His instructions were very plain on that. He was to keep the gun wrapped till he got back to his base, and only when he had found a good hiding place was he to remove it from the wrapping. That made sense, nothing special, just ordinary common sense, but the way they’d gone on about it you’d have thought the paper would be stripped off and the gun waved all over Royal Avenue. At times Davidson treated everyone around him like children. ‘Once it’s hidden,’ Davidson had warned, ‘leave it there unless you think there’s a real crisis. For God’s sake don’t go carrying it round. And be certain if you use it. Remember, if you want to fire the damn thing, the yellow card and all that’s writ thereon applies as much to you, my boy, as to every pimpled squaddie in the Pioneers.’

  With the parcel under his arm, for all the world like a father bringing home a child’s birthday present, Harry walked back from the centre of the city to the Broadway. He wanted a drink. Could justify it too, on professional grounds, need to be there, get the tempo of things, and to let a pint wash down the dryness of his throat after what he’d been through the last thirty-six hours. The ‘local’ was down the street from Mrs Duncan’s corner. Over the last few paces to the paint-scraped door his resolve went haywire, weakened so that he would have dearly loved to walk past the door and regain the security of the little back room he had rented. He checked himself. Breathing hard, and feeling the tightness in his stomach and the lack of breath that comes from acute fear, he pushed the door open and went into the pub. God, what a miserable place! From the brightness outside his eyes took a few moments to acclimatize to the darkness within. The talk stopped and he saw the faces follow him from the door to the counter. He asked for a bottle of Guinness, anxiously projecting his voice, conscious that fear is most easily noticed from speech. Nobody spoke to him as he sipped his drink. Bloody good to drink, but you’d need to be an alcoholic to come in here to take it. The glass was two-thirds empty by the time desultory conversation started up again. The voices were muted, as if everything was confidential. The people, Harry recognized, had come to talk, as of an art, from the sides of their mouths. Not much eavesdropping in here. Need to Watergate the place.

  Across the room two young men watched Harry drink. Both were volunteers in E Company of the First Battalion of the Provisional IRA, Belfast Brigade. They had heard of the cover story Harry was using earlier in the morning just after he’d gone out for his walk. The source, though unwittingly, was Mrs Duncan. She had talked over the washing line, as she did most mornings, with her neighbour. The neighbour’s son, who now stood in the bar watching Harry, had asked his mother to find out from Mrs Duncan who the new lodger was, where he came from, and whether he was staying long. Mrs Duncan enjoyed these morning chats, and seldom hurried with her sheets and pegs unless rain was threatening. It was cold and bright. She told how the new guest had turned up out of the blue, how he hoped to find a job and stay indefinitely, had already paid three weeks in advance. He was a seaman, the English Merchant Navy, and had been abroad for many years. But he was from the North, and had come home now. From Portadown he was.

  ‘He’s been away all right,’ she shouted over the fence to her friend, who was masked by the big, green-striped sheet suspended in the centre of the line, ‘you can see that, hear it rather, every time he opens his mouth. You can tell he’s been away, a long time and all, lucky beggar. What we should have done, missus. Now he says he’s come back because Ireland, so he says, is the place in times of trouble.’ She laughed again. She and her friend were always pretending they’d like to leave the North for good, but both were so wedded to Belfast that a week together at a boarding house north of Dublin in the third week of August was all they ever managed . . . then they were full of regrets all the way back to Victoria Street station.

  The son had had this conversation relayed to him painfully slowly and in verbatim detail by his mother. Now he watched and listened, expressionless, as Harry finished his drink and asked for another bottle. In two days’ time he would go to a routine meeting with his company’s intelligence officer, by then sure in his mind if there was anything to report about the new lodger next door.

  Harry walked quickly back to Delrosa after the second glass of Guinness. He’d never been fond of the stuff. Treacly muck, he told himself. He rang the doorbell, and a tall, willowy girl opened the door.

  ‘Hullo, McEvoy’s the name. I’m staying here. The room at the back.’

  She smiled and made way for him, stepping back into the hall. Black hair down to the shoulders, high cheekbones, and dark eyes set deep above them. She stood very straight, back arched, and breasts angled into the tight sweater before it moulded with her waist, and was lost in the wide leather belt threaded through the straps of her jeans.

  ‘I’m Josephine. I help Mrs Duncan. Give her a hand round the house. She said there was someone new in. I do the general cleaning, most days in the week, and help with the teas.’

  He looked at her blatantly and unashamed. ‘Could you make me one now? A cup of tea?’ Not very adequate, he thought, not for an opening chat-up to a rather beautiful girl.

  She walked through into the kitchen, and he followed a pace or so behind, catching the smell of the cheap scent.

  ‘What else do you do?’ Perfunctory, imbecile, but keeps it going.

  ‘Work at the mill, down the Falls, the big one. I do early shift, then come round and do a bit with Mrs Duncan. She’s an old friend of my Mam’s. I’ve been coming a long time now.’

  ‘There’s not much about for people here now, ’cept work, and not enough of that,’ Harry waded in, ‘what with the troubles and that. Do you go out much, do you find much to do?’

  ‘Oh, there’s bits and pieces. The world didn’t end, and we adapted, I suppose. We don’t go into town much – that’s just about over. There’s not much point, really. Go to a film and there’ll be a bomb threat and you’re cleared out. The Tartans run the centre anyway, so you have to run for dear life to get back into the Falls. The army don’t protect us, they loo
k the other way when the Tartans come, Proddy scum. There’s nothing to go to town for anyway ’cept the clothes, and they’re not cheap.’

  ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ said Harry, ‘people have been through an awful time. I thought it time to get back home. You can’t be an Irishman and spend your time away right now.’

  She looked hard at him. The prettiness and youth of her face hardened into something more frightening to Harry. Imperceptibly he saw the age and weariness on the smooth skin of the girl, spreading like the refocusing of a lens, and then gone as the face lightened. She reached into the hip pocket of her jeans, straining them taut as her fingers found a crumpled handkerchief. She shook it loose and dabbed it against her nose. Harry saw the green embroidered shamrocks in the corners, and fractionally caught the motif in the middle of the square. Crossed black and brown Thompson machine-guns. She was aware he was staring at her.

  ‘There’s nothing special about these. Doesn’t mean I’m a rebel and that. They sell them to raise funds for the men and their families, the men that are held in the Kesh. ‘‘The Men Behind the Wire.’’ Look. It’s very good, isn’t it – a bit delicate? You wouldn’t think a cowardly, murdering thug would have the patience to work at a thing so difficult, be so careful. They think we’re all pigs, just pigs. ‘‘Fenian pigs’’, they call us.’

  She spat the words out, the lines round her face hard and clear cut now, then the tension of the exchange was gone. She relaxed.

  ‘We make our own entertainment. There’s the clubs, social nights. There’s not much mid-week, but Saturday night is OK. Only the bloody army comes belting in most times. They always say they’re looking for the great commander of the IRA. They take ten boys out, and they’re all back free in twenty-four hours. They stir us up, try to provoke us. We manage. I suppose all you’ve heard since coming back is people talking about their problems, how grim it is. But we manage.’

  ‘That handkerchief?,?’ said Harry, ‘does that mean you follow the boyos, have you a man in the prisons?’

  ‘Not bloody likely. It doesn’t mean a damn. Just try and not buy one. You’ll find out. If you don’t buy one there’s arguing and haggling. It’s easier to pay up. You’ve got to have a snot-rag, right? Might as well be one of these and no argument, right? I’m not one of those heated-up little bitches that runs round after the cowboys. When I settle it’ll be with a feller with more future than a detention order, I can tell you. And I’m not one of those that runs around with a magazine in my knickers and an Armalite up my trousers, either. There are enough who want to do that.’

  ‘What sort of evenings do you have now? What sort of fun do you make for yourselves?’

  ‘We have the céilidh,’ she said, ‘not the sort they have in the country or in the Free State, not the proper thing. But there’s dancing, and a bit of a band, and a singer and a bar. The army come lumping in, the bastards, but they don’t stay long. You’ve been away, at sea, right? Well, we’ve got rid of the old songs now . . . 1916 and 1922 are in the back seat, out of the hit parade. We’ve ‘‘The Men Behind the Wire’’ – that’s internment. ‘‘Bloody Sunday.’’ ‘‘Provie Birdie’’, when the three boys were lifted out of Mountjoy by helicopter. Did you hear about it? Three big men and a helicopter come right down into the exercise yard and lifts them out . . . and the screws was shouting ‘‘Shut the gates!’’ Must have been a laugh, and all. Understand me, I’m not for joining them, the Provos. But I’m not against them. I don’t want the bastard British here.’

  ‘On the helicopter, I was going through the Middle East. I saw it in the English paper in Beirut.’

  She was impressed, seemed so anyway. Not that he’d been to an exotic sounding place like Beirut, but that the fame of Seamus Twomey, Joe O’Hagen and Kevin Mallon had spread that far.

  ‘Do the army always come and bust in, at the evenings?’

  ‘Just about always. They think they’ll find the big boys. They don’t know who they’re looking for. Put on specs, tint your hair, do the parting the wrong way, don’t shave, do shave . . . that’s enough, that sorts them out.’

  Harry had weighed her up as gently committed – not out of conviction but out of habit. A little in love with the glamour of the men with Armalites, and the rawness of the times they lived in, but unwilling to go too close in case the tinsel dulled.

  ‘I think I’d like to come,’ said Harry. ‘I think it would do me good. I’m a bit out of date in my politics right now, and my voice is a bit off tune. James Connolly was being propped up in his chair in Kilmainham in my time, and they were wearing all their Green. It’s time I updated and put myself back in touch. A lot of brave boys have died since I was last here. It’s time to stand up and be counted in this place. That’s why I came back.’

  ‘I’ll take you. I’ll pick you up here, Saturday, round half seven. Cheers.’

  She was away into the kitchen, and Harry to his room.

  Chapter 7

  The man was moving the last few yards to his home. It was just after two in the morning. Two men had checked the streets near his house and given an all-clear on the presence of army foot patrols.

  It was his first visit back into his native Ardoyne since he had left to go to London nearly a month ago. His absence had been noted by the local British army battalion that operated out of the towering, near-derelict, Flax Street mill complex on the edge of the Ardoyne. It was entered in the comprehensive files the intelligence section maintained on the several thousand people that lived in the area, and a week before two Land-Rovers had pulled up outside the man’s house, made their way to the half-opened front door and confronted his wife. She could have told them little even if she had felt inclined to. She didn’t, anyway.

  She told them to ‘Go fuck yourselves, you British pigs’. She then added, nervous perhaps of the impact of her initial outburst, that her husband was away in the South working for a living. The army had searched the house without enthusiasm, but this was routine, and nothing was found, nor really expected to be. The intelligence officer noted the report of the sergeant who had led the raid, noted too that it would be nice to talk to the occupant of No. 41 Ypres Avenue at some later date. That was as far as it had been taken.

  If Harry had been chosen for his role because he was clean, the same criterion had operated with the other man’s superiors when they had put the cross against his name midway up the list of twenty or so who were capable of going to London and killing Danby.

  Ypres Avenue was a little different from the mass of streets that made up the Ardoyne. The battle it was named after gave a clue to its age, and so its state of repair was superior to those streets up in the Falls where Downs had been hiding the last three weeks and where the streets took their names from the Crimean and Indian Mutiny battles, along with the British generals who had led a liberal stock of Ulstermen into their late-nineteenth-century fighting. But fifty-nine years is still a long time for an artisan cottage to survive without major repairs, and none had been carried out on any considerable scale in the Avenue since the day they had been put up to provide dwellings for those working in the mill, where the army now slept. The houses were joined in groups of four, with, in between, a narrow passage running through to the high-walled back entrance that came along behind the tiny yards at the rear.

  The blast bombs, nail bombs and petrol bombs of four years of fighting had taken their toll, and several of the houses had been walled up. The bottom eight feet of a wall at the end of the Avenue had been whitewashed, the work of housewives late at night at internment time, so that at night, in the near darkness of the Ardoyne, a soldier’s silhouette would stand out all the more clearly and give the boyos a better chance with a rifle. Most corners in the area had been given the same treatment, and the army had come out in force a week later and painted the whitened walls black. The women had then been out again, then again the army, before both sides called a mutual but unspoken truce. The walls were left filthy and disfigured from the daubings.<
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  The army sat heavily on the Ardoyne, and the Provos, as they themselves admitted, had had a hard time of it. This was good for the man. A main activist would not be expected to live in an area dominated by the military and where IRA operations had virtually ceased. He had been careful to link all his work with the Falls, away in a quite separate Catholic area from the Ardoyne.

  Each house was small, unshaped, and built to last. Comfort played only a small part in its design. A front hall, with a front room off it, led towards a living area with kitchen and scullery two later additions and under asbestos roofing. The toilet was the most recent arrival and was in the yard against the far wall in a breeze-block cubicle. Upstairs each house boasted two rooms and a tiny landing. Bathing was in the kitchen. This was Belfast housing, perfect for the ideological launching of the gunman, perfect too as the model ground for him to pursue his work.

  In the years the man had lived there he could find his way by the counting of his footsteps and by touch, when he came to the door of his own yard. The door had been recently greased, and made no sound when it swung on its hinges. He slipped towards the kitchen and unlocked the back door and went upstairs. That back door was never bolted, just locked, so that he could come in through it at any time.

  It was the longest he had ever been away. The relief was total. He was back.

  He moved cat-like up from the base of the stairs, three steps, then waited and listened. The house was completely dark and he had found the banister rail by touch. There were the familiar smells of the house, strong in his nose – the smell of cold tea and cold chips, older fat, of the damp that came into the walls, of the lino and scraps of carpet where that damp had eaten and corroded. On the stairs while he waited he could hear the sound of his family clustered together in the two rooms, the rhythm of their sleep broken by the hacking cough of one of the girls.