Harry's Game Read online

  There was no question of using the lights. Any illumination through the sparse curtains would alert the army to the fact that someone in the house was on the move unusually late, coming home or going out. A little enough thing, but sufficient to go down into the files and card system that the intelligence men pored over, and which gave them their results. In the blackness the man inched his way up the stairs, conscious that no-one would have told his wife he was coming home this particular night, and anxious not to frighten her.

  He moved slowly on the landing, pushed open the door of the back room where he and his wife slept, and came inside. His eyes were now accustomed to the dark. He made out her hair on the pillow, and beside it the two small shapes, huddled close together for warmth and comfort. He watched them a long time. One of the children wriggled and then subsided with the cough. It had just been coming on when he had left home. He felt no emotion, only inhibition over how to break in and intrude on their sleep. Gradually his wife became aware of his presence. At first she was frightened, moving quickly and jerking the head of one of the sleeping children. She was defensive in her movement, the mother hen protecting her nest. The aggression went when she saw it was him. With a half-strangled sob she reached out for her man and pulled him down onto the bed.

  Beneath him he felt the children slide away to continue their sleep uninterrupted.

  ‘Hullo, my love, I’m back. I’m OK. Safe now. I’ve come back to you.’

  He mouthed the words pressed hard into the pit of her neck, his voice sandwiched between her shoulder and ear. She held him very tightly, pulling at him as if some force were working to get him away from her again.

  ‘It’s all right, love. I’m home. It’s over.’

  He rose to his knees and kicked off his shoes, wrenched at his socks and pulled away the trousers, jacket and shirt. She passed one of the sleeping children over her body and pulled back the clothes of the bed for him to come into the empty space.

  Desperately she clung to him there, squeezing the hardness and bitterness and strength out of him, demolishing the barriers of coldness and callousness with which he had surrounded himself, working at the emotions that had been so suppressed in the last month.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘Don’t . . . don’t . . . I’ve missed you, I’ve wanted you.’

  ‘No, where’ve you been?’ she persisted. ‘We thought you were gone – were dead. There was no word, not anything. Where? There’s always been a word before when you’ve gone.’

  He clung to her, holding onto the one person that he loved and whom he needed as his lifeline, particularly over the last weeks of tension and fear. He felt the tautness draining out of him as he pressed down onto her body. It was some moments before he realized that she was lying quite still, rigid and yielding nothing. His grip on her slackened and he rose a little from the bedclothes to see her face, but when he was high enough to look down at her eyes, she turned them away from him towards her sleeping children.

  ‘What’s the matter? What’s this for?’

  ‘It’s where you’ve been. Why you’ve been away. That’s the matter. I know now, don’t I?’

  ‘Know what …?’ He hesitated. Stupid bitch, what was she blathering for? He was here. Flesh and blood. But what did she know? He was uncertain. How much had she realized through the frenzy in which he had held her? What had that crude and desperate weight of worry communicated to her?

  ‘Are you going to tell me about it?’ she said.

  ‘About what?’ His anger was rising.

  ‘Where you’ve been . . .’

  ‘I’ve told you. Once more. Then the end of it. I was in the South. Finish, that’s it.’

  ‘You won’t tell me, then?’

  ‘I’ve said it’s finished. There’s no more. Leave it. I’m home – that should be enough. Don’t you want me here?’

  ‘It said in the papers that his children were there. And his wife. They saw it all. That the man went on shooting long after he’d gone down. That the children were screaming, so was his wife. It said she covered him from the bullets. Put herself right over him.’

  She was sitting right up now with her hands splayed behind her, back straight, and her breasts, deep from the children she had suckled, bulging forward under the intricate pattern of her nightdress. Downs’s longing for her had gone, sapped from him by her accusation. The moment he had waited for, which had become his goal over the last few days on the run, was destroyed.

  She went on, looking not at him but straight in front of her into the darkness. ‘They said that if it took them five years they’d get the man who did it. They said he must have been an animal to shoot like that across the street. They said they’d hunt for him till they found him, then lock him up for the rest of his natural. You stupid, daft bastard.’

  Her point of focus was in the middle distance way beyond the walls and confines of their back bedroom. In his churning mind the replies and counter-attacks flooded through him. But there was no voice. When he spoke it was without fight.

  ‘Someone had to do it. It happened it was me. Danby had it coming. Little bastard he was. There’s not a tear shed for him; they haven’t a clue to bring them to me. There’s no line on me. The picture’s no good. The kids wouldn’t recognize me on that. They didn’t, did they?’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid. Do you think I’d hold up two four-year-olds and show them a picture and say “Do you recognize your Dad? He’s a killer, shot a man in front of his kids.” That what you want me to do?’

  ‘Shut your face. Finish it. I told you there’ll be no more. You shouldn’t have known. You didn’t need to know.’

  ‘It’ll be bloody marvellous. The return of the great and famous hero, with half the sodding army after him. What a future! “We weren’t supposed to know.” What sort of statement is that? If they shoot you when they get you there’ll be a bloody song about you. Just right for Saturday nights when they’re all pissed, so keep the verses short and the words not too long. What a hero. You’ll want me to teach the kids the words, and all. Is that the future for us?’

  She sank back onto the pillow, and holding the nearest of the two children, began to weep, in slight convulsive shudders, noiselessly.

  He rose from the bed and put on his underclothes, shirt and trousers, before moving in his bare feet across the room to the door. He went down the stairs and into the front room. Checking an instinctive movement towards the light switch, he groped his way to his armchair by the grate and lowered himself gingerly down onto it. There were newspapers there, and he pushed them down onto the floor. He sat there very still, exhausted by the emotion of the last few minutes. She’d clobbered him, kicked him in the crutch, and when the pain had sped all over him come back and kicked him again. Since Danby all he had wanted was to get back here, to her, to the kids, the totalness of the family. To be safe with them. The bitch had destroyed it.

  In the dark he could relive the moments of the shooting. He found the actual happenings hard to be exact about. They had faded, and he was uncertain whether the picture he put together was from his memory or his imagination. The immediate sensations were still clear. The kicking of the Kalashnikov, the force driving into his shoulder – that was as vivid as the day and the time itself, the impact feeling. So, too, was the frozen tableau of the woman on her husband. The children. That enormous, useless dog. That was all still there. He saw the incident as a series of still frames, separate episodes. Some of the pictures were in panorama, as when Danby came down the steps and was looking right for the car and waving left at the children. Others were in close up – the face of the woman he had run past. Fear, disbelief, shock and horror. He could see every wrinkle and line on the silly cow’s face down to the brown mole above her right cheek. He remembered the blood, but with detachment. Inevitable. Unimportant.

  He wanted congratulations for a job well done. He’d thought that out and decided he was justified in some plaudits. It had been professionally done. T
he movement would be proud of the effort. He knew that himself, but yearned to be told so out loud. She should have bestowed the accolade. Of course she would guess, no way she wouldn’t. Dates were right, the picture. She should have been the one with a nod, and an innuendo. She had guessed. She had to. But she called him a ‘stupid, daft bastard’. He was hurt and numbed by that.

  They had never talked about the Provos. Right from the start that had been laid down. She didn’t want to know. Wasn’t interested. No word on the nights he was going out. Went and buried herself in the kitchen, played with the children, got out of his way. She accepted, though, that he needed her strength and support when he came home. That was the concession she gave him. But that was not exceptional in the Ardoyne.

  The women would hear the shots out in the streets where the battlefield was just beyond the front-room curtains. There would be the high crack of the Armalite, fired once, twice or perhaps three times. Within seconds would come the hard thump of the answering army rifles, a quite different and heavier noise. If the man was not home by dawn the women would listen to the first news broadcast of the day, and hear what had happened. Sometimes there would be an agony of time between hearing that the army returned fire and claimed hits and the savoured moment when the man came in untouched.

  Then there would be no words, only warmth and comfort and the attempt to calm the trembling hands.

  His wife had once shown him an article in a London women’s magazine which told of the effect on the morale of the army wives stationed in Germany that those same early broadcasts had. He had read how fast word spread around the married quarters that the unit had been in action, and how the women then waited at their windows to see if the officer came round and which house he went to. They would know if one of the men had been killed because the chaplain or the doctor would be with the officer, and they would go to a neighbour’s house first, have a quick word on the doorstep, then move next door and knock, and when the door opened go inside. The news would be round the houses and maisonettes and flats within minutes.

  The man had been responsible for two of those visits. On the first occasion he had watched the funeral on television, seen the forty-five-second clip that showed the coffin with the flag on it, and a young widow clutching the arm of a relative as she walked surrounded by officers and local dignitaries. Then the staccato crack of rifle fire from the honour party. That was all. The other soldier he’d killed last week had been buried without a news team there to record the event. Interest had been lost. Whether he saw it or not was of no importance to him. He extracted no satisfaction either way.

  It left him unmoved. He could imagine no soldier weeping if it were he who were shot dead. He had long accepted that it could happen and, apart from the tension of the actual moments of combat and the bowstring excitement afterwards, he had learned a fatalism about the risks he took.

  He had started like most others as a teenager throwing rocks and abuse in the early days at those wonderful, heaven-sent targets . . . the British army, with their yellow cards forbidding them to shoot in almost every situation, their heavy Macron shields, which ruled out effective pursuit, and their lack of knowledge of the geography of the side streets. All the boys in Ypres Avenue threw stones at the soldiers, and it would have been almost impossible to have been uninvolved. The mood had changed when a youth from the other end of the street and the opposite side of the road was shot dead in the act of lighting a petrol bomb. He had been one form above the man in secondary school. Later that night four men had arrived at the far end of Ypres Avenue to the rioting, and the word had spread fast that the kids should get off the streets. Then the shooting had started. In all, fifteen shots had been fired, echoing up the deserted street. He was eighteen then, and with other teenagers had lain in an open doorway and cheered at the urgent shouts of the soldiers who had taken cover behind the Pigs. Abruptly a hurrying, shadowy figure had crawled to the doorway, pushed towards him the long shape of a Springfield rifle, and whispered an address and street number.

  He had made his way through the back of the houses, part way down the entry, and through another row of houses where a family had stared at the television, ignoring him as he padded across their living space before closing the door onto the street behind him. When he reached the address he had handed the rifle to the woman who answered his knock. She said nothing and he had made his way back to Ypres Avenue.

  That had been the start.

  Many of his contemporaries in the street had thrust themselves forward into the IRA. They would meet together on Saturday nights at the clubs, standing apart from the other young men to discuss in secretive voices their experiences over the previous days. Some were now dead, some in remand homes or prison, a very few had made it to junior officer rank in the IRA and after their capture had been served with indefinite detention orders to Long Kesh. The man had kept apart from them, and been noticed by those older, shadowy figures who ran the movement. He had been marked down as someone out of the ordinary, who didn’t need to run with the herd. He had been used sparingly and never with the cannon fodder that carried the bombs into the town shoe shops and supermarkets, or held up the post offices for a few hundred pounds. He’d been married on his twentieth birthday when he was acting as bodyguard to a member of the Brigade staff, at a time when relations between the divided Provisionals and officials were at an all-time low. After the wedding he had not been called out for some months, as his superiors let him mature, confident that he would, like good wine, repay well the time they gave him. They used him first shortly before the twins were born. Then he took part in an escape attempt at Long Kesh, waiting through much of the night in a stolen car on the M1 motorway for a man to come through the wire and across the fields. They had stayed seven minutes after a cacophony of barking dogs on the perimeter fence six hundred yards away had spelled out the failure of the attempt. With two others he had been used for the assassination of a policeman as he left his house in the suburb of Glengormley. It was his first command, and he was allowed to select his own ambush point, collect the firearm from the Brigade quartermaster, and lead the getaway on his own route. After that came attacks on police stations, where he was among those who gave covering fire with the Armalites to the blast of the RPG rocket launcher.

  On those early occasions he had often missed with the crucial first shot, firing too hurriedly, and then had to run like a mad thing with the noise and shouting of the soldiers behind him. They were heady moments, hearing the voices of the English troops with their strange accents bellowing in pursuit as he weaved and ducked his way clear.

  Amongst a small group, though, his reputation had improved and his future value was reckoned as such that for nearly a year he had been left to lead what amounted to a normal life in the Ardoyne. Around him the army removed all but a tight hard core of activists. He was left at home, his name not figuring on the army files, his photograph absent from the wanted lists.

  In their four years of marriage his wife had borne him twins, both boys, and conceived some weeks before their wedding, and two daughters. The time that he was away preparing for London, in the English capital, and then hiding in Northern Ireland before coming back to Ypres Avenue was the longest he had ever been away from his family. As he sat in the room where the light began to filter its gentle way through the thin cotton curtains he reflected on the hugeness of his disappointment at the way his wife had reacted.

  He was still slumped in his chair when she came downstairs, a little after six. She came into the room on tiptoe and up behind the chair, and leaned over and kissed him on his forehead.

  ‘We’ll have to forget it all,’ she said. ‘The kids’ll be awake soon. They’ve been upset, you being away so long, and the wee one has the cough. They’ll be excited. There’s a dance at the club on Saturday. Let’s go. Mam’ll come down, and sit. We’ll have some drinks, forget it ever happened.’

  She kissed him again.

  ‘We need some tea, kettle’s up.’<
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  He followed her into the kitchen.

  For Davidson, in his offices above a paint store in Covent Garden, it was to be a bad morning. He had asked for an appointment with the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Defence. The Boss. The Gaffer. Appointments with subordinates only when there was a fiasco or a potential fiasco. Davidson had to explain that their operator had gone missing and had never checked into the address that had been suggested to him.

  Davidson had been hoping for a phone call, or failing that at least a letter or postcard to the office, saying, if nothing else, that Harry was installed and working. The complete silence was beginning to unnerve him. The previous day he authorized the checking of the Antrim Road guest house – discreetly, by telephone – for a Mr McEvoy, but the word had come back that no-one of that name had been near the building. There was no way Davidson could find out in a hurry whether the package containing the pistol sent for collection had in fact been picked up. He told himself there was no positive foundation to his fears, but the possibility, however faint, that Harry was already blown or dead or both nagged at Davidson. Nagged enough for him to seek a rare audience in the Ministry.

  By early afternoon the brandies were on the table in the restaurant of the big hotel on the outskirts of the city. Both the Brigadier and the Chief Superintendent were in their own clothes and mildly celebrating the promotion and transfer of the army officer from second in command of the Brigade with responsibilities for Belfast to a new appointment in Germany. Both knew from their own intelligence-gathering agencies in vague terms of the sending of Harry and the Prime Minister’s directive – it had come in a terse, brief message from the GOC’s headquarters. There was little more to it than the statement that a special team had been set up to spearhead the hunt for Danby’s killer, and that all other operations in this direction should continue as before. During the serving of the food neither had spoken of it, as the waiters hovered round them. But with the coffee cups full, and the brandy glasses topped up, the subject was inevitably fielded.