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‘Address?’

  Jones had had his eyes down on his notebook till that moment. He glanced up to hear the answer. Harry saw an expression of astonishment take hold of him, then change to suspicion, then back to bewilderment.

  ‘Bloody hell, what are you doing—?’

  Harry’s right foot moved the seven inches into Jones’s left ankle. As the private ducked forward, caught off balance by the sudden pain, Harry lurched into him.

  ‘Shut your face,’ he hissed into the soldier’s ear.

  Jones’s face came up and met Harry’s stare. Imperceptibly he saw the head move. A quick shake, left to right and twice.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harry. ‘Forget it. I hope you’ll forget it.’

  The last words were very quiet and straight into Jones’s ear. The men in the line, waiting to be questioned, still faced the wall; the women, sitting at their tables, were out of earshot. The exchange between Harry and Jones seemed to have passed unnoticed.

  Llewellyn had been diverted by a commotion down at the far end of the hall, where four youths were half carried and half dragged towards the doorway. He was concentrating again now.

  ‘Come on – what’s the address?’

  ‘Delrosa Guest House, in the Broadway. Just up from Beachmount.’

  Harry’s eyes were fixed, snake-like, on Jones.

  ‘Bit off course, aren’t you?’ said Llewellyn.

  ‘My girl’s local.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘In the polka dot, the dark-haired girl.’ Harry gazed past Llewellyn, his eyes never leaving Jones. Twice the younger soldier’s eyes came up from his notebook, met Harry’s, and dived back to the writing.

  ‘Lucky bastard,’ said Llewellyn, and moved on.

  Apart from Downs, the army had taken nine youths when the officer shouted for his men to leave the club. They went out in single file, the last going out backwards with his rifle covering the crowd. As the door swung to after him a hail of empty bottles and glasses cannoned into the woodwork.

  A tall man at the far end from Harry shouted a protest.

  ‘Now come on, folks, we can do better than that. Lob things at the bastards, yes, but not so we cover our floor with our bottles and our glasses and our beer. Now, we’re not going to let those swine spoil the evening for us. Let’s move it all back and tidy up, and see if we can’t get something out of the evening.’

  It was a good effort on the part of the community leader, but doomed to failure.

  Harry noticed that the girl in yellow was gone before the floor was half cleared. He shifted in his seat.

  ‘We can’t go yet. It’s the principle of the thing,’ said Josephine. ‘You cannot let the bastards wreck everything. What did you say to that soldier?’

  ‘I just tripped against him, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re lucky. You might have got a rifle butt across your face. There’s men taken to the barracks for less.’

  The band had started up again, attempting to capitalize on the angry mood of those left behind.

  Armoured cars and tanks and guns,

  Came to take away our sons . . .

  ‘Will it wake up again, or is this the lot for the evening?’ asked Harry.

  . . . Through the little streets so narrow . . .

  ‘I doubt it,’ she said, ‘but it’s best to give it a few minutes. Let’s see, anyway.’

  . . . Cromwell’s men are here again . . .

  ‘It’s not that bad, is it?’ said Harry. ‘I heard it in the Baltic when we were working out of a Swedish port. They used to play it about every third disc. Got to quite like it. We had a mate on board who said his son was in the army here. He used to get right steamed up just listening to it.’

  . . . The men behind the wire . . .

  People were edging towards the door. Harry sensed there would be little more of a night out for any of them.

  ‘Come on, let’s quit. We don’t want to stay here for the funeral.’

  ‘I’m going to powder my nose, then,’ Josephine said.

  ‘Looks all right to me. Don’t hang about.’

  She smiled, got up from the table and went out through a side door where a gaggle of girls younger than Josephine had gathered. The band was still trying, but was competing with a wave of talk particularly from a large group that had gathered round a local primary schoolteacher who was taking down the names of all those lifted by the military. He was promising to go round to the barracks to see what had happened to them.

  It was a cold clear night as Harry, with Josephine on his arm, walked out of the hall and off towards the all-night taxi rank for the drive down to Castle Street. Then there would be another taxi, and a walk up the last part of the Falls to Mrs Duncan’s.

  Harry and Josephine were naked, entwined and asleep, when 275 miles to the south the Garda squad car drew up outside the stone terraced house in the Dublin Road in Cork. There was the sharp mustiness of the docks in the pre-dawn air, as the two policemen fumbled their way from the car to the front doorstep.

  ‘It’s a sod of a time, God help us, to be getting this poor dear out of her bed.’

  The sergeant rang the door bell, twice and firmly, and waited. A light came on upstairs, not fast, then in the hall, and after that the noise of the bolts in the door grating open.

  ‘From the sound of it you’d think she’d got the Bank of England in there,’ muttered the sergeant into his gloves.

  ‘Good morning, my love. I’m sorry to be coming at such a time as this to wake you. But a message has come down over the telephone from Dublin and I’m to ask you some questions. Won’t take a moment now. Shall we come on in, out of that wind?’

  ‘We’ll do what business you have here. You should be ashamed of yerselves coming at this time . . .’

  ‘That’s not our affair, my love. Now, are you ready? We want to ask you when was your boy last here.’

  ‘Billy, you mean?’

  ‘That’s the lad, love. That’s the one they want to know about.’

  ‘He was down till the middle of the week. Been here a month, and just gone back. Why do you need to come at this time of night to ask that?’

  ‘You’re sure of that now, my dear? No mistakes?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Billy was here for a month. And those are bloody silly questions to be asking at this time of night.’

  She closed the door on them. The two Garda men knocked at the next-door house and again waited for the door to open. They took away the same message. Billy Downs had been there for a month.

  The alibi had been passed on to the old lady and her four immediate neighbours some forty-five minutes before the police car had arrived. The wife’s phone call to a friend of her man in Belfast had started the chain. Another call had been made to Dublin, another one from there to Cork, and a young man who had left his car two streets away from the Dublin Road had completed the process. The Provisionals’ lines of communication were somewhat faster than the complicated and official process of liaison between North and South.

  Downs had been interrogated twice, maintaining quietly and without fuss that he had been at his mother’s in the South. He was kept apart from the other prisoners with the officers who had questioned him unsure whether they ought to have pulled him in or not. They heard at 5.30 the results of the checks in Cork, gave him back his coat and his tie and his shoes and told him to get away home.

  Chapter 9

  They’d come into the house on tiptoe and holding their shoes. Both knew the prim well-scrubbed hallway and stairs well enough to estimate where the boards creaked, and where it was safe to put down their full weight. Harry held the girl’s hand very tight. At first they had tried to go up the stairs together, and then, finding that impossible, he had gently led the way. There had been no talk about what they should do, where they should go when they left the taxi, no discussion whether she should come back to Delrosa with him. He had looked into her face at the doorway as he rummaged with his free hand for the latch key, seen t
hose mocking, querying eyes turned up to his face, looking as if to challenge or dare him to take her inside. He’d squeezed her hand, and they’d gone in together. The message of silence was implicit.

  Once in his back room a floorboard had erupted in protest at her foot and he had pulled her away from the place near the basin where she was standing wriggling out of her coat. That was where it would creak. That was the place where he had prised up the planks two days earlier to find a secure hiding place for his Smith & Wesson revolver.

  She slung the coat across his easy chair by the window, and stood waiting for him to move towards her. He felt a tightness streaming through him. Clumsy. Gauche. Inhibited. He reached out towards the tall girl who gazed back at him, her expression one of interest, curiosity to see what he had to offer.

  ‘You make me feel . . . a bit like someone who’s forgotten most of it,’ he whispered into her ear, one hand holding the back of her neck, the other flattened into the small of her back.

  ‘You haven’t made me feel anything yet.’

  ‘Cheeky girl.’

  ‘Try a bit of cheek yourself. Might take you a long way.’

  He pulled his left hand round, drawing back from her to give himself room to unbutton the few remaining buttons on her blouse.

  ‘Not much of an obstacle course here,’ he murmured as he flicked the buttons, small and transparent, through the opened holes of the fabric.

  ‘Who said they were supposed to be?’

  His hand had moved inside her blouse, and he began to ease the soft cotton over her shoulders and down her arms.

  ‘I was never very much one for this. Getting everything off in the right order, like a bloody production line in reverse.’

  ‘And it takes so much more time. Let’s see to it ourselves. I’ll meet you under the sheets in forty-five seconds from now.’

  In a welter of tights, pants, black skirt, shoes and bra she stripped herself and was away in the bed waiting for him. Harry was fighting with his right cuff link. She had started to follow the second hand of her watch with exaggerated interest before he climbed into the narrow bed alongside her.

  ‘You took thirty seconds over the limit. Bad marks for that, sailor boy.’

  ‘Wasn’t for lack of trying.’

  He had curved his arms round her, as she came close to against him. His fingers ran their course across her skin, tight, cool and firm. Beautiful girl. Her eyes closed. She moaned. Calling for him, hurrying him. That first time there were few preliminaries, few subtleties. He found her fast, deep, easy. He poured himself into her. Both engaged in a frantic, uncaring race. He sagged away. Disastrous. Bloody Belfast. Like everything else – crude and rushed. No future for tenderness or patience.

  ‘Got a bus to catch?’

  ‘It’ll be better next time,’ he said, ‘it happened too quick for me. And I never got round to asking you whether . . . you know, whether you take anything . . . or what?’

  ‘There’s Catholics and good Catholics here. I’m one of the first. You don’t have to worry about that.’

  The second time was better. Softer, calmer. Slower. He took a long time finding the routes and depths and contours of her body. Finding where she moved and squirmed, and when she thrust herself at him. Heat against his chest and his thighs. She called the time she was ready for him to come into her, called quietly in his ear. Her mouth open, almost soundless. He smiled down at her as he felt himself slipping away into the void. It was over and they lay together. Her hair strewn with the sweat out on the pillow, he on her softness waiting for the limpness to come. Still locked together.

  ‘You’ve no worries, then?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean? I don’t think so.’

  ‘You can’t screw if you’re really worried. Did you know that?’

  ‘Old wives. Where did you hear that? Who told you that?’

  ‘Just what one of the girls said in the bog tonight.’

  ‘Tell me what she said.’ He lay straddled across her, her mouth an inch or so from his ear.

  ‘She said she’d tried to do it with one of the big men, but he couldn’t manage it. She said he was all so tied up he couldn’t make it. She was ever so upset.’

  Harry grimaced in disbelief.

  ‘No, that’s what she said. She was there tonight. She told me in the loo. She’s a bit frantic at the best of times. Then the army nicked the fellow who’d have had her on the way home. Peeved her a bit. On her own on Saturday night. Not right for her. That’s what she said. Big hero. Big deal. I’m all for cowards in this city.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Harry, very still now. ‘Which girl was it?’

  ‘I’m not telling you the best lay in Ballymurphy!’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You’re making it up.’

  She pushed him back sideways. In the small bed there was hardly enough room, and he clung to her to save himself from disappearing on the floor. She rolled over onto him, half her weight supported by his hips and waist and the other half supported by an elbow.

  ‘It was Theresa. In pink. She had the tight skirt? Remember her? Believe me. You’ll be up to Ballymurphy sniffing round now. Randy bugger.’

  ‘I’d believe anything said by anyone as lovely as you,’ said Harry.

  ‘Bullshit,’ she said.

  ‘Who was the big man that didn’t slake wee Theresa’s thirst?’ His hands were on the move again now, seeking the closeness between her thighs. She rolled and rose beneath him.

  ‘Just like that. Go on. Just like that. The big man, the one they’re all looking for. The London man. The one that did the politician in London. Don’t stop there. Just like that. Faster! There’s bugger all time. The old girl’s alarm’ll be off in half an hour. She’s out like a flash then. Makes enough noise to wake half the folks in Milltown Cemetery.’

  Minutes later she was out of bed, dressed and making her way quietly down the stairs to the front door. She refused to let Harry come and see her off, gave him a sisterly kiss on the forehead and was gone. He stood at his bedroom window and saw her some moments later walking along the main road under the street lights. When she had gone beyond the gap he lost sight of her.

  After she had left Harry lay in his bed, stretching out his legs, searching out the new-found room, working over in his mind the information she had given him. No problem for the intelligence guys. A girl called Theresa, about eighteen or nineteen, in Ballymurphy. Sleeps around a bit. No problem. Should wrap up the whole thing. Not bad; one good screw in the line of duty, and the big coup. He could scarcely believe his luck – getting so far so quickly – all falling into his lap – and on a night out, at that. And the old woman, Davidson, who didn’t rate his chances, who fussed and clucked over him, what would he be thinking when Harry called through? A moment to savour, that would be. I’d like to see his face, thought Harry.

  There was still the worry over being recognized by that stupid, gawping soldier. But they should have the man within forty-eight hours, and then what the soldier saw wouldn’t matter. All be academic by then. But where did the soldier come from? He turned over in his mind the military situations he’d been in over the last two years, trying to work out where he had seen the young man who had no doubts about him. Davidson would sort it out. Ring him in the morning. Let him know it’s just about wrapped up.

  For the first time since he had come to Belfast he felt the excitement that had been the hallmark of the Sheik Othman operation.

  He used to leave little pencilled messages in English in an old fruit tin on the Sheik Othman-to-Mansoura road. Nothing as luxurious as a telephone. Sometimes he’d stay around in the afternoon heat the next day when the town was sleepy and out of gear and watch the military come bulldozing into the town in their Saladins and Saracens. He would watch the leather-faced, expressionless men hustled away into the armoured cars, resisting the show of force that came to get them only with the contempt in their eyes. That was the reward for the strange job he did – to see th
e clumsy boot of the army stepping into the exact footprints he had silently prepared for them.

  It was a good two and a quarter hours before Davidson would be in the office. He had told Harry that for the first three weeks at least he would be there every day, Sundays included, at eight in the morning and stay till ten at night. Must be playing havoc with his marriage, thought Harry. Can’t really see Davidson with a wife, though.

  He’d go into town, he decided, and make the call from one of those anonymous call boxes in the city centre. Now two hours’ sleep. That bloody woman. He was exhausted.

  But she was a bit special.

  Not like that at home. Couldn’t be really. Nothing in married life vegetating round a barracks square in a line of neat, desiccated quarters that matched the drawn bowstring of the city at war. Too many bombs, too many snipers, too many mutilations for people to hang about on the preliminaries. You’d want a few memories as you bumped about in the box up the Falls to Milltown Cemetery. That was the philosophy of life for Belfast. And not a bad one, thought Harry.

  Across in Germany they’d be asleep now. The wife and the kids, tucked up in their rooms, the familiar bits and pieces round them. The things, semi-junk, that they’d collected from the duty-free lounge and the market places where they went shopping when he was off duty. Knick-knacks that brightened the service furniture they lived off. Josephine didn’t fit in there, was outside that world. They’d be up soon. Always had an early breakfast on Sundays. Someone would take the boys out for football. That was regular. And his wife . . . how would she spend a cold Sunday in North Germany? Harry was half asleep. Not quite dreaming but close. She’d go visiting, walk out along the line of officers’ detached houses for a coffee in mid-morning, and stay for a drink before lunch, and have to make her excuses, and there’d be laughter when she’d flap about the lunch in the oven. Perhaps someone would ask her to stay and share theirs. That would be par for the course. And they’d say how sorry they were that Harry was away, and how suddenly he’d gone, and fish for an explanation. The questions would confuse her, and embarrass her, because they’d expect her at least to have an idea of why he’d vanished so quickly. And she wouldn’t have an answer.