Harry's Game Page 7

‘It’s not the accuracy that counts so much with the first ones, sir,’ said the older man, pulling off his earmuffs, ‘it’s the speed you get the first one or two away. If you’re shooting straight enough for your opponent to hear them going by his ear that tends to be enough to get his head back a bit. But it’s getting the first one away that matters. Gets the initiative for you. There aren’t many men as will stand still and aim as you’re pulling the trigger for the first one. Get ’em going back and then worry about the aim for the third and fourth shot. And try not to fire more than the first four straight off. It’s nice to keep a couple just so that you have a chance to do something about it if things don’t turn out that well. Remember with this one it’s a great little gun, but it’s slow to load. That’s its problem. Everything else is OK.’

  They went over the firing positions. Sometimes the classic right-arm-extended, sideways-on stance. ‘That’s if you’ve got all night, sir, and you don’t think he’s armed. Take your time and make sure. Doesn’t happen that often.’? Then they worked on the standard revolver-shooting posture. Legs apart, body hunched, arms extended, meeting in front of the eye line, butt held in both hands, the whole torso lunging at the target. ‘You’re small yourself then, sir, and you’ve got your whole body thrown in with the gun to get it away straight. You won’t miss often from that, and if you do you’ll give ’im such a hell of a fright that he won’t do much about it.’

  ‘What’s he like, Chief ?’ Davidson said to the instructor.

  ‘We’ve had better through here, sir, and we’ve had worse. He’s quite straight but a bit slow as of now. I wouldn’t worry about that. If he has to use it he’ll be faster. Everyone is when it’s real.’

  Harry followed Davidson out of the greenhouse and they walked together up the brick and weed path amongst the vegetables. It was mild for November; the trees, huge above them, were already without their load of leaves and above the trees the soft meandering grey clouds.

  ‘I think it’s going quite well, Harry – no, I mean very well at the moment. But I don’t want to minimize anything that you’re going to have to go through. It’s all very well here, swotting for an exam if you like . . . but the questions themselves are very tough when you get to the actual paper. Forgive the metaphor, Harry, but it’s not an easy road over there, however much we do for you here. There are some things we can iron out at this end. Accent. It’s critical for immediate and long-term survival. You can spare your blushes but I think that’s coming along very well. Your background knowledge is fine, detail of events, names, folklore – that is all good. But there are other more complex factors, about which we cannot really do very much, and which are just as vital.’

  They stopped now some twenty-five yards from the house on the edge of the old tennis court. Davidson was looking for the words. Harry wasn’t going to help him; that wasn’t his style.

  ‘Look, Harry. Just as important as the accent, and getting the background right, and knowing what the hullabaloo is about, is how you are going to stand up to this yourself. It’s my job to send you in there as perfectly equipped as possible. Right? Well, the thing I cannot actually gauge is how you’ll soak up the punishment of just existing there. You could have an isolation problem . . . loneliness, basically. No-one to confide in, not part of a local team, completely on your own. This could be a problem. I don’t know the answer to it, I don’t think you’re liable to suffer too greatly from it – that’s my reading of your file. Sorry, but we go through it most nights with a fine blade. Unless you’re aware of it, and bolt it down, there’ll come a time when you’ll want to tell someone about yourself, however obliquely, however much at a tangent. You’ll say now, never, never in a month of whatevers, but believe me it’ll happen, and you have to watch it.’

  Harry searched his face, noting for the first time since he’d come to the big house the concern of the other man. Davidson went on, ‘After Aden we’re pretty confident in your ability to look after yourself. There’s a lot in the file on that. I’ve no reason to disbelieve it, you’ve shown me none. The simple day-to-day business won’t be pleasant but will be bearable. The other thing you have to consider is if you’re discovered – what happens then? There is a fair chance that if they spot you we may be getting some sort of feedback as they build up information and we’ll have time to shift you out in a hurry. You may notice something, a tail, a man watching you, questions being asked. Don’t hang about then, just come back. What I’m getting at is difficult enough to say, but you have to face it, and you’ll be better for facing it. You have to work out how you’ll react if they take you alive.’

  Harry grimaced weakly. The older man was fumbling about trying to say the most obvious thing of the whole operation, stumbling in his care not to scratch the varnish of morale that was coated sometimes thickly, sometimes sparsely on all these jobs.

  ‘I think I can help you,’ Harry smiled at him. ‘You want to know whether I’ve considered the question of being taken, tortured and shot. Yes. You want to know whether I’m going to tell them all about here, you and everything else. Answer, I don’t know. I think not, I hope not. But I don’t know. You don’t know these things, and there’s no absolute statement I can make that would be of any use. But I’ve thought of it, and I know what you’d hope from me. Whether you’ll get it I just don’t know.’

  They began to walk again. Davidson swung his right arm round behind Harry’s back and slapped his far shoulder. Like a father, thought Harry, and he’s scared stiff. It’s always been nice and comfortable for him, sitting at a desk packing the nameless numbered men off to heaven-knows where, but this time the jungle’s been creeping a bit close.

  ‘Thank you, Harry. That was very fairly put. Very fair. There’s things that have to be discussed if one’s to keep these things professional. I’m grateful to you. I think your attitude is about right.’ Thank God for that, Harry thought, now he’s done his duty. We’ve had our facts of life talk, ready to go out into the big nasty world, and don’t put your hands up little girls’ skirts. God, he’s relieved he’s got that little lot over.

  As they came to the paint-chipped back door, Davidson started again. ‘You know, Harry, you haven’t told us much about home, about your wife. The family. It’s an aspect we haven’t really had time to go into.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about there. Not that I know of. I suppose you never do till it’s too late to be worrying about that sort of thing. She’s very level. Not complicated. That sounds pretty patronizing, but I don’t mean that. She’s used to me going away in a hurry, at least was used to it when we were younger. It’s not been so frequent over the last few years, but I think she’s OK.’

  ‘Did she know what you were doing in Aden?’

  Harry said it slowly, thoughtfully, ‘No. Not really. I didn’t have time or the opportunity to write. There had been those little sods rolling grenades into the married quarters and smuggling bombs in with the food and things like that. The families went home before I became involved in the special stuff. I didn’t tell her much about it when it was all over. There wasn’t much to tell, not in my terms.’

  ‘I’m sorry you had to come over here without being able to see her.’

  ‘Inevitable. It’s the way it is. She’s not very service-minded. Doesn’t live off married mess nights. Doesn’t really get involved with the army scene. I think I prefer it that way. She’d like me out, but I tell her earning anyone else’s shilling than the Queen’s isn’t that easy these days. I think she understands that.’

  ‘The postcards will start arriving soon. The first lot that you did. And you’d better do some more before you move on.’ Davidson sounded anxious, wanting to do it right, thought Harry. As if there was anything he could say about – what was the word he used? – this ‘aspect’ of the job. Of course she’d want to know where he was, of course if she knew she would be stunned with worry. What else could she be, and what could be done about it? Nothing.

  They hesitated outside
the door of the big room where the work was done.

  Davidson said, ‘I wanted to be sure that you wouldn’t be too concerned about your family while you’re over there. It could be important. I once had a man—’

  Harry cut in, ‘It’s not a problem. Not compared with the other ones. She’ll cope.’

  They went into the room where the others were waiting. Davidson thought to himself, he’s a cold enough fish to succeed. It went through Harry’s mind that his controller was either very thorough or on the reverse slope and going a touch soft. It was the only time the two men had anything approaching a personal conversation.

  Later that afternoon it was suggested that Harry should personally meet the eye-witnesses who had been in Belgrave Square, or who had reported the jostling incident with the hurrying man in the Underground ticket area at Oxford Circus. Harry could have gone in the guise of a detective, but Davidson, after mulling it over for thirty-six hours, decided it was an unnecessary risk and sent a video camera from the Ministry round to their homes with one of the young officers in order that they could relive the moments they had been face to face with the gunman. For about fifteen minutes the elderly man who had seen a flash of the face while reading his paper, the girl with the bag of laundry, the woman exercizing her dog, the driver of the ministry car and the woman who had stood immobile as the man weaved a way past her had spelled out their recollections. They were taken again and again through the short experience, milked till their impatience with their questioner grew pointed, and then left wondering why so much equipment and time was spent in merely reiterating the statement they had made to the police the previous week.

  Endlessly the tapes were rerun, so that the strength of each witness’s description could be tested. Hesitations about hair styles, eye colours, cheekbone make-up, nose size, all the details that make each face unique as a fingerprint were analysed. Davidson made up a chart where all the strong points were listed in green ink, the next category in red, the doubtful points in blue. These were placed against the photokit picture already issued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Scotland Yard.

  There were differences, they found. Differences that would have been sufficient to prevent the young soldiers in the pub off the Broadway eight days earlier from connecting the picture they had memorized with the man they had studied, arms up and legs apart, against the wall.

  ‘You have to know him,’ said Davidson – so often it became like a holed record – ‘You have to know about him, have a sense that when he’s on the pavement and you’re at the other side you’ll have him straight away. It’s chemistry, my boy.’

  Harry thought of it a different way. He thought in a job as daft as this you need everything on your side. He reckoned his chances of seeing the man about minus nil, though he maintained a more public optimism with Davidson.

  The Ministry had designed their own photokit of the man, using the Scotland Yard one as a basis, but from the eye-witness tapes they slightly altered various features, particularly the profile of the face. Their own picture was displayed around treble life-size in the rooms where the team worked, the big living room, and the dining area at the back – and more space on Harry’s wall was taken up with it, alongside the maps and aerial photographs.

  By the fifteenth day they were ready to push Harry out into the field, and cut the cord that held him to the security of the big house amongst the trees. Other than his sleeping time, and those hours he’d worked in his room on the voice tapes and the maps, he’d been allowed to spend little time on his own. That was Davidson’s idea – ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t let him brood on it,’ he told the others.

  Davidson had wondered whether there ought to be some celebration on Harry’s last night, and then decided against it in favour of a few glasses of beer after their final session, and another early night.

  ‘Don’t believe all that Daily Telegraph stuff about them being beaten, smashed, in their final death throes. It’s nonsense. They need time to regroup, and they needed a big morale booster. They’ve got that, not in the killing itself, but in our failure to nab their man and lock him up. The Prods are restless now, not critical yet, but stirring the pot – just as the Provos want it.

  ‘To be frank, Harry, we all thought they’d have had the killer by now, and for the first week at least we may have handled your preparation on that basis. The word I had last night is they haven’t identified any positive clue yet. No-one’s losing anything by you going in. But in a strange idiotic way you have a better chance than the military clumping round and the police. It’s not a great chance, but worth taking.’

  They wished him luck. A little formal. Harry said nothing, nodded and walked into the hall and up the stairs to his room. They let him go alone.

  The fire position was in the roof of a derelict house just to the north of the Falls Road, beyond its junction with Springfield. Four of the houses had been demolished when a nineteen-year-old volunteer in the First Battalion had stumbled, knocking the arm of the battalion’s explosives officer as he was putting the final touches to a seventy-five-pound gelignite bomb. The officer’s fingers had moved some three-eighths of an inch, enough to connect momentarily with the terminals that in another few minutes would have been attached to the face of a cheap alarm clock.

  The explosion had left a gouged hole in the line of the street. The first house to the right after the gap was left naked and exposed to the open air. The next house down was in better shape. There was a door still in place, and the roof was largely intact. The house was empty because local housing officials had condemned it as unsafe, and gas and electricity had been switched off. The five houses beyond were occupied.

  The man had wedged himself in the angle between the beams and the horizontal struts of the roof. Part of the time his legs were astride the struts, which cut deep into his thighs in spite of the cushions he had brought with him. Otherwise he knelt, spreading his weight over two of the struts. In that position his balance was more stable, but it hurt more.

  Looking down he could see through a gap in the roof where a tile had slid down into the street, shaken loose by the blast from the explosion. The tile had been only slightly above the level of the guttering and from his position his eyes were little more than four feet from it. From the hole his line of visibility took him left to the corner of the street, and across to the right the length of the frontage of three houses. On the same side of the street as the man’s hiding place was the home of a Mrs Mulvenna, whose husband was currently held in Long Kesh. She always kept her front-room light on, with the curtains drawn back, so that the light illuminated the pavement just beyond the extremity of the man’s field of fire, and threw shadows into the area covered by his line of vision. It was his hope that a night patrol, their faces blackened, rubber soles on their boots, would edge away from the brightness in favour of the side of the road where they could find some false refuge in the greyness, but where they would be covered by the man’s sights. He knew enough of the habits of the soldiers to be able to bank on one of the troops in the middle of the patrol lingering uncertainly on the corner. The soldier would need to pause for only two or three seconds to make the man’s vigil worthwhile.

  The army were never consistent with their patrol patterns, and in the three days that he had been in the roof the man had seen only one group of soldiers. That had been in mid-morning and then, without Mrs Mulvenna’s light to drive them across the street, they had come by, right underneath the hideout, and virtually out of sight. He had seen one of them momentarily then, heard their fresh, young English country voices as they passed by unaware of his presence above.

  Across the man’s knee was an Armalite rifle. Small, light-weight, with shocking high velocity hitting power. The bodywork of the rifle was of black plastic, made in Japan, built under licence as a copy of the American infantry’s M16 weapon. The Kalashnikov in London had been a luxury, an eccentricity . . . for the more routine job in which he was now engaged the Armalite was total
ly suitable.

  And so he waited in the dark and freezing draughts of the roof for the twenty seconds or so it would take an eight-man patrol to move past the shadows of the three houses opposite. His eyes strained at the darkness, his ears keen to the noise of feet and the different types of shoes the civilians wore. He had cat-napped through the day to reserve his concentration for the time, fast and silent, that the soldiers would come.

  Chapter 5

  The lady who had been walking her dog in Belgrave Square now left it at home each morning when she went to the doctor’s surgery. The elderly GP allowed her to talk for at least ten minutes each morning before gently shooing her back to her flat and the hysteria and depression that had engulfed her since the shooting. The doctor appreciated the need of the widow, who had been his casual and infrequent patient for twenty-three years, to talk to some friend who could comprehend her meticulous description of the screaming woman, the man with that awful banging gun at his shoulder, the petrified children, the sirens, and the shouting, helpless policemen.

  He gave her mild sedatives, but had been unwilling to prescribe habit-forming doses in the hope that time would eventually erode the images of the killing. He had been surprised and annoyed when she had told him that the detectives had been to see her again, a clear week after they had received her signature on what was described as the final and definitive statement she would need to make. She had told the doctor of the queer equipment they had brought, and how over and over she had been made to describe the man with the gun.

  It had been sufficient of an ordeal for her, this last visit, to set back her recovery, and accordingly the doctor had phoned the Scotland Yard officer who was named in the papers as heading the enquiry. But such was the pressure on his time, and the size of his register, that he had taken the matter no further when told that no policeman had been to visit his patient in the last nine days. He had blustered a bit when he was told that, protested about the obvious inconsistency between the police story and his patient’s, and then rung off. It still puzzled him.