Harry's Game Read online

  It was some minutes before the traffic moved again. None of the other passengers in the cab – the old lady with her month’s shopping, or the two office girls from Andersonstown – spoke a word. When the cab reached the street corner where the ambulance had emerged the soldier in the middle of the road waved them out and to the wall. He ran his hands fast and effectively over the shoulders, torsos and legs of Harry and the driver, contenting himself with examining the woman’s shopping holders and the girls’ bags. He looked very young to Harry.

  ‘What happened?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Shut your face, you pig-arsed Mick.’

  The taxi dropped him off seventy-five yards farther on. He was to try Mrs Duncan’s. First left, twelfth door on the right: ‘Delrosa’.

  It didn’t take Harry long to settle into the small room that Mrs Duncan showed him at the back of her two-storey house – about as long as it takes to unpack the contents of a small suitcase and put them into a medium-size chest of drawers and a wardrobe. She suggested he wash his hands and then come down to the big room where the other guests would gather, first for tea, then to watch television. She asked no questions about him, obviously prepared to give the stranger time to fill in his background at his own pace.

  Looking across from his window, Harry could see the Falls Road where the army Land-Rovers and Saracens still criss-crossed back and forth.

  There were six at tea, all eating urgently and with concentration. The way to avoid talking, thought Harry. Stuff your face, with just a mutter for the milk or the sugar, or the fresh-cut bread, and you don’t have to say anything. No-one mentioned the shooting, but it came into the room with the BBC local television news. Mrs Duncan came from the kitchen to the doorway, leaning there, arms folded, in her apron. A single shot had killed the first soldier to die in Northern Ireland for three weeks. The pictures showed troops illuminated in doorways and manning roadblocks. Over the sound-track but half drowned by the report came the words ‘Put that bloody light off.’ Then there was only the meaningless picture of the tarmacadam with the dark stain on it, something for the colour-TV people but just a shapeless island on Mrs Duncan’s set. Then out of the blackness the overlit whitened face of the young reporter as the hand light picked him up at close range.

  He had little to say. A routine foot patrol in the Broadway district of the Falls had been ambushed. A single shot had been fired, fatally wounding a soldier just as darkness was falling. He said that an extensive follow-up operation was still in progress, that the area had been cordoned off, and that all cars leaving it were being searched. The camera cut to a harassed-looking officer.

  Q. What happened here, Colonel?

  A. This is really a most shocking attack, a most cowardly murder. One of my soldiers was shot down in cold blood, quite without warning. A horrible, despicable crime.

  Q. Did your men get a sight of the gunman?

  A. No, it wasn’t till we were engaged in an extensive follow-up operation – which you will have seen for yourself – that we found the place where the gunman was hiding. He was up in the roof of a derelict house, and he aimed at my patrol through the gap left by a missing tile.

  Q. Would this have been the work of an expert?

  A. An expert – in terrorism, yes, in killing, yes. We found sixty-eight cigarette butts in the roof. He’d been there some time. He’d put four chairs on the staircase of the house – it’s very narrow anyway. If we’d been chasing him and had run into the building those chairs would have lost us several seconds. That’s the work of an expert killer. He’d chosen a house which had a communicating passage down the length of the terrace roof. That’s the way he got out.

  Q. Did anyone see anything on the street?

  A. I’m sure half the street knew what was going on. Lots of people, masses of them, must have known a young man was going to be shot down in the gutter outside their homes. But I think your question is, did they identify the gunman to us? The answer there is decisively, No, they didn’t. But many of them must know who the killer is – I appeal to them to use the police Confidential phone and stamp out this type of cruel, cowardly attack.

  Q. Thank you, Colonel.

  The programme changed to an interview in the studio. A Protestant politician and a Catholic politician were arguing over the same ground, with some minute variations, that they’d been debating on the same channel for the last four years. Between them was a linkman who had been hosting them, feeding them their questions and winding them up over the same period. Before the talk was a minute old Mrs Duncan came forward like a battleship under power, and reached for the off switch.

  ‘There’s enough politics on the street without bringing them into my house. Just words. Won’t do that young man any good. Mother of Jesus rest with him.’

  A youngish man, across the table from Harry, said, ‘If they stayed in their barracks they wouldn’t get shot. If they weren’t here there wouldn’t be any shooting. You saw what they did when they came round here a few days ago. Taking the houses apart, lifting men, and blocking the streets. Claimed then it was because of that man that got shot in London. But the searches they did were nothing to do with it. Aggro, what they were looking for, nothing more. Harassment.’

  Nobody in the room responded. The young man looked round for someone to join in argument with. Harry sided with him. ‘If they were as busy chasing the Prods as us, they’d find things easier for themselves.’

  The other looked at him, surprised to find support, if not a little disappointed that it was an ally who had put his cap in the ring. Harry went on, ‘I’ve been away a long time, but I can see in the few hours that I’ve been back where all the troops are. I’ve been abroad, but you still read the papers, you still see the news on the telly bought from the BBC. You get to feel the way things are going. Nothing’s done about those Prods, only us.’

  It was not easy for Harry, that first time. With practice he would gain the facility to sing the praises of the IRA. But the first time round it was hard going. Never like this in Mansoura. Never went down the souk and shouted the odds, about what a fine bloke Quahtan As-Shaabi was, victory to the NLF, out with the imperialists. Just kept quiet there, and scuffed around in the dirt, and watched. But a different scene here. Got to be in the crowd. He excused himself, saying he was tired and had been travelling all day, and went to his room.

  Chapter 6

  It was just after seven when Harry woke. He knew soon enough that this was the day he started working and move on to active service. The euphoria of the farewells, the back-slaps and good-luck calls, were over. He had arrived. Now would begin the hard work of moving on to the inside. He checked his watch. Well, twenty minutes more and then it could all begin, then he would get up.

  He’d known since his training started that the initial period of infiltration was going to be the difficult part. This was where the expertise and skill entered in his file after Mansoura would count. They had chosen him after going over those files, and those of a dozen other men, because they had thought that he above all of them stood the best chance of being able to adapt in those early critical hours in the new environment.

  They’d told him he must take it slowly, not lambast his way in. Not make so much of his presence that he attracted attention and with that, inevitably, investigation. But they also stressed that time was against him. They pointed to the enormous benefits the opposition were gaining from the failure of the vast military force to catch the assassin.

  The dilemma was spelled out to him. How much speed could he generate? How fast could he move into that fringe world which had contact with the gunmen? How far into that world must he go to get near the nucleus of the organization where the man he hunted was operating? These were his decisions. The advice had been given, but now he had to control his own planning.

  They had emphasized again and again at Dorking that his own death would be bad news all round. Enormous embarrassment to HMG. No risks should be taken unless absolutely essential. It
had amused him, drily. You send a man to infiltrate the most successful urban terrorist movement in the world over the last twenty-five years, and tell him if he gets shot it would be awkward. Not much time to mess about with the frills. They’d said if it was going to work out for him it would be in the first three weeks. By then they expected something to bite on . . . not necessarily the man’s full name but a regular haunt, the address of a friend. A hint. Anything on to which they could turn the huge and formal military and police machine. The great force was poised and waiting for him to tell it where to hit, and that pleased him.

  He was starting with little enough to go on. The same available to everyone else in the city – or virtually the same. He had in his mind the photokit picture, with the knowledge that it was superior to the one issued in police stations and army posts. But that was all that tipped the scales in his favour. Nothing else, and not much to set against the disadvantages of arriving as a stranger in a community beset by informers and on its guard against them. His first problem would be the infiltration of the Catholic population, let alone the IRA, and becoming known to people already haunted by the fear of army plain-clothes units cruising in unmarked cars, laundry vans and ice-cream trucks with hidden spy holes, of the Protestant UVF and UFF killer squads. He had to win a degree of confidence among some small segment of these people before he could hope to operate with success.

  Davidson had struck a chord when he said, ‘They seem to have the ability to smell an outsider. They close ranks well. It’s like the instinct of a fox that’s learned to react when there’s a hostile being close by. God knows how they do it, but they have a feeling for danger. Much of it is how you look, the way you walk, the way you go along the pavement. Whether you can look as though you belong. You need confidence. You have to believe that you’re not the centre of attention the whole time. The first trick is to get yourself a base. Establish yourself there, and then work outwards. Like an upside-down pyramid.’

  The base was clearly to be the good Mrs Duncan. She was in the kitchen and washing up the first sitting of breakfast when Harry came down the stairs.

  ‘Well, it’s good to be back, Mrs Duncan. I’ve been away a while too long, I feel. You miss Ireland when you’re away, whatever sort of place it is now. You get tired of the travelling and the journeys. You want to be back here. If these bastard British would leave us to lead our own lives then this would be a great wee country. But it can’t be easy for you, Mrs Duncan, running a business in these times?’

  The previous evening he had formally given his name as Harry McEvoy. That was what she called him when she replied.

  ‘Well, Mr McEvoy, they’re not the easiest of times, to be sure. One minute it’s all quiet and the place is full. Then you’ll have a thing like last night, and who is going to come and sleep a hundred yards or so from where a soldier was shot dead? The travellers from the south find all this a bit near. They like it a bit further away from where it all happens. Having it full like it is now is a luxury. What did you say your business was? I was flustered up a bit when you came, getting the teas and all, yesterday.’

  ‘I’ve been away, ten years or so, just under in fact, at sea. In the Merchant Navy. Down in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, mainly.’

  ‘There’s a lot you’ll see has changed. The fighting’s been hard these last years.’

  ‘Our people have taken a bad time, and all.’

  ‘The Catholic people have taken a bad time, and now the Protestants hate us as never before. It’ll take a long time to sort it out.’

  ‘The English don’t understand us, never have, never will.’

  ‘Of course they don’t, Mr McEvoy.’ She flipped his egg over expertly, set it on the plate beside the halved tomatoes, the skinned sausage, the mushrooms and the crisp fried bread. ‘Look at all the ballyhoo and palava when that man of theirs was shot – Danby. You’d think it was the first man who had died since the troubles. Here they are, close to a thousand dead and all, and one English politician gets killed . . . you should have seen the searches they did, troops all over. Never found damn all.’

  ‘He wasn’t mourned much over here.’ Harry said it as a statement.

  ‘How could he be? He was the man that ran the Maze, Long Kesh. He brought all his English warders over here to run the place for him. There was no faith in him here, and not a tear shed.’

  ‘They’ve not caught a man yet for it?’

  ‘Nor will they. The boys will keep it close. Not many will know who did it. There’s been too much informing. They keep things like that tight these days. But that’s enough talk of all that. If you want to talk politics you can do it outside the door and on the streets all the hours that God gave. There’s no shortage of fools here to do the talking. I try and keep it out of the house. If you’re back from the sea, what are you going to do now? Have you a job to be away to?’

  Before answering, Harry complimented her on the breakfast. He handed her the empty plate. Then he said, ‘Well, I can drive. I hoped I could pick up a job like that round here. Earn enough so that with a bit of luck I can pay you something regular, and we can agree on a rate. I want to work up this end of town if I can, not in the centre of town. Seems safer in our own part. I thought I might try something temporary for a bit while I look round for something permanent.’

  ‘There’s enough men round here would like a job, permanent or not.’

  ‘I think I’ll walk around a bit this morning. I’ll do the bed first . . . an old habit at sea. Tomorrow I’ll try round for a job. Wonderful breakfast, thanks.’

  Mrs Duncan had noticed he’d been away. And a long time at that, she was certain. Something grated on her ear, tuned to three decades of welcoming visitors and apportioning them to their birthplace to within a few miles. She was curious, now, because she couldn’t place what had happened to his accent. Like the sea he talked of, she was aware it came in waves – ebbed in its pitch. Pure Belfast for a few words, or a phrase, then falling off into something that was close to Ulster but softer, without the harshness. It was this that nagged as she dusted round the house and cleaned the downstairs hall, while above her Harry moved about in his room. She thought about it a lot during the morning, and decided that what she couldn’t quite understand was the way he seemed to change his accent so slightly mid-sentence. If he was away on a boat so long then of course he would have lost the Belfast in his voice – that must have happened. But then in contradiction there were the times when he was pure Belfast. She soundlessly muttered the different words that emphasized her puzzlement to herself, uncomprehending.

  They don’t waste time in Belfast lingering over the previous day. By the time Harry was out on the pavements of the Falls Road and walking towards town there was nothing to show that a large-scale military operation had followed the killing of a young soldier the previous evening. The traffic was on the move, women with their children in tow were moving down towards the shops at the bottom end of the Springfield Road, and on the corners groups of youths with time on their hands and no work to go to were gathering to watch the day’s events. Harry was wearing a pair of old jeans he had brought from Germany, and that he’d used for jobs round his quarters in the base, and a holed pullover that he’d last worn when painting the white surrounds to the staircase at home. They were some of the clothes the officer had collected when he’d called and told his wife that her husband was on his way to the Middle East.

  The clothes were right, and he walked down the road – watched, but not greatly attracting attention. The time had been noted when he came out of the side road where Mrs Duncan had her guest house, and into the Falls. Nothing went on paper, but the youth that saw him from behind the neat muslin curtain at the junction would remember him when he came back, and mentally clock him in. There was every reason why he should be noticed, as the only new face to come out of the road that morning. Last night when he had arrived it had been too late to get a decent look at him. All Mrs Duncan’s other guests were regulars
, discreetly vetted and cleared by the time they’d slept in her house enough for a pattern to emerge.

  Harry had decided to walk this first morning, partly because he thought it would do him good but more importantly to familiarize himself with his immediate surroundings. Reconnaissance. Time well spent. It might save your life, they’d said. Know your way round. He came down past the old Broadway cinema where no films had been shown for two years since the fire bomb exploded outside the ticket kiosk, and the open space of the one-time petrol station forecourt where pumps, reception area and garages had all long since been flattened. Across the road was the convent school. Children were laughing and shouting in the playground. Harry remembered seeing that same playground, then empty and desolated, on West German television when the newsreader had described the attack by two IRA motorcyclists on William Staunton. The Catholic magistrate had just dropped his two girls at school and was watching them from his car as they moved along the pavement to the gate when he was shot. He had lingered for three months before he died, and then one of the papers had published a poem written by the dead man’s twelve-year-old daughter. Harry had read it in the mess, and thought it of rare simplicity and beauty, and not forgotten it.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ Mummy said

  ‘They’re not real.’

  But Daddy was

  And he’s not here.

  ‘Don’t be bitter,’ Mummy said

  ‘They’ve hurt themselves much more.’

  But they can walk and run –

  Daddy can’t.

  ‘Forgive them and forget,’ Mummy said