Harry's Game Part 13

When her mother came up the stairs late in the evening she was still doubled up, still holding her stomach, and cold now on her skin. The old lady looped the girl's nightdress over her head, and twisted her feet under the clothes. She spent some minutes picking the clothes up from the floor, showing no more interest in those that were torn than to those that formed the general muddle on the floor.

Twice during the Sunday evening Davidson phoned through to Frost. The first-floor office had with the coming of darkness taken on the appearance of a bunker. The telephone that was specified for outgoing outside calls was on the floor beside the canvas camp bed, now erected.

Davidson was curtly told there was no information, and reminded that he'd already been told that he would be notified as soon as anything was known. The earlier elation had left him, and he allowed Frost the last word on an operation so inefficient that you cannot even get in touch with your man when you need to get him out.

But for all his bark Frost was now sufficiently involved in the operation to call Springfield Road, wait while the commanding officer was brought to speak to him, and stress the urgency with which the girl Laverty should be found.

In their eyrie high above Ardoyne two soldiers looked down on Ypres Avenue. There were no street lights, old casualties of the conflict, but they watched the front door of No. 41 from the image intensifier, a sophisticated visual aid that washed everything with a greenish haze and which enabled them to see the doorway with great clarity. On the hour they whispered the same message into their field telephone. No one had used the front door of the house.

Frank did not go near Delrosa that night. On his bicycle he had ridden up to Andersontown in search of his Battalion commander. It was arranged that at midnight he would be taken to meet the Belfast Brigade commander. Frank knew his name, but had never met him.

From his home the Permanent Under Secretary had authorized the sending of a photograph of Harry to Belfast. The next morning, Monday, it was to be issued to troops who would raid the various Andersonstown sc.r.a.p merchants. Less than half a dozen people in the province would know the reason for the swoops but each search party would have several three-inch-by-four pictures of Harry. It had originally shown him in uniform, but that had been painted out.

The big television in the corner of the room droned on, its Sunday message of hope and charity, goodwill and universal kindness expounded by ranks of singers and earnest balding parsons. The family sat quite still on the sofa watching the man with the Armalite rifle.

The pictures claimed no part of the attention of Janet Rennie as she stared, minute after minute, at the man with the rifle across his knee, but for long moments the children's concentration was taken by the images on the screen before being jerked to the nightmare facing them across the carpet. It was a new degree of fear that the children felt, one they were not able to cope with or a.s.similate. They held fast to their mother, waiting to see what would happen, what she would do. To the two girls the man opposite represented something quite apart from anything they had experienced before, but they recognized him as their father's enemy. Their eyes seldom left his face, held with fascination by the greyness of his skin, its lack of colour, its deadness. This was where they saw the difference between the intruder and their world. There was none of the ruddiness and weight, the life and colour that they knew from their friends" fathers and the men that came home with their father.

In the first twenty minutes that Downs had been in the room, Fiona, who traded on her ability to charm, had attempted to win the stranger with a smile. He looked right through her, gap-toothed grin and all. She'd tried just once, then subsided against her mother.

He's never come out into the light, the elder girl, Margaret, told herself. He's been locked up, and like a creature he's escaped from wherever they've kept him. This man was across the wall, but she knew little of the causes of the separation and the walling-off. She studied the deepness of his eyes, intent and careful, uninvolved as they took in the room, traversing it like the light on a prison camp watch-tower, without order or reason but hovering, moving, perpetually expecting the unpredictable. She saw his clothes too. A coat with a darned tear in the sleeve, and b.u.t.tons off the cuffs, trousers without creases and s.h.i.+ny in the knees, frayed at the turn-ups and with mud inside the lower leg. To children suits were for best, for work, not for getting dirty and shabby. His shoes were strange to them, too. Cleaned after a fas.h.i.+on by the rain on the winter pavements, but like his face without l.u.s.tre, misused.

Margaret understood that the gun on Downs's lap was to kill her father. Her sister, twenty months younger, was unable to finish off the equation and so was left in a limbo of expectancy, aware only of an incomprehensible awfulness. Margaret had enough contact with the boys at school who played their war games in the school yard to recognize the weapon as an Armalite rifle.

He'll be a hard b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Janet Rennie had decided. One of the big men sent in for a killing like this. Won't be able to distract him with argument or discussion enough to unsettle him. He's hard enough to carry out his threat. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Would have his own kids, breed like rats the Catholics, have his own at home. But he'd still shoot hers. She felt the fingers of her daughters gripping through her blouse. But she kept her head straight, and her gaze fastened on Downs. There was no response to her stare, only the indifference of the professional, the craftsman who has been set a task and time limit and who has arrived early and therefore must wait to begin. Faster than her children she had taken in the man, searched him for weakness, but the gun across his knees now held her attention. If he were nervous or under great strain then she would notice the fidgeting of the hands or the reflection of perspiration on the stock or barrel of the gun. But there was no movement, no reflection.

He held the gun lightly, his left hand half-way along the shaft and his fingers loose round the black plastic that cradled the hard rified steel of the barrel. His hand was just above the magazine and her eyes wandered to the engineered emplacement where the capsule of ammunition nestled into the base of the gun. Just after he had sat down, Downs had eased the safety catch off with his right index finger, which now lay spanning the half-moon of the trigger guard. Like a man come to give an estimate on the plumbing, or the life insurance, she thought. None of the tensions she would have expected on display. Thirty minutes or so before she thought her husband might be arriving home she decided to talk.

'We have no quarrel with you. You've none with us. We've done nothing to you. If you go now you'll be clean away. You know that. You'll be right out of here and gone before my husband gets back.' That was her start. Poor she told herself, it wouldn't divert a flea.

He looked back with amused detachment.

'If you go through with this they'll get you. They always get them now. It's a fact. You'll be in the Kesh for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?'

'Save it, Mrs Rennie. Save it and listen to the hymns.'

She persisted. "It'll get you nowhere. It's the Provisionals, isn't it? You're beaten. One more cruel killing, senseless. It won't do any good.'

'Shut up." He said it quietly. "Just shut up and sit still.'

She came again. "Why do you come here? Why to this house? Who are you?'

'It's a pity your man never told you what he did when he went to work of a morning. That's late in the day now, though. Quiet yourself and stay where you are.'

He motioned at her with the rifle, still gently, still in control. The movement was definitive. Stay on the sofa with the children. He sensed that the crisis was coming for her, and that she knew it. With growing desperation she took up the same theme.

'But you're beaten now. It'll soon be all over. All your big men are gone. There'll have to be a cease-fire soon, then talking. More killing won't help anything." Keep it calm, don't grovel to him, talk as an equal with something on your side. There's nothing to counterbalance that Armalite but you have to make believe he doesn't hold everything.

'We're not beaten. It's not over. We've more men than we can handle. There'll be no talks, and no cease-fire. Got the message. Nothing. Not while there are pigs like your man running round free and live.'

The children beside her started up at the way the crouched stranger spoke of their father. Janet Rennie was an intelligent woman and hardened by her country upbringing. That she would fight for her husband's life was obvious: the problem had been in finding the medium. For the first time in nearly two hours she believed she stood a chance. She still watched the hands and the rifle. The hands were in a new position on the Armalite. From resting against the gun they were now gripping it. Attack, and how can he hit back before Rennie comes home?

'There's no future for you boys. Your best men are all locked up. The people are sick and tired of you. You know that. Even in your own rat holes they've had enough of you...'

'You don't know a b.l.o.o.d.y thing about what goes on. Not a b.l.o.o.d.y thing. You know nothing. Nothing. Shut up. Shut your b.l.o.o.d.y face...'

She taunted him, trying to act it with her voice to overcome the fear. "They don't want you any more. You're outnumbered, living off the backs of people. Without your guns you're nothing...'

He shouted back across to her. "What do you know of the way we live? What do you know of what support we have? All you see is what's on the b.l.o.o.d.y television. You don't know what life is like in the Falls, with murdering b.a.s.t.a.r.ds like your husband to beat the s.h.i.+t out of boys and girls. We're doing people a service when we kill f.u.c.king swine like that husband of yours.'

'My husband never killed anyone." She said it as a statement of fact. Safe.

'He told you that, did he?" Very precise, low and hissing the words out. "Pity you never asked him what sort of little chat he had with the wee girl what hanged herself in the cells at Springfield.'

She had built herself towards the climax. Now he watched with relish the demolition. She remembered reading about the girl, though it had not been mentioned at home. Work rarely was. The reb.u.t.tal caught her hard, draining her. The hands. Hold on to the hands, and concentrate on them. The only lifeline is the hands. The left knuckle was white on the barrel, blood drained out from round the bones. He was holding the rifle with both hands as he brought it up across his face to wipe his forehead with the sleeve on his right arm. He was sweating.

'You're nothing, are you? That's all you're fit for. Sitting in people's homes with guns, guarding women and wee bairns. You're a rat, a creeping, disease-ridden little rat. Is that what the great movement is about? Killing people in their homes?'

Her voice was battering it out now, watching the anger rise first in his neck and spreading through the lower jaw, tension, veins hardening and protruding. Safe. What can the gun do now that would not rouse the neighbours who lived through the thin brick-and-cement walls of the estate just a few feet from her own bungalow?

'You've made it all out wrong, Mrs Rennie. Whatever your b.l.o.o.d.y man says you don't kill the Provos just by locking a few up. We are of the people. Don't you know that? The people are with us. You've lost, you are the losers. Your way of life, G.o.d-given superiority, is over and finished, not us... We're winning. We're winning because the people support us. Go into Andytown, or the Murph or Ardoyne or Turf Lodge. Go in there and ask them about Provo rule. Then asks them what they think of RUC sc.u.m.'

He was shouting, half-rising out of the flower-covered seat of the chair. The rifle was now only in the right hand, but with the finger still close to the trigger. His left arm was waving above his head.

The hatred between the two was total. His fury was fanned by the calmness she showed in face of the rifle, and the way she had made him shout and the speed with which he had lost his control. Her loathing for the Republicans, bred into her from the cradle, gave her strength. With something near detachment she weighed the pluses and minuses of rus.h.i.+ng him there and then. He was gripping the gun, but it was pointed away from the family. There was no possibility that she could succeed. She felt the children's grip on her arms. If she surged suddenly across the room she would carry them like two anchors half-way with her.

He was not so calm now, and she saw the hint in his eye that he felt the claustrophobia of the room, that the time he had sat in the chair had sapped that sense of initiative and control that were so important to him. She remembered a young Catholic boy who had come round her father's store, idling or loitering or just with nothing to do, and how her father had pulled him up by the front of his collar, and shaken him like an animal to find what he was doing there, on the corner outside the shop. And there had been then the trapped-rodent fear of the youth, of the second-grade boy, who accepted that this would happen, and ran when released, feeling himself lucky not to be thrashed. In the eyes of the man across from her was the hint that he knew he no longer dominated the situation.

When Rennie turned into the cul-de-sac he noted immediately that the garage interior light was not switched on. He stopped his car forty yards from the bottom of the road, and turned off his engine and lights. The bungalow seemed quite normal. The curtains were drawn, but there was a slice of light through the gap where they had been pulled not quite together, from the hall light filtering through the patterned and coloured gla.s.s. Everything as it should be.

But no light in the garage. For months now it had been a set routine that an hour or so before he was expected Janet would go into the kitchen and switch on the light in the garage. They kept the garage empty, without the clutter that their neighbours stored there. That way there was no hiding place for an a.s.sa.s.sin.

The detective sat in the car watching, allowing himself some minutes just to look at the house and search in front of him in detail for any flaw other than the unlit garage. There was no light upstairs. Perhaps there should have been, perhaps not. Usually Fiona would be having her bath by now, but only darkness there. That was another cautionary factor.

Over the years Howard Rennie had been to enough full-dress police funerals to wonder how it could happen to himself. There was only one way. The epitaphs of the dead men were clear enough. Carelessness. Somewhere, for some time, usually minuscule, they had slackened. Not all, but most, grew over-confident and fell into the convenience of routine, began to believe in their own safety. A few were killed in closely-planned attacks, but most as Rennie knew well presented themselves as casual targets.

This was why he had a light fitted for the garage that should now be on, and why he noticed it was not lit.

His wife was a meticulous and careful person. Not one to make a silly mistake about the garage. It was the dilemma of the life they led that he wondered constantly how far as a family they should take their personal security. On the one hand there could be something drastically wrong that had prevented his wife from switching on a light as agreed. On the other she could be next door for sugar or milk, and stayed to gossip while the children played or watched television.

But it was quite out of character for her to forget.

He eased out of the car, pus.h.i.+ng the door to but not engaging the lock, and reached to the PPK Walther in his shoulder-holster. He had loaded and checked it before starting his drive home from Castle reagh, but he again looked for the safety catch mechanism to see it was in the "on" position. On the b.a.l.l.s of his feet he went towards the front gate. The gate was wrought-iron and had never hung well--it rattled and needed a lifting, forcing movement to open it. Rennie instead went to the far side of the gatepost before the hedge thickened, through a gap, past the roses and on to the gra.s.s. The run up to the front door was gravel and he kept to the gra.s.s, fearful of any noise his feet might make. Though the window showed the light from inside the gap between the curtains it was not enough for him to see through.

There were no voices at the moment he reached the window, just the hymn-singing on the television. Rennie came off the gra.s.s and stepped on to the tiled step of the doorway. The Walther was in his right hand, as with the left he found his Yale key and inserted it gently into the opening. Steady now, boy. This is the crucial time. If you're noisy now it's blown--if there's anything to blow. For a fraction he felt sheepish at the stupidity of tiptoeing across his own front lawn. Had the neighbours seen? The door opened, just enough to get him inside. To the lounge door. It was off the latch, and the aperture of an inch or so acted as a funnel to the final crescendo of the programme, and the choir's l.u.s.ty singing. As the sound tailed away he heard his wife speak. "Great hero, aren't you? With your b.l.o.o.d.y rifle. Need it to make a man of you...'

The voice, shrill and aggressive, was enough to deaden the tiny amount of sound Rennie made as he leaned into the door, and the man in his chair was aware of nothing till the door started swinging on its hinges towards him.

Downs saw the door moving long before the woman and her children.

His body stiffened as he fought to take hold of himself, and for concentration after seeing his control debilitated long before by the argument across the room. He was still raising his rifle into the fire position when Rennie came in, low and fast, to hit the carpet and roll in one continuous action towards the heavy armchair between the fireplace and the window.

The movement was too fast for Billy Downs, who fired three times into the s.p.a.ce by the door before checking to realize that the policeman was no longer there. He struggled up from the sitting position in the deep soft armchair, flooded with the sudden panic that he had fired and missed, and didn't know where his target was.

The metallic click of Rennie's safety catch, and the single shot that howled by his ear and into the French windows behind, located the target.

Rennie was not a marksman. He had been on pistol-shooting courses, most of which simulated a street situation. Once only they'd practised storming a room. When you go in, they'd said, dive and roll as soon as you hit the floor, and keep rolling till you find cover. You're difficult to hit while you're moving. The first shot came as he balanced momentarily on his left side, his right arm free to fire in the general direction of the dark shape across the carpet. But his momentum carried him on till he cannoned into the solid bulk of the big chair. He was on his right side, the Walther driving into the softness of his thigh when he realized his impetus had wedged him between the wall and the chair. He twisted his head, seeing for the first time with agonizing clarity the man, his wife and the children, as he struggled helplessly to swivel his body round. His survival depended on that movement.

The rifle was against Downs's shoulder now, eye down the barrel, not bothering with the complicated sight device, just using the barrel itself to give him a line. He poised himself to fire. Wait for it, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d copper, wait for it, now. The triumph of the mission was there now, the b.l.o.o.d.y slug of the copper on the deck, soft, fat and vulnerable. And dead.

Rennie was screaming. "No, no. Keep away.'

For the two children the room had disintegrated in speed and noise. When Fiona saw her father some four seconds after he had come through the door she fled from the sofa across the middle of the room towards him.

It was the moment that the man had chosen to fire.

Fractionally his vision, misted and unclear, of the man that he had come to kill was blocked by the chequered dress and the long golden hair.

He hesitated. Staring at the body feverishly trying to get the child behind it and away. It was the time to shoot, a perfect target. Still he hesitated.

He saw the child with pin-point clarity, as sharp as the mummified kids back in the streets in London. Not part of the b.l.o.o.d.y war. He couldn't see the face of the girl as she writhed closer to her father, only the brightness of her dress, the freshness of the white socks, the pink health of the moving skin on the small legs. Couldn't destroy it. Rennie was struggling to pull the child under him to protect her. Downs could see that, and when he'd done so the big policeman would be free to fire himself. Downs knew that. It had no effect. Not shoot a child, no way he could do it. He felt himself drifting away from the reality of the room, concentrating now on his wife. Kids at home, not as clean, scrubbed as these, but the same. If his wife knew he'd slaughtered a small one ... He saw the slight body fade under the shape of the detective, and the other man's firing arm come up to aim.

Behind the man were the French windows and the light framework of wood. He spun and dived at the centre of one of the gla.s.s panels. The walls of wood and gla.s.s squares gave way. Rennie, the child spread-eagled under him, emptied the revolver in the direction of the window.

It was the fifth or sixth shot that caught Downs in the muscle of the left arm, just above the elbow. The impact heaved him forward through the obstacle of wood and gla.s.s splinters and across the neat patio towards the well-cut back lawn.

The pain was searing hot as Downs ran across the lawn. At the bottom, among the vegetables still in the ground, he crooked the rifle under his injured arm and with his right levered himself over the fence and into a cut-through lane.

Struggling for breath he ran down the lane and then across a field to get to the road where the car was parked. Pus.h.i.+ng him forward was the fear of capture, and the knowledge that the failed shooting would bring ma.s.sive retaliation down on him. Like the fox discovered at work in the chicken coop who flees empty-handed, the sense of survival dominated. The experience in the house, coupled with the exhaustion of the running and the pain in his arm combined to create a confusion of images all returning to the looming blonde head of the child thrust into his line of fire as the detective lay on the ground. It merged with the memory of the muted stunned children in London as he fired at their father. Again and again, though, as with a film loop, came the face of the child across the room, throwing herself at her p.r.o.ne father. And after that, as he neared the car, was the knowlege that if he had fired he would have killed the policeman. He might have hit the child, that was the area of doubt, he would have killed the policeman, that was certainty. He had hesitated, and through his hesitation his target was alive. It was weakness, and he had thought himself above that.

The young driver was asleep when he felt his shoulder shaken violently and above him the frantic and blood-etched face of the man.

'Come on. Get the f.u.c.king thing moving. Don't hang about. Get it out of this b.l.o.o.d.y place.'

'Aren't you going to do something about that...?" the youth pointed to the still-a.s.sembled Armalite, but cut off when he saw the blood on the arm that was holding the rifle.

'Just get moving. Mind your own b.l.o.o.d.y business and drive.'

The boy surged the car forward and out on to the road in the direction of Andersonstown.

'Did it go okay?" he asked.

I I.

SIXTEEN.

The Belfast Brigade staff met in a semi-detached corporation house in the centre of the conglomeration of avenues, crescents, walks and terraces that make up the huge housing estate of Andersonstown. It was very different country to the Falls and Ardoyne. Landscaped roads, and flanking them a jig-saw of neat red-brick homes. Ostensibly the war had not come here with the same force as in the older battlegrounds closer to the city centre, but such an impression would be false. This was the Provo redoubt, where the Brigade officers and top bomb-makers had their hideouts, where the master snipers lay up between operations, where five thousand people voted for a Provisional supporter in a Westminster election. Cups of tea were rare for the troops here, and it was the tough and experienced battalions who were asked to hold the ring with the most dedicated and intransigent of the enemy.

The particular house where the Brigade met had been chosen with care. It had been noticed that the combination of a twist in the road and a slight dip s.h.i.+elded both the front and rear doors of the house from the army camp some three hundred yards away. The house could be approached from the rear with virtual impunity.

The Brigade commanders were key figures in the campaign in the main urban area of Northern Ireland. Some, like Joe Cahill and Seamus Twomey, had become household names round the world, famous as the men who had converted the guerrilla wars of SouthEast Asia and the Middle East and Latin America into West European terms. Promotion had exposed younger men to the job, none of them any the less hardliners for their youth ... Adams, Bell, Convery. All had learned a.s.siduously the arts of concealment and disguise. Their capture called for rounds of drinks and celebration toasts in the Mess of the army unit concerned, and articles in the national press maintaining that the Proves were about to fold up. But within a week of the one-time commander being carried off to Long Kesh so another young man moved forward into the scene to take over. During their reign in office, however short, they would set the tone of the administration. One would favour car bombs, another would limit attacks only to military and police targets, or direct operations towards spectaculars such as big fires, major shoot-outs and prison escapes.

Each left his imprint on the situation, and all went into the mythology of the movement. The one common factor was their ability to move, almost at will, round the rambling Andersonstown estate. Their names were well known to the troops, but their faces were blurs taken for the most part from out-of-date photographs. One had ordered his wife to destroy all family pictures that included him, and given all his briefings from behind curtains and drapes, so that under the rigours of cross-examination his lieutenants would not be able to give an accurate description of him. The most famous of all had sufficient mastery of impersonation to be able to win an apology for inconvenience from a young officer who had led a search party through the house where the Brigade commander was giving an interview to a reporter from a London Sunday.

To a portion of the community their names provoked unchecked admiration, while to those less well disposed they sowed an atmosphere of fear. There were enough youths with "knee-cap jobs" and daubed slogans of "Touts will be shot dead" for the message not to have to be repeated that often.

That there were a few prepared to risk the automatic hooding and a.s.sa.s.sination was a constant source of surprise to the army intelligence officers. Money was mostly the reason that men would whisper a message into a telephone booth, but not even then big sums. There was seldom the wish to rid the community of the Pro visionals ... Men who felt that way stayed silent, kept their peace, and went about their lives. It was because the Brigade commander and his princ.i.p.al lieutenants could never be totally certain of the loyalty of the men and women who lived in Andersonstown that they delayed their meeting till midnight, though their arrival at the house had been staggered over the previous seventy minutes.

None was armed. All were of sufficient importance to face sentences of up to a dozen years if caught in possession of a firearm. If arrested without a specific criminal offence proveable against them they could only be detained in the Kesh--with the constant likelihood of amnesties.

They took over a back bedroom while below the lady of the house made them a pot of tea. She took it up the stairs on a tray with beakers and milk and sugar. They had stopped talking when she came in and said nothing till she had placed the tray on the flat top of a clothes chest, and turned to the door.

'Thanks, mam," the Brigade commander spoke, the others nodding and murmuring in agreement. She was away down the stairs to busy herself with her sewing and late-night television. When that was over she would sleep in her chair, waiting for the last man to leave the house to tell her the talking was over. The woman asked no questions and received no explanations other than the obvious one that the positioning of the house made it necessary that the men should use it.

There were six men in the room when the meeting started. The Brigade commander sat on the bed with two others, and one more stood. Frank and Seamus Duffryn were on the wooden chairs that, apart from the bed and the chest, represented the only furniture in the room. The present commander had been in office more than six months, and his general features were better known than was common. He scorned the flamboyance of masks. From the pocket of his dark anorak he brought a small transistor radio of the sort with a corded loop to be slipped over the wrist so that he could walk along the pavement with it pressed to his ear. This was how he kept abreast of the activities of the ASU's, the Active Service Units.

The crucial listening times of the day for him were 7.50 a.m., the 12.55 lunchtime summary, and then five to midnight. Each day the BBC's Northern Ireland news listed with minute detail the successes and failures of his men. Shootings, hi-jackings, blast bombs, arms finds, stone-throwing incidents, all were listed and chronicled for him. The lead story that night was of the shooting at a policeman's house in Dunmurry.

The men in the room listened absorbed to the firm English accent of the announcer.

The gunman had apparently held Mrs Rennie and her two children at gunpoint in their house for some hours while he waited for her husband to return from duty. A police spokesman said that when Mr Rennie entered the living-room of his home the gunman fired at him. Mr Rennie dived for shelter behind an armchair just as his younger daughter ran towards him. It seems the child ran into the field of fire of the terrorist, who then stopped shooting and ran from the house. Mr Rennie told detectives that when the girl moved he thought she was going to be killed as the gunman was on the point of firing at him. The family are said to be ing from shock and are staying the night with friends.

In the Shantallow district of Londonderry a blast bomb slightly wounded...

The commander switched off the set.

'That's not like b.l.o.o.d.y Downs from Ardoyne. Not like him to lose his nerve. Why should he do that?'

'Stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d. We needed Rennie killed. Put a lot of planning in and a deal of work to have him rubbed. Then it's screwed. Could be they're just feeding us this c.r.a.p." It was the Brigade quartermaster who came in.

'Doesn't sound like that. Sounds like Downs just threw it. Hardly going to fool us, are they? The b.u.g.g.e.r Rennie, he's alive or he's dead. We sent for him to be killed, he's not. So that means it's failure, can't be any other answer. What matters is that our man couldn't finish it.'

He pondered on the decision he was about to take as the other men waited for him. He alone knew of the link between Danby in London and the man Downs from Ardoyne. Later perhaps he would include the others in his knowledge, he decided, but not now. At this stage, he felt, the fewer the better. Some of the commanders ran the office by committee, but not the man who now spoke again.

'On from there. What about the man they've put in? What do we have?'

'I think it's watertight." Frank had taken the cue and come in. Frank had been with the Provisionals since the split with the Officials, the "Stickies" as they called them, but this was the first time he had been in such elite company. It slightly unnerved him. 'The girl he was laying spills it all. It's incredible, what he told her. She was saying that he says to her that he was sent over to get the man that shot Danby in London. She told him about the girl, the one that was picked up and taken to Springfield, the one that hanged herself. It was because he shopped her that she was taken in. She says she challenged him about it yesterday afternoon. He admitted it.'

The Brigade intelligence officer was sitting on the bed beside the commander. Hard face, tight pencil lips, and darting, pig-like eyes.

'What's his name, the Englishman?'

'The name he's using is Harry McEvoy. I doubt if it's real or----'