Harry's Game Part 5

She was sitting right up now with her hands splayed behind her, back straight, and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, deep from the children she had suckled, bulging forward under the intricate patternwork 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

Her point of focus was in the middle distance way beyond the walls and confines of their back bedroom. In his churning mind the icplies 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 < oming.="" little="" b.a.s.t.a.r.d="" 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="">

'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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 b.l.o.o.d.y song about you. fust right for Sat.u.r.day nights when they're all p.i.s.sed, 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 on to 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, s.h.i.+rt and trousers, before moving in his bare feet across the room to the door, tie went down the stairs and into the front room. Checking an in siinctive movement towards the light switch, he groped his way to his armchair by the grate and lowered himself gingerly down on to it. There were newspapers there, and he pushed them down on to 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 Klashnikov, 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. The 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d'. 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 Ardoyne.

The women would hear the shots out in the streets where the battlefield was just beyond the front-room curtains. There would be e high crack of the Armalite, fired once, twice or perhaps three times. Within seconds would come the hard thump of the answering array 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 i he 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 attempts 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 bow-string 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 s.h.i.+elds, which ruled out Ieffective pursuit, and their lack of knowledge of the geography of theside 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.

S.

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 I had stared at the television, ignoring him as he padded across their " living s.p.a.ce before closing the door on to the street behind him. When he reached the address he had handed the rifle to the woman who answered his knock. She had 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 the 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 a 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 Ml 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 crimeter fence six hundred yards away had spelled out the failure of the attempt. With two others he had been used for the a.s.sa.s.sination of a policeman as he left his house in the suburb of Glen gormley. It was his first command, and he was allowed to select his wn ambush point, collect the firearm from the Brigade quartermaster, and lead the get-away 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 he noise and shouting of the soldiers behind him. They were heady moments, hearing the voices of the English troops with their strange ;>ccents 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 Seen left to lead what amounted to a normal life in the Ardoyne.

Vround 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 ihotograph 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 laughters. The time that he was away preparing for London, in the linglish 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 huge icss 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 Sat.u.r.day.

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.'

He followed her into the kitchen.

For Davidson, in his offices up 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 gla.s.ses topped up, the subject was inevitably fielded.

'There's been nothing from that fellow the PM launched," muttered the Brigadier. "Long shot at the best of times. No word, I'm old, and Frost in intelligence is still leaping about. Called it a iloody insult. See his point.'

'Sunk without trace, probably. They sniff them out, smell them a nile off. Poor devil. I feel for him. How was he supposed to solve it when SB and intelligence don't have a line in? If our trained people can't get in there, how's this chap?'

'b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous.'

'He'll end up dead, and it'll be another life thrown away. I hope he doesn't, but if he sticks at it they'll get him.'

'I expect your SB were the same, but intelligence weren't exactly thrilled. What really peeved them was that at first they weren't supposed to know anything, then it leaked. I think the Old Man himself put it out, then came the message, and there wasn't much to show From that. Frost stayed behind after the Old Man's conference last Friday and demanded to know what was going on. Said it was an indication of no confidence in his section. Threatened his commission and everything on it. GOG calmed him down, but took a bit of time.'

The music was loud in the dining-room, and both men needed to speak firmly to hear each other above the canned violin strings. The policeman spoke: 'I think Frost's got a case. So have we for that matter'... in mid chord and without warning the tape ran out ... "to put a special operator in on the ground without telling ..." Dramatically conscious of the way his voice had carried in the sudden moment of silence he cut himself short.

Awkwardly the two men waited for the half-minute or so that it took the reception staff away in the front hall to loop up the reverse side of the three-hour tape, then the talking began again.

The eighteen-year-old waiter serving the next table their courgettes had clearly heard the second half of the sentence. He repeated the words to himself as he went round the table--'Special operator on the ground without telling." He said it five times to himself as he circled the table, fearful that he would forget the crucial words. Then he hurried with the emptied dish to the kitchen scribbling the words in large spidery writing on the back of his order pad.

He went off duty at 3.30, and seventy-five minutes later the message of what he had overheard and its context were on their way to the intelligence officer of the Provisionals" Third Battalion.

EIGHT.

Harry spent a long time getting himself ready to go out that Sat.u.r.day night. He bathed, and put on clean clothes, even changing his socks from the ones he'd been wearing through the rest of the day, took a clean s.h.i.+rt from the wardrobe and brushed down the one suit he'd brought with him. In the time that he'd been in Belfast he had tried to stop thinking in the terms of an army officer, even when he was on his own and relaxed. He attempted to make his first impulses those of the ex-merchant seaman or lorry driver that he hoped to become. As he straightened his tie, though, he allowed himself the luxury of thinking that this was a touch different from mess night with the rest of the regiment at base camp in Germany.

He'd spent a difficult and nearly unproductive first week. He'd visited a score of firms looking for driver's work with no success till Friday when he had come across a sc.r.a.p merchant on the far side of Andersonstown. There they'd said they might be able to use him, but he should come back on Monday morning when he would get a definite answer. He had been in the pub on the corner several times, but though he was now accepted enough for him to stand and take his drink without the whole bar lapsing into a silent stare none of the locals initiated any conversation with him, and the opening remarks he made to them from time to time were generally reb.u.t.ted with non-committal answers.

It had been both hard and frustrating, and he felt that the one bright spot that stood out was this Sat.u.r.day night. Taking Josephine out. Like a kid out of school and going down the disco, you silly b.u.g.g.e.r. At your age, off to a peasant hop. As he dressed himself he began to liven up. One good night out was what he needed before the tedium of next week. Nearly six days gone, and not a thing to hook on to. Davidson said three weeks and something ought to show. Must have been the pep talk chat. He came down a little after seven and sat in the chair by the fire in the front room that was available to guests. He was on his own. All the others scurried away on Friday morning with their bags packed and homes to get to after a half day's work at the end of the week. Not hanging about up here, not in i he front line.

When the door bell rang he slipped quickly out into the hall, and opened the door. Josephone stood there, breathing heavily.

'I'm sorry I'm late. Couldn't get a bus. They've cut them down a bit, I think. I'm not very late, am I?'

'I think all the buses are on the sc.r.a.p yards up the road, stacks of them there, doubles and singles. I'd only just come down. I reckon you're dead on time. Let's go straight away.'

He shouted back towards the kitchen that he was on his way out, that he had his key, and not to worry if he was a bit late.

'How do we get there?" he asked. "It's a bit strange to me moving about the city still, especially at night.'

'No problem. We'll walk down to the hospital, get a cab there into town, and in Castle Street we'll get another cab up the Crumlin. It's just a short walk from there. It won't take long, we'll be there in forty-five minutes. It's a bit roundabout, that's all.'

In Ypres Avenue the man and his wife were making their final preparations to go out. There had been an uneasy understanding between them since their talk in the early hours after his homecoming, and no further word on the subject had been spoken. Both seemed to accept that the wounds of that night could only be healed by time and silence. She had lain in bed the first three mornings waiting for the high whine of the Saracens, expecting the troops to come breaking in to tear her man from their bed. But they didn't come, and now she began to believe what he had told her. Perhaps there was no clue, perhaps the photokit really did look as little like him as she, his wife, believed. Her mother was busying herself at the back of the house round the stove, where she kept a perpetual pot of freshened tea. All the children were now in bed, the twins complaining that it was too early. To both of them the evening was something to look forward to, a change from the oppressiveness of the atmosphere as the man sat about his house, too small for privacy or for him to absent himself from the rest of the family. It had been laid down by his superiors that he was not to try to make contact with his colleagues in the movement, or in any way expose himself to danger or arrest. It meant long hours of waiting, fiddling time uselessly away. Already he felt restless, but hurrying things was futile. That's how they all got taken, going off at half-c.o.c.k when things weren't ready for them. Not like London. All the planning was there. No impatience, just when it suited and not a day earlier. Boredom was his great enemy, and the need was for discipline, discipline as befits the member of an army.

With his wife on his arm, and in her best trouser suit, he walked up his street towards the hut with the corrugated iron roof that was the social club. He could relax here, among his own. Drain his pints. Talk to people. It was back to the ordinary. To living again.

By the time Harry and Josephine arrived at the club, it was nearly full, with most of the tables taken. The girl said she'd find somewhere to sit, and he pushed his way towards the long trestle tables at the far end from the door where three men were hard at it in their s.h.i.+rt sleeves taking the tops off bottles and pouring drinks. Harry forced his way through the shoulders of the men standing close to the makes.h.i.+ft bar, made it to the front and called for a pint of Guinness and a gin and orange.

As he was struggling back to the table where Josephine was sitting he saw a man come up to her and gesture towards him. After they'd spoken a few words he'd nodded his head, smiled at the girl and moved back towards the door.

'Someone you know?" he said when he sat down, s.h.i.+fting her coat on to the back of the seat.

'It's just they like to know who's who round here. Can't blame them. He wanted to know who you were, that's all.' 'What did you tell him?' 'Just who you were, that's all,'

Everything was subdued at this stage of the evening, but the effects of the drink and the belting of the four-piece band and their electrically-amplified instruments began to have a gradual livening effect. By nine some of the younger couples were ignoring the protests of the older people and had begun to pile up the tables and chairs at the far end of the room to the bar, exposing a crude, unpolished set of nail-ridden boards. That was the dance floor. The band quickened the tempo, intensified the beat. When he felt that the small talk they were making was next to impossible, Harry asked the girl if she'd like to dance.

She led the way through the jungle of tables and chairs. Near the floor Harry paused as Josephine slowed and squeezed by a girl in a bright-yellow trouser suit. It was striking enough in its colour for Harry to notice it. Then, as his eyes moved to the table where she was sitting, he saw the young man at her side.

There was intuitive, deep-based recognition for a moment, and Harry couldn't place it. He looked at the man, who stared straight back at him, challenging. Josephine was out on the floor now waiting for him to come by the girl in yellow. He looked away from the face that was still staring back at him, holding and returning his glance, mouthed an apology and was away to the floor. Once more he looked at the man, who still watched him, cold and expressionless--then Harry rejected the suspicion of the likeness. Hair wrong. Face too full. Eyes too close. Mouth was right. That was all. The mouth, and nothing else.

The floor pounded with the motion of a cattle stampede--as it seemed to Harry, who was used to more ordered dances at the base. At first he was nearly swamped, but survived after throwing off what decorum he had ever learned as he and Josephine were buffeted and shoved from one set of shoulders to another. Sweat and scent were already taking over from the beer and smoke. When the band switched to an Irish ballad he gasped his relief, and round them the frenetic movements slowed in pace. He could concentrate now on the girl close against him.

She danced with her head back, looking up at him and talking.

Looking the whole time, not burying herself away from him. She was wearing a black skirt, full and flared, so that she had the freedom to swing her hips to the music. Above that a tight polka dot Mouse. The top four b.u.t.tons were unfastened. There were no osephines in Aden, no Josephines taking an interest in married ransport captains in Germany.

They talked dance-floor small talk, Harry launched into a series of concocted anecdotes about the ports he'd visited when he was at sea, and she laughed a lot. Twice a nagging uncertainty took his attention away from her to where the man was sitting quietly at the table with the girl in the yellow trouser suit, gla.s.ses in front of them, eyes roving, but not talking. The second time he decided the likeness was superficial. It didn't hold up. Face, eyes, hair--all wrong. Before he turned back to Josephine he saw the mouth again. That was right. It amused him. Coincidence. And his attention was diverted to the girl, her prettiness and inevitable promise.

The man too had noticed Harry's attention. It had been p.r.o.nounced enough to make him fidget a little in his chair, and for him to feel the hot perspiration surge over his legs inside the thick cloth of his best suit. He had seen the door-minder talk to the girl who brought him in, and presumably clear the stranger. But his nerves had caved when he had seen Harry on the dance floor, no longer interested, but totally involved in the girl he was with. The man could not dance, had never been taught. He and his wife would sit at the table all evening as a succession of friends and neighbours came to join them to talk for a few minutes and then move on. Along the wall to the right of the door and near the bar were a group of youths, some of them volunteers in the Provisionals, some couriers and some look-outs. These were the expendables of the movement. The teenage girls were gathered round them, attracted by the glamour of the profession of terrorism, hanging on the boys" sneers and cracks and boasts. None of the boys would rise high in the upper echelons but each was necessary as part of the supply chain that kept the planners and marksmen in the field. None knew the man except by name. None knew of his involvement.

First through the door was the big sergeant, a Stirling submachine gun in his right hand. He'd hit the door with all the impetus of his two hundred pounds gathered in a six-foot run. Behind him came a lieutenant, clutching his Browning automatic pistol, and then eight soldiers. They came in fast and fanned out in a protective screen round the officer. Some of the soldiers carried rifles, others the large barrelled, rubber-bullet guns.

The officer shouted in the general direction of the band.

'Cut that din. Wrap it up. I want all the men against the far wall. Facing the wall. Hands right up. Ladies, where you are please.'

From the middle of the dance floor a gla.s.s curved its way through the crowd and towards the troops. It hit high on the bridge of a nose creeping under the protective rim of a helmet. Blood was forming from the wound by the time the gla.s.s. .h.i.t the floor. A rubber bullet, solid, unbending, six inches long, was fired into the crowd, and amid the screams there was a stampede away from the troops as tables and chairs were thrown aside to make way.

'Come on. No games, please, let's get it over with. Now, the men line up at that wall--and now.'

More soldiers had come through the door. There were perhaps twenty of them in the hall by the time the line of men had formed up, legs wide apart and fingers and palms on the wall above their heads. Harry and the man were close to each other, separated by three others. At her table the girl in the yellow trouser suit sat very still. She was one of the few who wasn't barraging the army with a medley of obscenities and insults. Her fingers were tight round the stem of her gla.s.s, her eyes flicking continuously from the troops to her husband.

Josephine's table had been knocked aside in the scramble to get clear from the firing of the rubber bullet, and she stood on the dance floor interested to see what the army made of her merchant-seaman escort.

Six of the soldiers, working in pairs, split up the line of men against the wall and started to quiz each man on his name, age and address. One soldier asked the questions, the other wrote down the answers. The lieutenant moved between the three groups checking the procedure, while his sergeant marshalled his other men in the room to prevent any sudden break for the exits.

Private David Jones, number 278649, eighteen months of his nine year signing served, and Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn, 512387, were working over the group of men nearest the dance floor. The man and Harry were there. The way the line had formed itself they would come to the man first. It was very slow. Conscientious, plodding. The wife was in agony. Charade, that's all. A game of cat and mouse. They had come for him, and these were the preliminaries, the way they dressed it up. But they'd come for him. They had to know.

The lance-corporal tapped the man's shoulder.

'Come on, let's have you." Not unkindly. It was quiet in the Ardoyne now, and the soldiers acknowledged it.

The man swung round, bringing his hands down to his side, fists clenched tight, avoiding the pleading face of his wife a few feet away. Llewellyn was asking the questions, Jones writing the answers down.

'Name?'

'Billy Downs.'

'Age?'

Twenty-three.'

'Address?'

'Forty-one, Ypres Avenue.'

Llewellyn paused as Jones struggled in his notebook with the blunted pencil he had brought with him. The lieutenant walked towards them. He looked hard at the man, then down into Jones's notebook, deciphering the smudged writing.

'Billy Downs?'

'That's it.'

'We were calling for you the other morning. Expected to find you home, but you weren't there.'

He stared into the young man's face. That was the question he posed. There was no reply.

'Where were you, Mr Downs? Your good wife whom I see sitting over there didn't seem too sure.'

'I went down to see my mother in the south. It's on your files. You can check that.'

'But you've been away a fair few days, Downs boy. Fond of her, are you?'

'She's not been well, and you know that. She's a heart condition. That's in your files and all. It wasn't made any better when there weren't any of you lot around when the Prods came and burned her out... and that's in your files too.'

'Steady, boy. What's her address?'

'Forty, Dublin Road, Cork." He said it loud enough for his wife to hear the address given. His voice was raised now, and she listened for the message that was in it. "She'll tell you I've been there for a month. That I was with her till four days ago.'

The lieutenant still gazed into Downs's face, searching for weakness, evasion, inconsistency. If there was fear there he betrayed none of it to the soldier a bare year older than himself.

'Put him in the truck," the lieutenant said. Jones and Llewellyn hustled Downs across the room and towards the door. His wife rose up out of her chair and rushed across to him.

'Don't worry, girl, once the Garda have checked with Mam I'll be home. I'll see you later." And he was out into the night to where the Saracen was parked.