Harry's Game (26 page)

She had started to shout again, spitting out the unsaid accusation at Harry. The weakness had gone. The heat of her attack burst round the tiny marooned inside of the car.

'You might as well have killed her yourself, Harry. She wasn't involved in any way at all. You came here with your challenges, and the bloody games you play. And a wee girl dies who had nothing to do with it. There's enough innocent people killed here without strangers coming and putting their fingers in and digging out more shit.'

She crumpled then. Sobbing rhythmically and noiselessly. Gazing into the steamed‐up window beside her. The rain was still falling.

Harry was deciding what he should do on his return to Belfast. His ego was rumpled by the way the girl had broken through him. He ought to have killed her up there on the hill, but she had said she was no threat to him and he believed it. His ego was of less importance, though, than the news she had just given him. The man who he searched for had been at the each" the previous weekend.

She shook herself, trying to shrug away her misery.

'Come on, I want a drink. There's a pub just down the road. You can't stop for the dead. Not in Ulster. Like they say, it all goes on. I should have dropped it ages ago. Come on, let's go have a couple of hot tods.'

She leaned over and kissed him lightly, again on the cheek. Then she began to adjust her face, working with deftness from her little pouch that came out of her bag, painting over the reddened and flushed valleys under her eyes.

When she had finished she said, "Don't worry, hero boy, I won't

tell the big bad Provies about you. But if you've ever taken advice, I'm telling you, don't hang about. Or whatever medal you're after will have to go in the box with you.'

They drove down the hill to where a pub and petrol station were nestled in a redoubt cut out from the stone. He ordered the drinks she wanted‐‐Irish, with hot water and sugar and lemon.

136

The faint sunlight that had seen them out of Belfast was long since gone as Harry drove back on the shiny, watered road into the city. They spoke hardly a word all the way, and Harry dropped her off where he had met her in the morning, on the corner of Grosvenor and the Falls. Just before he stopped he asked her where she lived, so that he could drop her at the door. She said it would be better at the main road.

'When will I see you again?" he said, as she climbed out of the car. The traffic was hustling them.

'Next week, at Mrs Duncan's. You'll see me there.'

'And we'll go out somewhere? Have a drink?'

'Perhaps.'

She knew so much more than she had wanted to, or was equipped to handle. What had started as something of a game had become considerable enough to subdue her into a morose silence most of the way home. She darted out of the car, and without a wave disappeared into the Clonard side streets.

Harry dropped the car off at the garage and walked back to Delrosa. His mind was filled with that conversation he'd had with Davidson in the garden. The loneliness factor. Sounded so astonishing when the old chap was trying to put it over as a problem. What had he said?

"Unless you're aware of it, there will come a time when you want to tell someone." Fumbling his way into it because it embarrassed him that his chosen man could possibly fall into so well sign‐posted a pit, embarrassed even to suggest it. And that's the way it was, because Davidson knew what it was about, was the only one of them who knew what it was about. How many of the others could transpose themselves into the hostility of this community, live day in, day‐out with the fear and the strain and the isolation?

Don't go on with it, Harry boy, let it rest there. Don't let it infect you. The cancer of doubt spreads fast enough, Harry. Drop it.

Billy Downs decided he would go for Rennie the next day, Sunday.

The reports that were available from the minders who had been

cautiously watching the policeman suggested that he made a habit of

going to the interrogation centre on Sunday afternoons. He stayed a few hours and reached home around seven in the evening. It fitted with the plan that Downs had made. He discussed none of this with his wife, but as his preoccupation with the killing grew so they moved about 137

their house, two strangers under the same roof. Life was carried on with a series of gestures and monosyllabic phrases.

Downs had been informed of the arrangement by which he would take possession of the Armalite rifle that he would use for the attack, and he had reported up the chain on the timing and the date that he would want the operation set in motion. It had been suggested to him that the Armalite was an unsuitable weapon for a close‐quarters killing, but in the face of his wishes the point had not been pressed.

The huge power of the weapon excited him to such a degree that he could think of taking no other. The bullet that he intended should kill Rennie would leave the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 3250 feet per second. The statistics that he had read in a sales brochure astounded and exhilarated him. It weighed slightly less than seven pounds and would fit comfortably into the poacher‐style pocket he had fashioned on the inside of his raincoat. And he would be far from his safe base area: if he were intercepted by the army or police then the sharp crack of the Armalite would be enough to send his enemy scurrying for cover for the few seconds he might need to get clear. He had asked for two thirty‐round magazines for the weapon, just in case.

A brandy in his hand, Frost was sitting on his own in a corner of the Mess at Lisburn mulling over the magazines of weekly comment with which he prided himself he kept abreast. He made a point of working his way through the dog‐eared Spectator, Economist, and Statesman, and it had become sufficient of a ritual for other officers of equal rank to leave him to himself, when on any other evening they would have joined him.

The Mess waiter came over and hesitated beside the chair, before plunging in.

'Excuse me, sir. Sorry to trouble you. There's a reporter from The Times on the phone. Says he needs to speak to you. Says it's urgent. He said to say he was sorry to trouble you, but he thought you'd want to hear what he had to say.'

Frost nodded, pulled himself up and followed the waiter to the phone cubicle.

'Hello, Frost here. Ah, yes, we've met. A leaving party, in the

right? What can I do for you?'

He listened without interruption as the reporter read over to him the story that was being prepared for Monday's editions. The Provisional IRA had tipped off one of their favoured reporters in Belfast that they believed the British had infiltrated a new secret agent into the city on a mission so sensitive that only the GOC, General Fairbairn, had been told of it. The Proves were claiming that the operation had caused great anger among British army staff officers in HQ. On Monday the story would appear in Dublin papers as well as British ones, and 138

the IRA would be calling for special vigilance from the people to seek out the spy. The Provos, Frost was told, were saying this was a special operation and one quite different from anything mounted before.

Tm not expecting you to comment or anything, Colonel. This is a private call, just to let you know what's going on. Good night.'

The colonel mouthed his thanks.

He flicked the receiver's buttons up and down till the operator came on to the line.

'Evening. Frost here. GOC at home, please." When he was connected he told the General he needed to see him immediately. There was no hint of an apology for disturbing the senior soldier in Northern Ireland at that time of night. That would not have been Frost's style. His early‐warning antennae were already jangling with the possibility of a major intelligence scandal.

The General and Frost talked for an hour, and agreed to have another meeting at eight on Sunday morning with the benefit of further information. They would then, they thought, get on to the MOD and demand Harry's immediate recall before the awkward business became necessary of dragging him out of some hedgerow with an IRA bullet in the back of his head.

Across the city in Mrs Duncan's boarding house Harry was asleep. He had been somewhat unnerved by the brutality with which his cover had been stripped aside by the girl. On his return he had lifted die carpets and floorboards at the place where the revolver was hidden.

The Smith and Wesson, with its six chambers loaded, was now wrapped in a towel under his pillow, in the corner over by the wall. As a day it had been a fiasco. A shambles. Back in the reality of the city with the hardness of the gun near to him he felt lunatic at what had passed between him and the girl in the wind and the rain on the hillside. Out of his tiny mind.

FOURTEEN

Harry was up early again that Sunday morning, and out of the house well before eight to make his way down to the city centre and the phone that he could use to talk to Davidson. This time he took the revolver with him, in his coat pocket, with the roughness of its shape shielded by the length of the covering anorak. The decision to take the gun had been an instinctive one, but now that he had it, and out on the streets and loaded, the situation that he faced was all the more clear. For the first time since they had flown him in from Germany he felt uncertain.

That was the girl. Up that mountain talking a load of slop when he should have been concentrating, then letting her go last night, back into the warren that she shared with his 139

opposition. Madness, and it aggravated him. Perhaps also there was the knowledge that the trail that had seemed so warm a week ago had now chilled.

The Smith and Wesson jarred against him as he stepped out down the Falls to the phone and communication with Davidson. There were no eyes watching him after he left Delrosa: the orders of the Battalion intelligence officer were being strictly obeyed.

He dialled the number, four‐seven‐zero‐four‐six‐eight‐one. After several desultory clicks he heard it ringing at the other end. It was answered.

'It's Harry here. How are the family?'

Davidson was in early too, and hoping for the call. "Very well, they liked the postcards.'

'I've got a bit of a problem." Pause. "I've been blown by this girl, the one that helped me with the business I gave you last week. What a cock‐up that was." Pause. "But anyway, putting the finger on that bird has led this girl straight back to me. She knows what I am. Not who I am, but what we're here for. I want you to take her out. Get her out of the scene for the duration. You can do that, can't you? She tells me that the man we want was at the same dance that we were at, a fortnight ago. I half‐felt I remembered him. But the face wasn't quite right on the photokit. If it's

the man then the army pulled him in, but that looked routine. He was just one of the ones that were rounded up. He had a woman with him, presumably his wife, in a yellow trouser suit.

Have you got all that?'

'I've got it on tape, Harry. Anything else?'

'Hell, what more do you want? No, that's all I have at the moment. But look, I don't want the living daylights bashed out of this girl. I just want her lifted out so she doesn't get involved any more. She's Josephine Laverty, lives with her mother in one of those little streets in Clonard, up off the Springfield on the right. You'll find her, but get to her quick, there's a good lad.'

'We'll work something out. Don't worry.'

'There's not really much else. It's a bit chill here at the moment but I think I'm settled in here okay. If you don't wrap it up on what I've just given you then it'll be a very long time. Do we have time for that?'

'We've plenty, as long as you think it worth it, Harry. But we ought, as you say, to kill it this time. It was a hell of a balls‐up over the other girl. There was a lot of praise at this end for what you got. Great satisfaction. You're all right yourself, are you? No one following you about, no awkward questioning? Our assessment is that they would be right up to you by now if they 140

were about to blow you, and that you'd probably have been aware of something. That's not just supposed to cheer you up, but if no one is sniffing around you then it should mean you're okay.'

'No, there's nothing like that," Harry said. Tm working too. Job in a scrap yard in Andersonstown, and paying well. Back to the scene, then.'

'Harry, look, you ought to know this. I got well and truly chewed up over your living arrangements, us not knowing. It's not only unusual, it's unprofessional as well. Very unprofessional.'

'The whole thing's unprofessional," Harry replied. "Nothing's going to change. You're not going to order me, are you? I don't think it would help, and it's my neck. Thanks very much for caring.

Cheers, maestro.'

" "Bye, Harry, I understand. No one else does. Take care, and listen to the news. As soon as you hear we've got him, come whistling out. Give me a call first if you can, but head on up to the airport like you've got a bomb up your backside. Take care.'

Harry put the phone down, and hurried out into the cold and the long walk back up the Falls.

He was concerned that they should get

the girl out of the quagmire, and fast, before her involvement became too great for her to extricate herself ... before she followed the other girl he'd brought into the game. But things did not move fast that Sunday.

Twenty minutes after Harry had rung off Davidson called the Permanent Under Secretary. He caught the civil servant on the point of going to early morning service. The bad news first.