‘Just brought some food, did she?’
‘Course, she did… don’t bloody question me… like the fucking Branch.’
‘Just on the strength of that, brought her in and questioned her, just because she brought you some grub? Didn’t get her father in — he’s giving interviews. Just took her in.’
‘Leave it,’ he snapped at her. He wanted out. Escape.
‘Just tell me who the little bitch was and what she meant to you.’
‘She’s just a child a minute ago, now she’s a little bitch. She was nothing. Nothing. Must have blabbed her mouth off. Squealed, the little cow.’
‘How did she know who you were?’
She shouted the last question at him. She would have taken it back once the words were out and had crumpled against him. The noise and aggression slewed out of him. Beseeching. Pleading. Don’t make me answer. The found-out child and the hollow victory.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Just forget it.’
She turned away, back towards the door into the living room where the children were fighting, and one was hungry, and another crying.
‘I’ll tell you what happened…’ She shook her head, but he went on, ‘This is once and for all, never ask again. If I’d wanted her I couldn’t have done anything about it. I was so screwed up. I was sort of cold, frozen, shivering. I couldn’t do anything for her. She asked if it was me in London. I hit her. Across the face. She went back to her room. I’ve only seen her once since then. She was at the dance at the club on Saturday night. I suppose she saw me.’
He walked across to his wife and put his arms round her. The children still cried and the pitch was growing. He pulled her head against his shoulder. There was no response, but she was pliant against him, totally passive.
Downs went on, ‘That’s when she must have talked. Going home after the dance. Must have said that she knew the man that had been in London. Then some rat, some bastard, squealed. A fucking spy, a tout. Right there at one of our dances, some bastard who’ll shop you. That’s what must have happened.’
‘Forget it. We have to forget all these things. There’s nothing left otherwise.’
He held her for a long time in the darkened kitchen, lit by the inadequate bulb hanging without a shade from the wire flex. At first she wept silently and without dramatic effect, keeping her grief private, not using it as a weapon to cudgel him with. She controlled herself, and clung to him. Nothing would be different, nothing in his way of life would change.
‘You’ll go back?’
‘When they want me.’
‘You could end it all now. You’ve done your share.’
‘There’s no way that could happen.’
He needed her now, to recharge him. When the dose was enough he would go back into his own vicious, lonely world. Of which she was no part.
She was one of the crowd. The crowd of women who had so little influence over their men that it was pointless, indecent, to beg them to stay off the streets. She was still luckier than most. Her man was still with her. The bus that came each Thursday lunchtime to the top end of Ypres Avenue was well enough known. It took the women to Long Kesh to talk to their men for half an hour, across a table.
That night Billy Downs opened his door to a treble knock. He was given an envelope by a youth and saw him scurry away into the darkness. His wife stayed in the kitchen, as she too had recognized the call sign of the fist against the door. She heard him switch the hall light on, pause a few moments and then the sound of tearing paper, over and over again.
He went into the front room and threw the half-inch squares of paper that had made up the single sheet of writing into the fire. The message was from Brigade. It was short and to the point. For the moment he was to stay at home. It was believed that the girl had hanged herself before identifying him.
Davidson had had a bad week. He admitted it to the young man who was drafted in to share the office with him. The fiasco of the girl had started it off. The Permanent Under-Secretary had been on as well, laying the smokescreen that would be used if the operation went aground. Davidson had tried to counter-attack with complaints about the original lodgings and then the foul-up over the girl, but had been rejected out of hand. There was silence from Harry himself for six days after his first call. Davidson and the aide sat in the office reading papers, making coffee, devouring takeaway fish and chips, takeaway Indian, takeaway Chinese. The number that had been given to Harry was kept permanently free from all other calls.
When he did call, on the Saturday afternoon, the effect was electric. Davidson started up from his easy chair, pitching it sideways, tipping a coffee beaker off his desk as he lunged for the telephone. Papers drifted to the floor.
‘Hello, is that four-seven-zero-four-six-eight-one?’
‘Harry?’
‘How are the family?’
‘Very well. They liked the postcards, I’m told.’
Davidson was on his knees, his head level with the drawer where the recording apparatus was kept. He pulled up the lead and plugged it into the telephone’s body. The cassette was rolling.
‘Anything for us?’
‘Nothing, old chap. No, I’m just digging in a bit. I think it may go all quiet for a few days, so I’m settling into some sort of a routine.’
‘We’re worried about you in the wake of that bloody girl. We’re wondering whether we should pull you out.’
‘No way. Just getting acclimatized.’
‘I think we all feel at this end that you did very well last weekend. But we want some way to get in touch with you. This may suit you, but it’s ridiculous for us. Quite daft. We’re sitting here like a row of virgins waiting for you to call us up.’
‘It’s the way I’m happiest. I’ve been bitten, remember. On the first house. It’s going to be a touch trickier getting something further out of this, and this is the way I want it to be. Bit silly, you might say, but that’s the way it is.’
Davidson backed down and switched the subject.
‘Are they sniffing round you at all?’
‘I don’t think so. No particular sign of it yet, but I don’t know. More of a problem is that I don’t see where the next break is going to come from — what direction. I was very lucky last time, and look where the thing got us. It can’t be on a plate like that again.’
‘You’re not following anything particular at the moment, then?’
‘No, just entrenching. Getting ready for the siege.’
‘Perhaps it’s time you should come out. Like this weekend. I don’t want you hanging about wasting time. Look, Harry, we know it’s bloody difficult in there, but you’ve given the military and security people a lead that they ought to be able to do something about… Come out now. Get yourself up to Aldergrove and get the hell out…’
The phone clicked dead in his hand, before the dialling tone purred back at him. Despairingly he flicked the receiver buttons. The call was over.
Bugger. Played it wrong. Unsettled him. Just when he needs lifting. Silly, bloody fool. Should have made it an order, not a suggestion, or not mentioned it at all. The military should be following this now. The girl must have left a trail a mile wide.
Davidson could see through his uncurtained window that it was now dark outside. He thought of Harry walking back up the Falls to his digs. Past the shadows and the wreckage and the crowds and the troops, the legacy of the spluttering week-long street fighting he had been the spark to. Keep your head down, Harry boy.
Chapter 12
It was acknowledged at the highest levels of the IRA’s Belfast Brigade command that the campaign was at a crucial stage, the impetus of the struggle consistently harder to maintain. The leadership detected a weariness among the people on whom they relied so greatly for the success of their attacks. But the differences between the people at street level and their protectors, as the Provisionals saw themselves, were growing. Money was harder to collect for the families of those imprisoned, doors generally left unlocked for the gunman or blast bombers to escape through were now bolted, and the confidential phones to police headquarters where the informers left their anonymous messages were kept busy with tip-offs that could only come from the Catholic heartland.