As the pressure grew to a near intolerable degree on the shoulders of the Provisionals’ leadership so it was understood that the days of gallantry and chivalry were gone, too. Once a British officer had stood in the turret of his armoured car, stiffly upright with his right arm in the salute position as the coffin of an IRA man was carried past him, draped in the tricolour. Once British officers after an evening’s celebration and in their slacks and sports jackets found they had wandered into the Bogside, were captured and returned safely to their embarrassed seniors.
That was all over now. As the IRA fought back against the growing strength and experience of the security forces arrayed against them, so the attacks became more vicious and more calculated to shock.
It was the Brigade commander who made the reluctant decision to call Billy Downs out from the Ardoyne and from inactivity. It was accepted that he was of greatest value when used sparingly, but within seventy-two hours of the earlier instruction he was given new orders.
The subject of the Brigade’s death sentence was an RUC inspector. A priority was put on his death, and it was reckoned important enough to risk the exposure of one of the movement’s top cards.
The policeman they wanted shot was Howard Rennie, CID, transferred to Special Branch. Their dossier reported him as coming from the hills of Country Antrim, near the coast. He had been unknown in Belfast till recently when word had begun to seep into the information system from the holding centres and prisons about a detective with sufficient ability as an interrogator that he was directly responsible for the failure of several suspects to keep their mouths shut.
It had taken a long time once they’d started for the Brigade intelligence section to identify Rennie, locate his headquarters at the holding centre in Castlereagh barracks, and put a plan into operation against him. The final decision to eliminate him was taken after a company intelligence officer reported on the list of police cars’ number plates and models that had left the police station after the death of the girl in her cell. One was similar in model and colour to that driven by the detective. His association with the events of that night was sufficient to put him several places up the list of priorities, and would win the movement nothing but support when he was killed.
Billy Downs was given a dossier to read but not to keep. The caller who came to his house late, after the wife and the children had gone upstairs, was to bring it away with him when Downs had done his reading. His wife came down the stairs to see who the visitor was, paled at the sight of the long-haired youth in jeans and heavy quilted anorak who returned her stare and then turned away without speaking to her. She went into the kitchen, aware that the front room was no place for her. When she moved upstairs again she could hear the voices, talking hurriedly, hushed and with urgency.
Downs was shown a picture of Rennie. Taken five years ago, and one of a group. It had been gained from the copious files of a photographer in the small town where Rennie had then been stationed. It was a fair bet they’d find such a picture when they went into the photographer’s shop with guns in their hands, and the competence of the filing system saw them through. The picture was of a group of policemen all celebrating their promotion to sergeant. The picture would not help Downs that much, as it suffered seriously in the enlargement, but it gave him an idea of the build, the hair and the shape of the face of the policeman that he had been ordered to kill. The car the detective would be using was a Triumph 2000 and bottle-green, but the file on Rennie carried a list of a minimum of eight number plates that he might use. He read that Rennie lived in a small, detached house in Dunmurry, down a cul-de-sac. The house right at the bottom of the ‘U’ of the close. Difficult for surveillance and for ambush. The dossier said he used a door direct into the garage. Wife opened the garage doors from the inside and he drove straight out in the mornings. They would be open when Rennie came home. The policeman would be armed.
The problems of the ambush were made clear to him.
‘It’ll not be easy to get the whore. None of them is easy. They often go together — lift each other to work. They’ll be using different routes and all. They’ve guns, too. One of them would get a shot in if you try it then. They know how to use them. Rennie’s a trained shot. And clever — won’t be easy to nail the bastard. No chance of sitting down his road: all those women flappin’ their curtains from not enough to do, they’d see you and be on the phone straight off. And you don’t have time to set it up, next week, next month, when you like. They want it, and fast. Brigade’s order. It’s a special one, and they want you for it.’
His unpolished ankle-length boots were beside the chair. Jeans crumpled and not washed nor ironed since he came home. Shirt was off-white and dirty, collar frayed. The fire was small now, needing help to stay alive. He had put the light out when the courier had gone, so that he could concentrate the better on the policeman, Rennie, that they had put him against. He had memorized much of the detail of the file and now he savoured the problem they had set him, seeking out a plan of action. Like a mathematician attempting the answer to a complex formula, he stayed in the chair thinking on the method and the manner by which Rennie would be assassinated. He was surprised to have been called out, but the implication was clear. This was a vital and important operation, he was a vital and important operator.
His wife stayed upstairs, aware that this was no time for her to go down to the front room and try to break the spell her husband was weaving for himself as his mind took up attack tactics and the weapons he would use.
She drifted into an uneasy sleep that night, tossing through an immediate nightmare. She saw her man cut down by a burst of bullets, caricatures of grotesque soldiers standing over him. Life throbbing away in the gutter. Feet pushing and manœuvring him. When she reached across to see if he had come upstairs she found only the emptiness of the sheets beside her. Back in her half-sleep she witnessed over and over again the firing of those perpetual rifles, and the agony and throes of her man. And then exhaustion and fear took her beyond the stage of the dreams and left her in deep sleep till the morning.
That was how he found her when he came upstairs with a plan maturing well in his mind. He was impressing himself with the cleverness of what he would do. Excited and pleased with his solution to a technical problem.
He lay on his back, elbows outstretched on the pillow, his hands under his neck, going back over his plan, testing each point in it for flaws. He was tired but elated enough to find none as he checked over each aspect of the killing, each aspect bar the final one — the killing itself. He shut that out of his mind. The actuality of the killing, the pulling and squeezing of the trigger.
He seldom tried to work out the values of the killings he performed to the movement that he served. Tasks and projects set for him by his superiors. Others determined the morality. Others had the hatred. Others turned his work into victories. He did as he was told, expertise his trade mark. The soldier in his army.
There were some in the movement, men that he had met or, in other cases, heard of, who were said to relish the physical side of the killing. There were stories that they tortured the demented minds of their victims after the sentence of the kangaroo court. Demonstrate the firearm. Go right up to the moment of shooting and then fire with an empty gun. There were beatings-up, knifings and cigarette burnings. That was no part of Billy Downs. His killing was different. Clever. Organized. Against major targets. His feelings were known and respected by the top men. The ritual was for others. He belonged in the field. His mind reverted to the reconstruction and progress of the murder of Rennie, his plans racing far ahead. It was close to dawn before he slept.