Undercover men working for the army or D16 were the particular dislike of the Provisionals. They believed there was a much greater secret intelligence and surveillance operation against them than in fact existed. Their traditional hatred was for the plain-clothes army squads who cruised at night round the backstreets of the ghettos in unmarked cars, looking for the top men in the movement. But this had a more important ring about it to the intelligence officer than squaddies out in jeans and sweaters and armed. If a Brigadier and a top copper were not in on the act, and thought they ought to have been, it meant first it was top secret, and second that they considered it important enough for them to have been briefed. Something of critical value to those English swine, so sensitive that top-ranking men had been left out in the cold.
Farther down the waiter’s report was a paragraph explaining that the tone of the exchange across the lunch table had been critical.
The officer wrote a three-line covering note on a separate piece of paper, clipped it to the original report and sealed it in a plain brown envelope. A courier would take it that night to the next man up the chain, someone on the Brigade staff.
Twenty-two hours later he met Seamus Duffryn for the first time. Duffryn had originally intended that his message should go by hand, but the combination of the new appointment and the nagging worry about this man, Harry McEvoy, had led to the direct meeting, risky as it was.
They met in a pub in the heart of the broken-up and ravaged triangle of the Lower Falls. Taking their pints of beer with them, Duffryn led the other to a corner table. With their heads huddled together he spoke of the stranger that had come to the guest house farther up the Falls. Looking for work. Said he’d been away a long time. Had this strange accent that was noted by those when he first came, but which his latest reports said was not so pronounced. When Duffryn mentioned the accent, the Battalion officer looked at him intrigued, and the junior man explained the apparent lapses in speech. Duffryn said that his men who followed McEvoy and heard him talk in the pubs, said the oddness about the speech was something very much of the past. Ironed out, muttered Duffryn. He had come to the end of his patience on the matter and wanted a decision. Either the man should be cleared or there would have to be authorization for more surveillance with all its problems of manpower. Duffryn himself had personally tried to observe McEvoy by spending three successive evenings in the pub on the corner where it was reported that the stranger came to drink, but he’d stayed alone these evenings, and the man he wanted to see had not shown himself.
‘I’m not sure what it means,’ said the man from Battalion. ‘You never know about these things. It could mean he’s a man put in to infiltrate us. It could be nothing. It counts against the bugger that his accent is improving. Would do, wouldn’t it? With each day he spends here, it would improve. There’s something else we have that indicated a few days ago that they could have put an undercover man in. He’ll be a big bloody fish if it’s right. He’ll be a bloody whale if what we think about him is right.’
He hesitated as to whether he should bring the young Duffryn further into the web of reports and information that was forming in his mind. He dismissed it. The golden rule of the movement was ‘need to know’. Duffryn needed to know no more than he already knew.
‘That’s enough. From now on — and this is important — and I want it bloody well obeyed to the letter — no more following this McEvoy. Let him ride on his own a bit. I don’t want the bugger flushed before we’re ready for him. We’ll just leave him alone for a bit, and if we have to we’ll move when it’s all nice and relaxed. I want it taken gently, very gently, you see? Just log him in and out of the guest house, and that’s the lot.’
Harry had not been aware of the watchers before they were called off, and therefore had no idea that he had thrown off a tail when he had gone through the city centre shopping crowds to a telephone kiosk to call Davidson. On the Friday night when he had been in the city nearly three weeks he came down past the cemetery towards Broadway with his wage packet in his hip pocket, and the knowledge that there seemed to be no sign of suspicion towards him from the men he was working with. He had a hired car booked for Saturday for his date with Josephine.
There was a Sinn Fein meeting that Friday night up on the junction of the Falls, and after he’d had his tea Harry wandered up to listen to the speeches. There were some familiar faces on the lorry that was being used as a speaker’s platform. The oratory was simple and effective and the message brutally clear. Amongst the committed there would be no easing in the struggle, the war would go on till the British were gone. The crimes of the British army, the Stormont administration and the Free State government were catalogued, but the crowd of three or four hundred seemed lukewarm to it all. They’d been listening to this stuff for five years or so now, Harry reflected. He’d be a bloody good orator to give them something new at this stage. The army stayed away and after hearing the first four speeches Harry left. He’d clapped with the rest, and cheered by consensus, but no-one spoke to him. He was just there, ignored. God, how do you get into this bloody mob? How does it all happen like Davidson said, in that magic three weeks? It’ll take months, till the face is known and the background and every other bloody thing.
A long haul. He wouldn’t call Davidson this weekend. Nothing to say. Those buggers had sent him here, they could sit and stew for a bit and wonder what was going on. The trail of the man he sought was well chilled now. It would be very slow, and his own survival would take some thinking about. But there’d be no coming out, no trotting up to Aldergrove. One-way to Heathrow please, my nerve’s gone and so has that of my controller, thank you very much.
No way. You stay in for the whole way, Harry boy.
Chapter 13
She was waiting at the lights at the junction of Grosvenor and the Falls when he pulled up in the hired Cortina. Tall in the brittle sunlight, her hair blown round her face, and shivering in the mock sheepskin coat over the sweaters and jeans he’d told her to wear.
‘Come on, get that door open. I’m frozen out here.’ A bit distant, perhaps too off-hand, but not the clamouring alarm bells Harry had steeled himself to face.
He was laughing as he reached across the passenger seat and unlocked the nearside door, and pushed the handle across to open it. She came inside, a bundle of coat and cold air, stealing the warmth he had built up since he had collected the car.
‘All right then, sunshine?’ He leaned over to kiss her, but she turned her head away, presenting her cheek for what he hadn’t intended to be the brotherly peck they ended up with.
‘Enough of that. Where are we going?’ she said. She straightened her back in the seat, and began to fasten her seat belt.
‘You said you wanted some country. Somewhere we can stretch ourselves a bit, walk around. Where do you suggest?’
‘Let’s off to the Sperrins. About an hour down the Derry and Dungiven road. That’s wild country, real Ulster stock. You’ve seen the slogans on the Proddy walls before the troubles started, “We will not exchange the blue skies of Ulster for the grey mists of the Republic,” well, the blue skies are over the Sperrins.’
‘Well, if it’s OK for the Prods it’ll do for us second-class Micks.’