They walked together back towards Frost’s Land-Rover.
Frost was gone by the time Rennie was brought to Ypres Avenue in a Saracen from Battalion headquarters. He climbed gingerly out of the protection of the personnel carrier and jumped down onto the road. First time in the Ardoyne for sixteen months. The Special Branch had no love for parading their faces on the streets of the Provisional heartland. He was conspicuous, he knew that. Anyone in civilian clothes who needed five soldiers and a three-ton armoured car to take him in and out would attract attention. He was conscious of the eyes at the doors, blank and subdued but watching him.
‘Are the bodies still here?’ he asked the Battalion commander.
‘We’ve shifted them, I’m afraid. My people have taken the necessary pictures. There’s not much to see now. That’s where Downs died, the blood on the road. The other fellow, McEvoy, he was shot on the pavement by number twenty-nine. There’s a small blood pool there.’
‘Who’s McEvoy?’ said the detective.
‘I fancy you’ll hear more of him from your own office. But he’s a rather sensitive creature right now. One of ours, they tell me. Trailed Downs back here and shot him. I’m still waiting for the details on the rest. Looks a bit black, though. I think one of my OPs shot him. McEvoy was waving a gun round, in civilian clothes. It’s pretty definite.’
He had no need to ask about Downs. The wild, staring face that had confronted him fourteen hours earlier across the width of his bright living room remained vivid in his mind.
But Downs was dead now. Rennie thanked the officer and hurried back to the Saracen.
The press statement from Lisburn was short and took something more than two hours to prepare. It was the result of a series of compromises but owed most of its drafting to the civilian deputy head of the army public relations department who had recently transferred from the Treasury, and had experience of the art of communiqué writing.
Billy Downs, a known IRA gunman, was shot dead at 09.10 hours in Ypres Avenue where he lived. He was involved in an exchange of shots with a member of the security forces, an officer engaged in plain-clothes surveillance duties. The officer, who will not be named till his next of kin have been informed, was hit by a single shot in the chest and died before medical treatment reached him. Downs was high on the army’s wanted list in Northern Ireland, and was also wanted in London for questioning by detectives investigating the murder of Mr Henry Danby.
The main object was to keep it short, pack it with information and deflect the press away from the sensitive bit. There was, he said when he had finished typing it, more than enough for the scribes to bite on without them needing to go digging round any more.
A solitary journalist moved towards the delicate area that first day, but without knowing it, and was easily put off.
‘Then this man Downs was carrying a gun?’ he asked the duty press officer.
‘Obviously, old man, it says in our statement that there was an exchange of shots. Have to be armed, wouldn’t he?’
There were no other questions to be asked. Amongst the resident reporters in McGlade’s pub that night interest was warm but not exceptional, and the treatment of the story was straight and factual.
Locally it was denied that Downs had been armed, and three hours of rock-throwing followed the news bulletin that contained the army statement. By then it had started to rain.
Chapter 20
The Prime Minister learned the news at lunchtime. The message had been framed by the Under-Secretary, Ministry of Defence, with an eye to the political master’s taste, and the order in which he would read of the events in Ypres Avenue had been carefully thought out. First, Billy Downs as the killer of Henry Danby had been shot dead. Second, he had been identified by the agent specifically sent to Northern Ireland by the Prime Minister. Third, and unfortunately, the agent had been shot in the chest during the incident and had died.
As he read the message that the aide gave him his attentive smile had switched to a frown of public concern, studied by the bankers round the table with him in the first-floor salon of No. 10. They looked for a clue as to the contents and information that was important enough to intercede in discussions on the progress of the floating pound, albeit the end of the discussions. The Prime Minister noted their anticipation and was anxious to satisfy it.
‘Just on a final note, gentlemen.’ He refolded the typewritten sheet. ‘You will all be reading it in the papers tomorrow morning, but you might be interested to hear that we have caught and killed the man that assassinated Henry Danby. He was shot in Belfast this morning after being hunted down as part of a special investigation that was launched from this building a few hours after our colleague was murdered.’
There was a murmur of applause round the table and a banging of the palms of hands on the paper-strewn mahogany surface.
‘But you will be sorry to hear, as I am, that the man we sent to find this terrorist was himself killed in the shooting exchange. He’d been operating under cover there for some weeks, and obviously carried out a difficult task extremely successfully and with great bravery. The whole concept of this intelligence operation really goes back to the last war. My family were involved in Special Operations — you know, the crowd that put agents into the occupied countries. I had a hell of a job getting the military and police to agree to it. But it just shows, you sometimes need a fresh approach to these things. Perhaps we should get that general over there, who always seems to be wanting more troops, to have a try at banking and running a budget!’
There was general and polite laughter.
‘He’ll get a medal, won’t he? The man you sent over there? They look after the families and all that sort of thing, I suppose?’ the elegantly-dressed deputy chairman of the Bank of England said.
‘Oh, I’m sure he will. Well, I think we can adjourn now. Perhaps you would care to join me for a drink. I have a luncheon, but I’m not off to that till I’ve had a drop of something.’
Later in the day he called the Under-Secretary to express his appreciation of the way the operation had been handled.
‘It’ll get a good show in the papers, I trust,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘We ought to blow our own trumpets a bit when we chalk one up.’
‘I don’t think there will be too much of that, sir.’ The civil servant replied decisively. ‘MOD have put out a short statement only. I think their feeling is that under-cover is bad news in Ulster, and that apart from anything else it was a damn close thing whether our man got theirs first or vice versa. They’re playing it rather low key I’m afraid, sir.’
‘As you like. Though I sometimes feel we don’t give ourselves the pat on the back we deserve. I’ll concede that. One more thing. The man we sent over there, I’d like a medal for him now it’s over. What sort of chap was he, by the way?’
‘I’ll see to that. He already had an MC from Aden. We could make it a bar to that, but perhaps that’s a bit on the short side. I personally would favour the OBE. The George Cross is a bit more than we usually go for in these circumstances, and it would obviously provoke a deal of talk. You asked what sort of chap. Pretty straightforward, not too bright. Dedicated, conscientious, and a lot of guts. He was the right man.’