Life stirred in the houses around him. The baby crying, dogs barking, mothers shouting at their children. Soon he spotted men leaving for work, trudging along the street, their jackets held tight around them against the early chill, cigarettes hanging from their lips, lunches wrapped in newspaper beneath their arms.
A milk float hummed onto the street. Ryan lost it behind the houses, but he heard the clinking of bottles and the milkman’s whistling.
The corner shop below Ryan’s vantage point opened not long past seven thirty. The proprietor wiped down the windows and swept the floor.
A movement at the house caught Ryan’s attention. He checked his watch: just past eight. A short, stocky man stepped out of the gated yard. He walked along the alleyway, coming directly towards Ryan. A soldier, there could be no question, with that hair, that gait. One who’d seen action. Ryan guessed him at around thirty years old, too young to have been in the Second World War, but very likely Korea.
The man rounded the corner and entered the shop. Barely visible through the glass, Ryan saw him nod at the shopkeeper, speaking as few words as he could get away with. He emerged with a packet of cigarettes and a box of kitchen matches, stuffing his change into his pocket, and jogged back up the alley to the gate.
Ryan had been correct about one thing: he came and went by the rear of the house, not the front.
Ten minutes later, two more men emerged. Ryan brought the field glasses to his eyes. He recognised one of them as Captain John Carter. Fuller in the face, his hair thinner on top, but it was him. The other stood a good five or six inches taller, and gave sharp deferential nods as Carter spoke. The face triggered Ryan’s memory: one of the men standing alongside Carter in the photograph Weiss had given him. Carter went to the driver’s side, unlocked the door, slid it back, and climbed into the cabin. He reached across and unlocked the passenger door. The other man finished his cigarette before getting in.
The clatter of the Bedford’s engine echoed between the houses and the railway arches. Carter watched his side mirrors, the alleyway barely wide enough to allow the van to pass.
Ryan shrank back into the ivy as it approached. Through the vines and leaves he could make out the lines on Carter’s face, and the other’s. The tall man looked a similar age to his leader, around forty five.
The van pulled out of the alley, and rounded the corner onto the avenue. The engine puttered and barked as it gathered speed on its way to Jones’s Road and turned right towards the city centre.
Ryan noted the time.
All remained still until eleven thirty when the shorter man left the house once more, again via the rear gate. He walked in the direction of Ryan’s position, turned towards the corner shop, and came out a minute later with a bottle of lemonade.
Ryan held his breath as the man paused in the street below and unscrewed the cap. He brought the bottle to his lips, threw his head back, and gulped the fizzy liquid down. Wiping his chin, he let out a long belch. He went to the alleyway’s entrance and leaned against the wall. There, he fished a packet of cigarettes from his pocket — the same one he’d bought earlier — and lit one.
The man remained at the end of the alley, sipping at his lemonade, long enough to smoke three cigarettes. All the while, he cast his gaze around, along the alley, up and down the street.
Ryan recognised the behaviour of a man not dealing well with being cooped up in his quarters. He had seen it everywhere he’d served, men finding any excuse they could to get outdoors, even if it meant simply walking circles around their barracks.
Finally, the man trudged back towards the house, taking his lemonade with him, and let himself through the gate.
More than two hours passed before the van reappeared at the far end of the alleyway. It halted at the rear of the house, and the two men alighted without speaking to each other. They entered through the gate.
Three men in total. Ryan scribbled a brief description of each on his notepad. Height, build, hair colour.
The sun came out, warming Ryan’s back.
On the street below, a group of five young boys rounded the corner, one of them carrying a soccer ball and a piece of chalk. He came to the gable wall of the house next to Ryan and disappeared from view. Ryan heard the scratching of the chalk on the wall, pictured the boy drawing a goal mouth.
One boy volunteered as goalkeeper, and the others split into pairs. Soon the sound of panting, kicking, leather scuffing on tarmac. Ryan watched them shove one another, their feet tangling over the ball. Every minute or two he heard the hard slap of its leather against the wall, the hollow ring as it bounced away, and one of the pairs would cheer.
Now and then the shopkeeper came to his window, glared out at them, shook his head, and retreated back to his counter.
They played for more than an hour without a break, each pair’s score reaching the dozens, before they stopped, breathless and sweating.
“I’m sitting down for a minute,” the boy who owned the ball said.
“Me too,” another said. “I’m fucking knackered.”
The five sat on the footpath, in the shade, their backs against the red-brick gable wall opposite Ryan. They talked about school, and which of the Christian Brothers was the biggest bastard, and what they’d do when they were older and bigger and found one of the worst Brothers alone on the street. They talked about their mothers and fathers, and the girls they knew.
“Did you hear about Sheila McCabe and Paddy Gorman?”
“No, what?”
“She showed him her tits.”
“Fuck off. Sure, she’s got no tits to show.”
“Yeah, she has, I saw her in town with her ma, they were buying her a bra.”
“Aw, shite, no you didn’t.”
“I did. Anyway, she showed ’em to Paddy. He told me she let him have a suck on ’em and everything.”
The boys roared with laughter.
The shopkeeper came out onto the street. “Here now, lads, I won’t have that dirty talk outside my shop. Go on, the lot of you, before I go and tell your mothers what you were mouthing about.”
The boys stood, dropped their gazes to the ground, shuffled their feet. The shopkeeper went back inside. The boys laughed and recommenced their game.
They hadn’t been playing long when the shorter man emerged from the house and walked down the alleyway. The boys glanced at him as he walked to the shop, and again when he left, a chocolate bar in his fingers. He went back to the mouth of the alley, unwrapped the bar, and ate. When the chocolate was done, he took his cigarettes from his pocket.
The boys paused their play. They huddled around their leader, then parted.
The leader said, “Here, mister.”
The man lit his cigarette, drew on it. The breeze carried away the smoke as he exhaled.
“Here, mister.”
He looked at the boy.
“Give us a couple of them, will you?”
The man hesitated then took two cigarettes from the packet and held them out. The boy approached and took them from his fingers.
“Thanks, mister.”
The boys ran off, taking their ball with them, their footsteps reverberating underneath the bridge as they went.
“What was that?”
The voice took Ryan by surprise as much as it did the man below.
Carter stood behind the man, his face hard with anger.
“Just some kids,” the man said, his accent Rhodesian or South African, Ryan couldn’t tell which.
“We talked about this, Wallace.” Carter spoke through tight lips. “Didn’t we talk about this?”
“They’re only kids. I didn’t—”