Later that afternoon it was suggested that Harry should personally meet the eye-witnesses who had been in Belgrave Square, or who had reported the jostling incident with the hurrying man in the Underground ticket area at Oxford Circus. Harry could have gone in the guise of a detective, but Davidson, after mulling it over for thirty-six hours, decided it was an unnecessary risk and sent a video camera from the Ministry round to their homes with one of the young officers in order that they could relive the moments they had been face to face with the gunman. For about fifteen minutes the elderly man who had seen a flash of the face while reading his paper, the girl with the bag of laundry, the woman exercizing her dog, the driver of the ministry car and the woman who had stood immobile as the man weaved a way past her had spelled out their recollections. They were taken again and again through the short experience, milked till their impatience with their questioner grew pointed, and then left wondering why so much equipment and time was spent in merely reiterating the statement they had made to the police the previous week.
Endlessly the tapes were rerun, so that the strength of each witness’s description could be tested. Hesitations about hair styles, eye colours, cheekbone make-up, nose size, all the details that make each face unique as a fingerprint were analysed. Davidson made up a chart where all the strong points were listed in green ink, the next category in red, the doubtful points in blue. These were placed against the photokit picture already issued by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Scotland Yard.
There were differences, they found. Differences that would have been sufficient to prevent the young soldiers in the pub off the Broadway eight days earlier from connecting the picture they had memorized with the man they had studied, arms up and legs apart, against the wall.
‘You have to know him,’ said Davidson — so often it became like a holed record — ‘You have to know about him, have a sense that when he’s on the pavement and you’re at the other side you’ll have him straight away. It’s chemistry, my boy.’
Harry thought of it a different way. He thought in a job as daft as this you need everything on your side. He reckoned his chances of seeing the man about minus nil, though he maintained a more public optimism with Davidson.
The Ministry had designed their own photokit of the man, using the Scotland Yard one as a basis, but from the eye-witness tapes they slightly altered various features, particularly the profile of the face. Their own picture was displayed around treble life-size in the rooms where the team worked, the big living room, and the dining area at the back — and more space on Harry’s wall was taken up with it, alongside the maps and aerial photographs.
By the fifteenth day they were ready to push Harry out into the field, and cut the cord that held him to the security of the big house amongst the trees. Other than his sleeping time, and those hours he’d worked in his room on the voice tapes and the maps, he’d been allowed to spend little time on his own. That was Davidson’s idea — ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t let him brood on it,’ he told the others.
Davidson had wondered whether there ought to be some celebration on Harry’s last night, and then decided against it in favour of a few glasses of beer after their final session, and another early night.
‘Don’t believe all that Daily Telegraph stuff about them being beaten, smashed, in their final death throes. It’s nonsense. They need time to regroup, and they needed a big morale booster. They’ve got that, not in the killing itself, but in our failure to nab their man and lock him up. The Prods are restless now, not critical yet, but stirring the pot — just as the Provos want it.
‘To be frank, Harry, we all thought they’d have had the killer by now, and for the first week at least we may have handled your preparation on that basis. The word I had last night is they haven’t identified any positive clue yet. No-one’s losing anything by you going in. But in a strange idiotic way you have a better chance than the military clumping round and the police. It’s not a great chance, but worth taking.’
They wished him luck. A little formal. Harry said nothing, nodded and walked into the hall and up the stairs to his room. They let him go alone.
The fire position was in the roof of a derelict house just to the north of the Falls Road, beyond its junction with Springfield. Four of the houses had been demolished when a nineteen-year-old volunteer in the First Battalion had stumbled, knocking the arm of the battalion’s explosives officer as he was putting the final touches to a seventy-five-pound gelignite bomb. The officer’s fingers had moved some three-eighths of an inch, enough to connect momentarily with the terminals that in another few minutes would have been attached to the face of a cheap alarm clock.
The explosion had left a gouged hole in the line of the street. The first house to the right after the gap was left naked and exposed to the open air. The next house down was in better shape. There was a door still in place, and the roof was largely intact. The house was empty because local housing officials had condemned it as unsafe, and gas and electricity had been switched off. The five houses beyond were occupied.
The man had wedged himself in the angle between the beams and the horizontal struts of the roof. Part of the time his legs were astride the struts, which cut deep into his thighs in spite of the cushions he had brought with him. Otherwise he knelt, spreading his weight over two of the struts. In that position his balance was more stable, but it hurt more.
Looking down he could see through a gap in the roof where a tile had slid down into the street, shaken loose by the blast from the explosion. The tile had been only slightly above the level of the guttering and from his position his eyes were little more than four feet from it. From the hole his line of visibility took him left to the corner of the street, and across to the right the length of the frontage of three houses. On the same side of the street as the man’s hiding place was the home of a Mrs Mulvenna, whose husband was currently held in Long Kesh. She always kept her front-room light on, with the curtains drawn back, so that the light illuminated the pavement just beyond the extremity of the man’s field of fire, and threw shadows into the area covered by his line of vision. It was his hope that a night patrol, their faces blackened, rubber soles on their boots, would edge away from the brightness in favour of the side of the road where they could find some false refuge in the greyness, but where they would be covered by the man’s sights. He knew enough of the habits of the soldiers to be able to bank on one of the troops in the middle of the patrol lingering uncertainly on the corner. The soldier would need to pause for only two or three seconds to make the man’s vigil worthwhile.
The army were never consistent with their patrol patterns, and in the three days that he had been in the roof the man had seen only one group of soldiers. That had been in mid-morning and then, without Mrs Mulvenna’s light to drive them across the street, they had come by, right underneath the hideout, and virtually out of sight. He had seen one of them momentarily then, heard their fresh, young English country voices as they passed by unaware of his presence above.
Across the man’s knee was an Armalite rifle. Small, light-weight, with shocking high velocity hitting power. The bodywork of the rifle was of black plastic, made in Japan, built under licence as a copy of the American infantry’s M16 weapon. The Kalashnikov in London had been a luxury, an eccentricity… for the more routine job in which he was now engaged the Armalite was totally suitable.
And so he waited in the dark and freezing draughts of the roof for the twenty seconds or so it would take an eight-man patrol to move past the shadows of the three houses opposite. His eyes strained at the darkness, his ears keen to the noise of feet and the different types of shoes the civilians wore. He had cat-napped through the day to reserve his concentration for the time, fast and silent, that the soldiers would come.