He was still mouthing the words as the Royal Victoria Hospital loomed up, part modern, part the dark close red-brick of old Belfast. Staunton and scores of others had been rushed here down the curved hill that swung into the rubber doors of Casualty.
Harry turned left into Grosvenor Road, hurrying his step. Most of the windows on either side of the street showed the signs of the conflict, boarded up, bricked up, sealed to squatters, too dangerous for habitation, but remaining available and ideal for the snipers. The pubs on the right, a hundred yards or so down from the main gate of the RVH, had figured in Davidson’s briefings. After a Proddy bomb had gone off the local Provos had found a young bank clerk on the scene. He came from out of town and said he’d brought a cameraman to witness the devastation. The explanation hadn’t satisfied. After four hours of torture, and questioning, and mutilation, they shot him, and dumped him in Cullingtree Street, a little farther down towards the city centre.
Davidson had emphasized that story, used it as an example of the wrong person just turning up and being unable to explain himself. In the hysteria and suspicion of the Falls that night it was sufficient to get him killed.
The half-mile of the street Harry was walking down was fixed in his mind. In the log of the history of the troubles since August 1969 that they’d given him to read, that half-mile had taken up fifteen separate entries.
Harry produced a driving licence made out in the name of McEvoy and the post office counter clerk gave him the brown paper parcel. Harry recognized Davidson’s neat copperplate on the outside — ‘Hold for collection.’ Inside was a.38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. Accurate and a man-stopper. One of nine hundred thousand run off in the first two years of the Second World War. Untraceable. If Harry had shaken the package violently he would have heard the rattling of the forty-two rounds of ammunition. He didn’t open the parcel. His instructions were very plain on that. He was to keep the gun wrapped till he got back to his base, and only when he had found a good hiding place was he to remove it from the wrapping. That made sense, nothing special, just ordinary common sense, but the way they’d gone on about it you’d have thought the paper would be stripped off and the gun waved all over Royal Avenue. At times Davidson treated everyone around him like children. ‘Once it’s hidden,’ Davidson had warned, ‘leave it there unless you think there’s a real crisis. For God’s sake don’t go carrying it round. And be certain if you use it. Remember, if you want to fire the damn thing, the yellow card and all that’s writ thereon applies as much to you, my boy, as to every pimpled squaddie in the Pioneers.’
With the parcel under his arm, for all the world like a father bringing home a child’s birthday present, Harry walked back from the centre of the city to the Broadway. He wanted a drink. Could justify it too, on professional grounds, need to be there, get the tempo of things, and to let a pint wash down the dryness of his throat after what he’d been through the last thirty-six hours. The ‘local’ was down the street from Mrs Duncan’s corner. Over the last few paces to the paint-scraped door his resolve went haywire, weakened so that he would have dearly loved to walk past the door and regain the security of the little back room he had rented. He checked himself. Breathing hard, and feeling the tightness in his stomach and the lack of breath that comes from acute fear, he pushed the door open and went into the pub. God, what a miserable place! From the brightness outside his eyes took a few moments to acclimatize to the darkness within. The talk stopped and he saw the faces follow him from the door to the counter. He asked for a bottle of Guinness, anxiously projecting his voice, conscious that fear is most easily noticed from speech. Nobody spoke to him as he sipped his drink. Bloody good to drink, but you’d need to be an alcoholic to come in here to take it. The glass was two-thirds empty by the time desultory conversation started up again. The voices were muted, as if everything was confidential. The people, Harry recognized, had come to talk, as of an art, from the sides of their mouths. Not much eavesdropping in here. Need to Watergate the place.
Across the room two young men watched Harry drink. Both were volunteers in E Company of the First Battalion of the Provisional IRA, Belfast Brigade. They had heard of the cover story Harry was using earlier in the morning just after he’d gone out for his walk. The source, though unwittingly, was Mrs Duncan. She had talked over the washing line, as she did most mornings, with her neighbour. The neighbour’s son, who now stood in the bar watching Harry, had asked his mother to find out from Mrs Duncan who the new lodger was, where he came from, and whether he was staying long. Mrs Duncan enjoyed these morning chats, and seldom hurried with her sheets and pegs unless rain was threatening. It was cold and bright. She told how the new guest had turned up out of the blue, how he hoped to find a job and stay indefinitely, had already paid three weeks in advance. He was a seaman, the English Merchant Navy, and had been abroad for many years. But he was from the North, and had come home now. From Portadown he was.
‘He’s been away all right,’ she shouted over the fence to her friend, who was masked by the big, green-striped sheet suspended in the centre of the line, ‘you can see that, hear it rather, every time he opens his mouth. You can tell he’s been away, a long time and all, lucky beggar. What we should have done, missus. Now he says he’s come back because Ireland, so he says, is the place in times of trouble.’ She laughed again. She and her friend were always pretending they’d like to leave the North for good, but both were so wedded to Belfast that a week together at a boarding house north of Dublin in the third week of August was all they ever managed… then they were full of regrets all the way back to Victoria Street station.
The son had had this conversation relayed to him painfully slowly and in verbatim detail by his mother. Now he watched and listened, expressionless, as Harry finished his drink and asked for another bottle. In two days’ time he would go to a routine meeting with his company’s intelligence officer, by then sure in his mind if there was anything to report about the new lodger next door.
Harry walked quickly back to Delrosa after the second glass of Guinness. He’d never been fond of the stuff. Treacly muck, he told himself. He rang the doorbell, and a tall, willowy girl opened the door.
‘Hullo, McEvoy’s the name. I’m staying here. The room at the back.’
She smiled and made way for him, stepping back into the hall. Black hair down to the shoulders, high cheekbones, and dark eyes set deep above them. She stood very straight, back arched, and breasts angled into the tight sweater before it moulded with her waist, and was lost in the wide leather belt threaded through the straps of her jeans.
‘I’m Josephine. I help Mrs Duncan. Give her a hand round the house. She said there was someone new in. I do the general cleaning, most days in the week, and help with the teas.’
He looked at her blatantly and unashamed. ‘Could you make me one now? A cup of tea?’ Not very adequate, he thought, not for an opening chat-up to a rather beautiful girl.
She walked through into the kitchen, and he followed a pace or so behind, catching the smell of the cheap scent.
‘What else do you do?’ Perfunctory, imbecile, but keeps it going.
‘Work at the mill, down the Falls, the big one. I do early shift, then come round and do a bit with Mrs Duncan. She’s an old friend of my Mam’s. I’ve been coming a long time now.’
‘There’s not much about for people here now, ’cept work, and not enough of that,’ Harry waded in, ‘what with the troubles and that. Do you go out much, do you find much to do?’