The two soldiers came back to the line, and the lieutenant moved away to the other end where the youths, resigned to a ride back to barracks and an interrogation session at the end of it, snapped back sullen replies to the questions.
Llewellyn touched Harry’s shoulder.
‘Name?’
‘Harry McEvoy.’
‘Age?’
‘Thirty-three.’
‘Address?’
Jones had had his eyes down on his notebook till that moment. He glanced up to hear the answer. Harry saw an expression of astonishment take hold of him, then change to suspicion, then back to bewilderment.
‘Bloody hell, what are you doing—?’
Harry’s right foot moved the seven inches into Jones’s left ankle. As the private ducked forward, caught off balance by the sudden pain, Harry lurched into him.
‘Shut your face,’ he hissed into the soldier’s ear.
Jones’s face came up and met Harry’s stare. Imperceptibly he saw the head move. A quick shake, left to right and twice.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Harry. ‘Forget it. I hope you’ll forget it.’
The last words were very quiet and straight into Jones’s ear. The men in the line, waiting to be questioned, still faced the wall; the women, sitting at their tables, were out of earshot. The exchange between Harry and Jones seemed to have passed unnoticed.
Llewellyn had been diverted by a commotion down at the far end of the hall, where four youths were half carried and half dragged towards the doorway. He was concentrating again now.
‘Come on — what’s the address?’
‘Delrosa Guest House, in the Broadway. Just up from Beachmount.’
Harry’s eyes were fixed, snake-like, on Jones.
‘Bit off course, aren’t you?’ said Llewellyn.
‘My girl’s local.’
‘Which one?’
‘In the polka dot, the dark-haired girl.’ Harry gazed past Llewellyn, his eyes never leaving Jones. Twice the younger soldier’s eyes came up from his notebook, met Harry’s, and dived back to the writing.
‘Lucky bastard,’ said Llewellyn, and moved on.
Apart from Downs, the army had taken nine youths when the officer shouted for his men to leave the club. They went out in single file, the last going out backwards with his rifle covering the crowd. As the door swung to after him a hail of empty bottles and glasses cannoned into the woodwork.
A tall man at the far end from Harry shouted a protest.
‘Now come on, folks, we can do better than that. Lob things at the bastards, yes, but not so we cover our floor with our bottles and our glasses and our beer. Now, we’re not going to let those swine spoil the evening for us. Let’s move it all back and tidy up, and see if we can’t get something out of the evening.’
It was a good effort on the part of the community leader, but doomed to failure.
Harry noticed that the girl in yellow was gone before the floor was half cleared. He shifted in his seat.
‘We can’t go yet. It’s the principle of the thing,’ said Josephine. ‘You cannot let the bastards wreck everything. What did you say to that soldier?’
‘I just tripped against him, that’s all.’
‘You’re lucky. You might have got a rifle butt across your face. There’s men taken to the barracks for less.’
The band had started up again, attempting to capitalize on the angry mood of those left behind.
Armoured cars and tanks and guns,
Came to take away our sons…
‘Will it wake up again, or is this the lot for the evening?’ asked Harry.
… Through the little streets so narrow…
‘I doubt it,’ she said, ‘but it’s best to give it a few minutes. Let’s see, anyway.’
… Cromwell’s men are here again…
‘It’s not that bad, is it?’ said Harry. ‘I heard it in the Baltic when we were working out of a Swedish port. They used to play it about every third disc. Got to quite like it. We had a mate on board who said his son was in the army here. He used to get right steamed up just listening to it.’
… The men behind the wire…
People were edging towards the door. Harry sensed there would be little more of a night out for any of them.
‘Come on, let’s quit. We don’t want to stay here for the funeral.’
‘I’m going to powder my nose, then,’ Josephine said.
‘Looks all right to me. Don’t hang about.’
She smiled, got up from the table and went out through a side door where a gaggle of girls younger than Josephine had gathered. The band was still trying, but was competing with a wave of talk particularly from a large group that had gathered round a local primary schoolteacher who was taking down the names of all those lifted by the military. He was promising to go round to the barracks to see what had happened to them.
It was a cold clear night as Harry, with Josephine on his arm, walked out of the hall and off towards the all-night taxi rank for the drive down to Castle Street. Then there would be another taxi, and a walk up the last part of the Falls to Mrs Duncan’s.
Harry and Josephine were naked, entwined and asleep, when 275 miles to the south the Garda squad car drew up outside the stone terraced house in the Dublin Road in Cork. There was the sharp mustiness of the docks in the pre-dawn air, as the two policemen fumbled their way from the car to the front doorstep.
‘It’s a sod of a time, God help us, to be getting this poor dear out of her bed.’
The sergeant rang the door bell, twice and firmly, and waited. A light came on upstairs, not fast, then in the hall, and after that the noise of the bolts in the door grating open.
‘From the sound of it you’d think she’d got the Bank of England in there,’ muttered the sergeant into his gloves.
‘Good morning, my love. I’m sorry to be coming at such a time as this to wake you. But a message has come down over the telephone from Dublin and I’m to ask you some questions. Won’t take a moment now. Shall we come on in, out of that wind?’
‘We’ll do what business you have here. You should be ashamed of yerselves coming at this time…’
‘That’s not our affair, my love. Now, are you ready? We want to ask you when was your boy last here.’
‘Billy, you mean?’
‘That’s the lad, love. That’s the one they want to know about.’
‘He was down till the middle of the week. Been here a month, and just gone back. Why do you need to come at this time of night to ask that?’
‘You’re sure of that now, my dear? No mistakes?’
‘Of course I’m sure. Billy was here for a month. And those are bloody silly questions to be asking at this time of night.’
She closed the door on them. The two Garda men knocked at the next-door house and again waited for the door to open. They took away the same message. Billy Downs had been there for a month.
The alibi had been passed on to the old lady and her four immediate neighbours some forty-five minutes before the police car had arrived. The wife’s phone call to a friend of her man in Belfast had started the chain. Another call had been made to Dublin, another one from there to Cork, and a young man who had left his car two streets away from the Dublin Road had completed the process. The Provisionals’ lines of communication were somewhat faster than the complicated and official process of liaison between North and South.
Downs had been interrogated twice, maintaining quietly and without fuss that he had been at his mother’s in the South. He was kept apart from the other prisoners with the officers who had questioned him unsure whether they ought to have pulled him in or not. They heard at 5.30 the results of the checks in Cork, gave him back his coat and his tie and his shoes and told him to get away home.