Poor bastard.
Frost had seen the body of the Armoured Corps captain, found shot and hooded, dumped outside Belfast. He had been working with a full team behind him. All the back-up he needed. Time on his side. Now this nameless and faceless man was trying to do what the whole army and police couldn’t. Stupid. Idiotic. Irresponsible. All of those things, that’s how Frost rated it. And there’d be a mess. And he’d have to clear it up.
Harry was nearly at his digs by the time the meeting Frost had called was under way. He had decided this was to be his day off. Tomorrow he would chase the job and try to get a bit of permanence into his life.
But today the pubs were closed. Nothing to do but eat Mrs Duncan’s mighty roast and sit in his room and read. And listen to the news bulletins.
The platoon commander briefed to go and arrest the girl deep in the network of the Ballymurphy housing estate had stood his ground when asked to take the minimum number of troops needed for the pick-up.
‘We’ve had four patrols shot at from that street or the alleys off it in the last eighteen days. If we have to search for her we’ll be in there twenty minutes or so, and I can’t just leave a couple of men outside to play Aunt Sallys. If I take a Saracen and a Pig they’ll carry sixteen, and that way I can have enough men round the house, and enough to search the place as well.’
‘They’ve asked for it to be discreet,’ said his company commander.
‘Well, what do they want us to do, have the padre drive a Cortina up to the front door and ask her to come for a picnic with him? Who is the girl anyway, sir?’
‘Don’t know why they want her. We hardly know her. The CO went up to Brigade this morning about something, and then came on the net with the instruction to pick her out.’
‘However we do it, the whole street will know inside five minutes. It’s Sunday, so we can’t take her on the way back from work, wherever that is. If we’re going into those streets we ought to have a proper back-up. Can they wait till dark?’
‘No, the instruction is for immediate. That’s quite clear. I take your point. Have as many men as you want, but be fast in there, and don’t for God’s sake start a riot.’
Theresa and her family were at lunch when the army arrived. The armoured troop carriers outside the tiny overgrown front garden, soldiers in fire positions behind the hedge and wall that divided the grass from next door’s. Four soldiers went into the house. They called her name, and when she stood up took her by the arms, the policeman at the back intoning the Special Powers Act. While the rest of the family sat motionless she was taken out to the back of the armoured car. It was moving before her mother, the first to react, had reached the front door.
None of the soldiers who surrounded the girl in the darkened steel-cased Saracen spoke to her, and none would have been able to tell her why she had been singled out for this specific army raid. From the Saracen she was taken into a fortified police station, through the back entrance, and down the stairs to the cells. A policewoman was locked in with her to prevent any attempt at communication with other prisoners in the row. An hour or so earlier the nine boys taken from the club the previous night had been freed after sleeping in identical cells on the other side of the city. One of their number, pressed to identify someone who would swear he had been in the club all evening, had unwittingly given Theresa’s second name and address.
The decision had already been taken that she would be kept in custody at least until the intelligence operation that had produced the information was completed.
Chapter 10
Seamus Duffryn, the latest of the intelligence officers of E Company, Third Battalion Provisional IRA, had made Sunday his main working day. It was the fourth weekend he’d been in the job, with a long list of predecessors in Long Kesh and the Crumlin Road prison. Duffryn was in work, a rarity in the movement, holding down employment as mate to a lorry driver. It took him out of town several days a week, sometimes right down to the border and occasionally into the Republic. Being out of circulation he reckoned would extend his chances of remaining undetected longer than the average of nine weeks that most company-level officers lasted. He encouraged those with information for him to sift through to leave it at his house during the week where his mother would put it in a plastic laundry bag under the grate of the made-up but unlit front-room fire. He kept the meagre files he had pieced together out in the coal shed. There was a fair chance if the military came and he was out that they would stop short of scattering the old lady’s fuel to the four winds in an off-the-cuff search.
On Sunday afternoons his mother sat at the back of the house with her radio while Duffryn took over the front-room table, and under the fading coloured print of the Madonna and Child laid out the messages that had been sent to him. They were a fair hotch-potch, and at this level the first real sorting of the relevant and irrelevant took place. They concerned the amounts of money held at the end of the week at small post offices, usually a guess and an overestimate, the occasions when a recognized man of some importance drove down the company’s section of the Falls, the times that patrols came out of the barracks. Then there was the group that fell into no natural pattern, but had seemed important enough for some volunteer to write down and send in for consideration.
He kept this last group for his final work, preferring to spend the greater part of the afternoon on the detail of the job that he liked best, checking over the information from his couriers and the eyes that reported back on what was happening at street-corner level. His sifted reports would then go to his company commanding officer, a year younger and three and a half years out of school. The best and most interesting would go up the chain to Battalion.
The afternoon had nearly exhausted itself by the time he came to the final group, and the one report in particular that was to take him time. He read it slowly in the bad light of the room, and then went back and reread it looking for the innuendo in the ambiguous message. It was a page and a half long, written in pencil and unsigned by name. There was a number underneath which denoted which volunteer had sent it in. He went through the report of probably only one hundred words for the third time till he was satisfied he had caught its full flavour and meaning. Then he began to weigh its importance.
Strangers were the traditional enemies in the village-sized Catholic communities of Belfast. The Short Strand, the Markets, the Ardoyne, Divis, Ballymurphy… all were self-sufficient, integral units. Small, difficult to penetrate, because unless you belonged you had no business or reason to come. They boasted no wandering, shifting groups, no cuckoos to come and feed off them. Those who were admitted after being burned out or intimidated away from their homes came because there were relatives who would put roofs over their heads. There were no strangers. You were either known or not admitted.
What concerned Duffryn now was the report on the stranger in the Beachmount and Broadway area. He was said to be looking for a job and getting long-term rates at Delrosa with Mrs Duncan. There was a question about his speech. The scribbled writing of the report had the second name of McEvoy. First name of Harry. Merchant seaman, orphaned and brought up in Portadown. No harm in that and checkable presumably. The interest in the report came later. The flaw in the set-up, the bit that didn’t ring true. Accent, something wrong with the accent. Something that had been noticed as not right. It was put crudely, the reason Duffryn read it so many times to get the flavour of the writer’s opinion: