She had brought sandwiches full of sausage and a Thermos of tomato soup today, and they would have that later sitting at a wooden table in the picnic area beside the car park.
From the wide path she could hear the distant noise of their voices, as she walked with a taller, older woman, her mother. A week after Harry had gone she had written to her home in the English midlands countryside. There the three-page letter had been recognized as a distress flare, a call for help. Arrangements had been made. Father could look after himself for a week, cook his own meals, get the garden into shape for the long winter lay-off.
When the children were in bed the conversation often, and hardly accidentally, strayed to Harry’s abrupt departure, and now that they were again out of earshot it continued.
‘It’s just so difficult to understand,’ said Mary’s mother, ‘that no-one should be able to tell you anything about it. You’d have thought someone could have had the gumption, even the courtesy, to say something to you.’
‘There’s been nothing,’ said Mary, ‘not a word from anyone since they came and packed his case. Rummaged around in the wardrobe, right down the bottom where his old things are — half of them should have gone this week to the sergeants’ wives’ jumble sale — things he’d only wear if he was gardening or painting or cleaning out the cellar, or something like that. We’ve had two postcards from somewhere down the Gulf, and otherwise nothing.’
The postcards had shown a camel corps contingent of the Sultan, and a gold-domed mosque. The messages had been brief and facetious. ‘Having a wonderful time, got a very red nose from the heat, don’t think there’ll be snow here this Christmas, love to the boys and to you, my darling, Harry,’ and ‘Giving church parade a miss this week. Missing you all. Sorry about the nonsense but it will all seem clear when I’m home. Love you all, Harry.’ They’d taken a long time to arrive, and now they decorated the mantelpiece above the fire in their front room.
‘But tell me again, dear, exactly what they said when you asked the people in the office.’ Mother had the infuriating habit of demanding endless, word-by-word repetitions of conversations she’d already heard umpteen times.
‘Just what I told you. That it was as a result of a signal from London, that everyone here was as much in the dark as I was. That Harry would be away six weeks’ minimum, probably not more than eight. And that if I were short of anything or having problems not to hesitate to call the Families Officer. He’s an awful old bore — a passed-over major. I’d really be on my last legs if I called him. I just don’t think they know.’
‘It must be to do with the Aden business, I suppose. The thing he was awarded the Military Cross for. Your father and I were very proud for you—’
Mary cut in, ‘I cannot believe it’s anything to do with that. It was years ago, and Harry was really knocked out by that. He had weeks of sick leave. He doesn’t talk much about it. But it must have been awful from what I was told. He just lived in amongst them then, wasn’t even fluent on Arabic. Passable but not fluent.’
‘Well, it has to be something secret.’
‘Has to be.’ She was wearing her hair up, and the wind was pulling it away from the big tortoiseshell clip at the back of her head. It was whisping away — she hadn’t taken enough time to settle it properly in the hurry to get the food ready and the kids dressed for the expedition. She had little make-up on, lipstick untidy. Not how she’d want Harry to see her. ‘But I don’t think he’d volunteer for anything like this now, and I cannot for the life of me see why anyone would just pick him out over all the people they’ve got and rush him down to the Gulf. It just doesn’t make sense. I thought he’d burned all the spook stuff out of him.’
‘Still, it’s not long now, only a fortnight or so,’ comforted her mother.
‘That’s what they said. We’ve no option but to believe them.’
Mary Brown could not confide the depth of her unhappiness to her mother. Too many years of marriage and before that secretarial college in London had dulled the relationship. Their marriage was too confidential to gossip about. What hurt most was that she had thought she had understood the man she had been living with for so long, and now she had discovered that there was a different compartment in his make-up.
‘Well, at least we know he can look after himself??’ said her mother, sensing the barriers going up.
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t have to. We’ll get the kids back and have lunch.’
She called for them, and when they emerged filthy from the forest they all walked back to the car.
That same lunchtime Seamus Duffryn was summoned to a house in Beachmount and told by the Battalion intelligence officer to resume close surveillance on McEvoy. Duffryn was told a squad was going out in the afternoon to find a friend of McEvoy, a girl who had been out with him. Josephine Laverty from Clonard.
A few hundred yards away in the Springfield Road the British army unit that had been asked to find the girl was puzzled that it had no record of her or her mother living in the area. There was no reason why they should have done, as the house was in the name of Josephine’s uncle, Michael O’Leary. A little after three o’clock the unit reported in that it had been unable to locate the girl. By then a critical amount of the available time had run out.
It took more than two hours from the time Frost called the army headquarters dominating the Ardoyne and told them of the tip to the moment Billy Downs was identified. First the troops who had taken part in the search operation at the céilidh had to be located. The lieutenant who had led the raid was in Norfolk on weekend leave, and there was no answer to his telephone. The sergeant, the next senior man out, recalled that he had busied himself near the door on security, but he was able to name the six soldiers who had carried out the split-up question-and-answer work. Private Jones was now in Berlin, but Lance-Corporal James Llewellyn was picked up by a Saracen from a foot patrol on the far side of the Battalion area. There was no written record, of course. That, along with Jones, were the only two pieces of evidence of the confrontation, and both had now disappeared. Llewellyn stared at the photokit issued in London that had been brought up from the guardroom.
‘That’s the one it’s like, if it’s any of them. It’s Downs. It’s not a great likeness. It’s not easy to pick him on that picture. But if he was there that’s the one it was. There was his woman there, in yellow. She ran out across to him.’
With the name they attacked the filing system. Billy Downs. Ypres Avenue, number 41. There’d been a spot-check on his story about being down in Cork with his mother. The Garda had been fast for a change, and had cleared him of involvement. They said he’d been there through that period. There’d been a query about him because he was away from home. Otherwise, clean with nothing known. The net inside the headquarters spread wider, to include the policeman who had seen him that night in the small hours.