‘Excuse me, is it Mrs Rennie?’
She looked at the shortish man standing there on her front doorstep, hands in his coat pockets, an open smile round his face, dark hair nicely parted.
‘Yes, that’s right.’
Very quietly he said, ‘Put your hands behind your head, keep them there and don’t shout. Don’t make any move. I know the kids are here.’
She watched helplessly as through his coat, unbuttoned and open, he drew out the ugly squat black shape of the Armalite. Holding it in one hand, with the stock still folded, he prodded her with the barrel back into the hallway. She felt strange, detached from what was happening, as if it were a scenario. She had no control over the situation, she knew that. He came across the carpet past the stairs towards her, flicking the door closed with his heel. It clattered as it swung to, the lock engaging behind him.
‘Who is it, Mama?’ From behind the closed door of the lounge Fiona called out.
‘We’ll go in there now. Just remember this. If you try anything I’ll kill you. You, and the children. Don’t forget it when you want to play the bloody heroine. We’re going to sit in there, and wait for that bastard husband of yours. Right? Is the message all plain and clear and understood?’
The narrow barrel of the Armalite dug into her flesh just above the hip as he pushed past her to the door and opened it. Their mother was half into the room before Fiona turned, words part out of her mouth but frozen when she saw the man with the rifle. Even to a child three months off her fifth birthday the message was brilliantly obvious. The girl rose up on her knees, her face clouding from astonishment to terror. As if in slow motion her elder sister registered the new mood. Wide-eyed, and with the brightness fading from her, she saw first her sister’s face then her mother standing hunched, as if bowed down by some great weight, and behind her Downs with the small shiny rifle in his right hand.
Too frightened to scream the elder girl remained stock-still till her mother reached her, gathered the children to her, and took them to the sofa.
The three of them held tightly to each other as on the other side of the room Downs eased himself down into Rennie’s chair. From there he was directly facing the family, who were huddled away in the front corner of the sofa to be as far as possible from him. He also had a clear view of the door into the room, and of the window beyond it at the far edge of the lounge. It was there that he expected the first sign of Rennie’s return, the headlights of the policeman’s car.
‘I’ll warn you for the last time, missus. Any moves, anything clever, and you’ll be dead, the lot of you. Don’t think, Mrs Rennie, when it comes to it, that you’re the only one at risk. That would be getting it very wrong, a bad miscalculation. If I shoot you I do the kids as well. We’ll leave the TV on, and you’ll sit there. And just remember I’m watching you. Watching you all the time. So be very careful. Right, missus?’
Billy Downs paused and let the effect of his words sink in on the small room.
‘We’re just going to wait,’ he said.
Chapter 15
The four men sent to question Josephine Laverty had none of the problems finding her that the British army unit in the Springfield Road had encountered. Smiling broadly, the oldest in the group, and the leader, suggested that old Mrs Laverty might care to go into the kitchen and take herself a good long cup of tea.
They took Josephine up to her bedroom far from the mother’s ears. One of the younger men drew the curtains, cutting out the frail shafts of sunlight, and took up his position by the window. Another stood at the door. The third of the volunteers stood behind the chair they suggested Josephine should sit in. The older man they called Frank, and they treated him with respect and with caution.
The girl was poorly equipped to handle an interrogation. Frank’s opening question had been harmless enough, and he was as astonished as the other three boys in the room at the way she collapsed.
Perhaps it was because she was one of the uninvolved, those few in the city who tried to weave a life outside the troubles. Her lack of commitment had built up a fear of violence, second nature to so many, and therefore not so terrifying. Without loyalties there was only self-preservation, and there was little anyone could do now to help her in the face of the unspoken brutality of the men who had crowded round her. Cold, cruel faces, pallid, expressionless, used and trained in begetting pain. There was only one reason they would come to her… because of Harry, sweet and beautiful and chatty Harry. She looked at their hands, big, dirty, broken fingernails, roughened with usage. Their boots, hard and bruised from wear, drab from the rain outside. Men who would hurt her, punch her, kick her. And for what? For a few minutes’ delay in the inevitable. She would tell them what they had come to find out. They were far outside her experience, the men who stood around her, moving among her possessions as if there by right. They did have the right, she thought. Yesterday on the Sperrins she had become involved in their territory, and that was why they had come.
‘This fellow McEvoy, that you’ve been going with. Who is he?’
There had been no reply, only a dissolve as her head went down to her lap and she buried her cheeks and her eyes and ears into the palms of her hands.
‘Who is he?’ Frank was insistent. ‘Who is he, where does he come from?’
‘You know who he is. Why come to me for it? You know well enough.’
Frank paced up and down, short steps, continually twisting round towards the girl when he lost sight of her, moving back and forward between the window and the door, skirting the single bed littered with the girl’s clothes.
‘I want you to tell me.’ He emphasized it. Like an owl with a scarce-whelped mouse, a stoat with a rabbit, he dominated the cringing girl on the wooden chair before him.
‘I want it from you. D’yer hear? I’ve not much time.’
Josephine shook her head, partly from the convulsion of her collapse, and reeled away from him as he swung his clenched fist back-handed across her face. Her knuckles took much of the force of the blow, but through the splayed fingers across her eyes she saw the blood welling close and then breaking the skin at the back of her hands.
Frank could see that what had been put to him as somewhat of a routine questioning had become rather more complex. The fear and hesitation of the girl had alerted him. Her inability to answer a simple explicit question. Frank knew McEvoy only as a lodger at the girl’s employer’s guest house… been out with him once or twice. A fair-looking piece, he’d probably knocked her off, but that wouldn’t be enough to put her there doubled up and sniffling.
‘I’m getting impatient, girl. To him you owe none of the loyalty you should give to us.’
He weighed up whether he would need to hit her again.
She nodded her head, very slightly at first, then merging into the positive mood of acquiescence and surrender. Frank held back. He would not have to hit her again.
She straightened up, steadying herself as she prepared the words.
‘He’s with the British, isn’t he? You knew that. He’s British. I don’t know what he does, but he’s been sent to live amongst us. He’s looking for the man that killed the politico. Over in London. That’s his job. To find that man. He said when he found him he’d exterminate him.’
She stopped, leaving the shadowy little room quiet. Below she could hear her mother about the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down.