Josephine saw the enormity of what she had said. She’d told him, hadn’t she, that his truth was safe with her. One backhander and she spilled it all. She remembered it, outside the pub on the hill at Glenshane. She’d promised it then, when she’d told him to quit.
Frank stared intently at her.
‘His job was as an agent in here? He’s a British agent? Sent in to infiltrate us?… Holy Jesus!’
‘You knew? You knew, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t known.’
The room was near-dark now. Josephine could barely make out the men in the room — only the one silhouetted at the window by the early street light. Her mother called up for tea for her visitors. No-one answered. The old lady lingered at the bottom of the stairs waiting for the reply, then went back to the kitchen, accepting and perhaps understanding the situation and unable to intervene.
The girl wavered one last time in her loyalties and her allegiance. Upbringing, tradition, community all came down heavily on the scales against the balance of the laugh and adulthood and bed of Harry. But there was the wee girl with the tossing feet and the tightening stocking, and the obscenity and the misery of death in the police cell, and that wiped Harry from the slate. She spoke again.
‘He was the one that shopped Theresa, the girl that hung herself. She said she’d been with the man that did the London killing, but he couldn’t perform. Harry tipped the army about it. He said the killing was a challenge to the British, and they had to get the man who did it, and kill him. Something like that, just to show who ran things. He told me this yesterday.’
The volunteers said nothing, their imagination stretched by what the girl said. Frank spoke. ‘Was he close to the man he was looking for? Did he know his name? Where he lived? What he looked like? Just how much did the bastard know?’
‘He said he thought he knew what he looked like.’ She saw Theresa again in her mind, heard her giggling in the small space round the basin outside the lock-up closet. That was the justification, that was enough… to see the girl’s face. Hear her choking. ‘He said he was a good shot, and a cool bugger, that’s what he called him. And, yes, they were looking, he said, for a man who would be out of the main eye of things. That was the exact phrase he used.’
‘And you, how did you spot this highly-trained British assassin, little girl?’
‘I spotted him because of a silly thing. You have to believe me, but we were on the Sperrins yesterday. He said he’d been in the Merchant Navy, and sailed all over, but the gale on the mountain seemed to shake him a bit. I said to him it wasn’t very good if he’d been to sea as much as he said. Then he didn’t hide it any more. He seemed to want to talk about it.’
Clever little bitch, thought Frank.
‘Is he in regular touch, communication, with his controller?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Is he armed?’
‘I don’t know that either. I never saw a gun. I’ve told you all I know. That’s God’s truth.’
‘There’s one little problem for you, Miss Josephine.’ Frank’s voice had a cutting edge to it now, something metallic, cold and smooth. ‘You haven’t explained to me yet how this British agent came to hear about Theresa and what she was saying about the London man. You may need a bit of time for that, you bastard whore. Treacherous little bitch.’
He came very close to her now. She could smell the tobacco and beer on his breath and the staleness of sweat on his clothes. He hadn’t shaved that day, and his face was a prickled, lumpy mass.
‘Just work it out,’ he said. ‘Then tell the lads, because they’ll be waiting for an answer. To us you’re nothing, dirt, scum, shit. You’ve shopped one of your own… a wee girl who hanged herself rather than talk to the fucking British. You betrayed her. You betrayed your lover boy as well. We’ll put it about, you know, and we’ll let the military know as well. You’ll find somewhere to run, but there’ll be sod-all people to help you get there, you little cow. But then, when these lads have finished with you, you’ll be thinking twice before you go drop your knickers to another Britisher.’
Frank turned away and walked to the door. He said to the man who was standing there, ‘It’s just a lesson this time, Jamie. Nothing permanent and nothing that shows. Something just for her to remember, to think about for a long time. Then lose yourselves. If we need you later we know where you’ll be, so split from here. And, little girl, if you’ve half an inch of sense in your double-dealing painted head you’ll not mention what’s happened here tonight, nor what’s going to.’
He went out of the door and down the steep staircase. In the hall the old woman saw him, as she turned in her chair by the fire and looked at him. He smiled at her.
‘Don’t worry, lady,’ he said, ‘I can find my way out. You just stay where you are.’
The three younger men followed him through the door fifteen minutes later. They left Josephine doubled up on the bed wheezing for air and holding the soft solar plexus of her stomach. She lay a long time in the room, fighting the pain and willing it away. Her clothes lay scattered in the corner of the room where the men had ripped them from her.
‘Right on your bloody flesh, you little bitch, where it hurts, and where it’ll last.’
She’d thought they were going to rape her, but instead they simply beat her. She curled herself up, foetal position, her arms protecting her breasts and lower stomach, thighs clamped together. That was how she stayed after they’d gone. Her breath came back to her soon, and after that there was the long, deep aching of the muscles, and, mingled with it, the agony of the betrayal. Betrayal of Theresa. Betrayal of Harry.
Perhaps the men had been sensitive about beating up a girl, perhaps it was the sight of her nakedness, but the job was not thoroughly done. The effect soon faded. There was time to think then. Frank would have gone straight to the house to find Harry. He’d be taken, tortured, and shot; that would come later, or tomorrow morning. Her reasoning made any thought of warning Harry irrelevant. They would have him already, but did she want to warn him? One good screw, and what had he done? Lifted her bedroom tattle from pillow confidence to military intelligence information. Let him rot with it.
When her mother came up the stairs late in the evening she was still doubled up, still holding her stomach, and cold now on her skin. The old lady looped the girl’s nightdress over her head, and twisted her feet under the clothes. She spent some minutes picking the clothes up from the floor, showing no more interest in those that were torn than in those that formed the general muddle on the floor.
Twice during the Sunday evening Davidson phoned through to Frost. The first-floor office had, with the coming of darkness, taken on the appearance of a bunker. The telephone that was specified for outgoing outside calls was on the floor beside the canvas camp bed, now erected.
Davidson was curtly told there was no information, and reminded that he’d already been told that he would be notified as soon as anything was known. The earlier elation had left him, and he allowed Frost the last word on an operation so inefficient that you cannot even get in touch with your man when you need to get him out.
But for all his bark Frost was now sufficiently involved in the operation to call Springfield Road, wait while the commanding officer was brought to speak to him, and stress the urgency with which the girl Laverty should be found.
In their eyrie high above the Ardoyne two soldiers looked down on Ypres Avenue. There were no street lights, old casualties of the conflict, but they watched the front door of No. 41 from the image intensifier, a sophisticated visual aid that washed everything with a greenish haze and which enabled them to see the doorway with great clarity. On the hour they whispered the same message into their field telephone. No-one had used the front door of the house.