Frank did not go near Delrosa that night. On his bicycle he had ridden up to Andersonstown in search of his Battalion commander. It was arranged that at midnight he would be taken to meet the Belfast Brigade commander. Frank knew his name, but had never met him.
From his home the Permanent Under-Secretary had authorized the sending of a photograph of Harry to Belfast. The next morning, Monday, it was to be issued to troops who would raid the various Andersonstown scrap merchants’. Less than half a dozen people in the province would know the reason for the swoops but each search party would have several three-inch-by-four pictures of Harry. It had originally shown him in uniform, but that had been painted out.
The big television in the corner of the room droned on, its Sunday message of hope and charity, goodwill and universal kindness expounded by ranks of singers and earnest balding parsons. The family sat quite still on the sofa watching the man with the Armalite.
The pictures claimed no part of the attention of Janet Rennie as she stared, minute after minute, at the man with the rifle across his knee, but for long moments the children’s concentration was occasionally taken by the images on the screen before being jerked to the nightmare facing them across the carpet. It was a new degree of fear that the children felt, one they were not able to cope with or assimilate. They held fast to their mother, waiting to see what would happen, what she would do. To the two girls the man opposite represented something quite apart from anything they had experienced before, but they recognized him as their father’s enemy. Their eyes seldom left his face, held with fascination by the greyness of his skin, its lack of colour, its deadness. This was where they saw the difference between the intruder and their world. There was none of the ruddiness and weight, the life and colour that they knew from their friends’ fathers and the men that came home with their father.
In the first twenty minutes that Downs had been in the room, Fiona, who traded on her ability to charm, had attempted to win the stranger with a smile. He looked right through her, gap-toothed grin and all. She’d tried just once, then subsided against her mother.
He’s never come out into the light, the elder girl, Margaret, told herself. He’s been locked up, and like a creature he’s escaped from wherever they’ve kept him. This man was across the wall, but she knew little of the causes of the separation and the walling-off. She studied the deepness of his eyes, intent and careful, uninvolved as they took in the room, traversing it like the light on a prison camp watchtower, without order or reason but hovering, moving, perpetually expecting the unpredictable. She saw his clothes too. A coat with a darned tear in the sleeve, the buttons off the cuffs, trousers without creases and shiny in the knees, frayed at the turn-ups and with mud inside the lower leg. To children, suits were for best, for work, not for getting dirty and shabby. His shoes were strange to them, too. Cleaned after a fashion by the rain on the winter pavements, but like his face without lustre, misused.
Margaret understood that the gun on Downs’s lap was to kill her father. Her sister, twenty months younger, was unable to finish off the equation and so was left in a limbo of expectancy, aware only of an incomprehensible awfulness. Margaret had enough contact with the boys at school who played their war games in the school yard to recognize the weapon as a rifle.
He’ll be a hard bastard, Janet Rennie had decided. One of the big men sent in for a killing like this. Won’t be able to distract him with argument or discussion enough to unsettle him. He’s hard enough to carry out his threat. She saw the wedding ring on his finger. Would have his own kids, breed like rats the Catholics, have his own at home. But he’d still shoot hers. She felt the fingers of her daughters gripping through her blouse. But she kept her head straight, and her gaze fastened on Downs. There was no response to her stare, only the indifference of the professional, the craftsman who has been set a task and time limit and who has arrived early and therefore must wait to begin. Faster than her children she had taken in the man, searched him for weakness, but the gun across his knees now held her attention. If he were nervous or under great strain then she would notice the fidgeting of the hands or the reflection of the perspiration on the stock or barrel of the gun. But there was no movement, no reflection.
He held the gun lightly, his left hand halfway along the shaft and his fingers loose round the black plastic that cradled the hard rifled steel of the barrel. His hand was just above the magazine and her eyes wandered to the engineered emplacement where the capsule of ammunition nestled into the base of the gun. Just after he had sat down, Downs had eased the safety catch off with his right index finger, which now lay spanning the half-moon of the trigger guard. Like a man come to give an estimate on the plumbing, or life insurance, she thought. None of the tensions she would have expected on display. Thirty minutes or so before she thought her husband might be arriving home she decided to talk.
‘We have no quarrel with you. You’ve none with us. We’ve done nothing to you. If you go now you’ll be clean away. You know that. You’ll be right out of here and gone before my husband gets back.’ That was her start. Poor, she told herself, it wouldn’t divert a flea.
He looked back with amused detachment.
‘If you go through with this they’ll get you. They always get them now. It’s a fact. You’ll be in the Kesh for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?’
‘Save it, Mrs Rennie. Save it and listen to the hymns.’
She persisted. ‘It’ll get you nowhere. It’s the Provisionals, isn’t it? You’re beaten. One more cruel killing, senseless. It won’t do any good.’
‘Shut up.’ He said it quietly. ‘Just shut up and sit still.’
She came again. ‘Why do you come here? Why to this house? Who are you?’
‘It’s a pity your man never told you what he did when he went to work of a morning. That’s late in the day now, though. Quiet yourself and stay where you are.’
He motioned at her with the rifle, still gently, still in control. The movement was definitive. Stay on the sofa with the children. He sensed that the crisis was coming for her, and that she knew it. With growing desperation she took up the same theme.
‘But you’re beaten now. It’ll soon be all over. All your big men are gone. There’ll have to be a cease-fire soon, then talking. More killing won’t help anything.’ Keep it calm, don’t grovel to him, talk as an equal with something on your side. There’s nothing to counter-balance that Armalite but you have to make believe he doesn’t hold everything.
‘We’re not beaten. It’s not over. We’ve more men than we can handle. There’ll be no talks, and no ceasefire. Got the message? Nothing. Not while there are pigs like your man running round free and live.’
The children beside her started up at the way the crouched stranger spoke of their father. Janet Rennie was an intelligent woman and hardened by her country upbringing. That she would fight for her husband’s life was obvious: the problem had been in finding the medium. For the first time in nearly two hours she believed she stood a chance. She still watched the hands and the rifle. The hands were in a new position on the Armalite. From resting against the gun they were now gripping it. Attack, and how can he hit back before Rennie comes home?
‘There’s no future for you boys. Your best men are all locked up. The people are sick and tired of you. You know that. Even in your own rat holes they’ve had enough of you—’