Each left his imprint on the situation, and all went into the mythology of the movement. The one common factor was their ability to move, almost at will, round the rambling Andersonstown estate. Their names were well known to the troops, but their faces were blurs taken for the most part from out-of-date photographs. One had ordered his wife to destroy all family pictures that included him, and given all his briefings from behind curtains and drapes, so that under the rigours of cross-examination his lieutenants would not be able to give an accurate description of him. The most famous of all had sufficient mastery of impersonation to be able to win an apology for inconvenience from a young officer who had led a search party through the house where the Brigade commander was giving an interview to a reporter from a London Sunday.
To a portion of the community their names provoked unchecked admiration, while to those less well disposed they sowed an atmosphere of fear. There were enough youths with ‘kneecap jobs’ and daubed slogans of ‘Touts will be shot dead’ for the message not to have to be repeated that often.
That there were a few prepared to risk the automatic hooding and assassination was a constant source of surprise to the army intelligence officers. Money was mostly the reason that men would whisper a message into a telephone booth, but not even then big sums. There was seldom the wish to rid the community of the Provisionals… Men who felt that way stayed silent, kept their peace, and went about their lives. It was because the Brigade commander and his principal lieutenants could never be totally certain of the loyalty of the men and women who lived in Andersonstown that they delayed their meeting till midnight, though their arrival at the house had been staggered over the previous seventy minutes.
None was armed. All were of sufficient importance to face sentences of up to a dozen years if caught in possession of a firearm. If arrested without a specific criminal offence provable against them they could only be detained in the Kesh — with the constant likelihood of amnesties.
They took over a back bedroom while below the lady of the house made them a pot of tea. She took it up the stairs on a tray with beakers and milk and sugar. They had stopped talking when she came in and said nothing till she had placed the tray on the flat top of a clothes chest, and turned to the door.
‘Thanks, mam,’ the Brigade commander spoke, the others nodding and murmuring in agreement. She was away down the stairs to busy herself with her sewing and late-night television. When that was over she would sleep in her chair, waiting for the last man to leave the house to tell her the talking was over. The woman asked no questions and received no explanations other than the obvious one that the positioning of the house made it necessary that the men should use it.
There were six men in the room when the meeting started. The Brigade commander sat on the bed with two others, and one more stood. Frank and Seamus Duffryn were on the wooden chairs that, apart from the bed and the chest, represented the only furniture in the room. The present commander had been in office more than six months, and his general features were better known than was common. He scorned the flamboyance of masks. From the pocket of his dark anorak he brought a small transistor radio of the sort with a corded loop to be slipped over the wrist so that he could walk along the pavement with it pressed to his ear. This was how he kept abreast of the activities of the ASUs, the Active Service Units.
The crucial listening times of the day for him were 7.50 a.m., the 12.55 lunchtime summary, and then five to midnight. Each day the BBC’s Northern Ireland news listed with minute detail the successes and failures of his men. Shootings, hijackings, blast bombs, arms finds, stone-throwing incidents, all were listed and chronicled for him. The lead story that night was of the shooting at a policeman’s house in Dunmurry.
The men in the room listened absorbed to the firm English accent of the announcer.
The gunman had apparently held Mrs Rennie and her two children at gunpoint in their house for some hours while he waited for her husband to return from duty. A police spokesman said that when Mr Rennie entered the living room of his home the gunman fired at him. Mr Rennie dived for shelter behind an armchair just as his younger daughter ran towards him. It seems the child ran into the field of fire of the terrorist, who then stopped shooting and ran from the house. Mr Rennie told detectives that when the girl moved he thought she was going to be killed as the gunman was on the point of firing at him. The family are said to be suffering from shock and are staying the night with friends.
In the Shantallow district of Londonderry a blast bomb slightly wounded…
The commander switched off the set.
‘That’s not like bloody Downs from the Ardoyne. Not like him to lose his nerve. Why should he do that?’
‘Stupid bastard. We needed Rennie killed. Put a lot of planning in and a deal of work to have him rubbed. Then it’s screwed. Could be they’re just feeding us this crap.’ It was the Brigade quartermaster who came in.
‘Doesn’t sound like that. Sounds like Downs just threw it. Hardly going to fool us, are they? The bugger Rennie, he’s alive or he’s dead. We sent for him to be killed, he’s not. So that means it’s failure, can’t be any other answer. What matters is that our man couldn’t finish it.’
He pondered on the decision he was about to take as the other men waited for him. He alone knew of the link between Danby in London and the man Downs from the Ardoyne. Later perhaps he would include the others in the knowledge, he decided, but not now. At this stage, he felt the fewer the better. Some of the commanders ran the office by committee, but not the man who now spoke again.
‘On from there. What about the man they’ve put in? What do we have?’
‘I think it’s watertight.’ Frank had taken the cue and come in. Frank had been with the Provisionals since the split with the Officials, the ‘Stickies’ as they called them, but this was the first time he had been in such élite company. It slightly unnerved him. ‘The girl he was laying spilt it all. It’s incredible, what he told her. She was saying that he says to her that he was sent over to get the man that shot Danby in London. She told him about the girl, the one that was picked up and taken to Springfield, the one that hanged herself. It was because he shopped her that she was taken in. She says she challenged him about it yesterday afternoon. He admitted it.’
The Brigade intelligence officer was sitting on the bed beside the commander. Hard face, tight pencil lips, and darting, pig-like eyes.
‘What’s his name, the Englishman?’
‘The name he’s using is Harry McEvoy. I doubt if it’s real or—’
‘Course it isn’t. Doesn’t matter that. They must be a bit touched up then over there, if they send a man over on his own, to find us just like that.’