Last night he had not slept beside her. On the radio in the back room she heard the early news. A policeman shot at… an intruder hit… in the middle evening. That was the top story. Whoever had been involved should have been home now. Her man was usually home by now, or he would have said something.
Around the passage and stairs and landing of the house she thought of her man. Wounded, maimed, alone in the dawn of the city. What hurt most was that she was so unable to influence events.
News carried across the city. With the efficiency of tribal tom-toms word passed over the sprawling urban conglomeration that the terraced house in Ypres Avenue had been raided. Less than an hour after the major had walked through the front door and to his armoured Land-Rover Billy Downs would hear of it. Brigade staff had decided that he should know. They felt it could only enhance his motivation for the job at hand.
Harry’s alarm clock dragged him from the comfort of his dreaming, and woke him to the blackness of his room. His dreams had been of home, wife and children, makeshift garden behind his quarters, holidays in timber forest chalets, fishing out in the cool before the sun came up, trout barbecued for breakfast. With consciousness came the knowledge of another Monday morning. It was three weeks to the day that he had left the house at Dorking with the view of the hills and vegetable garden. Twenty-one days exactly. ‘Must have been out of my mind,’ he muttered to the emptiness of the room.
Over the weekend he had thought of what Josephine had said to him. She’d accused him of interfering in something that was basically none of his concern, of causing death when he should have stayed uninvolved. Stupid bitch should have passed the same message to the man who came to London with the Kalashnikov.
He examined his position and its natural courses. He wanted to finish it. End it properly. End it with a shooting, with the man in the picture with his black and white-lined face, dead. That was not emotional, there was no wild spirit of revenge, just that such an ending was the only finite one, otherwise the job was incomplete.
In Aden, good old Aden, it had been so much more simple. British lives at stake, the justification of everything, with the enemy clearly defined — Arabs, gollies. But here, who was the enemy? Why was he the enemy? Did you have to know why to take his life? It churned over and over, unanswered, like pebbles in a coffee machine, grating, ill-fitting and indigestible.
In spite of the fact that Harry came originally from a country town an hour or so’s drive from Belfast the army’s mould had been the real fashioning influence overreaching his childhood. Like his brother officers in the mess he was still perplexed at the staying power of the opposition. But here he parted company. To the others they were the enemy, to Harry they were still the opposition. You could kill them if it was necessary, or if that was demanded for operational reasons, but they remained the opposition. They didn’t have to be the enemy to make them worth killing.
But how did they keep it up? What made them prepared to risk their lives on the streets when they took on the power of a British army infantry section? What led them to sacrifice most of the creature-comforts of life to go on the run? What made them feel the God-given right to take life, and torture a man in front of his family?
They’re not heroes. Bloody lunatics, he said to himself as he pulled the sweater over his head. They rejected all the ordinary things that ordinary people search for, and chose to go on against these massive odds. It didn’t involve Harry. The man he was searching for was quite straightforward. He was a killer. He was a challenge. Simple and clean. Harry could focus on that.
‘A cup of tea, Mr McEvoy?’ Mrs Duncan at the door cut short his thoughts. ‘What would you be wanting for breakfast? There’s the lot if you can manage it. Sausages, bacon, tomatoes, eggs, and I’ve some soda bread?—’
‘Just toast and coffee, thanks. I’ll be away down in a moment.’
‘That won’t get you far. It’s a raw day, right enough.’
‘Nothing more, thank you, Mrs Duncan. Really, that’s all I want. I’ll be right down.’
‘Please yourself then. Bathroom’s clear. Coffee’s made, and remember to wrap up well. It’s a cold one.’
After he’d shaved there was not much to the dressing. Sweater already on and damp from the soap and flannel, faded jeans, his socks and boots and his anorak. He took the face towel from the rail in the bathroom, brought it back into his room and when he had finished dressing laid it out on the bed. About two feet by one and a half, it was bigger than the one the Smith & Wesson was already wrapped in, and he changed them over, putting the revolver in the new towel.
‘Silly bugger,’ he thought, ‘clean towel just to wrap a gun in.’ He needed a towel to disguise the outline of the weapon when it sat in the deep pocket of his anorak on the way to work. But he didn’t need a clean towel. That’s the army for you: everything clean on a Monday morning. Funny if he got stopped at a roadblock. He thought of that and a whole band of disappointed squaddies having to hand him over. Wouldn’t have cried overmuch either. Last night, late, he’d decided to put the gun in his coat, easier access than the food bag slung over his shoulder, and the bag with the sandwiches and flask would be lying about in the rest hut through the day, and God knows who could be rummaging around in there. When the revolver was wrapped it was light and blunt, though still bulky and hard to ignore, bigger than a spectacle case, bigger than twenty cigarettes and the large box of matches that most men carried.
He breezed into the kitchen.
‘Morning, Mrs Duncan, all right then?’
‘Not so bad, little enough to complain about. You’re sure about the toast and coffee?’ Disappointment clouded her face when he nodded. Harry had been in the bathroom during the seven o’clock news bulletin, and through the closed door he had heard her radio playing faintly downstairs, loud enough to be aware of it, but too indistinct to hear the actual words.
‘Anything on the news, then?’
‘Nothing to note, just the usual. It goes on. A policeman chased a man out of his house and shot him. That’s his version, anyway, up Dunmurry way, more trouble in the Unionists. Never change their spots, that crowd. They’ve given nothing to us without it being wrung out—’
Harry laughed. ‘They haven’t caught the big man yet then, top of the Provos?’
‘Well, Mr McEvoy, if they have, they didn’t say so, which means they haven’t. They’d be trumpeting it if they had, but that’s all the news is, the troubles. Makes you wonder what they used to put in before it all started. I can hardly remember. There must have been something else for them to talk about, but they’ve forgotten it now, right enough.’
‘Well, then, no big man in the net—’
‘They don’t get the real big men, only the shrimps.’
‘No, it’s just that I read in one of the papers I saw up at the yard that they were mounting an effort to rake in the big fish.’
‘They say they’re doing that each week, and nothing comes of it.’
Harry had banked a lot on the man being in custody. It was twenty-one hours after the call to London, to Davidson. Couldn’t be that difficult to pick the bastard up. Shouldn’t be taxing the might of the British army. They must have him, but they weren’t saying yet, had to be that way. They wouldn’t say yet, too early, of course it was. The explanation was facile but enough to tide him over his breakfast.