‘Thank you very much, Colonel.’
‘That’s all right, Mr Davidson. I’m sure we’ll never have the opportunity again of providing a similar service to your organization.’
Davidson put the phone down.
‘Stupid, pompous bugger. Bloody man, does he think we’re having a picnic at this end?’
He said it with enough ferocity to wake his assistant in the armchair by the door on the other side of the partition. The younger man shrugged himself out of his sleep.
‘Any news?’
‘Not a bloody dicky bird that matters.’
The men on duty in the intelligence section moved quietly round the room, unwilling to attract Frost’s attention. He was slumped ungracefully in his chair, his eyes half closed, half focused on the ceiling. He was a man of method and neatness, following his own individual rule book, but following it closely, and expecting others to ape him. Harry McEvoy violated the rule book. The theory, the preparation and the execution of the McEvoy operation all contravened the requirements of this sort of business. His subordinates had detected the inner anger and knew enough to keep their distance.
Frost could see the weakness in the whole affair. This lunatic fighting between departments and services. Point-scoring at a grand level and at the expense of the man out there on the streets. He was as guilty as any. But the issue had to be settled so there would be no repetition. That was where it was all so amateurish. The Prime Minister and the GOC… They should have their heads knocked together. But rivalries don’t come from a victory march, they don’t surface when the show’s going well, they’re the product of long-drawn-out failure.
The chatter of the teletype machines and the noise of men shuffling round the room, doors opening, muted talk were insufficient to disturb his train of thought.
It’s because we’re all lashing around, stranded by the tide, looking for the way out when there isn’t one, that a damn-fool thing like this gets launched. And after five endless years of it, and the promise of how many more to come, the inevitability that the professionals are going to be cold-shouldered, that the outsiders will want to have their say. Inevitable. And the price we pay for it is having that poor devil McEvoy or whatever his real name is out there on the streets, working for God knows who.
Frost straightened up in his chair. ‘Get me some coffee, please. Black, and make sure there’s plenty there this morning.’ He was tired, exhausted by it all. They all were.
The postcard was lying on the mat, colour side down, when Mary Brown responded to the flap of the letter box in the front door.
‘There’s a card from Daddy, darlings,’ she called into the back of the house where the boys were having their breakfast.
‘Not a letter, Mum?’ her elder boy shouted back.
‘No, just a card. You know how awful your father is about letters.’
There was a market scene on the card. Men in kaffiyehs and futahs staring blankly from the gold market that stood in the middle distance.
‘Hope to see you all soon. Still very hot, and not much to do. Love you all, Harry.’ That was all there was on the card, written in Biro and in Harry’s large hand.
Josephine Laverty was late, and hurried in a frantic mixture of a run and a walk down the Falls to the mill where she worked. She couldn’t go fast as the pain still bit into her ribs. She too had heard the early radio news, half expecting in an uninvolved sort of way to hear that Harry McEvoy had been found face down, hooded and dead. It had surprised her that there was no mention of him. This morning she had wondered for a wild moment whether to go to see if he was still at Delrosa, but there was no will power and the emotion he had created was now drained from her.
Perhaps she would go to Mrs Duncan’s tonight to help with the teas. Perhaps not, but that could be a later decision. There was now an irrelevance about Harry McEvoy. Forget him. The pillow eavesdropper who had a girl killed. Forget the sod.
With their photographs of Harry the troops from Fort Monagh raided the five scrap yards in Andersonstown. No-one in the operation had been told why they were to pick up the smiling man in the picture who wore his hair shorter than their more general customers. The orders were that if the man was found he was to be taken straight to Battalion headquarters and handed over. Amongst those NCOs who were the foremen of the military factory floor and who knew most of what mattered there was surprise that so many men were occupied in looking for a man whose picture was not on the operations room wall, whose name was completely fresh. They had their regular batch of photographs, top ten for the week, top thirty for the month, four for each day of the week. Made up on little cards and issued to the troops to study before they went out on patrol. But this face had never been among them.
At the scrap yards the employees who had arrived before the troops stood sullenly against the walls of the huts, hands above their heads, as they were searched and then matched with the photograph. From the five locations the initial report was that a blank had been drawn. But the troops would lie up in the yards till nine at least in the hope that the man they wanted would still come — was just late. At the yard where Harry in fact worked there was disbelief when they were shown the picture. Never involved, never talking politics, just an ordinary man, too old to be with the cowboys. The little man who ran the yard looked round the armoured cars, and the soldiers, reckoned Harry must be important and determined to say nothing. He confirmed the picture, that he employed a man called Harry McEvoy, that he had started work recently, that was all. Let them find the rest out for themselves.
‘Where does he live?’ the lieutenant who led the raid asked him.
‘Don’t know. He never said. Just down the road somewhere, that’s all he said.’
‘He must have given some impression where he lived?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What about his stamps, his insurance?’
The little man looked embarrassed. The answer was clear enough.
The lieutenant was new to Northern Ireland. The man opposite him seemed of substance, a cut above the yobbos, respectable even.
‘Look, we need this man rather badly.’ He said it quietly, out of earshot of the other men.
‘Well, you’ll have to wait for him, won’t you.’
But time was ticking on its way, and as the soldiers crouched behind the wrecked cars and buses and waited there was no sign of the face in the photograph. Even the little man became worried by Harry’s non-arrival. His first reaction had been that it was a case of mistaken identity, but that Harry should be absent at the same time that the military launched this reception led him to suppose that his newest hand was a rather more complex figure than he had believed.
The soldiers radioed in, hung about a few more minutes and drove back, empty-handed, to Fort Monagh.
Chapter 18
The Secretary of State spoke to Downing Street from the single-storeyed red-brick building that was the RAF Reception at Aldergrove. They’d offered him a car to take him to the officers’ quarters and the use of the group captain’s phone, but he’d declined. The message waiting for him was of the sort the Prime Minister rarely burdened him with, must be important and should be returned at speed.
It took several minutes for the connection to come through. The delay came from the need to patch in the speech distortion apparatus that would safeguard the security of the call and prevent any casual telephone user listening in on the conversation. When the instrument rang out in the partitioned office indicating that the call was ready the service aides discreetly backed out through the door. The Secretary of State’s men stayed with him.