‘It’s definite,’ he said. He was very tired now, deeply tired and needing to sit down, to take the great weight from his legs. He picked up her shopping bag with his right hand, and draped the injured left arm over the small woman’s shoulder. They began to walk by the terraced doors and the chipped and daubed red brick of the street. It was a grey Belfast morning, rain threatening, wind cold and from the east, coming in over the Lough. The two threaded a path over the fractured paving stones, past the endless heaps of dogs’ mess towards the house that had become Downs’s goal.
The moment the two had created for each other was broken by the footsteps behind. Instinctively both knew the noise of pursuit. In the Ardoyne the knack of recognizing it was inbred.
The women on the corner were silent as Harry ran by them down the gentle incline towards where the man and his wife were walking away from him. He held the revolver close to him, reassured by the hardness of the wooden handle, roughened with age and usage. He pulled up twenty feet short of them. The pair swung round to face him.
‘Don’t move. Don’t try to run or get your firearm. If you do I’ll shoot.’
Harry barked the instructions. The harshness of his tone and its assurance surprised him. He felt almost detached from the orders he was shouting.
‘Put the bag down and begin to walk towards me, and slowly. Your hands on your head. The woman — she stays where she is.’
Be strong. Don’t mess about with him. You’ll be a long time before you shift the bastard. Don’t let him dominate you. Keep the gun on him, look at his hands the whole time. Watch the hands, and keep the gun in line. Keep it so it’s only got to come straight up to fire, and the catch off. Check with the thumb that the catch is off. It is, certain. Now separate them, don’t let them be together so she can shield him. She’ll do that, they all will, throw themselves at you to give him a yard. And shoot. If he moves shoot him. Don’t hesitate. Stay still yourself. Don’t march about. That disorganizes the shot you may make. Two bullets only. One up the spout, and the other in the next chamber, that’s all.
Harry studied him hard. The other man, the opposition. Dirty, cowed and frightened — is that the terrorist? Is that all he is? Is that the killer in all his glory? Not much to look at, not much without his Kalashnikov.
‘Start walking now, and remember: keep it very cool, or I shoot. What’s your name?’
‘Billy Downs. You’re the Englishman they sent for me? The one that had the girl killed?’?They’d told him the Britisher hadn’t come to take him, not to put him in the Kesh, but to kill him. The fight of survival was returning, steadily and surely. ‘You won’t get out of here, you know. Not with me on the end of your pistol, you won’t.’
He looked past Harry and seemed to nod his head into the middle distance. It was cleverly done. Good try, Billy boy. But you’re with the professionals now, lad. A squaddie might have turned and given you the third of a second you needed to jump him. Not Harry. Pivot round. Get your back to the wall. Keep going till you feel the brickwork. But watch the bastard. All the time keep your eyes on his hands.
Faced with troops in uniform, Downs would probably have submitted without a struggle and climbed into the armoured car to start whatever segment of his lifetime in captivity they intended for him. But not this way. No surrender to a single hack sent from London to kill him watched by his wife and in his own road. For a year it would be talked about — the day when a lone Englishman came into the Ardoyne and shot down meek little Billy Downs. The day the boy’s nerve went.
He was formidable, this Englishman, in his old jeans and dark anorak, with the clear-cut face, softer than those fashioned in the bitterness of Belfast. He had not been reared through the anguish of the troubles, and it showed in the freshness of his features. But he was hard, Downs had no doubt on that. They’d trained him and sent him from London for this moment, and Downs knew his life rested on his capacity to read the expressionless mouth of his enemy. When he made his break all would depend on how well the Englishman could shoot, and, when he fired, how straight. Downs made his assessment… he’ll fire, but fire late, and he’ll miss. He turned himself now from the waist only, and very slowly, towards his wife. He was close to her, much closer than Harry, and with his face in profile he mouthed from the far side of his lips, the one word:
‘Scream.’
She read it in the shape of his mouth, the way the lips and gums twisted out the message. Harry didn’t see the instruction, and was still concentrating on the man’s hands when she yelled. It came from deep down, a fierce noise from so small a woman. Harry jerked from his preoccupation with Downs as he searched for the source of the noise, his eyes shifting direction.
Downs had made his decision. Now or not at all, either now or the bastard has you in his own time, to shoot like a rat in a cage. He pushed his wife violently towards Harry and started for the freedom of the open street down the hill. His first two strides took him to the edge of the pavement. A flood of adrenalin… anticipating the shot, head down, shoulders crouched. This was the moment. Either he fires now or I make it, three, four more paces then the range and accuracy of the revolver is stretched. His eyes half closed, he saw nothing in front of him as his left foot hit hard on the steep edge of the pavement. For his heel there was support, for his sole there was nothing, only the gap between the flagstones and the gutter eight inches below. His weight was all there, all concentrated on that foot, as he catapulted himself forward, the momentum taking over.
He realized the way he was falling, and tried to twist round onto his back, but there was no time, no room. He hit the rough gravel of the road on his left arm, right on the spot where the flesh had been twice torn open by Rennie’s bullet. The frail lint bandage gave no protection. With his right arm he clawed at the road surface trying to push himself up and away from Harry, who was coming to him, revolver outstretched…
Harry saw the pain reach over and cover the man’s face. He saw the hand scruffing under the body. If the man had a gun that was where it would be, down by the waist, where the hand was fumbling now. It wasn’t a difficult decision any more. He raised the revolver so that the line went down from his right eye, down his right arm to the ‘V’ of the back sight and along the black barrel to the sharp foresight, and then on to the man’s upper chest. He held the aim just long enough for his hand to steady, then squeezed the trigger gently into the cup of his forefinger. The noise was not great. The revolver gave only a slight kick, jolting down the rigid arm to Harry’s shoulder. Below him Downs’s body began to twitch, giving way to spasmodic convulsions. The blood found its own pathway from the side of his mouth out onto the greyness of the road. Like water tracking across dry earth it kept its course, faster, thicker, wider as the road discoloured with its brightness.
There was no need for the second bullet, Harry could see that.
‘Why did you shoot him? He had no gun. Why did you kill him?’ She was moving towards Downs, looking at Harry as she spoke. ‘You didn’t have to shoot. You could have run after him, and caught him. You know he was shot last night, and hit. He wasn’t much opposition to you, you Britisher sod.’
She knelt down beside her husband, her stocking dragging on the harsh surface of the road. He lay on his side, and she could not cradle him as she would have wanted. Both her hands touched the face of her man, unmarked in his death, fingering his nose and ears and eyes.
Harry felt no part of the scene; but something was demanded of him, and painstakingly he began to explain.
‘He knew the rules. He knew the game he was playing. He came to London and murdered the Cabinet Minister. In cold blood. Shot him down in front of his house. Then he went to ground. It was a challenge to us. He must have known we had to get him — you must have known that. It was a test of will. There was no way we could lose — we couldn’t afford to.’