The man had seen the police convoy racing into the airport as he’d left, carrying as his sole possessions the Schipol duty-free bag with two hundred cigarettes and a bottle of Scotch. As he’d come through a young man had stepped forward and asked him if he were Mr Jones. He’d nodded, nothing more was required of him, and followed the young man out of the new terminal and into the car park.
It was as they had driven past the airport hotel they’d seen the Garda cars and a van go by. Neither driver nor passenger spoke. The man had been told he would be met, and reminded that he must not speak at all on the journey, not even on the home run. Speech is as identifiable as a face, they explained. The car took the Dundalk road, and then on the stretch between Drogheda and Dundalk turned left and inland towards the hills.
‘We’ll be away over near Forkhill,’ muttered the driver. The man said nothing as the car bumped its way down the side road. After fifteen minutes at a crossroads, where the only building was a corrugated-iron-roofed store, the driver stopped, got out and went inside saying he’d be a minute and had to telephone. The man sat in the car, the light-headedness he’d felt at Schipol that afternoon suddenly gone; it was not that he was alone that worried him but that his movements and immediate future were not in his own hands. He had started to conjure up images of betrayal and capture, of himself left abandoned near the border and unarmed, when the driver walked back to the car and got in.
‘Forkhill’s tight, we’re going farther down towards the Cullyhanna road. Don’t worry, you’re home and dry.’
The man felt ashamed that the stranger could sense his suspicion and nervousness. As a gesture he tried to sleep, leaning his head against his safety belt. He stayed in this position till their car jerked and flung his head hard against the window of the door. He shot forward.
‘Don’t worry’ — again the self-assured, almost patronizing approach of the driver. ‘That was the crater we filled in two years ago. You’re in the North now. Home in two hours.’
The driver cut back to the east, through Bessbrook and on to the north of Newry and the main road to Belfast. The man allowed himself a smile. There was dual carriageway now, and a good fast road, till the driver pulled up outside Hillsborough and motioned to the duty-free bag on the back seat under the man’s coat.
‘Sorry, boy, I don’t want that as we come into town. Ditch it.’
The man wound down his window and flung the plastic bag across the lay-by and into a hedge. The car was moving again. The next sign showed Belfast to be five miles away.
On his return from London the previous evening, the Chief Constable had put a picked team of detectives on standby to wait for information over the confidential phone, the heavily publicized Belfast phone numbers over which information is passed anonymously to the police. They waited through the day in their ready room, but the call they hoped for never came. There was the usual collection of breathy messages naming people in connection with bombs, shootings, locating the dumping of firearms… but not a word even of rumour about the Danby killing. In three pubs in the centre of Belfast, British army intelligence officers met their contacts and talked, huddled forward in the little cubicles they favoured. All were to report later that night to their controller that nothing was known. While they talked, threatening, cajoling, bribing their sources, military police Land-Rovers cruised close by. The red-caps had not been told who they were guarding, just detailed to watch and prevent the sudden entry of a number of men into those pubs.
The blowing of the laundry van intelligence surveillance unit, when soldiers kept watch on an IRA base area from the false ceiling of a laundry van while their colleagues plied for trade below, had woken the operation directors to the needs for safeguards when their men were in the field. That was thirty months back. The tortured and mutilated body of a Royal Tank Regiment captain found just three months before had demonstrated the probability of a security leak close to the heart of the unit, and the public outcry at home at the exposing of soldiers to these out-of-uniform dangers had led to a Ministry directive that military personnel were no longer to infiltrate the Catholic community, but instead stay out and cultivate their informers. Funds and the availability of one-way air tickets to Canada were stepped up.
Quite separate from the military intelligence team, the RUC’s Special Branch was also out that night — men who for three years had slept with their snub-nosed PPK Walthers on the bedside table, and kept a stock of spare number plates at the back of the garage, who stood to the side at the well-photographed police funerals. They too were to report that there was no talk about the Danby killing.
In the small hours Howard Rennie settled onto a hard wooden chair on the first floor of headquarters down the Stormont Road, and began with painful awkwardness to type out his first report. Some of his colleagues had already been in with the news that they had discovered nothing, that their informants were pleading total ignorance of this one; others would come after him to tell the same story. Even the recording tapes — the ‘Confidential Line’ — had failed them.
As a chief inspector, Rennie had been hammering the typewriter keys for statements, criminal assessments and incident report sheets for eighteen years, but he still maintained the right-index-finger, left-index-finger patter.
From his time in Special Branch Rennie knew the way the city would buzz after a Provisional spectacular, how rumour and gossip passed from ghetto to ghetto, carrying the message of success and with it a degree of indiscretion. That was where the Branch came in, men trained to be sensitive enough to pick up the murmurs of information. But the days of Special Branch glory in Belfast were long past.
Rennie could remember the courses he’d been on in the early days before it all went haywire, and the troops arrived, when he’d been told across in England by dour-faced men with biscuit tans from long service in the Far East and Africa that the inside work by the police was the only hope of breaking a terrorist movement in its infancy. ‘When you get the army in, lording it over your heads, telling you what to do, knowing it all, then it’s too late. It’s out of your hands by that time. The military on the streets means the enemy are winning, and that you are no longer a force for the opposition to reckon with. The army are bad news for policemen, and the only way for a counter-terrorist operation to be successful is for the Special Branch to be in there, infiltrating, extracting knowledge at ground level.’
And they’d been right. Rennie could see that now. He and his colleagues didn’t poke their noses into the corners and crannies of the Provisional heartland. They let the army do that with their fire-power and their armour plating, while the detectives sat back and contented themselves with the interrogation of the flow of arrested men. It was the next best thing, but not good enough.
He’d never been much for the cloak and dagger stuff himself. Too big, too heavy, too conspicuous, not a man to flake his way into a crowd, not ordinary enough. But there were others who had been good at it, till the funerals became too frequent, and the Chief Constable had called a halt.
One man, for instance, had been the king of the Branch men till he died up the Crumlin in a hail of automatic fire. Just watching the nightly riot when the sniper spotted him, and gone was a card-index memory, a walking filing system.
Rennie’s report turned out to be a drab document. A succession of negatives after a score of calls and a search through the big tin drawers that carried the buff folders and the photographs and case histories. The Chief Constable came into the room as Rennie was pushing the typewriter back across the table.