‘You never knew anything of him — what sort of man he was, how good he was to us. And yet you come to our street, and shoot him down, defenceless.’
Harry struggled to speak again to her. So difficult, so exhausting, this twisted, shattered face above him, not understanding the world of her man, not understanding the war that was being fought out on her own streets. It was all so simple, so easy, but Harry felt the waves of tiredness pouring over him, and no longer had the strength to reason with the woman.
She went on: ‘You think we’re all animals over here. But what’s it to you if Danby gets killed, or a soldier, or a policeman, what’s it to you, over from England? Do you think you’re any better than our people?’
Harry stayed silent a long time as he struggled to concentrate his thoughts.
‘He deserved to die. He was an evil little bastard. He’s better off—’
The fingers wrenched at the trigger. The noise mingled with her sobs as Harry rolled slowly and with precision over onto his back. At the top of Ypres Avenue the first two Saracens were arriving.
The soldiers looked over the two bodies, made the decision that both were beyond medical help, and left them where they had fallen. Both Harry Brown and Billy Downs were in the awkward, sack-like form that the troops could recognize as death. Downs lay a few feet from the kerb, out in the road. The blood had run from him to create a lake, dammed from escaping farther by the debris of the gutter. His wife was beside him again, and still holding the revolver loosely and without interest. The sergeant of the platoon walked towards her and, with nervousness showing in his voice, asked her to hand over the gun. She opened her fingers and it clattered noisily on the road. When the soldier spoke again to her there was no reply. She stood, quite still, swamped by her emotions.
Harry was sprawled face up close to the wall of a house, his head beneath the front room window from which a face, old but without the softness of compassion, looked down on him. The women of the street edged their way closer to Billy Downs’s wife, the men gathered in clumps, leaving the business of comforting and abusing to their women.
In their shawls and head scarves and short skirts they shouted at the officer who came with the platoon. ‘He’s one of yours. That bastard dead over there.’
‘He’s a fucking Englishman.’
‘Shot a man without a gun.’
‘SAS killer squads.’
‘Killed an unarmed man. In front of his wife, and he never in trouble before.’
The crescendo gathered round the young man. In a few moments his Company commander and Battalion commander would be there, and he would be spared, but till then he would take the brunt of their fury. Faced with the accusation that Harry was one of theirs the soldiers looked curiously at the body of the big man. They knew a certain amount about the undercover operations of the army, particularly the Mobile Reconnaissance Force (MRF), but to the men in uniform it was a different and basically distasteful world. The soldiers had their rules and regulations to abide by. The book was near to God.
In exasperation the lieutenant shouted above the babble:
‘Well, if you say the chap who shot Downs is one of ours, who shot him then?’ He’d phrased it clumsily, said it in anger and expected no answer.
The chorus came back, gloating, satisfied. ‘The Provies got him. A Provie gunman. One shot. From the bottom of the street.’
The far end of the street down the hill was deserted, dominated only by the massive red-brick wall and grey-slate roof of the old mill. The lieutenant looked up at it, and winced.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
His sergeant, who had been examining Harry, came over to him. ‘The chap on the pavement, sir. He’s been hit twice. First I would say was high velocity, there is an entry and exit wound and a big blood marker, looks as if he tried to get away, you can follow the trail, about fifteen yards to where he is now. He was shot again then, right in the head, no exit, and it must have been a hand gun or something, that killed him.’
‘Thank you, sergeant. The woman who was holding the pistol, you’d better put her in the Saracen. Go easy with her, she’s in shock, and I don’t want a riot here.’
‘It’s just as we found it, as you requested,’ they told Frost when he arrived.
The Battalion commander briefed him. ‘The chap by the wall shoots Downs and then is shot himself. I’m not a hundred per cent sure where the second shot comes from. Still waiting for all the reports. Indications are that it’s my OP in the mill roof. We’re rather quiet about that position, but I haven’t spoken to the men up there yet. Seems they wounded the fellow, then Downs’s wife, she’s in the Saracen now, came in and finished him off.’
There was no reaction on Frost’s face. His eyes travelled round the street taking in the faces and the scene. He walked over from one body to the other, his bodyguards hovering at each shoulder. He recognized Harry from the photograph that had been sent the previous evening from England. It should never have worked, but it had. And now right at the end was all loused up. Poor devil.
He paused where Downs lay, looking into the profile of the face and running a check against the picture they’d issued. We’d have been lucky to spot him from that, the colonel thought, not really good enough, something to be learned from that. He went past the open door of the Saracen. Mrs Downs sat huddled deep in the shadow of the interior. She sat totally still, staring at the armour-plated sides, festooned with pick-axes, CS gas-grenade canisters, ammunition boxes. Two soldiers guarded her.
‘It’s not for general release,’ he said to the Battalion commander, ‘but you’ll hear about it soon enough anyway. The Prime Minister ordered a special man put in, with the sole job of finding Danby’s killer, right? The Cabinet Minister shot in London, what is it? six or so weeks ago. Downs was the assassin. By something of a miracle, and a quite unaccountable amount of good luck, the agent tracked him down. That’s not a generous assessment, but that’s how I evaluate it. He tracked him and shot him dead about fifteen minutes ago. I think your OP has just shot the Prime Minister’s man.’
Frost knew how to play his moment. He stopped there, let it sink, then went on.
‘We’ll deflect it as much as we can, but I suggest you leave it to Lisburn to make the statements. It may be some consolation to you, but I didn’t know much about the agent either. He wasn’t working to me. I wouldn’t worry about the role of the OP in all this.’
‘I wasn’t worrying—’
Frost cut across him.
‘It’s happened before, it’ll happen again. Marines shot their own crowd in the New Lodge. RUC have shot our people, we’ve killed theirs. Bound to happen.’
The other man considered. They stood alone in the street away from the people of Ypres Avenue, with the bodyguards and troops giving them room to talk. He remembered now the soldier they had sent to Berlin; what he had seen in the green-topped social club less than three hundred yards from where they stood. There was nothing to say, nothing that would help the prone figure by the wall, nothing that would achieve anything beyond unnecessary involvement. Business-like, brisk as always, he said to Frost:
‘Is there any reason for us not to clean this lot up now? Our photographer has done his stuff, and the RUC people won’t want to come in here.’
‘No reason at all. Get it out of the way before the press and cameras start showing up.’
‘Will there be much aggro, the fact that this fellow Downs wasn’t armed when he was killed?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Frost, ‘there isn’t usually when we get one of the real ones. They seem to accept that, part of the game. Right at the beginning there used to be mayhem. But they’ve become tired of saying it. They’re all unarmed men — that’s the charm. Doesn’t work them up any more. Be interesting to see what sort of show he gets in the death notices in the press tomorrow morning. We’ll see how highly they regarded him then. A big man can get three or four columns. Be interesting. Come from the Brigade command, their Battalions, Companies and a good number from the Kesh. Costs them a fortune — and keeps the papers going.’