Free Harry's Game by Gerald Seymour

dreadful crime. This was a colleague of mine. Of course, people should feel strongly; what I'm saying is that this is a last fling of the IRA... Q. A pretty successful last fling. A. Mr Danby was unarmed‐‐‐‐

    Q. In Loyalist areas of the city the Government are accused of not going in hard to find the killer because the results could antagonize Catholic opinion.

    A. That's untrue, quite untrue. When we have identified the man we intend to get him. There'll be no holding off. Q. Secretary of States thank you very much. A. Thank you.

    Most of the young Protestants who gathered in the side streets of the Albert Bridge Road, pelting the armoured vehicles as they went by, hadn't seen the interview. But word had quickly spread through the loyalist heartlands in the east and west of the city that the British had in some way glossed over the killing, not shown the determination to rout out those Provie rats who could murder a man in front of his bairns. The battalion on duty in Mountpottinger police station was put on fifteen minute readiness, and those making their way to the prosperous 37

    suburbs far out to the East of Belfast took long diversions, lest their cars became part of the sprouting barricades that the army crash‐charged with their Saracens. Three

    soldiers were hurt by flying debris and the Minister's broadcast was put down as the kindling point to the brushfire that was to smoulder for more than a week in the Protestant community.

    Meanwhile Harry was being prepared for the awesome moment when he would leave the woods of Surrey and fly to Belfast, on his own, leaving the back‐up team that now worked with him as assiduously as any heavyweight champion's.

    Early on Davidson had brought him a casette recorder, complete with four ninety‐minute tapes of Belfast accents. They'd been gathered by students from Queen's University who believed they were taking part in a national phonetics study, and had taken their microphones into pubs, laundrettes, working men's clubs and supermarkets. Wherever there were groups gathered and talking in the harsh, cutting accent of Belfast, so different to the slower more gentle Southern speech, tapes had attempted to pick up the voices and record them. The tapes had been passed to the army press officer via a lecturer at the University, whose brother was on duty on the Brigade commander's staff, and then, addressed to a fictitious major, flown to the Ministry of Defence. The sergeant on Davidson's staff travelled to London to collect them from the dead letter box in the postal section of the Ministry.

    Night after night Harry listened to the tapes, mouthing over the phrases and trying to lock his speech into the accents he heard. After sixteen years in the army little of it seemed real. He learned again of the abbreviations, the slang, the swearing. He heard the way that years of conflict and alertness had stunted normal conversation; talk was kept to a minimum as people hurried away from shops once their business was done, and barely waited around for the quiet gossip. In the pubs he noticed that men lectured each other, seldom listening to replies, or interested in opinions different to their own. His accent would be critical to him, the sort of thing that could awake the first inkling of suspicion that might lead to the further check he knew his cover could not sustain.

    His walls, almost bare when he had arrived at the big house, were soon covered by aerial photographs of Belfast. For perhaps an hour a day he was left to memorize the photographs, learn the street patterns of the geometric divisions of the artisan cottages that had been allowed to sprawl out from the centre of the city. The developers of the nineteenth century had flung together the narrow streets and their back‐to‐back terraces along the main roads out of the city.

    Most relevant to Harry were those on either side of the city's two great ribbons of the Falls and Shankill. Pictures of astonishing