The Journeyman Tailor (11 page)

But our aim is to keep Song Bird. To keep the twelve other sources all singing. Quite a little choir we have in the Province, but your exclusive concern until we decide otherwise is to assist Miss Parker in the handling of Song Bird."

The fear came in tiny shock waves through Bren. He wondered which of them in London had turned down Belfast.

5

Cathy worked him pitilessly. Every time she allowed him out of the house he thought of freedom, but he didn't argue, he did as he was told.

He knew when he would slip into the cover of a Department of the Environment civil servant, but it was not immediately. She kept him prisoner in the second-floor flat in the Malone Road.

He was allowed out for exercise each morning. It was four miles to the city centre.

She had gone with him the first morning. All the way back up the hill and the carbon monoxide from the car exhausts catching in his throat, dragging into his lungs, the whole time she was jogging comfortably at his shoulder. Once he had lifted his pace, and made no impression on her at all. They had come back inside the house. Bren felt a little sick, and his legs were stiffening again, but that was because of what P.T.I. Terry had put him through. He had trudged up the stairs, paused once to steady himself against the banister, the first morning.

Into his room. He had flopped into the one easy chair.

"Get me a towel," she'd said.

Bren had come back into the living room of the flat, and she had been standing naked in the centre of the room, her track suit and T-shirt and bra in a heap on the floor by her feet.

Thanks," she'd said.

She had dried herself hard. She had pummelled the towel down round her thighs and up round her stomach and across her breasts and under her armpits and across her throat and her neck and her head,and she had tossed the towel back to him and dressed again.

The first morning she had left him with a wad of papers, everything that he needed to know about the Department of the Environment in Northern Ireland.

He had made himself a sandwich at lunchtime, and grilled some sausages for the evening meal.

He knew nothing about Cathy Parker. He had seen the muscles in her body, the biceps and thighs and the tightness of her lower belly. She would know everything about him because she would have seen his file. He had seen the slender dull gold arms of the crucifix that hung low on a chain and rested between her breasts. Everything about him was in the file that would have been sent from Personnel at Curzon Street, his childhood and his education and his earlier work. She had big nipples on shallow breasts, and she had a bruise the size of his palm on her ribs. He knew nothing about her.

And it would be the same on the second morning - the run, the towelling off, and her passing him more papers to read, then leaving him to kill the day with them.

He had never met a woman remotely like Cathy Parker before.

"You didn't find work?"

"No, I got there a day too late. Just missed."

"But it was the weekend." The landlady was confused.

"There's friends of mine, they know what's around, they said there was nothing more."

"You were so hopeful of finding work."

"That's the way it goes, better luck next time I try . . ."

She thought he had a lovely smile.

"I do hope I'm not interfering, but wouldn't you do better looking for work at home?"

"None there."

He wore a wedding ring. She had noticed that when he had first come to her door in answer to the advertisement she had placed in the

Herald & Echo.
She thought he must have been married for several years, because since he first chose the ring his hands must have thickened with work and the flesh around the ring now furled over it so that it was tight, too tight to take off if he wanted to wash his hands thoroughly. She was very observant.

"Your wife must miss you dreadfully,"

She saw him start, as if she had nicked the hidden nerve "She understands."

"She sounds a very good woman."

"She knows what has to be done . . ."

She should not have mentioned the wife, she realised it. She enjoyed so much these brief conversations with her lodger. She was afraid she had spoiled something that was precious to her. She would have rather liked to have told him that she had defended his nationality against the busybody next door, but he had loped away up the stairs.

Later, from the kitchen, she heard him go out again.

The third day of the week. Bren had been ready, waiting in his room and changed, and looking down into the side street that ran to the Malone Road. From the high front window he saw her Astra swing across the traffic flow, causing two motorists to brake and almost collide. He heard the belt of their horns and she seemed to ignore them, didn't slacken her speed until she stopped outside the house.

She looked a wreck when she came through his door.

There was mud on her face and her hands. She wore a boiler suit that was too large for her, navy blue where the material was not obscured by the dirt smears.

"Am I late? Sorry . . ."

Bren said, "It's only a couple of minutes past eight."

"Sorry . . ."

She had a duffle bag and she dropped it on the floor.

She started to wriggle out of the boiler suit.

"My things are in there," she pointed down at the duffle bag.

She was kicking off her boots and the mud from them was spread out across the carpet of his room. She was out of the boilersuit, peeling off a sweater and then her jeans.

" Bloody cold old night," she said.

He had the grip open. First into his hand was the Heckler and Koch rifle, stock folded. Second into his hand were the two magazines taped upside down to each other. Third into his hand was the personal radio.

He laid them on the floor.

"Quite a heavy frost," she said.

He found her track-suit trousers and her T-shirt and her running shoes.

He put them on the floor beside her, and then he bent to pick up the mud that she had spread.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," she mouthed. "Does it matter . . . ?"

He didn't ask her where she had been, what she had been doing, and he didn't think she would have told him. In a ditch, or in a hole like the one Jocelyn had dug. Out on a hillside, or damp in a bog field. And he had been asleep, slept pretty well through the night. The weapon was old, its paintwork was scratched, but the grease was fresh on it. He looked down at it. He saw where the serial number had been rasped away. The Heckler and Koch was a killing weapon. He felt the winnowing of the fear in his stomach.

"Are you all right?"

"Course I'm all right . . ."

"Honestly, Cathy, wouldn't you rather rest up for an hour?"

"Come on," she said, and she was going for the door.

They didn't speak when they ran, and they made up the time that she had been late by running faster.

From her car, back at the house, she gave him his file for the day.

She was in his bathroom, and she hadn't closed the door. The first day he had had the file on the Department of the Environment's work in the province. The second day he had had the file on the state of the war throughout the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, designated SECRET.

The file was marked "East Tyrone Brigade". It was stamped "NOT TO

BE TAKEN FROM SECURE PREMISES". It was another SECRET

file. He saw there were ninety-three pages, closely typed, and then bound separately inside the outer folder were photographs of men and women and of buildings and of countryside, and there was a large-scale map folded into the back of the file. It was the world he had walked into.

"Would you like some coffee?"

She murmured from the bathroom, "Be great, lots of sugar."

He put on the kettle. He was scared, couldn't hide it, couldn't help but admit it. He thought that it was the skill, the smooth talk and soft soap, of people like Mr Wilkins that they could con young men like himself to join up in total ignorance. The file he had read yesterday, he reckoned that back at Curzon Street they didn't know the half of it. The place had terrified him, and all he had done was read.

The place had him on a barbed hook, He made the coffee. He knocked gently. No answer. He took it into the bathroom.

She was stretched out in the filled bath, the water lapping at her ears and mouth. She was asleep. She looked so bloody vulnerable.

He poured the coffee down the kitchen sink.

After she had dressed, a long time later, gone, left her mud on the carpet, Bren settled with the file. He studied the digest and the faces and the farmhouses and the countryside of Altmore mountain. The names of the officers of the Brigade were typed out. The man who was O.C. and the man who was Quartermaster, and Mossie Nugent who was Intelligence Officer. And the young men who were learning the trade, ranked as volunteers. The names of the hopefuls, the couriers and the watchers . . . and the same photograph of Jon Jo Donnelly that he had seen on Mr Wilkins' desk in Curzon Street. He would work until his eyes misted in tiredness. He was again a prisoner in the flat on the second floor and would be until the morning, until she came for him again.

"Is he going to live?"

" The hospital say that he's out of danger, sir."

"That's a small mercy," the Prime Minister said.

The commander said, "Colonel Beck was pretty alert before he went under anaesthetic. He gave us a good description."

The pitch of the Prime Minister's voice rose. "So, exactly where does your investigation stand?"

Ernest Wilkins, who was near the window, felt himself witness to the interrogation, but not a part of it, which pleased him. For the last fifteen years he had been a visitor to Downing Street, and taken his share of flack.

‘’There are125,000 policemen who have seen and studied a photograph of Donnelly taken not two years ago in Gough. Likewise Customs, airports and ports. All the addresses we hold, safe houses, sympathetic pubs and so on, they're all being watched ..."

"Why don't you publish the photograph?"

"We'd frighten him off, sir. He'd disappear off the face of the earth.

Or that recognisable version of him would. We might put a stop to him for a year, but he'd be back, new cover and new method of operating."

"So. What next?"

"Patient pursuit, sir, that's best. The tedious combing of haunts and possible associates. It has borne fruit before and will again. Every day that passes pushes up the odds against his escaping capture or betrayal.

I've told you before, Prime Minister, that he is the one under pressure

..."

"You will not overlook the pressure my Government is under, Commander, even as I do not underestimate the burden that you personally carry."

"Thank you, Prime Minister, but Donnelly is the one who is suffering. He would appear to be working alone. Probably living alone.

One by one his havens will be shut to him. His weapons are harder and harder of access. His contacts, from what we know, are less and less reliable, that is to say his couriers, his messengers. Some of them are children almost. We have access to one or two of this intake and . . .

well, we are due a little luck, sir."

The Prime Minister stood very close to the Commander. "I don't believe in the wait-and-the-heavens-will-open approach. I would urge a more positive line on you, Commander. At our last meeting, we envisaged a resolution of the hunt in Altmore mountain. Is that the place?"

The Commander hesitated. "Indeed, sir."

The Prime Minister said, "I would like him to go home, your Mr Donnelly, Commander."

"Excuse me, Prime Minister." The tactical intervention was one of the chief accomplishments of Ernest Wilkins. He had been brought up in a hard school. He was a Desk Head. "That is a most interesting suggestion, Prime Minister. It is an approach to the problem that we have been developing. A little more work ,and I think Well, leave it with me, Prime Minister."

There was the slight bow. He acknowledged the Prime Minister's satisfaction. He ignored the Commanders dagger glance. The meeting was over.

"He is just one man, and making a lavatory of our country." "Quite so, sir." Ernest Wilkins smiled. "I'll be working on it, be assured, getting Jon Jo Donnelly home ..."

He had had his supper, washed up his plate, thrown away the empty Irish stew tin and the banana skin. And he had no coffee.

The music came flooding through the floor and the walls.

The pictures, East Tyrone's finest, were laid out on the carpet, all mug-shots, all police station photographs. He had the pictures of each of their homes beside each face that registered the shock of arrest and the defiance and the contempt. He had separated from the rest the face of Jon Jo Donnelly. Not strictly relevant because he was over the water, but the custody mug-shot was different from the others, cocky and controlled ... He couldn't survive unless he had coffee ... All day and all evening she had been in his mind. The pearl whiteness of her body in his bath, the hard weight of her Heckler and Koch on his floor.

There was the whip of her tongue and the bright laughter of her eyes . .

. Now, without looking at the legend on the back of the photographs, he could put a name to most of them, and a ranking to nearly as many, and a history of previous convictions to several of them. There were eighty-two photographs. To match all of the photographs to names and addresses and "previous", he would be up half the night, but not without bloody coffee . . . All the time that he failed to concentrate on the photographs and the biographies, she was there in his mind, her face, her body, her voice and her eyes . . .

He went down the stairs, carrying his empty coffee jar.

It was Debussy, played loud.

He knocked on the door.

The door jumped open, on a chain. He was swiftly scrutinised. The door shut and then was spread wide.

It was the cardboard city man. "Yes?"

"Sorry to disturb you, I wondered if you had any coffee . . .?"

"Coffee, for fuck's sake?"

The man was in a dressing gown. The bed was unmade. Past him, Bren saw the open book on the bed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, one of the all-in anthologies with print like a telephone directory's. He'd have had a shower since Bren last saw him because the hair on his shoulders and his beard glowed chestnut.