The Journeyman Tailor (12 page)

"Just enough for a couple of cups, please."

"Come in."

He went inside. It was a flat the size of his own. The man shuffled barefoot into his kitchen. A tin must have fallen from an upper shelf because there was the impact and then the oath.

He was handed the coffee.

He started to unscrew the top. He intended to pour from the man's jar into his own.

"Don't bother yourself, take it. Gin's my poison . . ."

"Are you sure?"

He saw the rifle on the far side of the bed, tilted against the wall. The rifle would have been six inches from the hand of the man when he slept. On the top of the rifle barrel was a bulging night-sight. The smell in the room was of the clothes that were heaped by the open window, as if that might carry away some of their stench. There was a pistol on the table, and a pile of bills and an Inland Revenue envelope

. . .

The man must have followed his eyes. "Those buggers find you anywhere . . . You're Parker's new boy?"

"Yes."

"She bollocked you out yet?"

"Afraid so."

The man drawled, "How do you find her?"

"I don't know anything about her. I suppose I was surprised to find a woman, well, you know, doing this sort of work."

The man looked into Bren's face. "Are you good enough to work with her?" "Why not . . , ?"

"I don't know who you are, squire, and I don't know what you know, but I'll tell you something. There's men here would go through walls for that woman, got me?’’

‘’Yes, I only meant . . ."

"And go through fire ... Do you know Henry IV, part 2?"

"No."

"Me neither, so be a good fellow and piss off and let me get into it . . .

You're a lucky sod, squire, and I hope you realise it, to work with Cathy Parker."

Mossie remembered the heavy-type box in
An Phoblacht.

". . . No matter how long a person has been working for the enemy if they come forward they will not be harmed. Anyone caught touting will be executed! ..."

"We'll go through it, one by one . . . Who knew?"

Their cars were parked in a farm gateway off the Ballygawley road.

The gateway was on a bend and a steep dip in the road. There was a copse of conifers that masked the gateway from the hillside above.

The O.C. had the farmer, most days, check through the copse with his dogs, so that they could be certain there was not an army observation hide amongst the trees. It was where the O.C. and Mossie Nugent often met.

"I knew," Mossie said.

There was the light brittle laugh of the O.C. "You knew because it was your plan. I knew because I authorised your plan. Who else knew?"

"Quartermaster."

"Knew what he had to provide, only that."

"Kids who moved the guns."

They knew where they had to pick them up and where they had to drop them. That's all they knew."

"Kids who drove the front car."

"My wee brothe, his girl. I'd go to the grave for them."

" There’s been others, with family in the Organisation, they've touted .

,

Not my brother, Mossie, don't ever feckin' say it's my wee brother Who else?"

Those who was going to do the hit."

"Gerry Brannigan’s boy, and the Devitt kid. They were most at risk, tooled up They were looking at ten years Who else?"

Mossie spoke, so slowly, so quietly. "I did one recce. The Riordan boy watched there four weeks in a row."

"He's a little shite."

"If there's a tout we might as well pack it up. Will you call in people from outside . . . ?"

They were the hard men. They would come from beyond the mountain community. They would be from Derry or Belfast. They would interrogate every man and woman in the Organisation. They would watch, perhaps for weeks, maybe for months. The unit would be shut down while they sifted the answers they had been given before they pointed the finger, or called the unit clean. They would interrogate the O.C., and the I.O., and the O.C.'s wee brother and his brother's girl, and the Q.M., and Gerry Brannigan's boy and the Devitt kid. The men from outside would have suspicion of every last one of them. Every volunteer in the unit would have a cause for fear if the men from outside came onto the mountain.

The O.C. shrugged. "I'm not wanting to."

Mossie said, "Best if you don't. Best if you keep it close. The people from outside, they turn every man against his friend."

There was the hiss of the O.C. "I tell you what I want . . ."

"What's that?"

"I wish to God that Jon Jo was back here."

They talked another half an hour. They talked of the big one that was being put together in the shed of a farmhouse, proper engineering, with a base plate of steel on the back of a flat-top lorry and a cradle welded to the base plate that would take an oil drum lying on its side and the spigot tube that would be filled with explosive powder and throw the oil drum high enough into the air to get it over the barracks' fence and the oil drum could hold just around four hundredweight of fertiliser mix with a five pound Semtex charge to give it the kick. Done before and getting to be time to do it again. Not ready yet, getting ready. And they talked about a repeat of the brilliant one of three years back, one of the best, when they had taken a slurry cart from a farm and a tractor to pull it and hosed the cart out, and filled it with diesel fuel oil and driven it out to the Stewartstown barracks and sprayed all over the walls and roof and put enough automatic fire down, and an R.P.G.

launcher, to ignite the diesel and oil. Feckin' magic, and Jon Jo Donnelly on the R.P.G. launcher
,
last one he'd done before going south to rest up and let the heat off his back. Feckin' brilliant, Jon Jo with the R.P.G. missile launcher on his shoulders.

They went their separate ways.

Bren opened the file stamped SECRET and marked SOURCE UNIT.

He thought that he had opened Cathy Parker's door, seen behind the facade of the cardboard city man. Top of the file was a background paper, four rather messily typed sheets. Probably typed by a Five man with the errors corrected in biro.

The early morning had been as before. Cathy Parker arriving at eight o'clock, looking as though she had been pulled through a hedge, looking as though she hadn't slept, running with him, giving him a new file and retrieving the one that was NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM

SECURE PREMISES. He already treasured the hour, never more, while she ran with him, dried her sweat off in front of him, talked to him. He longed for it all the time that he was shut away with his file and his coffee and his own dismal cooking.

The paper was clinical.

He read of the pressure that could be applied to turn a man to inform against his own. It was set out starkly. Money for a youngster whose girl was pregnant and they had nowhere to live and who could be persuaded to drink in the bars where the men of the organisation met.

The menace of a lost livelihood for the taxi driver picked up drunk, who feared for the loss of his licence, and who could report on the men who used his cab and the men he saw on the street corners at night when he was cruising. The threat of imprisonment, for the man who tried to cut away from the old life, who could be sent back into the A.S.U.s with the pedigree of imprisonment to boost his prospect of promotion. The certainty of maiming, the kneccap or the elbow, for the joyrider, who would keep his eyes and his ears open, or know that his name would be quietly fed to a Provo punishment squad And this was the war he had been
selected
for? He thought of Mr Wilkins saying that he
knew
Bren had the necessary qualities, was sure of it.

The second paper in the file was entitled, "Source Unit/Operational Procedures".

God, and it just wasn't real . . .

A different typewriter, and different handwriting for the corrections.

It was standard procedure that all Handlers had a Divisional Mobile Support Unit patrol or an army covert team in the area when they met with their Player ... At all times, at a meeting, there should be two Handlers, both armed, both in a state of maximum alert, maximum fitness ... In their relationship with the Player, the Handlers must always seek to dominate . . . The Player must be protected at all times,

unless he killed.
The Player could continue, should be encouraged, to take part in P.I.R.A. activities, but not to the point of murder. The Player who killed was not to be tolerated . . . The Player was never to be trusted . . . The Handlers should never place themselves in a situation where the Player could control their safety.

The house was quiet around him. He sat on the carpet, where Cathy stood when she dried herself off, and went deeper into the file. Bren felt the tension grow in him as he turned the pages. "Source Unit/Equipment". There was the name and the signature number of the electronic bug that could be secreted in the stock of a weapon that a Player would bring from a weapons cache. There was the miniature camera to be used by the Player to photograph documents he had access to, maps, target plans, personnel evaluations. There was the light beam that was to be put into a cache by the Player and that would be activated when the Quartermaster came to retrieve guns or explosives. There was the bleeper, the size of those carried by a hospital doctor or a Telecom engineer. The bleeper's frequency would be monitored twenty- lour hours.

He could not imagine why any man or woman would turn informer, Had to be in love with death, no question.

He could not imagine how the handlers had the guts or the simple cruelty to shepherd and corral the poor bastards, but he would learn.

The darkness had gathered inside his room.

He found it at the bottom of the file. Seven sheets, stapled together, marked SONG BIRD. No name, no address, no photograph.

The meeting of the Task Co-ordinating Group was over. The major from the Special Air Service had gone fast, with the Chief Superintendent from Special Branch. The colonel from Army Intelligence was on his way to the senior officers' dining room with the Assistant Chief Constable.

Only the two of them left behind, Hobbes and that bloody dour Ulsterman.

"Did they slap your wrist good and hard?"

Howard Rennie was the great survivor. Hobbes knew the history. A part of the war since the beginning. A sergeant in 1969 when it began, an inspector when the British had first sent over their cowboys to trample on half-decent covert work, a chief inspector when the Provies had been on the verge of extinction through the Supergrass programme where he had been responsible for cajoling the informers into the witness box, to come up with the evidence that convicted the fat cats, until the system had been thrown out by the judges as weak law. Now he was a superintendent in Special Branch. He worked in close liaison with a division of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that went under the title of E4. The Provos, his enemy, knew all about E4. Not many others did.

It was a miracle that Howard Rennie had climbed to superintendent rank, because he had sought no favours on the way up. There was no other man in Northern Ireland that Hobbes would have rather had on his side than the huge wide-shouldered Ulsterman, from whom a civil word was hard, bloody hard, to coax.

"I
was sorry you lost your player."

"Water under the bridge, Howard."

"Wouldn't have been lost, not if I'd been running him."

‘’I don't doubt it."

There was Rennie's smile, not the smile of a man who was amused If Rennie had had his way, then Hobbes and his kind would have been on the shuttle flying home There would have been just one Source Unit, his, the Royal Ulster Constabulary's. No players handled by Five or by army intelligence . . .

"I suppose you shipped out that Faber? I didn't rate him."

Hobbes gathered his papers. "You'll surprise me one day. Yes, we sent him back."

"And you'll replace him?"

"We already have," Hobbes said curtly.

"What's your new baby like?"

Hobbes looked into the grey eyes of the policeman. "Oh, the usual thing, another Englishman who doesn't know his arse from his elbow sent to interfere in the war that the R.U.C. have presided over so successfully that it's been running more than twenty years ..."

"Fuck you, Hobbes." There was a clout across Hobbes' back.

The story was part of police headquarters folklore. Rennie, new to E4, and meeting for the first time his opposite number from army intelligence. The military boasting that they were running a hundred players. Rennie, all humble, saying that he only had ten . . . and then very quietly going down the army's list of a hundred, pointing out some who were dead, and several who were in gaol, and one who was in Australia . . . Everybody at police H.Q. told Hobbes that story, except Rennie.

"Remind me, Howard, where's Jon Jo Donnelly from?"

"He's East Tyrone. Spreading a touch of panic over there, is he?

Tweaking the old lion's tail, eh? Up Altmore mountain. A few little bombs, a few hits, it's too sad. Tell them what happens over here every day. His wife's there . . ."

"Hassling her, would that bring him back?"

"Doubt it. More likely make him bomb a bit harder, shoot a bit siraighter. They're tough people there, hassle washes off them."

"Be a start, though ..."

Rennie was at the door. "Don't try giving me instructions, Mr Hobbes."

" Just a request, Howard, and make it good and heavy hassle."

"Christ Almighty, you're not in bloody insurance . . ."

Her clothes were old and dirty. He had put on well-pressed grey flannels, well-polished shoes, a check shirt with the collar undone and a lambswool sweater that his mother had sent him his last birthday, and his anorak.

"We're only going for a drive, aren't we?"

"... 'only going for a drive', Jesus! Down there they scent everything that is out of place. They know the faces and the cars that have the right to be there. That I can't help. But I can help that you don't look like you're trying to sell a policy at the weekend. Get those off." And she was gone.

He could smell the clothes the moment she came back through the door.