The Journeyman Tailor (20 page)

He had gone home, had told Siobhan it was a mistake, all sorted.

Three months later, going down the shop for fags, hadn't recognised her at first, old jeans and scruffy anorak. All she needed was that he drink at a certain pub, that he watch a certain man. Regular meetings, and then the suggestion that he should sell up, take his family home . . .

too late then to go back. Returned to Altmore mountain, bumping into her in Irish Street, and the note passed with her scribbled telephone number, and the money . . . too late then to go back.

"Would you like me to make you a pot of tea?"

"It'd be good."

"I's with you, Mossie. It'll be easier now."

He held her tight, crushed her against him. For six years he had lived that lie.

His voice was quiet in her hair. "Last year I tried to break with her.

Lasted three months. I cut the meetings. When I was down in Portadown last year, working on the new council place, she caught up with me. I never saw her, but she watched me. Letters were left for me, no beggar ever seemed to remember seeing them left, but they had my name on them. There was a photograph, Joey Fenton who was shot for touting, that was first. Next month, alter I'd broken the second meeting, there was a bullet. Third month, after I'd broken the third meeting, she sent me the note, her writing, addressed to the O.C., it named me as a tout ... If they thought you knew, they'd kill you too . . ."

He felt her lips brush his forehead. She said she'd go and make the tea.

He had never been so cold. The damp seeped through the sides of the hide and puddled on the flooring of plastic. The cold numbed his feet, it ached in his buttocks and his shoulders shook with it The only part of his face that was exposed, between the woollen cap pulled down over his forehead and the scarf wrapped across his mouth and throat, was raw with cold. It was as if she tested him. They had come to the hide as the dusk settled. They had hugged the hedgerows and crawled in the gorse, light enough for him always to be able to see Cathy as she had led the way. He was ice cold and he did not complain. His teeth chattered, a distraction beside the suppressed hum of the electronics.

He felt the dig of her elbow in his ribs. She pulled his head round and she fed him a stick of chewing gum. There was her chuckle, very quiet, beside him. His teeth pounded on the chewing gum and the chatter was gone.

The light at the back of the bungalow came on.

The white brilliance flared the television screen.

There was barely room for the two of them in the hide. Bren's body below, and Cathy's half on top of him. Her leg was over his thigh.

So much that he wanted to know about her . . .

"Bren . . ." Her voice was abrupt.

"Yes."

"I ate too many sausages."

"Yes."

"You silly bugger, I want to crap.""Fine by me, Miss Parker."

He had seen her the day before, treated as equal by the men of the Special Air Service, taken as a friend by the man who could kill and then eat a plate of sausages and beans and chips with her before they made their dry statements to the sympathetic detectives and the supercilious bastards of the army's Special Investigation Branch'. He had been with her the day before, in the watchtower, and seen that she had never flinched through a shooting that left three men dead . . . and the head shot off the one whose legs were still jumping.

She wriggled away from him.

She was crouched half
over his legs, bent double.

She cursed and he thought that her fingers were too chilled to work the buttons of her trousers.

She swore again as she tried to unfold the tinfoil.

Bren stared ahead of him. He saw the light go out in the kitchen of the bungalow. The only street lights were away to the left, the village lights. The mountain was black cloaked,. The darkness was around him.

She wriggled, struggled, in the confined space.

She would have closed the tinfoil over, sealed it.

She would have pulled her trousers back to her waist, fastened them.

She lay beside him, and her leg crossed over his and he could feel the sweet heat of her breath on the nape of his neck.

"Sorry about that," she said.

They left half an hour before the first smear of the dawn, and she took her wrapped tinfoil with her. She didn't tell him that he had passed any test. He thought she would have told him if he had failed.

Late, always late, the story of his whole damned life.

The big Mustang, left-hand drive, swung off the Killyman Road and into the estate. He was late, very late, a whole twenty-four hours late, but that was because he had been on
assignment
up on the north coast all through the last day and it was now two weeks since the radio in the Mustang had been screw drivered out in the Belfast centre car park and he had heard not a damn thing of the business before the late night news.

With a pounding heart he saw the woman with the bucket advancing on the pavement.

And he would have been there at dawn, first light, if the overnight rain hadn't seeped into the electricals under the bonnet, and certainly would have been there by mid-morning if the garage, scoundrels there, had accepted his cheque for petrol.

Eighteen stone and dieting, trying to, he pitched his legs out. "Hold it, Madam. Give me time."

She stopped. She was a tiny woman, and she carried a plastic bucket in one hand and a kitchen mop in the other.

"Hold your good work, Madam, two minutes will satisfy."

She stared at him.

'The blood, Madam, give me two minutes for the blood."

He had the driver's seat tipped forward. The harness had snagged the seatbelt. He swore, he pulled the harness out.

"Have to have the blood, Madam, can't have a killing story without the blood."

He used two cameras, and that was the beauty of the harness. The harness was a frame across his chest, supported over his shoulders. A camera to the right of the frame and a camera to the left, and a mutual microphone held between them that recorded sound for both. The sound, as was pointed out with increasing frequency by his clients, was often little more than the billow of his breathing when he exerted himself.

She watched. Silly little woman, didn't have to stare.

"Who's news is you's?"

He tugged at the hair on his lower chin, where the whitened sideburns curved towards his upper lip. It was his familiar gesture.

There were children emerging from gardens and houses, horrible-looking urchins.

"Peregrine Forster is the name, Madam, camera correspondent of the N.H.K. network of Japan and the Globo channel of Brazil, known to the trade as 'Perry', well known . . . Now, if you would be so kind as to stand back from the blood ..."

It was a rich English accent, cultivated over six years as a Flying Officer in the Royal Air Force, first with Accounts and then transferred to Kitchens. Always had trouble getting the cable leads into the right sockets under pressure, being watched. The urchins were gathering, sharks coming from the deep at the scent of cattle offal; he had done time in Singapore and knew about sharks, more about sharks than cameras.

"Is they interested, in those places . . . ?"

To lie or not to lie, always better to lie . . . "Interested? Tonight they'll be holding open the lead position in their newscasts . . . But there has to be blood."

His head tilted to the left. His left eye closed on the viewfinder of the N.H.K. network of Japan. The blood was all but dried onto the pavement and into the gutter. There was one good dribble that he could follow. His head tilted to the right and his right eye locked to the viewfinder of the Globo channel of Brazil. The pictures would be air freighted to London and would be lucky, damn lucky, to get further.

Pity there weren't any flowers. Pity all his cash had gone on the petrol and he couldn't run to a couple of tear-jerking bouquets. The children were all around him.

"Very quiet, please, and stay back from the blood . . ."

He filmed. Patch of blood, Madam with bucket and mop, dribble of blood, wide-eyed and dirty faces of children.

Very professional. Peregrine Forster, late of selling insurance and more late of greetings cards and very late of the Royal Air Force, had based himself in Northern Ireland three years back . . . it was a living.

He stood back. Again the cameras were switched on. The pulse lights flashed in his right eye and his left eye. He ran forward. He came ahead at a good trot. He jerked to a halt and he peered from one viewfinder to another, into the patch of blood and the blood dribble.

The small woman called out. "Mister, you's filmin' things that aren't happenin' . . ."

"Reconstruction, Madam, gives added poignancy to tragedy."

He started to heave the harness from his shoulders. He laid the cameras back onto the rear seat of the Mustang. The little blighters were all round him, giggling.

"Shouldn't you be showing more respect, Mister?"

"Casualties of war, Madam, yesterday's grief and today's statistics . . .

Bugger off, you little bastards ..."

The kids fled. He heard the life of their laughter as they went. It was only when he sat back into the Mustang that he appreciated the fuckers had let out the air in his rear right tyre. By the time he had Jacked up the car, and changed the wheel, and jacked down the car, the woman had gone, and the pavement and the gutter had been scrubbed clean.

Not a blood stain to be seen.

Well, Perry Forster would have said, perhaps as he filled in so expertly his expenses sheets, "We all have to earn a crust, and the tools of my trade are old blood on the pavement."

It was the last funeral of the day, Vinny Devitt's. Mossie went. He was far back in the procession of men and women and children who walked from the Devitt house to the church. A piper led them Mossie had stayed away from the funerals of Jacko and Malachy.

Both of their families had told the Provisionals, given it to them straight and then slammed the family front door on them, that they wanted no part in a stunt. No tricolour flag, no black beret, no black gloves on either coffin.

Devitt's was a funeral with full honours. There had been shots fired in the night by masked men close to the Devitt home. In the middle of the afternoon, when the rain clouds masked the crest of the mountain, the piper led the procession the mile to the church. A narrow lane was the route. The piper's lament was blotted out by the drone of the helicopter above, and there was a phalanx of police in front of the piper and following up the mourners, and more police walking sober-faced beside the procession so that the Altmore people were hemmed in by the men in their visored helmets, who carried the riot sticks.

It was a good turn-out.

The man from Belfast Sinn Fein, over the open grave, spoke of a hero and of the certainty of ultimate victory.

Twice Mossie met the eyes of the O.C. inside the church and across the grave, cold and bitter. What Mossie had heard, Gerry Brannigan's boy had gone, run for the safety of the Republic, gone after saying that East Tyrone Brigade was as secure as a feckin' sieve.

He thought the tout hunt would start as the last shovel of dirt covered the coffin, and he had been guaranteed that he was protected.

It was the aftermath of a killing, not the planning of it.

The Assistant Under-Secretary stayed away from the Task Co-ordinating Group. The colonel, Army Intelligence, took the chair, his right by rota.

First business from the major, a cache on the Limavady road out of Londonderry that had been watched for twelve days now without result

- how much longer could manpower be deployed? A report by the Assistant Chief Constable on a police approach to a North Antrim volunteer - early days but promising. An inquest, led by Rennie, into the appearance of an Andersonstown "bad boy" at a Sinn Fein news conference where the little bastard had squealed that he had been approached, offered money, and gone straight to his solicitor and then the Provos - damage limitation, and the lesson was that the handlers had moved too fast. A query from the colonel, the increasing quantity of "traces" on a south County Down man, presumably rising in the Organisation - questioning whether it would be a suitable time to pull him into Gough Barracks, Armagh, and let the Southern Region crime squad fellows have him for seven days and three sessions a day.

Agreed.

Last item before coffee, and Hobbes broke his silence.

"Dungannon, I thought, was good."

The major said, "It was first-class information, made it pretty straightforward.'

The colonel said, "A good example of what can be achieved when we all pull together."

The Assistant Chief Constable said, "Invaluable source, your Song Bird, would there were more like him, but I'd say we got away with it by the skin of our teeth. Parading their weapon was critical. But I'm getting it on the grapevine that one of the team got clean away."

The major said softly: "A householder was right behind the target. It was very responsible fire control ..."

Rennie spluttered on his pipe.

Hobbes smiled. "Yes, Howard."

The smoke clouded Howard Rennie. He let them wait. He coughed from the depth of his throat. "If the safety of Song Bird, whose identity Mr Hobbes is unwilling to share, has been preserved then the shooting was justified. If the risk to Song Bird has been increased, then the operation was a disaster. Time, gentlemen, will tell us whether self-satisfaction is in order."

Hobbes bit at his lip. "Thank you, Howard, I'll minute that."

He put the milk bottle down onto Mrs Byrne's kitchen table. The petrol was amber in the clear bottle. He put the box of matches beside the bottle.

The O.C. said, "It's a nice kitchen, missus."

She told him what she had seen.

She talked because of the threat to her kitchen of scattered petrol and a thrown match. And she talked to the O.C. because her nephew's wife's brother was on remand in the Crumlin Road gaol, and because her neighbour's cousin had been under psychiatric treatment for two years in Belfast after four days in the Castlereagh holding centre. And she talked because she had seen three young men cut down by the soldiers, no warning shout, no chance to surrender, not even a priest allowed near them for an hour. She talked.