The Journeyman Tailor (25 page)

Siobhan was no safer than himself. The nightmare spread in him. If he were pulled in. If he were worked on by the security team, then sooner or later he would crack, and when he cracked he would name his Siobhan as tout's accomplice . . . Who would hold the children's hands in a churchyard? And if he fled, then his friends in hiding would be the bitch and her minder. He would have no other friends . . .

Mossie started the engine. He drove home to collect the second ladder. He could not scour from his mind the pain-streaked face of Mrs Riordan, walking in the lane and walking against the wind.

He was blindfolded. He was stripped naked. He was tied at the wrists and ankles. He lay on the bed.

They searched his privates and his nostrils and ears and mouth, and between the cheeks of his buttocks, and he felt the cold touch on his skin and Patsy Riordan's numbed mind told him that they used a metal detector over his body.

He was lifted from the bed.

He was taken across the room. He felt the thin carpet below his feet.

He was pushed down onto a chair.

The voice was in his ear. "You know who we are, Patsy?"

So difficult to speak. The fear strangled the words. "Yes."

"You know why you're here, Patsy?"

"I done nothing."

"You're a touting bastard, Patsy."

"No . . . no . . ."

"And you're going to tell me, Patsy, that you're a touting bastard ..."

The voice beat in his ears.

He was clearing his mind. It was the rubbish bin that had his attention.

After the Victoria bomb they had taken away all the rubbish bins, but the stations had become so filthy and fifteen months later with no more main line stations attacked they had quietly, no fuss, reintroduced the rubbish bins. The rubbish bins were back, but he didn't know how often they were emptied, and how often they were checked, and he didn't know where they had placed new security cameras at the stations. He had drawn the plan so that he could better work out where cameras might be placed, so that he could examine the possible fields of vision that the cameras might have . . .

"Hi, there, how you doing?" His mind was swept of the rubbish bin.

"We wanted to say ..."

"Just tell him," the woman snapped.

It was a soft accent, it was real Cork, being in London hadn't harmed it. The young man blurted, "We wanted you gone . . ."

"Gone now," she said.

"I've got work, there's another baby coming ..."

"We don't want it going on . . ."

"We'll not have our lives ruined."

He stood. Under his feet was the loose floorboard. Under the floorboard was a pistol and a timing device, and ammunition, and detonators and a circuit board. The anger was rising in him.

The young man said, "So, we'd be glad if you were gone . . ."

"By tomorrow."

He stood his full height. He sought to dominate with his physique, and he felt himself punched.

The young man said, "It's averages, really, sooner or later they'll have you. If they have you then they have us . . ."

Always his wife, she reinforced him. "The beginning and the end of it is that we've grown out of your games. We don't want them any more."

The anger bubbled in him. He said, "Wait, wait, easy, easy . . . Don't come in here feckin' telling me what suits you ..."

"There's no call for language," the young man said.

, . Don't think you can feckin' push me. Don't think you can just throw me out on the street What’ll happen to you, you thought of that?

What'll happen when it goes back to Dublin that a snivelling little prick, a snappy little cunt, have put me out on the street? You thought .

. . ?"

"Don't threaten me," he said.

"... you thought what'll happen when I pass the word?"

She looked at him. He could see that she was not afraid. "Is that all you're at, making fear? I'll tell you something, this isn't home, this isn't where you run things. What are
you
going to do? You going to shoot us, because we want you out? It's a different place this, it's not your place. Your place is back where your bloody home is. You do what you bloody like where your bloody home is. I want you gone by tomorrow .

. ."

"Or what?"

She gazed back at him. She met his eyes. Donnelly looked away, He turned his face from her eyes. He heard her voice.

"Try me."

He heard the door close. He sat on the bed. He bent forward and pulled away the carpet and then with a savage strength He dragged up the loose floorboard. The ring of a voice in his ear. The voice of a brother. The voice of the brother who had gone ;away. Not even a Christmas card now from the brother who had been gone nine years.

He took the folded sheet of paper, the plan, from its hiding place. The voice of a younger brother who now lived outside Albuquerque in New Mexico, and who was a big man and an executive in an electronics company, with a wife and a bungalow and a pool and two young ones.

The bell of a voice, I’m going, and I'm not coming back, because of people like you People like you make a shit of everybody's world You think you’re the big smart bastard but you're just rubbish, and i’m going somewhere where people like you would just squashed out of existence. You're not loved. All you have is the fear of your feckin’

gun. I despise you Jon Jo, and I am ashamed to be your family...’’He tried to read he plan, but there were tears running on the face of Jon Jo Donnelly.

‘’What we could do, we could hang you by your legs, hang you upside down, and we could cut the balls off you. You could blather all you wanted, no one'll hear you. We'll get it out of you, you bastard little tout ..."

"I wasn't touting."

"What were you for at the barracks?"

"They pulled me in."

"Why'd they send a car for you?"

"To lift me."

"Why'd they let you go?"

"Don't know."

"Who was they?"

"Didn't give their names."

"Had you called them?"

"I hadn't."

Voices around him. The accusations dinning in his head. "Why'd they send a car to collect you . . . Where'd the money come from for your bike . . . How many times you met them . . . ?"

Patsy screaming. "No . . . no . . . no . . ."

The quietest voice. "You knew, Patsy, you knew what was planned in Dungannon. Good men, Vinny and Jacko and Malachy. They was set up, Patsy. They was shot down like dogs

. And you got money for a bike, and they sent a car to collect yon.

You say they just lifted you. Why should they lift you? Why didn’t they charge you?"

"I don't know . . ."

I Know, Patsy, I know because I can smell a tout when I'm close to him."

He sat on the chair. The darkness of the blindfold was around him.

The tightness of the binding cut at his wrists and ankles. Patsy Riordan knew no way to make them believe him.

She went to Sean Heggarty. . Hegarty sat in the hard oak chair and his pipe smoke mixed with the scent of the peat blocks on his fire, and his sister brought in tea and then scuttled for the safety of her kitchen.

I’m like everyone else on Altmore, Mrs Riordan. I know nothing and i see nothing and I hear nothing. I don't want to know anything, see anything, hear anything. There's an evil on the mountain, Mrs Riordan, and I live my life around it. I don't hold with murder, believe me, but I don't hold with touting either. If the police had your boy, had their claws in him, then I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for him, I can’t tell you anything that'll help, Mrs Riordan. I'm just sorry, for you . . ."

She went to the house of the man she knew to be the O.C. of East Tyrone Brigade.

The O.C. let her no further than the kitchen door.

"I don't know why you came here , Missus, it’s nothing that's my business. You go shouting your mouth round here, you go saying that I'm in the Armed Struggle, then you've got real trouble, Missus. I don't know who took Patsy away, I don't know why they took him away, I don't know what he might have done. No point in you, Missus, coming to me and asking that I speak up for your Patsy because I don't know who took him, why, what he might have done . . . only thing I'll tell you, Missus, if there's a tout from off this mountain and he's dead then you won't find it tears on me . . ."

She walked in the rain up the lane spattered with tractor mud to the house of the man who had twice in the last three months called at her home for Patsy.

The Quartermaster took her to the back of his garage.

"It's not my business, Mrs Riordan, and you're making trouble for yourself by coming here. It's the business of the Organisation, and I don't know anything about that. You'd best be asking them, Mrs Riordan, but don't be asking me where you'd find them. Not a clue.

Mrs Riordan, I wouldn't have the first idea. I'll tell you this though, if your boy's clean then he'll come to no harm."

The wind blew her coat hard around her as she came to the farmhouse far up the mountain slope.

Attracta Donnelly was in her barns and shovelling manure off the concrete and her brat was sweeping what she missed.

‘’You’ve an impertinence, Mrs Riordan, coming to me. What am i supposed to do? If your son's a tout, good riddance. Touts have destroyed fine men from here. There'll be no snivelling for the death of a tout in this house You want to complain, well don't complain to me.

Get yourself down to Dungannon barracks and make a complaint to the Chief Inspector there, the 'Branch bastard, complain to him about the entrapment of good young boys to spy against their own community. I don't know what you think I could do, and I don't know where you'd the idea that I was someone to speak to. The people I mix with, Mrs Riordan, are patriots, they'd sooner die than inform on their own. Good evening to you ..."

She sat in her wet shoes in the priest's office.

He had made her tea and she held the cup in both hands to control her shaking, and the cake he had brought her went untouched.

"I talk very frankly to you, Mrs Riordan. I speak in the knowledge that you will hold what I say in confidence. I am a person of convenience here. I baptise the children, I marry the adults, I bury the dead. That is what is required of me, to be a functionary. I venture to say that I have no influence in those areas of wickedness that afflict our society. I can stand in my pulpit and I can demand, or I can appeal, for your Patsy to be released. I would not be heeded. I would be ignored. It hurts me to say it to you, but I am as helpless as you are. The men who hold your Patsy would have no fear of God's wrath. They surround themselves with armour that is ignorance and hatred. And, Mrs Riordan, I have to tell you what you know already, that this community holds powerful feelings against those persuaded by the police to inform against the men of violence. I can only pray, I can only urge you to pray . . ."

She did not know what else she could do. Mrs Riordan walked home.

She was not to know of the friend of the priest, who had grown up with him in a village in Antrim and who now worked high in the civil service administration at Stormont Castle, and who had the ear of the Assistant Under-Secretary, the Security Co-ordinator. She could not know that the priest would telephone his friend.

She could only go home to make her man's tea, to wait, and to pray.

The civil servant, the school friend of the priest, stood beside the Assistant Under Secretary, the Security Co-ordinator. He heard the blustering anger as the Englishman shouted at the phone link to the Chief Constable

". . . There is a rule of law in this province, I don’t care what Five says. I don't give a brass farthing for the realpolitik of Mr Hobbes, or how he justifies his his sordid, dishonourable operations. I hold you accountable for the finding and rescue of that boy . . ."

"Patsy, I'm your friend

The voice in his ear.

"... I want to help you, Patsy

Hunger was in him, and tiredness, and, overwhelming all, fear.

". . . Listen to what I'm saying, Patsy

There was the smell of cooking from downstairs.

". . . You have half an hour , Patsy. You've that time to think on it.

In half an hour I'll give you paper and a pen and you will write out all your contacts and all the money they've given you, and all the operations that you've told them about. If you write everything down then we will take you to a press conference and you will read out the statement, and then you will be free to go . . ."

The breath beside his ear was of stale tobacco.

"... If you keep on with your lies, after half an hour, then you'll be given over to other men. We haven't treated you badly, Patsy, fair's fair, you'd see that. It'll be different if you get handed over to other men. They're animals, Patsy. There'd be cigarettes on you, there'd be electricity. I wouldn't want to reckon what they'd do to you, Patsy.

You've a half an hour to think on it . . ."

"Wait,"

‘’You going to talk? That's being sensible."

"Ask Mossie...?’’

‘’Ask Mossie what?’’

‘’Mossie ‘ll tell you I worked to Mossie. l's no tout, Mossie’ll know I’s no tout.Go to Mossie, ask Mossie, Mossie’ll speak for me...Mossie’s a grand man,he'll tell you I's no tout..’

The voice was murmured close to him. ‘’It was Mossie that named you.’’

A soft footfall slithering away on the carpet. He was left sitting on the chair and he thought his bladder would burst and his bowels would break.

There were a few times when he was told everything, and a few times when he was told nothing. Most often Colonel Johnny was given a partial truth.

He played host in his office to the Chief Superintendent from Division, and to Howard Rennie from Belfast and the Branch. He worked most days hand in glove with the Chief Superintendent from Division, but he had met Rennie only on a previous tour when he had served in the Intelligence section at H.Q. Northern Ireland. He thought that the Chief Superintendent from Division was present for form's sake. It was Rennie that he listened to. He remembered Rennie as a cheerful and no-nonsense man, and he was taken aback by the coldness of the Special Branch officer.