The Journeyman Tailor (27 page)

She walked away from him. She- swayed once and he thought she might just have been half asleep.

They were outside the block building, deafened by the helicopter floating down to land. There were soldiers, with their kit and their weapons kneeling in a line, ready to board. Her voice was drowned but shouting at him.

They had time to kill.

How long to kill?

Six hours, seven.

What should he do?

They were going to be eating, sleeping, drinking East Tyrone, he should learn about the place.

How to do that?

Start where everyone starts, in the Library

Where was she going to be?

She was going back to Belfast, she would rolled him in six hours in the Market Square.

Shouldn't he be with her?

"Mooning around after me like a bloody sheep on heat? No, thank you."

She might have punched him.

"I'll see you," Bren said.

Two roadblocks on his way to work. Because he was Charlie One, Stop and Search, he had been out of the car both times and half stripped down at the side of the road, and both times every piece of kit that he took to work, tins, dust sheets, brushes, ladders had been emptied out of the back of the estate for examination. If there had not been a uniformed police constable at both roadblocks then he might have been roughed over by the soldiers. Bitter, snarling taunts from the soldiers, like they were trying to wind him, like the best they could hope for was that his temper would crack. "Heh, you cripple arsehole, why are you making war on your own people, eh?’’ '" "You must be fucking perverts, torturing some little kiddie for your kicks " Got a tout in your knickers, have you? Giving out the inside story, is he?"

"Steady on, Sar'nt, better be nice to this one, maybe he's one of ours."

"Nah, this one's a kiddie-torturer . . ."It was what they wanted, that he would flail out, and then they could have taken him behind the hedge and given him the real kicking, the hard belting. It was Mossie's secret, and he could hold his temper. The whole of the mountain community had known that the roadblocks ringed the villages. At home, under the false floor of the wardrobe, beside the Building Society account book, was the bleeper. Couldn't have the bleeper strapped between his legs if he were to be stopped and searched by the army and police. It was his secret, one he shared with the bitch.

So he had been late to work. He had been there an hour when there was a message, he was wanted on the telephone.

Siobhan told him there had been three calls, close together, twice she had picked it up, no voice.

He told her he would be late home.

It was the first time he could remember the bitch using her emergency code to call him to a meeting.

The man from Lurgan had the reports. More troops on the mountain than there had been the evening before, more police blocks, derelict buildings had been searched, houses had been raided. The reports came by telephone and by courier. It was confirmation of what he had earlier thought.

The house where they held the Riordan boy was outside the cordon that had been thrown around Altmore. He knew the way the army and the police worked. They would first satisfy themselves that the boy was not inside their present net, then they would expand it. He didn't reckon he had much time left.

If 500 soldiers and police with helicopter support were searching the mountain then it was because of
obligation.
They had lost one of their own. The man from Lurgan was without remorse, without compassion.

Many years before, when Patsy Riordan who was now upstairs and blindfolded and bound had been in nursery .school, the man from Lurgan had been interviewed by a psychiatrist. He had been in custody, charged with murder. The psychiatrist had declared him to be without mental illness, not reliant on alcohol, emotionally stable and of average intelligence. The forensic evidence against him had failed. The man from Lurgan was quite normal, quite loving, in the company of his family and the friends he acknowledged who were outside the Provisionals. He could handle, effortlessly, the irreconcilable compartments of his life ... He would have preferred a confession from the boy. He would have wanted it on tape so that it could be played to the tout's family.

But time was against the man from Lurgan.

On the telephone he named a rendezvous, and he asked for a handgun to be brought to the rendezvous.

"Do you want leave?"

"I do not."

"Do you want transferring out?"

Cathy said, "All I want to know is that you'll stand my corner."

Hobbes thought she was magnificent. He thought she was the sort of young woman who would be found at hunter trials or working her own big estate, or who would very occasionally take time off to be at one of those Sunday drinks in the country where his wife was so happily at home and where he was the abysmal stranger. Darling Charlotte had flatly refused to join him in Belfast, stated right off the bat when his transfer had come through that life was too short to be wasting it in the provinces.

"Damn you for thinking you even need to ask." She grinned. "Their nerve’s going."

"It’s what you'd expect, policemen, civil servants, politicians. I'll stand your corner, always."

He had never understood from where she quarried her strength. She looked to him to be worn out. She obviously needed leave and she probably did need transferring out. Nor could he grasp what seemed to be her compulsion to stay in Northern Ireland. Perhaps it was not his job to understand, just to be thank-full that he had her on his payroll.

He ran six teams in the province, three in Belfast, three for the rest of the territory. She was unique. He would never again be surprised by her, not after the Christmas party the year before last, where all the teams came together. Fancy dress. Cathy, the only woman there, on the table. Cathy dancing a belly dance to the frantic hand-clapping of the men around her. Best Christmas party anyone could remember. She hadn't come last year, hadn't even answered the invitation actually . . .

She wouldn't be transferred out, they'd need a blow torch to move her.

He did not understand what was the compulsion.

"You go careful."

"And you keep those bastards off my back - till I've got Donnelly here, till I've him stitched."

He showed her out. He went back to his desk and sat beside his telephone and waited for the Triple A, anti-aircraft artillery, to begin to detonate around him.

Mrs Riordan stayed at home. Her man was away at the farm. It was too stressful for him to sit with her by the small fire and while away the uncertain hours. No neighbours visited her. If she had gone to the village shop, all the talk would have stopped while she made her purchases and paid for them, not started again until she had gone back out through the shop door. It was no more than she expected, that her neighbours would shun her, abandon her. It would be known across the mountain that her Patsy had been taken for questioning as a tout. So confused . . . She had known he was junior with the Provisionals, but through the pain, the agony of imagining her son, screaming in fear, she could think of nothing that might have told her he lived the double life, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't believe it of him. She had said as much to her man. She had gone so far as to say that young Patsy wasn't up to it, not bright enough, but her man wouldn't meet her eye, couldn't bring himself to speak the boy's name. She was so alone she thought her heart would just break.

It would be the priest who would bring the news of the finding of a body.

There was no note taken, no stenographer was present. The Assistant Under-Secretary was on secondment from London. The Chief Constable had been transferred from a northern English force. They were blow-ins. Competing voices because each man sought to preserve the sanctity of his position.

"It's down to Five. Five thinks it can ride roughshod over us. They're unaccountable. They have no place here ..."

"They demand support and facilities, and they share nothing."

"It's the arrogance of their people that infuriates me, the constant implication that no one else is prepared to prosecute the war with sufficient ruthlessness ..."

"This time they've gone too far."

The Assistant Under-Secretary said, "But your people are involved.

Your people arrested the Riordan boy, directed the finger of suspicion at him ..."

The Chief Constable said, "Not at my rank, not at the level of my Deputy, nor my Assistant Chief Constables - way below that."

"All they talk about, Five, is winning the war, they have no comprehension of winning the peace . . ."

'it's to be stopped. They're to be put out of here. They're a nuisance and an impediment. What I hear, not from them of course, I'm told nothing by that dreadful little Hobbes, what I hear is that all of this fiasco can be laid at the door of just a slip of a girl."

The Assistant Under-Secretary said, "If my Secretary of State back down in front of them, I'll take it to Downing Street . . ."

The Chief Constable said, "You do that. You will have the gratitude of every senior man in my force, just rid us of them.’’

The voice of the Assistant Under-Secretary dropped, "Did I hear you right? Did you say, a girl . . . ?"

Bren sat in the Library on the town's Market Square.

He was on the first floor, in the wide well lit room
that was
the reference section. It was the type of library rarely
found at home.

Probably a bomb had done for its predecessor, this was new and clean and warm. Most of the square outside, round the cenotaph was recently built, as if the old centre of Dungannon had been blown away, a chunk of used history.

He had started with the back files of the local paper. All of life's tapestry spread before him. Road deaths, local thieving, drunk driving bans, industrial accidents, assaults, vandalism. Jobs hopes and jobs despair, fashion shows, advertisements of Christmas menus at the hotels and restaurants, property for sale. Quite like home . . . Bullshit.

". . . he died after being shot by gunmen as he worked in a friend's garage on the outskirts of . . ."

"... the chairman of the District Council went on to express sympathy to the family and relatives of . . ."

"... he called on the R.U.C. to take action following the U.V.F. arson attack . . ."

"... the Presbytery of Tyrone expresses its deep concern at the Campaign of vicious terrorist violence that goes on unabated . . ."

"... the two police officers suffered minor shock when the car in which they were travelling was ..."

Stories tucked away, given no especial prominence, in the local newspaper. He turned to the current rates at the Farmers' Mart, and the organised day tour to show off a new fiat-deck weaner house for pig breeders. He checked the local gaelic football results and the property prices. The killings and the burnings and the ambushes were given no particular priority. All new to him, and all .old and sickening and

ordinary
to the people of the community . . .

He looked up. She was a pretty girl. She carried four volumes of old books. She was sorry she had not been quicker. They would cover the history of Dungannon and the history of Tyrone. She wore bright clothes and careful make-up. He wondered how she closed her mind to killings and burnings and ambushes. She took away the bound files of the newspapers. There were five tables in the room. Three were taken by sixth-formers, quiet and dedicated in their reading.

Dungannon...Dun-genan...Dum was fort on the hill, Genan was the son of Cathbad the druid. Genan, son of Cathbad, had built his strongpoint on the hill that was above Market Square. He gutted the pages Saint Patrick had built a religious house here. Time slipped by Bren. Shane O'Neill, with his seat at Dungannon, launched rebellion against Elizabeth the First of England, defeated in battle, trapped, killed, his head worth £1000. Fine print straining his eyes. Hugh O'Neill, uncrowned king of Ireland and ruling from Dungannon, defeating the English at the battle of the Yellow Ford. Feet shuffling towards him on the parquet floor. Hugh O'Neill destroyed by the army of James the First of England, and the start of the plantation. A chair at his table scraped back. The good lands planted with English and Scots settlers, and the Dungannon Irish driven to the mountain slopes of Altmore, castles built and Dungannon fortified, and seditious speaking a capital offence. The smell was stale rich, of an unwashed body and clothes. The rebellion of Sir Phelim O'Neill, and the English slaughtered in Dungannon and Tullyhogue; a battleground for Cromwell; a campaign land for William of Orange and the deposed James the Second; at the top of the Market Square, below the walls of the castle, had been the high gallows. There was a guttural cough and then the sound of phlegm spat into a handkerchief. He read the name of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly, the dispossessed, the man without teeth whose gums were tough enough to bite through a tin plate who was hunted by the English dragoons, and who . . .

"They's fine books."

Bren looked up. He saw the strong country face and a thin chin not shaven that day. Behind the man was the sign requesting "Silence". The old man wore a rain-stiffened overcoat and under that was a grey jacket and then a shirt without most of the upper buttons and then a high-necked and yellowed vest.

‘’Yes’’

‘’It 's, the book I like the best here."

"Is it?"

It , the book that tells best of the injustices done to us."

"Really?"

The hand, grimed fingernails and bloodless knuckles, snaked out over the table The old man pulled the book to him.

"So. You’s reading of Shane Bearnagh . . . ?"

"I am.’’

‘’Gave the English a great dance. A whole barracks they built for the soldiers hunting him on the mountain. Is you’s English?’’

"Yes."

There was a cackled laugh. "You've not much of a tongue."

Bren felt the colour in his face. The book was pushed back towards him. "Well, . . ."

"So, what brings an Englishman to Dungannon to read the history of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly, rebel and patriot?"