The Journeyman Tailor (30 page)

He saw the boots and the bright-coloured stockings and the corduroys and the waterproof coats. He saw men and women. He saw stout walking sticks. He saw the leashed dogs. Thank the Lord. He pushed the rifle sideways under the groundsheet to hide it.

"God Almighty, look at this . . . It's not allowed, is it, the ranger would throw a fit . . . get one in and we'll have a whole camp of these people . . . next thing they'll be lighting fires, short cut to mega-problems . . . Who the hell are you? What the hell do you think you're doing here?"

His mind raced. His tongue seemed to flap and his lips moved, and there was no voice. He had the idiot smile on his face. To speak was to give himself away. His arms moved with his mouth, as if that were his communication. To show fear would be a catastrophe, to show aggression was disaster. He was thinking well. Irish accent, frightened, aggressive, a hide deep in forest ... He gave the whole party the mad grin, and he said nothing. There were seven of them.

One of the women spoke as if he could not hear her, as if he were an imbecile.

"It's really just scandalous, these people should be in care. They've closed down all the sort of places where these people should be.

They're just put out on the streets to fend for themselves. It's criminal.

We've probably frightened the poor man half out of his wits.

Sometimes I look at the new face of Britain and I'm ashamed."

They made a collection. There were 50 pence pieces and pound coins, and the woman gave them to Jon Jo, and he cupped his hands together to receive them from the woman.

"But you've no right to be here." She spoke slowly and loudly. "We don't expect to find you here again."

They moved away. They left him shivering, huddled under the groundsheet.

They met in a house that was on the plateau of the mountain, on the road to Pomeroy. Only Nugent and the O.C., in the back bedroom upstairs. The warmth of the O.C. gushed over Mossie. Not a word of what had happened in the barn. That was past history, forgotten by the O.C.

What Mossie noticed was the number of times that the O.C. touched him. They drank a pot of tea together. They talked of a U.D.R. man who drove a school bus by day, and the new route he had been given.

They spoke of a policeman said to be Catholic who had joined the Special Branch unit at Dungannon. They looked, on a map, at what seemed to be a regular helicopter landing zone where troops were dropped off or collected after forty- eight-hour patrols. Patsy never mentioned, and his body cold on the side of a lane in South Armagh.

The man from Lurgan never mentioned, and gone home to his own town.

"We have to show them we's alive," the O.C. said. "We have to hurt them so's they know they's won nothing ..."

Mossie breathed deep. "We need Jon Jo back."

He had interrupted the O.C. "What's that?"

"Jon Jo was the best that ever was on Altmore. The way they'll know that they've won nothing is if Jon Jo's here to hit them."

The O.C. stared at the drawn curtain. "He was great, the best there's been . . . remember when he took the police in the Market Square? . . . remember when he was on the big machine gun, 12.7

calibre, Russian job, and he took the helicopter?"

And Mossie hadn't thought it would be so easy. "It's not the big scene down in Armagh now, they're just playing at it Belfast's all talk.

Derry's gone, lost the soul. East Tyrone Brigade, no equal, but with Jon Jo back ..."

"How does I do that?"

"You'd be top cat, but you'd have Jon Jo for the hitting . . . You takes yourself down to Dublin, and you tells them that's what you want. You

tells
them."

"He's identified, what they did to his house shows . . ."

"Jon Jo knows the mountain better than any."

"Worth thinking on . . ."

"Worth acting on," Mossie said, and he squeezed the O.C.'s hand in friendship.

It wasn't quietly smart like Cathy's; it wasn't where Hobbes lived, but Bren thought it was fine.

It was one bedroom and a dining room/living room with kitchen off, a bathroom, and use of a lawn outside. There was an older woman who showed him round the flat, then made him count each last plate, glass, saucepan, and fork and then sign the inventory. When she'd gone, when he had the place to himself, he sat in the easy chair and the pleasure beamed off him. Gone from Malone Road without a backward glance, without even checking to see if the cardboard city man was in his room.

Flat 3, Creagh House, 43/49 Amsterdam Gardens, Lisburn, Co. Down .

. . home, with an easy chair. A place of his own. Up from the chair.

Into the kitchen to check again all that was his in the cupboards. He would be home for two years. Back into the bedroom to unpack his cases, folding his shirts again and laying them neatly into drawers, hanging his two suits in the wardrobe and his slacks and his blazer, lopping his ties onto the hooks. The central heating

. ..... He was warm. He felt comfortable. He reached for the remote control beside the television, and flicked through the channels.

Bren saw the picture. It was a telephoto of a winding lane.

". . . believed to be that of Patrick Riordan, aged eighteen, from the Dungannon area, reported taken from his home three days ago. A police spokesman said within the last hour it would be at least another day before the ground round the body was declared safe of booby traps and the body could be recovered ..."

Bren was slumped in the easy chair. He could hear the righteous ring of his own voice. "... luck is going to run out on you . . . You're running out of friends, Cathy . . ." It wasn't a day trip, it was two bloody years.

How much luck would he need for two bloody years?

He snapped the television off.

He locked the front door behind him and went to his car to drive to the shopping centre to buy food and milk and bright indoor plants for his home.

"What I am telling you is that they have to be curbed ..."

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was the last viceroy of the whittled empire. He rejoiced in his tiny fiefdom. There were Cabinet colleagues who had turned down the position, others who had previously gone to Belfast sulking and in poor grace. But he loved it, and his wife adored it. They were the great fishes in the small pond. He was a small man and to emphasise his point, he strode up and down the Home Secretary's carpet, jabbing his finger like a hell-fire preacher.

"... I will not permit the Security Service to run riot across the Province ..."

The Home Secretary scratched at a trimmed moustache. "I hope you will allow me, as an old friend, to say that your reaction may be slightly excessive."

"A young man died. He was as good as murdered by Five. That is not tolerable."

"We should all be pulling in the same direction, even if different arms by their very natures, by their very specialisations, are using different methods."

Nominally the Home Secretary was considered responsible for the Security Service. The early meetings, when he had first taken the appointment, were etched on his experience. Two men,Director General and Deputy Director General, sitting in his office, drinking his sherry, letting him know that they had forty- two years of service and wisdom between them, making it so clear that in the two or three years he might spend as Home Secretary before electoral defeat or a ministerial reshuffle he would not be welcome at the workface. Done with great politeness, quiet chill, the slamming of the door on his foot.

He hadn't made a fuss there and then and oddly enough he had found as the months went by that, well, the inner workings were indeed perhaps rather less interesting, less of an urgent anxiety than a good deal else crossing his desk.

"I want them out, gone."

"I understand your feelings, but I doubt that's possible."

"I'll go to the Prime Minister over it."

"I'm not sure that's wise."

"I will not allow a young woman to run round Northern Ireland, in the name of this Government, deciding who lives, who dies . . ."

"I don't think ..."

"You never have done ... I will take your refusal to the Prime Minister.

I'll have Five out by the end of the year, and that young woman out by the end of the week."

"I'm sorry you feel . . ."

"I'll fight you and I'll win," the Secretary of State said.

Young Kevin had changed out of his school uniform and into his farm clothes.

It was dark when he returned to the farmhouse, the clear beam of the torch guiding him.

"They’s fine, Ma, they's finding good grass at the top."

She thought him a great boy. She had been too busy that day to hike up to the Mahoneys' fields to check the beef stock. Attracta Donnelly had shopped, mended a skirt torn on barbed wire when she had tried to repair a length of broken fencing, and she had scrubbed through her kitchen. He was a great boy to go away up the mountain slope to the field where the bullocks were. He was a boy that Jon Jo would have been proud of, Each day, just as the satisfaction rested on her, she thought of Jon Jo, and she was flattened.

He had made his cryptic calls, he was expected. He drove fast on the winding lanes as he headed for the open road that would take him across the border and into the south. He would still be the O.C., he believed that, otherwise he would not have countenanced it. He had told Mossie Nugent that the meeting was set up. As he drove into the night he felt the warm glow inside him ... if Jon Jo Donnelly were back, the mountain would burn bright again.

Wilkins had been tidying away the papers on his desk for the night when the call came for him. His annoyance cut him, not because of the call that would delay his journey home but because the matter of the day was unresolved. It would have to be a direct order, the way Penn was playing it from Nairobi. The time for suggestion and request was gone. The man was stalling. Another day gone and the decision had been further postponed. The decision was whether to demand the immediate return of Penn from Kenya, and to further demand his prompt transfer to Belfast . . it would be a shame for young Brennard.

The call had come from the Director General's outer office, could Mr Wilkins be so kind as to spare five minutes?

His own area was deserted. Carthew already gone, and Foster. He had missed Bill that day, but then Bill was becoming erratic in his attendance, and Charles was sick, and Archie had been telling anybody who cared to listen since the early morning that he had tickets for the National Theatre and had needed to leave before the tea trolley had reached their end of the corridor. Most evenings after seven, when he cleared his desk, locked all the papers away in his safe, at least Brennard would still have been working. A good young man that.

Hobbes was over the following week and he made a note to enquire how Brennard was making out over there. Archie had hold of some quite extraordinary story of how Brennard had run P.T.I. Terry off his legs and had actually shot at Jocelyn and winged his combat jacket.

That would let some of the hot air out of the pair of them...He climbed the darkened staircase to the top floor.

The Director General painted a rapid picture. Five was at war. The R.U.C. at Chief Constable level were clamouring for blood. The civil service at Assistant Under-Secretary rank were demanding a head. And the Secretary ol
State seemed
to be blundering round Whitehall, boring little man, preaching morality. Five was back against the wall.

"These bloody people, Ernest, they're going in the Prime Minister.

What defence do we lay out?"

Wilkins stood in front of the Director General's desk, hands clasped in front of his stomach. "The young people I send over to Northern Ireland, and I include Hobbes, are all committed completely to the work there. Those young people, sir, are the finest that the Service can offer. Sometimes I feel humble, privileged, to know them ..."

"Ernest, I know that speech. Can we come very quickly to the point?"

It was his usual stance. His wife had told him, not once but frequently, not to look like a waiter attending on an order. "I just want to point out, sir, that they are the very front line. We must trust them to interpret the evidence as they on the ground see it. They are forced to make exceptionally finely calculated judgments. These involve their own lives as well as other people's ..."

"Thank you, but I can do that one, almost word for word. I want you to come clean about this killing of an apparently innocent young man.

Tell me the truth."

So Wilkins told him as much as he knew and what was at stake.

"You'll have to convince the Prime Minister . . ."

"Not a man of fibre, sadly."

"You had better stand by to do that. I like the bit about only being able to supervise the sewer cleaners if you're prepared to climb down into the tunnels yourself. Keep the sermonising to a minimum And the young woman, can you save her?"

Wilkins shook his head. "Save Cathy Parker? I don't know, sir, and I won't know until I have tried. I can only do mv best.’’

Jon Jo sat in the pub on the Harrow Road and was passed the sealed envelope.

He read the message of approval.

He had moved his hide in the morning and reset his groundsheet in deeper undergrowth further from the buried dustbin. He had stayed in the hide through the day and only emerged from the forest as night had fallen. In the pub he could smell himself, the dank wetness of his clothes and the dirt of his body. The courier was going back on the last flight. Donnelly told the girl, perhaps eighteen years old, that two safe houses were now denied him. The girl was from County Armagh and there was the softness of her accent in his ear, and there was the longing in him for his home. When she had gone, hurrying for Heathrow, he tore the message of approval into small pieces and flaked them into the ash tray and took them to the pub's open fire to burn them. She would carry back with her a sealed envelope. He had been a long time writing the letter it contained.

He had approval to place a bomb in a mainline railway station.

The smells merged over Bren. There was the smell of the polished flooring and of the newly painted walls and of the webbing of the men who passed him in the corridor and the damp of their uniforms and of baked beans heated near to him, and always the tang of cigarettes.