The Journeyman Tailor (33 page)

"History doesn't go away here. Stories lose nothing by the the telling.

Stories are handed down, father to son, family to fanily, close as frogs in a drain here. Listen . . . This crossroads, anyone'll tell you, was where the Auxiliaries shot the Catholic postman in 1922 . . ."

Going by a farmhouse, three hundred yards further.

". . . Two lads, one from the farm, best Sunday clothes, go to check a weapons cache, our boys mashed them, middle 1970s ..."

Going by a copse, and the road falling away towards a cemetery, bright with white headstones and fresh-cut flowers.

". . . That's the wood where the guns were, that's the graveyard where they are, and there's a prison escaper in there with them, shot in the early 1980s ..."

Going away from the graveyard and towards the bridge where the lane joined the main road and where the fast stream tumbled dirty underneath.

"... The Protestants came to burn down the R.C. chapel here, there was a hell of a fight and about a dozen Catholics were beaten to death.

They call it the Battle of Black Bridge. They know it like it was yesterday, but yesterday was 1829 ..."

Going by the shops at the main road junction.

"... There was a U.D.R. man, drove the school bus, shot here a few years back. Nobody remembers when because nobody cares when, but they'll tell you the day and the hour when the postman was shot, and the boys at the cache, and the lad breaking out from the Kesh, and they'll tell you whether it was wet or fine on the day of the Battle of Black Bridge . . ."

"You trying to depress the poor bugger?" A sly grin from the cardboard city man.

Jocko said, cheerful, "It's better he knows, safer."

Bren sat huddled in the back of the car. He wondered where was Cathy. They had been gone more than two hours before Herbie accelerated for home base. He wondered why she had not allowed him to be with her. They drove fast away from the low wetland beside the Lough. And he wondered how it was possible to survive, on the ground, alone, out there, and he thought the mountain of Altmore was worse than what they had shown him.

They returned to Mahon Road.

Cathy hadn't shown.

Bren asked if he could wait for her.

They thought it was where she would come back to. He should please himself.

Wilkins stood.

He had thought the man feeble. He was lashed with the Prime Minister's tongue.

Wilkins was the chastised labrador dog and the beating was savage.

He thought he could accept it, it was why he had been sent. He would never, ever, answer back. It was why he had been sent from Curzon Street, to absorb a verbal thrashing.

". . .1 have to tell you, Wilkins, that I had expected your Director General. On a matter of this importance I had not thought it necessary to stipulate the attendance of the Director General. What I most certainly do not require is a potted and imprecise lecture on the work of the Security Service in Northern Ireland, a golden petal. I am not in need of generalities, but of some very clear specifics. The charge brought to my attention against the Security Service operations in the province is of the gravest type. It smacks to me of a total disregard on the part of senior officials for the close supervision of juniors. The charge laid against you, and one that should have been answered by the Director General, is that a young man was set up, the correct vernacular I believe, so that the Provisional I.R.A. might consider that young person to be an informer. He was not an informer, never had been, and was unlikely to be one in the future. The young man was quite directly pitched into a most hideous danger, from which he unhappily did not survive. It is unspeakably revolting behaviour on the part of your juniors. I am informed, and since it is not denied I have to assume the information is reliable, that a junior officer, a woman, is currentlv careering around Northern Ireland making policy on the hoof, taking it upon herself to decide that a young man's life is not important. Do you begin to see, Wilkins, the colossal arrogance of such a posture? I won't have it, that shocking behaviour, and I am minded to order the disengagement of the Security Service from the province ..."

"I really think . . ." The small voice, Ernest Wilkins?, so mild.

"You'll be given your chance to defend the indefensible when I've finished. You will do me the courtesy, Wilkins., of hearing me out. If the Security Service believes that it is not accountable, as are the police and army, then a very rude shock...’’

A schoolboy going home. He had lost his season ticket in the playground. His headmaster had given him the money to buy the necessary train ticket. The boy shouted through the hatch the name of the station where he lived.

A middle-aged secretary travelling to visit her mother, and requiring a return ticket to come back to the capital in the morning. She was weighed down with the gifts that would cement success on the small family birthday party. She stood behind the schoolboy.

A young account executive employed by a major advertising agency of central London. He was heading north for a client dinner and would make his preliminary presentation in the morning. He held his closed lap-top computer in one hand, his mobile telephone in the other and shouted the news to his wife as to where he was. He waited behind the middle-aged secretary.

A retired army officer who had been given a lift into town in the morning and was now making his own way back to the country. He rolled on his heels. Great willpower to have taken himself away from the company of colleagues and a worthy lunch and an open bar at the Cavalry club. He reckoned that if the schoolboy and the middle aged woman and the yuppie didn't shift themselves, if he didn’t get his ticket and decamp soonest to the urinal, then he'd wet his trouser leg.

A West Indian boy, bright in the plumage of his French- manufactured leisure suit, dropped a beefburger's wrapping into the rubbish bin . . .

An impatient queue. The departure board flickering new departure times.

None of them would see the disintegration of the rubbish bin.

The light flash.

None of them would hear the hammer blow of the explosion.

The thunder roar.

The flash and the roar would be seen, heard, by the masses on the far side of the station and on the middle ground of the concourse, before the pressure blast flattened them against walls and to the ground.

They were the battlefield victims.

They were a schoolboy and a secretary and an account executive and a retired army officer and a young West Indian.

They were the enemy.

They were broken, split, mutilated.

After the light flash and the thunder roar came the monsoon fall of glass shards, and then the pain quiet.

Across the concourse the dust settled on Jon Jo Donnelly's bomb.

". . . the Security Service may feel, because of the very vague nature of its terms of reference in Northern Ireland, that it has been given the nod and the wink to involve itself in areas where the police and army, quite rightly, feel inhibited to tread. If the Security Service feels that then it has placed itself on shifting sands, false foundations. My inclination is that the time has been reached for a sharp lesson to be learned ..."

The Prime Minister broke off. There had been the faintest knock at the door, barely heard by Ernest Wilkins. The aide's shoes slid silently across the carpet. A notelet was passed. There was that shiver of annoyance on the Prime Minister's face, not a man who could take interruption. He read the message and the door closed on the aide.

The colour was gone from him.

His eyes closed momentarily.

He seemed to rock.

Ernest Wilkins waited on him.

"Oh, God ..."

Held his peace.

"... the wicked bastards ..."

Gave him time.

". . . Bomb at Marylebone, at least three dead, many injured, no warning, no chance . . ."

It had been the intention of Ernest Wilkins to let the storm blow itself over before he had launched himself..He would have allowed the Prime Minister's anger to exhaust itself before offering defence of the Service's operations. He took the cue.

His voice was gentle, so reasonable. "That'll be Jon Jo Donnelly, sir.

You'll remember when the name was last talked of, and the suggestion that the man be encouraged to return to his home, because there we would stand a greater chance of trapping him. I said then that I would be working on it, that you should leave it in my hands. There's a young woman in Northern Ireland, I don't think it wise you have her name, one of my best. Donnelly comes from the mountain country of Tyrone.

I tell you, sir, in the greatest confidence, we have an informer inside that community. He is our informer, sir, not the army's and not answerable to the police. At our instigation there have been meetings inside the Provisional I.R.A., East Tyrone Brigade and Army Council level, that should, we hope, earn the recall to home
territory of Donnelly. The informer, I don't think you need that person's identity, will tell us of Donnelly's return and give us the location of his hiding place.

That young woman, sir, so heavily criticised by the ill informed, has taken very grave risks to her personal safety to lake us thus far . . . Oh, yes, what you should be told, our informer, vital to us, was threatened last week with exposure. We felt it necessary, for the greater good of the greater number, to divert the threat . . ."

"I want that bastard, that Donnelly animal, dead . . ."

"Of course, sir. I never doubted that, sir."

He seemed to Ernest Wilkins to be in pain. "God, that bloody awful place . . ." "And much worse there, sir, when it's not left to the professionals."

"Do what's necessary."

"If I might say so, sir, a very wise attitude."

Outside, in the corridor, Ernest Wilkins paused to wipe the first sweat beads off his forehead. He thought he had done well, really rather well.

In the evening, the undertaker brought home the body of Patsy Riordan.

The open coffin was laid on trestles in the front room. The boy's face had been cleaned but a patch of hospital gauze covered that part of his jaw where the killer bullet had exited.

His mother sat stone-faced and dry-eyed beside the head of the coffin.

His father stood near to the door with a filled whiskey glass in his hand. Some neighbours came and took tea or a small glass and muttered embarrassed condolences. They were the few.

Patsy Riordan had been executed for touting.

The few paid their respects, the majority gathered in the village bar.

"Should she have come by now?"

There was the sharp look into Bren's face from the cardboard city man.

"You work with her, I don't."

"Please, I don't need any bloody sarcasm. I'll repeat my question.

Should she have come by now?"

The cardboard city man said, "I'd have expected her an hour or two back, but you can't tell with her."

They played cards, the cardboard city man and Jocko and Herbie. The night duty had taken charge of the computers and the banks of radio equipment. Outside the rain beat the windows and the wind whined in the telephone wires.

Bren waited. And he promised that he would never let Cathy Parker, alone, loose out there again.

They had rowed through the evening. Siobhan had finally followed Mossie into the bedroom to hiss in a spat and hushed voice that it was right for her to go to Mrs Riordan's home.

He had a feeling, small, for what he thought was right; a feeling, sometimes, for what he knew was wrong. He thought it was not right, that it was wrong, that his Siobhan should be away down to the Riordan house.

"You can't, not after what was done."

"It's respect for her."

"You'd be a sham."

"It's respect for the family."

"I'm not going with you, I'd not have the face."

"I was never asking you to be with me."

"I don't know how you'd have the face."

Siobhan said, cunning, "It'd cause more talk if I didn't, and she's a good and decent woman."

It had been the usual way that they argued. They found the corners of the bungalow, away from his mother, out of earshot of the children.

They had been silent through the tea, him asking the children to ask their mother to pass him the brown sauce, her asking his mother to ask him whether he wanted more chips. His mother and the children wouldn't have known that they rowed over whether Siobhan should attend the house of a shot tout.

He sat on the bed. The fight was gone from him. He looked to her for comfort.

"Will us ever be forgiven for what we've done?"

He saw the hard set of her mouth, it was a new mouth for her to wear.

"Get paid, don't we?"

He repeated what she'd said, the bitterness in his voice. "Get paid, don't we?"

"You'll wait outside, they'd not be expecting the likes of you, there'll be none like you there . . . and we'll go after and take a drink."

It was accepted. He could never fight her and win. The only time that she had not won her way was when they had returned from Birmingham to his mother's bungalow. Only the once. Every other time they fought, she won. They came out of the bedroom and he let her slip her arm round his waist, like it was a sign to the children and to his mother that the hidden problem was solved. If it had been he that was shot, if it had been Mossie Nugent killed for touting, then he reckoned that Mrs Riordan would have called for her respects. The lie burdened him, he thought the weight of the lie grew each day he woke.

He gave her time to change, the dress she wore often for Sunday Mass. He helped his mother with the washing of the plates and pans, and then he romped and larked with the kids and built bricks for Mary.

Mossie drove to the Riordan house.

If the boy had been shot by the army, if he had died in the ferrying of a bomb, then the lane in front of the house would have been filled with cars. The cars would have stretched a quarter of a mile in front of the house. He had been executed by his own. There were six cars parked outside the Riordan house. If it had been the army that had done him, or his own bomb, if he had been the volunteer 'tragically killed on active service', then the neighbours would have flown black flags from their upper windows. The neighbours showed what they thought, front-room curtains open, lights blazing, televisions blaring. He parked away from the house. He let Siobhan walk a hundred yards. He sat alone in the car and he smoked a cigarette.