The Journeyman Tailor (36 page)

The trail of his trade was behind him, scattered when he ha d

replaced the telephone at the station call box. Joy enough for him to have shouted . . . Going back to Altmore . . .

She sat primly at the edge of her seat. She was shown the photograph, as she had been shown it by the constable when he had called. She confirmed that the photograph and her lodger were the same. It was easier than she had thought it would be. She wore a close-knit woollen cardigan and she had buttoned it to her throat so that there would be no sign to the detectives who questioned her of the damp stain of the tears that had been wept against her shoulder. She repeated what he had told her, that he would go to London, fly to Holland or Germany, look for work. They told her his name, and they told her what he had done. He had been a fine man to her, and he could have killed her, and she tried to sweep from her mind the image of a smiling schoolboy as photographed in the first edition of the afternoon newspaper . . . It was like it had been yesterday, the clear and recent memory to her , but it had been five weeks before, and he had been in the bathroom and she had come to the room to bring clean bedding and the photographs had been on the table beside the bed. A handsome woman and a small boy.

The boy in the photograph Was younger than the boy in the newspaper, and there was the stretch of a mountainscape behind the woman and the boy. She kept her question until the end, until the detectives were about to leave.

"Such a good and decent man, so helpful to me, and so cheerful How could he hate so much?"

And no answer given her.

‘’She should go home," Bren said.

‘’That’s out of the question."

‘’She’s exhausted. She was exhausted before this happened. She made a mistake."

‘’There’s a job to finish," Hobbes said.

"She's not in a fit state. She was damn near killed."

‘’Brennard, when I need your advice running my department I'll seek it out. And it might help you to know that London's latest has Jon Jo on the move."

"There's a whole bloody army here, it doesn't have to be her . . ."

The flare of anger from Hobbes. "You don't understand anything, do you? We did the work - not the army, not the Branch, not E4 - and we'll finish it. Have you got me?"

Bren played the prime card. "She has to go home, she's compromised."

Hobbes put his hand on Bren's shoulder, like a father. He said calmly, "It's me that has to decide who's compromised. It's my decision as to when the risk becomes intolerable. I can't change the jockey in mid-race. Just be thankful the big decisions aren't yours."

They were in the corridor and away from the door to her room. They were beyond earshot. She came out of the door, past the Military Police guard. There were two nurses with her and the doctor. Bren saw it: the nurse touched her elbow as if to support her and the help was shrugged off. Vintage Parker. She was in the same clothes they had found her in on the road under Altmore mountain. She walked stiffly. Hobbes went to her, Bren hung back. Hobbes kissed her lightly on the cheek, as if he were a distant relation. She didn't say goodbye to the doctor, she didn't offer her thanks to the nurses. Hobbes led, Bren followed. She slumped awkwardly between them towards the front door of the building. She was paler than usual and the colouring round her eve was brightening.

He saw the mud on her jeans and the dirt on her T-shirt and the rips in her anorak. They walked outside. In the late afternoon light they stood in the car park and she asked about her car and was told it had been recovered during the night, that the radio had been destroyed by the fire, no problem. Hobbes told her that London believed that Donnelly was on his way back. Bren didn’t see any pleasure on her face, only the tiredness and the pallor and the colour ol the bruising. Hobbes told Bren to drive Cathy home and went his way.

He took her back to her flat,

He stood at the open door.

She walked across her living room to her bedroom.

He wondered if she had known, while she slept through the night and the morning, that he had held her hand. He could feel still the gentleness of her sleeping hand.

"Pick me up in the morning," she said, and the bedroom door closed behind-her.

16

It was the story that the small boy loved best, the story that had no ending."... When he had jumped the gorge, when he had escaped from the dragoons, Shane Bearnagh had to make the long way round the mountain of Altmore to avoid the troopers. They were furious at their failure to trap him, and they burned fodder barns and slashed the legs of the few cattle that the Catholic people had. More troops were sent for, from Armagh and from Omagh, and they searched all over the mountain. But the great mountain and the wild land behind, on either side of the road to Pomeroy, held its secret. It was no longer safe for a large group of men to be with him. Some deserted, some he asked to leave because he could not feed them."Hard times for Shane and his wife and his little boy. It was more difficult for him to bring them food, more dangerous for him to light fires to cook what little he had.

It was impossible now for him to stop the coaches that came up the mountain from Dungannon on the long road to Pomeroy and Omagh and then to Deny, because all the coaches were escorted by the dragoons. They lived mainly from eating wild berries, it was a great treat for him to find a stray sheep and kill it and cook. His beard grew, he was the wild man of the mountain. His wife and his little boy never complained of their life, and on the times when Shane would try to persuade her to go back down the mountain to her family, his wife would refuse. The poor people from the town would sometimes come up the mountain with food and fresh clothes for his wife and his boy, but they took great risk when they did so. If they were caught then their homes were burned and men would be thrown into the gaol in Armagh."The reward for information leading to Shane's capture was increased, but the people stayed loyal to him because they believed he was the last man in all Ireland to win the fight against the English who they hated. But the English were patient, they waited for a traitor.

There were some down below the summit who knew which caves were used by Shane Bearnagh, under which rock crags he sheltered with his wife and his little boy. The English waited . . .

"There were two journeymen tailors. They travelled the road from Dublin to Deny. They could repair the dresses of the fine ladi es in their mansions, they could make grand suits for the English gentlemen.

They were not from Altmore ... It was winter, there was snow on the mountain. There were no berries to be eaten. There was no stray sheep to be killed because all had been taken down to the farms on the lower ground. Shane was starving. He had left his wife who was thin to the bone, and his little boy who cried at night from hunger. He took the great risk of coming to the road to find food for them. The journeymen tailors had horses and a donkey that they led behind them and that carried the cloths from which they made the suits and dresses, and their needles and their threads. They gave him food, but there was evil in their hearts. They gave him a small amount to eat and they fed him sweet words. They said they would be back in an hour with more, enough for him to take to his wife and to his boy. There was greed in their hearts. They thought nothing of the patriot. They thought only of the gold and silver pieces they would earn from the English.

"They came to a check point, where the dragoons searched all travel-lers. God rot them . . . They told the dragoons where they had seen Shane, and they said they had told him they would be back within the hour. Evil men, the lowest of the low, traitors . . . The dragoons found Shane and they rode their horses off the road to chase him and ride him down. At first he could hold them off. He had the long-barrelled musket with which he was a fine shot. He would stop and fire, and run, and load again, and fire, and run again. They were frightened, the English dragoons, they had no cause to die for, they were far from their own homes. But to keep them back he must shoot, and each time he fired on them so the small pouch where he kept his musket balls was lighter.

".All through the afternoon they chased him. The exhaustion grew in him. He was without food, without water, and running from men on horseback. He fired his last shot, and he ran. Each time he fired they came closer to him. He had no more shot for his musket. . . Shane tore the buttons from his coat. Now, he rammed the buttons down the barrel of the musket. They were just buttons that he fired at them, but still they feared him, they would not dare to approach him. He fired the last button from his coat. He stood on a high boulder. He was alone on his mountain. They circled him. The dragoons were
all
around him. He could see the road far off, and on the rood were the journeymen tailors who waited for their reward, he could no longer defend himself. . ."

"Did they kill him, Ma? Did the bastard English kill the patriot?"

"It's time for your light to be off if you're to be good for school in the morning."

Ronnie, just about to go in, heard the voices, checked, dropped his hand from the door, and listened.

Charles would do the watch duty the first night, and Bill would do the second, and then Archie would do the third, then Charles again . . .

Charles protesting: "We're throwing a thrash for the eldest, her birthday."

Bill complaining: "There's a college concert and Harry's on the cello."

Archie arguing: "Long-standing dinner engagement, been fixed for ages."

He heard Ernest Wilkins, the man who was walked over, the man whose temper was always secured.

"I don't think in his present mood, with the importance of the operation currently being launched by the Service, that your Director General would take kindly to backsliding, but you are at liberty to try him . . . Good, excellent. We'll be taking over the E.O. room in an hour when the domestics have scrubbed it through."

Jorelyn heard, and looked out of his office to check it, Ernest Wilkins striding down the corridor and whistling the theme to

'Carousel’, and there were two ladies with mops and buckets and clean sheets and laundered pillows working over the Emergency Operations room, and there was a Curzon Street engineer carrying into the E.O.

room enough radio equipment to fit out a frigate, and an apprentice behind him festooned with telephone handsets and cable.

It would have been four years, maybe longer, since Emergency Operations had been manned round the clock.

"What I heard," said Jocelyn to Ronnie, "it's Ernest's finest hour. He's enmeshed the P.M. He's got Charles and Bill and Archie sleeping on the job ..."

"When did they not?"

"No bloody joke . . . Poor old Mr Donnelly, I'd say he's a bad bet for insurance."

They went down the corridor. They looked into the E.O. room where the engineers tested the radio and confirmed the phone lines. There was a full-face picture of Jon Jo Donnelly, life-size, on the wall above one of the two iron-framed beds, and on the pillow of that bed was a pair of folded, ironed, pyjamas.

On the upper deck of the big ferry boat Jon Jo leaned on the rail. The salt was in his lungs, the wind cleaned his throat, the air scoured his cheeks. Winter stars above him, and the swell of the waters of the Biscay below him. He felt freedom, and the love that a man has for the going home from work hard done.

The dawn had not yet given way to day when death came again to the mountain.

He was ambushed halfway between Donaghmore village and the start of the mountain climb. Death was carried by a burst from a Sterling sub-machine gun and two aimed rounds from an F.N. rifle.

The milk cart was slewed across the road. The driver's window was smashed. A body was slumped over the steering wheel. Blood seeped in the cab. A foot was rooted down onto the accelerator pedal and the drive wheels spun wildly in the rain ditch.

A car, stolen by Protestant para-military sympathisers, would later be found, burned through, at a picnic site on Lough Neagh, and later still a statement would be issued in the name of the

U.V.F. claiming that the dead man had been a known Republican activist.

Dead in the cab of his milk cart was the man who believed that he had no living enemy.

The widow of Pius Blaney stumbled, dazed, around her kitchen to make tea for the priest. She urged him to let it be k nown that she wished for no retaliation, that Pius, the softest-hearted man you could find in all Ireland, he would have wished for no retaliation.

The corpse in the mortuary not yet cold, a post mortem examination of gouged bullet tracks not yet completed

The O.C. met Mossie Nugent.

The urgency spilling in him, the eyes gleaming. "I want a target."

Mossie stalling. "Would you not do better to wait for Jon Jo, not go rushing?"

"I want a target and quick."

"I'll think on it."

"You'll do more ..."

"It takes setting up . . ."

They sat in the O.C.'s car. The O.C. had interrupted him on his way to work. The fingers below the plaster on his wrist were swollen sore, resting on the wheel.

"You got a problem, Mossie?"

"I got no problem."

"Why the bloody cold water, why the bloody ice"

"I was just saying . . ."

"Why d'you kill what I want, Mossie?"

The eyes searched him. Same eyes, same strip search, as in the
barn.

" There's no call for you's and me to quarrel, Mossie . . . We wait a few days and the mountain will say the Organisation is soft. You let those Prod feckers kill Pius Blaney on the mountain without an immediate response we can pack the whole war in. I don't need a Jon Jo back to tell me that. Give me a target, Mossie, and quick."

Mossie said, "There's a U.D.R. bastard, drives the bus from Stewartstown. He carries a gun, but he'd never reach it . . ." "Too small.

For Pius Blaney, people'd want something better." "There's a place

where they've put patrols down from a Puma. The helicopter's used the same pad two limes in the last month. Could stake it . . ."