The Journeyman Tailor (37 page)

"Needs six men, needs a heavy-calibre, you could be waiting for ever. I want now."

"There's a Catholic in the Special Branch in Dungannon. He's Browne ..." "Do us great."

He gave an address. He listed two sets of car registration plates.

Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne. He gave the name and the address and the make of the car. "How'd you do it?" "What's it to you, Mossie?"

The eyes cut him. Mossie was getting out of the car. "Just asking . . .

just talking." Mossie gave his O.C. the full smirk. "And I wouldn't be wanting to see another disaster like there was with that wee woman."

He was the master of the Task Co-ordinating Group meeting. They had no alternative, Hobbes was in the chair. The major and the Assistant Chief Constable and the colonel and Rennie of the Branch and the Assistant Under-Secretary, they could only listen.

"... This is a Five operation which we will direct. When we require help we will request it. Any shortfall in co-operation will be reported immediately to London and then to the Prime Minister's office. We believe that Jon Jo Donnelly has already left mainland Britain. In our view, he will return quite shortly to his home territory, to Altmore mountain. From midnight an area with a radius of five miles from his home there will be declared Tactical Out of Bounds. There will be no military or police movement inside the area without my express permission. Overall direction of the operation against Donnelly will be handled from Curzon Street. I will have my people on the mountain and they will have discreet
support.
They will wait
for
Donnelly, and when the time

comes a hit force will be moved in. This is the way it will In Questions . . . ?"

Bren, sitting behind Hobbes, watched the face. And mid stares, and no questions. Not finished, not quite, binding the last blood.

". . . In London, they want Jon Jo Donnelly's head and I aim to give it them."

He shuffled his papers together. Bren saw the smirk on his face.

And he saw the dry smile of the major who would provide the back-up, and the dented pride of the Assistant Chief Constable, and the suppressed fury of the colonel, and the flustration of the Assistant Under-Secretary who already knew that his master had been overruled. Rennie sucked at his pipe, he shut the briefcase, and leaned towards Hobbes, out of earshot ol the others

"You're an arsehole, Hobbes, and sending her back onto Altmore makes you simply a bigger arschole

He had been on the upper deck all through the night. He felt that the sea air had purged the memories, the fear of mainland Britain.

He had used one of the British passports to go through the port immigration. He left the ferry boat behind him, whre it dwarfed the fishing fleet that was clustered under the shelter of the harbour wall. Donnelly took the bus from Santander to the airport at Bilbao. He felt freedom within his grasp, and his Attracta and his Kevin, and he felt the joy grow in him that a man has in the going home from work hard done.

They stood by the cars.

Hobbes said, "Just get over to her, and the both of you start
moving."

"She told me to pick her up this morning, I think she should be allowed to rest . . ."

When she needs a nanny then I'm sure she'll ask for one. In the meantime look at yourself, get a bit of drive into your system."

Hobbes walked away from him. Bren went to his own car. The radio came on as he switched the ignition. A milk delivery driver, Catholic, shot dead by gunmen, Protestants . . . Christ, what a bloody awful war to be a part of . . . All the funerals going through his mind that were daily catalogued on the local television. A dog handler, and his Alsatian trotting behind the hearse with the police coat on its spine. A soldier, the union flag and his beret on the coffin carried by the bearer party from his platoon. The little escort behind Patsy Riordan's family, furtive as if they hoped their presence didn't give offence to those who had taken his life. A taxi driver in Belfast, his cortege made up of the cabs of his fellow Protestant workers. An English scaffolding erector, murdered for working at the new police station in Strabane, and his wife on sedation and eight months pregnant and supported by family who wouldn't have known where Strabane was . . . The war he was a part of.

Some had been warned that they were targets, most knew only generally that they were at risk.

The detective sergeant sat with the other plain-clothes police. He was opposite the Press seats, close to the witness box, side on to the dock, half facing the Lord Chief Justice, and he was already nodding.

Crumlin Road, No. 1 Court, always had the central heating turned up as if the Lord Chief Justice had been imported from the Caribbean, not Carrickfergus. He was there to see Brady go down, and preferably for a tenner. Some of those that he saw, between the moments that his head dropped, would have been warned of specific danger, more would just have accepted the general risk to their lives. Judges were shot by the P.I.R.A., defence lawyers were shot by the Protestants, the prison officers guarding the dock were detested equally ... He was the man who had turned his back on his history, his family. He worked for Protestants. His wife of three years, Catholic upbringing, lived wiih their eight-month-old baby amongst Protestant neighbours.

Detective Sergeant Browne wore his pistol under his coat. Policemen were allowed to carry their guns into court.

He dozed because he had not slept, the baby's teeth, and close lto him was the exhibits bench for the case against Brady, and laid on the bench were a Kalashnikov rifle, and a Remington rifle, and a Luger pistol, and their ammunition, all wrapped in plastic bags, killing weapons.

He had heard on his car radio of the murder of Pius Blaney, the milk-cart driver. There would be reprisal, Detective Sergeant Browne knew it. It was inevitable.

He drove via the Department of the Environment office. The message was on the answer phone. He transcribed it and then rang Cathy. He spoke to her recording machine which didn't answer him back, heard him out.

Bren walked into the city centre, through the security gates and down Royal Avenue, and into a florist's and chose four dozen amber and gold chrysanthemums.

He drove out to her flat. The radio said Pius Blaney was sixty- four years old, a man who had publicly and all his life rejected violence, who was respected by Catholic and Protestant customers alike. He caught himself thinking, well, they would say that, wouldn't they, and resolved to ask Colonel Johnny next time he saw him what was the truth about Pius Blaney. And would someone In- saying the same thing one day about Jon Jo Donnelly, farmer, respected by all his neighbours, devoted family man, violence an anathema to him . . . Mr Mossie Nugent, painter/decorator, a pillar of the community, no known association . . .

‘’Responsibility for the murder of Mr Blaney has been claimed by...’’

Bren snapped off the radio. Shut out the madness that was the real world. Wasn’t ready for this real a world. Hadn't learned the code yet.

Mr Gary Brennard had no known association Mr Gary Brennard, Bren to his intimates, needed a known association. Needed it one or two hundred light years from Belfast, for starters.

He took the stairs three at a time, carrying the flowers and wondering if she'd accept them.

Bren rang the bell He waited. He rang the bell again. A man in a

pinstripe and with an attache case came out of a flat on the same landing and stared at Bren, seemed to quiz him. He might have been a Five man or a 14th Intelligence man or a Special Military Intelligence Unit man. On the other hand, he might have been an accountant, a sales rep, a bank deputy manager, and he might have rejected violence all his life . . . There had to be another life, another world. Did accountants, sales reps, bank deputy managers believe there was hope for this world? The man smiled at him, and went down the stairs. He kept his finger on the bell.

Just reflex, he tried the handle. The door opened for him.

He called her name. On the floor were her anorak and her shoes and her jeans and her sweater, a not very straight path to her bedroom.

He crossed the room.

Bren pushed the bedroom door.

The curtain was not drawn, the curtain had been left open. The light flooded the room.

She lay on the bed.

She held her pillow against her. Her eyes were open. She stared at the pillow and the wall ahead of her. The bedclothes were rucked half over her body.

Bren knelt beside the bed. He put her open hand on the flowers and closed her fingers on the stems. The flowers shared the pillow with her.

He took her other hand from the pillow and he held it between his own.

He saw the blood red of her eyes and the rose pink of her face. He thought that if she had slept then she had cried herself to sleep. Beside her hand, beside the flowers, beside the pillow, was the low table on which was the light and a handwritten letter and her pistol. A firm feminine hand, he thought it would be a letter from her mother, he thought it would be everything safe like his own mother's letters would be, everything that a mother scared half out of her wits would write to her child who was covert in Northern Ireland. He moved the pistol to the floor, so she could see the flowers, not the pistol.

"You're a bastard . . ." she said, "for coming here, finding me."

There was no strength in her hand. He saw the bloodshot eyes and the bruising. He saw the scars on her temple. Bren put his arm gently under her neck and he lifted her head and shoulders and he held her against him. He tried to kiss, softly, the bruising and the scraped scars.

Her head was against his chest.

A small voice. "I hadn't been so frightened, not since I was a child.

The cat brought a rabbit into the kitchen. The rabbit was alive. The cat held the rabbit by the throat. What frightened me was the fear in the rabbit's face, it was a big animal, nearly as big as our cat, but it was so frightened that it just let itself be killed by the cat ..."

His fingers were in the short cut of her hair. He kissed her mouth, where the hand had punched the blood from her lip.

". . . It was only when I thought I was going to die that I fought them. I'd given up, and I don't know where it came from. It was the last chance I had. It's all about fear . . . I shouldn't have been alone, it was my fault. It wasn't your fault . . . Cathy Parker, not a nerve in her body, she'll no anywhere, not a nerve in her bloody body. I'm the living, walking, talking bloody legend. It's what I live with, that they'll get to find that Cathy Parker is just scared stiff. I went there for myself. It was only bullshit, it was to show myself that I could take it, cope with being so bloody scared that I could shit myself. Fear of failure, that's what drives you on. You have to keep proving it, testing it, that you're not scared. You said I'd make a mistake. I did, bloody fool, I showed them my voice. I was just so tired . . . and the bloody legend'll go on . .

."

He held her close against him. He kissed her cheek where the fist that had worn a signet ring had belted her.

Do you understand?"

" There has to be hope."

" They shouldn't know."

Bren said, "There has to be light for us."

"I couldn't survive it, not if they knew the legend was a bloody
s
ham."

"I want a future for us."

"You wouldn't tell them, Hobbes and Colonel Johnny and the boys?"

He' thought of them. Hobbes, who supplied the tourniquet of pressure, and who talked of Five's show, and who had only shaken her hand and kissed her cheek without emotion. Colonel Johnny, sad and caring and loving her as an uncle would a favourite niece. The boys, gruffly worshipping her and driving up the mountain in controlled silence and not knowing whether they were heading straight for a free-fire ambush situation, the cardboard city man and Jocko and Herbie.

"Not theirs, it's our business."

There was at her broken mouth something that he had not seen before. It was the trace of shyness. Her eyes, red, pouched, squeezed between bright bruising, dropped. She kissed him back.

Bren said, "If there is no hope and no light and no future then there is no point, no bloody point at all, in us being here ..."

She kissed the words away from him. Then she pushed him gently back. She threaded the coat from his shoulders, and pulled the sweater over his head. She unbuttoned his shirt, pushed it off his arms. She loosed his belt, she reached to prise away his shoes and his socks. She reached up to the curtains and pulled them closed, and stiffly drew off her T-shirt. She took the flowers in her arms and lay down with them.

He took off his trousers and his shorts. She reached up a hand to him.

She pulled him down onto her. There was the wet cold of the stems on the sheet. Her shoulder crushed the chrysanthemum blooms, amber and gold. The petals merged in her hair, gold and red. The nakedness of her against him.

"I love you, Cathy Parker ..."

Her legs close around his, pinioning him. Her mouth brushing his, welcoming him.

Later, she made him tea. Later, she went to the living room, and as he lay on his back he heard his message to her, that Song Bird wanted a meeting. Later, she took the battered flowers and put them in a water jug and carried them back to beside her mattress. Later, when she was dressed, he heard the sounds, metal on metal, sis she loaded the magazine into her pistol. Later, he had called to her that an emergency operations room was in place at Curzon Street, and that it was thought Jon Jo Donnelly was travelling back to the mountain.

He had told her that he loved her and she had not replied. But she had kissed him after she had made the calls and loaded her pistol, and heard him out,

She stood in the doorway of the bedroom. The calm was once more in her face.

"I love you, Cathy. I will never let you be alone again. I believe in the hope and the light and a future beyond this bloody place."

"Come on, my pretty boy, let's go to work."

"He comes back, we nail him, you go home."

"Let's just take it one step at a time."