The Journeyman Tailor (38 page)

The flight for Geneva left Bilbao airport, carrying Jon Jo Donnelly, travelling as James McHarg, on the wide route back to the mountain.

The Commander said, "You say he's gone . . . well, all I can tell you is that the ferry ports, Channel and east coast, have been put on a high state of alert, and all the airports, and all the Irish routes, and there's not sight nor sound of him."

Wilkins was the closed door. "Is that so?"

"His landlady was adamant that he was headed for Germany or Holland ..."

"Of course, what I would expect."

"I'm going to crank Dublin up, just in case he's dumb enough to go direct ..."

"I wonder if that's wise. I don't think so. Where are they now, their transferable goal posts, on the extradition issue? Close to the h alfway line? I wouldn't think it necessary to involve our Irish colleagues. I recommend the matter be resolved on our own grounds."

"It's your funeral ..."

Ernest Wilkins smiled. "My funeral or my party, we'll have to wait and see."

He despised senior policemen, and disguised his feelings under a bed of humility and politeness. They were such different men. He thought the policeman, the Commander of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, would retire to the boardroom of a major industrial company and augment a good pension with a fat salary. He, himself, and the office clock and the sherry gathering for colleagues in the Director General's office was beckoning, would slip away after thirty-two years of service to a Cornish cottage, to oblivion.. There would be no bar-fly anecdotes from Ernest Wilkins, only the closeted memories of the young men and young women that he had sent into the field.

With obsequious courtesy he escorted the Commander to the side-door exit of the building, then hurried back, not waiting for the lift, up the stairs to the Emergency Operations room. He was told Song Bird had rung for a meeting. He was told Parker and her minder were on the move. He felt a rare flush of excitement ... he would detest the Cornish cottage and oblivion.

". . . they's going to do a hit, a policeman."

Cathy incisive. "His name?"

"Browne. Detective Sergeant."

"Working out of?"

"Dungannon barracks, Special Branch."

"When?"

She was riding him, taking him, roughly, under her control.

"I don't know."

"What do you mean, you don't know?"

"Wasn't told."

"Why weren't you told?"

"They're keeping everything feckin' tight."

"Where then?"

"Don't know that either."

"What
do
you know, Mossie?"

"I gave you his name."

"Tell me when."

Mossie said, "Want to do it fast. Want to hit him while the anger's hot on the mountain. There was plenty of love for Pius Blaney."

Bren saw that Mossie couldn't keep his eyes from her face. He stood to the side of the quarry, a little away from them. Some of the time he listened closely, and most of the time he watched the road at the quarry entrance and the rim of the steep bank. The

back-up was somewhere up the road, with difficulty squeezed on the telephone from Rennie.

"Heh, miss, you did well out there. But, Jesus, you frightened me. Can you's do your drinking in some other bar now?"

He heard her light laugh. "How are they, our friends?"

"It was the O.C.'s wrist you broke, and you half bit off the Quartermaster's hand, the lad's in hospital ..."

She gave him a new telephone number. Bren watched. A fox was slipping by the top of the quarry wall. He heard Donnelly's name. The fox stopped and stared at him, the intruder. He heard a sum of money mentioned. The fox darted away.

"Miss, if there's patrols and things there, if it's obvious they've been touted ... it can come back to me."

She slapped his shoulder. "Just get on home, Mossie. I'll take care of you."

Mossie's car, no lights until he was well down the road, skidded away.

He put his hand loosely on her shoulder. She let it stay there, only a moment, then shrugged it off.

Bren heard her mutter, "Shit, why the hell did he have to tell me?"

17

She was her withdrawn and distant self. She had told him when they had come back from the meeting with Song Bird that she needed to sleep and given him a peck on the cheek at her door, told him when she would collect him. She had been full of the cold business of the morning and he had tossed through the night, alone in his bed, where the words of hope and light and a future had pierced his mind.

They were round Hobbes' kitchen table, dabbling with cornflakes and toast and coffee.

"It's just a problem we could have done without, but it won't go away, and it has to be addressed."

Cathy said, "The nub of it is Song Bird's physical security."

"The nub of it - let me put it in a slightly different way - is that, to protect the policeman, do we endanger our Song Bird?"

Cathy said, "Saturate the area round the policeman and you might just as well send up a barrage balloon trailing a message 'Come in Mossie Nugent, your time is very nearly up'."

"I don't think I can be hearing you right, Cathy."

"You said it was a problem, I've not disagreed."

There was the quiet round the table. The neon beamed down on them.

It was still grey outside. There was a curry take-away carton on the draining board and an empty wine bottle. Bren wondered, in the silence, how much Hobbes minded that his wife was not over here with him.

"You're saying the policeman's nothing more than a nuisance ..."

Cathy said, "No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that in a finely calculated arrangement of priorities, which I by God didn't ordain, Sony Bird comes first

It was a policeman's life, a man's life.

Bren was about to burst. The anger steamed in his tiredness.

"Hell of a shame he told you ..."

Cathy said, "But he did, and I told you . . ."

Bren's finger jabbed alternately at Hobbes and Cathy. Past breaking point. "Jesus, this is not a bloody board game, this is just goddamn stupid. This is a man's life ..."

Hobbes cut him off. "What's your difficulty?"

Bren shouted, control gone. "It's not a difficulty, it's a man's life."

Cathy said, "But it's Song Bird's life."

Bren's fist slammed onto the table. "It isn't one or the other. You have no choice but to protect D.S. Browne. You have no choice but to protect Song Bird.
That's
your obligation. You're not God, sitting in bloody judgement . . ."

"Steady down, young man."

Cathy said, "Put the lid on it, Bren."

"Sorry, Cathy, this isn't the sort of thing you put a lid on. I was a party to Patsy Riordan being fingered, I have learned and it will not happen again. I will not wash my hands of a policeman's blood."

Hobbes looked across at him, not even bothering to be angry. "You're like the whole dismal crew of them in London. Nobody wants to accept that it's a
war
here. They're just pussy-footing around. Killing in the way of the real fighting . . . Bloody delicate it’ll have to be."

Cathy seemed to understand what he meant, seemed satisfied that a compromise had been reached. He didn't, couldn't, know whether he had saved the life of a policeman at Dungannon, or whether he had simply made a bigger idiot of himself than before. She had slept alone in the bed where he had loved her. Cathy sipped at her coffee. She stared past him into the lightening day. He had been on her bed and loved her and he knew nothing of her beyond what had fallen into his hands in the one moment of weakness.

Hobbes was telephoning Rennie, making an appointment for them.

The wind off the runway caught at his face, and he rejoiced at it.

They had come in over the sea to the north of the city, swung over the coastline ol the villages and the inlets and the tiny harbours, broken through the bottom of the low cloud to see the sharp green of the fields, then banked for the airfield, he had been gone close to a year.

Passengers streamed around him, hurrying away towards the car-park area. Home ... It was where Attracta was, and little Kevin. A hand on his sleeve. It was a girl who met him. He thought she was nervous of him. She drove. She took a perimeter road round the edge of the city, and she looked in her mirror often enough to have been on a driving test. He thought that she had been told not to speak to him. She took him to a house in the Tallaght estate. It was what he loathed, grey houses on grey streets under a grey sky. Where there had been grass there were kids' bike tracks and tinkers' horses and mud.

She pointed to a house. She was away before he had reached the door. They were waiting for him in the house. The greetings were in Irish. A young man and an older man. He had met them before, didn't know their names. He was told the girl had gone for petrol. He was told of a new team going onto the mainland . . . The war going hard in the Six Counties . . . New blood needed on the mainland, and new blood needed in the North . . . He was told of discord in the Organisation, of the chasm between those who wanted to fight on and those who wanted to cut and run for the negotiating table . . .

"It's what the Brits are working at, dividing us, splitting us, weakening us. Soft words to deceive, and there are some, the eejits, who are believing them," the older man said.

"It's said that if we haven't won in twenty years then we're never going to. I say if the Brits haven't won in twenty years then they're never going to. They're losing, and I'd say they've started to know it.

Hurt them, Jon Jo, so's they scream," the young man said.

He was told that there was a heavy-calibre machinegun in a cache on Altmore, and that he could have use of another. There was an R.P.G.7, never fired, and eight warheads. There was 83 lb of Semtex, and more when it was wanted. There were automatic rifles, sniper rifles and handguns. There was what he needed, and there were men who would follow him. He should live rough and he could do that 'cause he was Jon Jo Donnelly and the mountain was his. Jon Jo told them of problems on the mainland, and neither of them wanted to know, said that was all in the past for him. He complained about the communications, the criticisms, but they slapped his back and said he'd done a fine job, not to worry himself about the recent slip-ups, they weren't going to be held against him. Sandwiches were fed him, and drink was given him. He was to set the mountain on fire, this was the now, and the year in England was over.

But he asked the question. The question had been in his mind all through the last night in Geneva, in his mind all through the flight via Zurich to Dublin.

"I'm taking it there's no touts on Altmore?"

"There was one ..." the older man said.

". . . and he was blown away," the young man said. "Altmore's clean."

Jon Jo said, "You'll hear them screaming, all the way down here, you'll see the fire, if there's no touts."

He was doing the late shift, noon till eight.

He kissed his wife and he kissed their baby's forehead.

The car was in the drive. He had already taken the car out of the garage and gone down the avenue to the shop for her. He was always careful. Detective Sergeant Browne had checked underneath his car at the start of the day. He kept a doormat in his garage and a light on an extension lead. He laid the mat on the concrete and knelt on it a nd craned under the chassis. He had looked under the centre of the car and then under the hidden wheel spaces. He looked behind the wheels on the other side.

They kept themselves to themselves in the housing estate, Catholics among Protestants, only on nodding terms with their neighbours. It would have been known that he was a policeman. It was the life he had chosen, and she had chosen to share it with him. The door was already closed on her as he slipped the key into the ignition. She never watched him drive away. She had told

him once, not recently, but soon after they were married, that she sometimes went to the bathroom after she had heard the car drive away and threw up into the lavatory.

He was careful about his routine.

Detective Sergeant Browne went to work.

Mrs Wilkins had responded to her husband's decision to sleep in the Emergency Operations room with regular bulletins to his P.A. on the immersion heater and the apparently unending quest for a plumber.

Wilkins had put down the telephone on her, banged it down in ungovernable impatience. His P.A. was at the door. Why on earth had she put the call through? He was wanted in the E.O. room. He hurried down the corridor. God, how was he supposed to know where a reliable, and not extortionate, plumber could be found? . . . Archie handed him the secure fax message.

He gutted Hobbes' report. Through the open window, open because Archie smoked and Charles complained, came the steady drone of inner London's traffic. A policeman's life known to be at risk, targeted by the P.I.R.A., an informer's cover more or less on the other end of the same see-saw at hazard. There was a delicate trailing plant on the window ledge, a gesture of homeliness installed by Bill. A risk and a hazard getting in the way of the whole damn business. Archie's eyes questioned him. Ernest Wilkins was the man who had promised the Prime Minister . . . He had never been in the field. He was Curzon Street Man. And he had been a Leconfield House man before the move down the street to the new premises. Collater rather than hunter.

"Could demolish the whole thing," Archie said. "Could put us down the plug hole."

He felt age creeping up on him. He sent young people, men and women, into the field. He understood so little of what actually confronted them.

Archie said, "Can't for the life of me see why they didn't keep their mouths shut, let things roll."

Wilkins said, "I don't think the Service could survive it, if it went wrong."

Archie muttered, "Any war throws up casualties, stands to reason. I suppose they've gone native and got too close to things. That's what usually happens."

Wilkins sat at the table. He started, with his penknife, to sharpen pencils. He whittled away, assessing the worth of the life of a policeman.

Rennie exploded. "You ask anyone who knows, not inside your pathetic little point-scoring division, any soldier that's done proper time here. He'll tell you the R.U.C. should be the only ones handling informers. We have the skills, we have the patience. We're not looking for a bloody victory parade. We may have to wait two years for an arrest, to put together the evidence that'll stand in court, but we can wait. We're not fast-fix heroes . . ."