The Journeyman Tailor (39 page)

Bren thought every detective on the floor must have heard him and that, no doubt about it, was his intention.

‘’The sooner you are out of here then the better I am pleased.

In Christ’s name, what did you think you were doing, Cathy? You sit on a police target for fourteen hours - fourteen bloody hours. I, the likes of me, I could have been knocking on his wife’s front door.

Fourteen hours you sat on the information that a police officer's life was in danger. What am I supposed to say? I don't know where I'll find the charity to forgive this of you . . . For starters, when we get to Dungannon, it'll be you that I line up to explain to D.S. Browne that for fourteen hours you pissed about with his life. See if he understands your point of view. See if he's any more charity than I can manage . . .

It's our war, we know how to fight it, and we don't want clever bastards

playing with our lives. You're dead in this province, Miss Parker . . ."

She looked him square in the face. "We pay the bills ..."

"Don't think you can pull the strings behind my back, young lady.

And don't you go thinking that I cared when I heard you were gone missing, that you damn near got yourself killed. Don't think that I was fussed ..."

Cathy touched his hand. "Thanks."

At the Dungannon barracks two constables had been detailed to provide Detective Sergeant Browne with immediate close-quarters protection. They were waiting for him. His superior, the Detective Inspector of Special Branch who had taken Rennie's call, had set in train the process of transferring D.S. Browne and his wife and child.

Two detectives in plain clothes, women, armed, had slipped discreetly into the house, like friends calling for a coffee morning, to guard her and the baby and to help her with the packing of essentials.

Why wasn't D.S. Browne on the radio in his car, the Detective Inspector had asked of D.C. McDonald? Malfunctioning, in repair, been reported, should be in working order tomorrow.

The motorcycle had been stolen in the early hours of the morning in the Creggan estate of Derry, away to the west. It had not been seen on the motorway that linked Lisburn to Dungannon, but now it was at the wide roundabout at the end of the motorway, between Derrycreevy and Moygashel. Many motorists and lorry drivers saw the motorcycle on the Donnydeade side of the road, and saw the two men in their black leather gear and their crash helmets, bent over the engine parts. The messages came to them by portable radio. The first that the car had turned out of the avenue and onto the main road. The second that the car was turning onto the motorway. The third that the car had not used the alternative route from the motorway turn-off at Tamnamore, thai it was coming the safe way, the fast way. They had the make and the colour of the car and the registration. A van driver, carrying building equipment, saw the two men finish their repairs and straddle the 500 cc motorcycle and gun the engine. The car .came steadily into the roundabout. The motorcycle powered forward, drew level with the policeman's car.

There was the dark line of the high ground ahead. They were east of Crossmaglen and west of Forkhill. The girl had said that it was a good route, and it was the one that she knew best. Himself, he would have gone far to the west, almost to the Atlantic seaboard,before crossing the border, but he couldn't fault the girl's choice. There were no patrols, no roadblocks. The border was only a bump and a lurch from the car.

They crossed where the army had cut a ditch ten years before, where ten years less a couple of days ago the local people had filled the ditch in again. The lurch of the car told Jon Jo that he was home.

He saw a helicopter far away, a high speck. He saw the watchtowers of the Brit army on the hilltops. He saw the dark purple of the winter-scarred heather and the old gold of the bracken and the worn green of the fields. He settled back against the seat. He wound down the window and let the cold air rip into his face. The tension slipped from him. Jon Jo Donnelly was back among his own.

The car had gouged twin tyre tracks through the grass verge and down the bank. Bren stood beside the driver's window. The glass had gone with the gunfire. He stood and stared at the face of the come and she had looked at the dead, cold face and she had gone back to her car that was parked behind Rennie’s. Rennie’s driver was out of his car and smoking hard.

The back of the head was smashed to hell and gone but the face was recognisable. A young man’s face, and the moustache that all policemen in the province seemed to need, His tie was neatly knotted at his throat still and the shirt was soaked in blood. Bren stood a few feet away and Rennie was at his shoulder. He stood back because the Scenes of Crime men men, white overalls, were already at work , and the photographer. Subdued voices all about. Necessary stuff about camera angles and spent bullets, one of them chipped and, oh aye, out of shape, embedded in the inside of the front passenger door.

They had come off the motorway, following hard on Rennie 's car, swept the roundabout, past the football pitches, been short of the rugby club, when they had seen the rotating blue lights on the cars and on the police Land-rovers. A policeman saluting, leaning down, explaining to Rennie, and Rennic had been out of his car and walking briskly back to them. They might be interested, they might care to follow him. Cathy had walked down the

bank behind Rennie and had withstood his terrible silence, not rejecting his fury, not denying the blame he was determined to wound her with.

She had absorbed it and she had gone back up the slope to the car. Bren knew nothing worthwhile to say. There seemed to be no anger around him. Too soon for that. Too much to get on with. It wasn't them, this time it was another poor bastard. He thought they had seen it all before, and would do it all and see it all again. He stayed until the men in black suits brought the plain wood coffin awkwardly down the steep bank.

He turned away. He didn't want to see the body manhandled out of the car.

He stood at the top of the bank and he gulped for air.

Cathy had her arms folded across her chest, watched him.

"I'm sorry," Bren said.

Rennie's voice was utterly flat. "That's very good. I'm very gratified that you're sorry. I'd be sorry if I'd sat on something for fourteen hours and not thought through the consequences. We could drive back to Lisburn and you could say the same thing to a young woman, that you're sorry, and you could help her change her baby, and you could tell her that for fourteen hours you slept on a little bit of information that had happened your way. Would you like to do that?"

He wondered if Rennie were about to hit him, if the big fist were about to belt him. The men in the black suits came past him, mud on their polished black shoes. Bren shook his head. "I don't think I've the strength . . ."

"To face up to the consequences? No, not many do. They leave that to other people." And without a glance at Cathy, he went to his car, slammed the door, and was gone.

Cathy said softly, "You have to hack it, Bren. There's no other way."

He saw the defiance on her face.

He saw no love in her, only her strength. He loved her and he felt his fear of her.

He was always tuned to the B.B.C.'s Radio Ulster when he worked. The B.B.C. didn't have the good music but it had the news on the hour. The news carried the condemnations:

The Secretary of State - "a bestial and pointless crime . . ."; theM.P. -

". . . this dreadful murder of a young man who had the courage to stand up and be counted . . ."; a bishop - ". . . every decent-minded person will be revolted by this killing, this disgusting sectarian killing . . ."; and the Chief Constable - ". . . the force I have the honour to command will not for one instant be intimidated from its duty by the men of violence who prey on our society ..."

Mossie heard them all. His hand shook and the brush strokes wavered. The bitch had let a policeman be blown away to keep him in place. No doubt on it. She had had all of a night and a morning to clear the policeman off the patch, and the policeman was dead. There was the trembling in his hand and he told the foreman that he was sickening with the 'flu, and that he was packing it in for the day.

The kids not yet returned from school. His mother was out, thank the Christ. Mary was asleep in her cot.

He told Siobhan of his power and saw the shock spread across her face.

"They'd do that for you . . . ?"

‘’For me to get them Jon Jo."

"Does it frighten you?"

‘’Half out of my skin."

Jon Jo Donnelly had been the big man on the mountain. He had been the man the kids whispered of and the man the girls eyed. He had been the man that the soldiers hunted. When Jon Jo had been on the mountain then no policeman and no soldier had felt himself safe.

Mossie knew all the tales. Donnelly with the heavy-calibre, and with the culvert bomb, and with the long-barrel sniping rifle. There had been a big man in South Derry, and another down in Fermanagh, and another from Cullyhanna near the border in Armagh, all shot down, and there had been Jon Jo Donnelly. It was the stuff of stories.

"How much’ll they give you?"

"Don't know."

"It'd be thousands?"

"Sure to be."

As if the walls had ears, they sat against each other on the settee, they whispered to each other. The guilt bled him further with each of her questions, and she held his arm in both her hands.

"If he's so important to them ..."

"He's all they talk about."

"To make it worth losing one of their own, has to be thousands."

"Be decent money."

"When does we get out of this feckin' place?"

"There's never a way out for a tout ..."

He told her what the life was. He knew what had happened to others.

It always started fast. The flash of the bleeper. The interception of a hit car. Troops and police round the house, and sweet precious nothing of time to pack and get the kids together or drag them out from class, and the stampede out of the area. Eventually to England, chased through the military section of Aldergrove and onto an R.A.F. transporter. A pair of semidetached houses in some nowhere town in England. The minders sleeping next door, and spending their waking hours, their duty shifts, always with the family, always answering the telephone when it rang, always reading any mail, always with their guns. Go shopping and the minders drive. Go drinking and the minders buy. God knows how the children got schooled. Can't work because the minders don't allow it. Can't row because the minders'll break it up. Living on top of each other, suffocated. They all wanted to come back, he told her. They all ended the same way, scribbling letters to the priest pleading to be allowed back. And, sooner or later, they all came back, and they all ended in the ditch with the dustbin bag over the head . . .

"So what's the money for?"

"It's so's she can own me better."

It had been his decision, and she had gone with it, that the car should be minimum four miles further back from when they had last been to the hide. The car was off the road in forestry halfway to Pomeroy. It had taken them two hours and twenty minutes to reach the hide, fast going in rough country, in darkness.

She talked softly in his ear, but she rambled, not the Cathy of before.

". . . if it hadn't been Browne it would have been someone else. They have the targets all drawn up. If we'd blocked Browne there'd only have been another target. They're never short of targets . . . They're so bloody clever. He'd have looked for the bomb under the car, and he'd have looked for a strange vehicle in his road, and he'd have stayed off using the back lanes. He'd have done everything right ..."

He didn't want to hear. He could see all too clearly the white face of the dead policeman. He wanted her quiet.

". . . So bloody good at the unexpected. They hit him where he just couldn't anticipate, and there's no defence for one man driving a car against two men on a motorcycle. That's where we lose, can't you see it? We're the procedure people. We have the duty rosters and the computers and we have the set-out way of doing things. They don't.

The Provos don't have a software system, they don't have banks of library folders, they make it up as they go along. We've never found anything approaching an archive system, yet there are people out there who know as much about how Colonel Johnny's battalion operates as he does himself. They don't have Operations Rooms and telexes and faxes, they hardly ever use the telephone. They don't have manuals. It's stone age stuff, and they're running us ragged."

"Let it go, Cathy."

The cattle were on the move
in the field below the hedgerow where they were dug in. He thought she was talking because the strength was cracking.

‘’You have to understand that, because then you know the way to fight them. Company formations, battalion units, brigade groups, all with the back up, the civilian clerical workers and the Personnel section and the electronics, that's not the way. That's the structure that ties down half your force guarding installations, putting up fences and watchtowers and cutting yourself off from the war. God knows what the percentage is of people over here who are just indexing the war.

You can't index war and keep up with it, any more than you can index fog. I don't suppose Clause- witz said that but if he'd been in Northern bloody Ireland, he'd have said it alright."

"Cathy, will you shut up."

"We have to learn, and learn sharp. We have to fight body to body, at close quarters ..."

"I want you to shut up so that I can concentrate."

He felt her stiffen away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. They lay together in the hide. The cattle were drifting in convoy up the field towards their camera's position. They were dark shapes, ships in the night, in the grey haze wash of the screen. He zoomed the lens back so that he could see the advancing cattle. He panned off the cattle.

He searched the hedgerows down near the farm house. He focused as tight as possible on the outbuildings. He wondered how she would be, if the legend was taken from her. He wondered if she would last an hour, a day, a week, if her strength cracked. The cattle were coming forward. He raked the hedgerows and the outbuildings again. He looked for the shadow figure on the move. A light rain was falling. The hood of his anorak was up, but the water had started to dribble on his face. It was what he was paid to do, it was his bloody job of work. The picture was lost, then found again. There was the faint squelching of the hooves across the field, there was the bulk shape of a bullock on the screen. There were the big eyes, and then the snort of the nostrils. He saw the tongue stretch to envelop the picture image. He stared at the screen, at the misted blur. "Shit . . ."