The Journeyman Tailor (13 page)

There was the mischief smile on her face. "Get those on."

"From downstairs?" The trousers were caked in mud.

"Correct."

"He's not there." There were still sweat patches under the armpits of the jersey.

"Second-class lock," she said.

"Don't they have baths down in Tyrone?" The anorak was torn in the sleeve, too large for him, looked to have been rolled in sheep droppings.

She stood back. "You are so wet behind the ears we could shoot snipe off you. Dear God." The smile was back on her face and she reached up and ruffled her fingers through his hair, wrecking the parting. It was the only morning that she hadn't called to take him out to run. He didn't think she had slept on any of the other nights. He saw her bite at her lips, as if that were the way she regained her control of herself.

There was a Subaru pick-up outside the house. It was filthy. There were two bales of hay loosely roped down in the back.

"What's this then? Local colour?"

She told him to drive. She unlocked the car and passed him a Browning pistol from the glove compartment and a magazine, told him to put it inside the anorak. She showed him the map and told him where to go.

She was asleep before they were out of Belfast.

6

It was the story that the child loved best, the story that had no ending.

"The length and breadth of Ireland, wherever men yearned to be free, they spoke the name of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly. There were few enough priests left living by the English, and they were thrown into filthy prisons and starved, and many were tortured then hanged. There was the walking gallows. A huge man, an Englishman, used to walk Ireland. He wore on his shoulders a harness on which four men at a time could be hanged. But the priests were brave in their faith, and they prayed for the safety of Shane Bearnagh . . .

"For year after year, Shane roamed on Altmore mountain. The men with him were gradually hunted and killed by the English, but Shane, they could never capture. More soldiers were sent to Altmore barracks that’s now in the bracken and trees where the road runs on to Pomeroy, where we get the blackberries . . .

"Shane took cattle from the English, and hid them up in the caves on Altmore, and the caves are still called Shane Bearnagh’s stables. Shane used to watch the soldiers searching for him from the high ground, and some old people like your Grannie would call that Shane's chair, and sometimes Shane's Sentry-box. Shane had a wife now and a fine small boy. his wife gave up her home, and she came to live with her man on the mountain, shared his dangers. He was the greatest Patriot that ever came from the mountain, and never forget that he was a Donnelly. He was cheeky with the English dragoons, he played games with them, and all they could do was curse al him from a distance ..,

‘’The English farmers complained bitterly to the English soldiers; how could one man for so long outwit all their soldiers? So a new officer was sent from England to hunt Shane.His name was Black Jemmy Hamilton. He was the cruellest of all the officers who ever came to Altmore. He tried to terrorise the native Irish into betraying Shane Bearnagh, but they never knew where he was. One of Shane's tricks was to colour the coat of his horse so that they would not recognise him. One day, when Black Jemmy Hamilton was away searching with his horsemen, Shane came down to the unguarded barracks and he was fed by the wives of the English soldiers. He took everything that he wanted. It was as if the wives of the English soldiers were shamed by the way their own men behaved to the downtrodden Irish folk.

Hamilton and his soldiers came back from another wasted day on the mountain tired and angry and found that their larders were empty. His fury was terrible. All of the wives were beaten, and Hamilton swore that he would not rest until Shane Bearnagh Donnelly was captured and hanged ..."

"Did they ever catch him, Ma?"

It was the story that never ended . . . She told him it was time for them to go to feed the cattle.

Ernest Wilkins had done it before, and he would do it again.

The afternoons of a weekend were a good time to reach the Prime Minister's aide. The Principal Private Secretary could always ensure that a brief message reached his man.

He had travelled into London from his home.

"... The Prime Minister made a quite excellent suggestion at our last meeting. I would like him to know that it is already being acted upon.

We are starting rather a vigorous programme this evening. You'll make quite certain that this is reported to him? I am very grateful ..."

All the way into London at a weekend, into the near-deserted Curzon Street building, to make one secure telephone call. It was the way he had advanced to Desk Head. Within ten minutes of entering the building he was leaving it.

It was a cold, grey day, with a mist hanging in the valley. There was a fleck of sleet in the air. They looked down from the crest of Altmore mountain.

Bren no longer smelt his own clothes, nor could he smell Cathy.

Bitterly cold in the cardboard city man's anorak, no gloves in the pockets. He could see the villages and on down to the Ballygawley road, and at the edge of his vision, before the cloud took over, were the towers and the smokier haze of Dungannon. It was a journey's end, it was where he had been volunteered to work. Beneath them the bracken and heather ran down a long way to the farmland below; the gold brown of the dead bracken and the dull dark green of the heather. There was no sign of life in the upper part of the mountainside. There were trees that were bent and stunted. His gaze shifted to lower down. The farms on the high ground were the smallest, the houses and the fields on a seemingly smaller scale. Bren knew nothing of agriculture, but it didn't take a trained eye to recognise that this was mean land. He saw a man walking with a dog along the edge of a field. He saw a car speeding along a narrow lane. Cathy passed him a pair of binoculars, the sort an ornithologist would have in his pocket on a weekend hike.

His vision roved further down the slope, larger farms, larger houses, larger fields. He found a village, then another with a tall steeple, with a graveyard behind the church, and he could see the black marble of the stones and the colour flicker ol flowers.

She slipped her arm round his waist. He felt the warmth of her, She scratched with her finger at his hip, as if she were teasing him, like tickling under a cat's chin. "Don't panic," she said. "It's only in case we're watched."

He had the Browning automatic pistol in his belt, and she had the Heckler and Koch in her hand, hidden under her anorak. "It's just like home," he said.

"Is that right?" She was grinning at him. Her head was against his shoulder.

"Stupid, but 1 can't feel the threat."

"Concentrate and listen."

She talked, and the binoculars were hard against his eyes. "The village, the top one . . . There was a U.D.R. man used to do a milk round, didn't think that anyone knew he did soldiering at night One day he had the flu, lucky for him, because that was the day they were going to kill him Another man did the round

He died in the street near the shop. See the bar? The shop's beside the bar. Everything was fine, though. They apologised for murdering the wrong man ... Go to the top end of the village, where the bend is. That's where the S.A.S. man crashed his car. They had a guy pounding him with an A.K. sticking out through the sun-roof of their motor, real Wild West stuff. It was very sharp thinking to get his car into a ditch, gave him cover and two free hands. He did really well, he closed them down with his pistol, scared them off, hit at least one of them. We know he hit one of them because there was a stake-out, an ambush, nine months later and one of them who was killed then had scars in his gut. . . Got the little road, running across us, north to south? Got the bridge? They had a come-on bomb under there, eight dustbin loads of fertiliser mix.

They got the army up there and set off the secondary bomb, the killer, took a whole group of squaddies right out ... Go back to the village, far side of the road, near the bar, the flagpole and the heap of rock, that's the memorial to a hunger-striker, dead before they called it off. . . The village down the hill, tiny place, get the church and the cemetery at the back. The big Celtic cross, that is the Republican plot, there's half a dozen of their best in there ... Go on down the road, away from the village, that's where they killed three police, culvert bomb, you can't see the new tarmac from here . . . The guys who do the heavy stuff over in Europe, they're from here, and on the mainland too. Forget Belfast, this is where the aggravation is. Time we were off. Put the binoculars away.

Been out here too long. Just hold on to me for a moment. Try and look as though you were enjoying it. Lie back and think of England, Bren."

The heat of her body had found him. He felt a spreading fear, a growing excitement. Bren gazed down the mountain slope over her shoulder. He saw the smoke from the chimneys of the lonely and dotted farmhouses. He heard, so faintly, the shout of the man walking his dog, and the dog was two fields away and springing in pursuit of something too small for Bren to see. It was where Jon Jo Donnelly was from, the home of the man whose photograph he had seen briefly on Mr Wilkins'

desk. He wondered how a man from here, the raw countryside, could survive in any city.

"Are they watching us?"

"Might be, might not be . . . the third or fourth time, if we were recognised again, if the vehicle became a habit, then we would be. Does that frighten you?"

"There's nothing to see to be frightened of."

"When you do see something it's probably too late. Come on, you smell revolting."

Her arm was away from his waist. He stood his ground. "Where is he?"

"Who?"

"Where's Song Bird?"

"Down there, somewhere."

She had reached him, spread the fear in him. "In God's name, how does he stand it?"

"I don't know and I don't care. It's only important to me that he keeps singing."

She snatched at his sleeve. She dragged him away.

He let her into the Subaru. "Is this where you come when you're out at night?"

"Come on," she said. "Let's get a cup of tea."

Bren drove.

In the village, on the corner by the bar, near the hunger striker's memorial, a group of youths watched them go by. Past a small and well-built school with a tarmacadam playground, and a gaelic pitch.

Prosperous bungalows on the edges of the villages. And Cathy was alert beside him. He had seen nothing that was different, out of the ordinary. She showed him where a police reservist driving a lorry had been ambushed and shot dead. He turned onto the Dungannon road and she nodded to the low wall, told him they had hidden behind it when they had waited to shoot and kill a police inspector.

She directed him through Dungannon. They crawled in the traffic jam up Irish Street and turned at the big school building, and again at the second church.

Small town anywhere. Crowded pavements loaded. Bright shop lights.

People bent with their shopping bags,

She told him where to turn.

Nothing ordinary about the army fortress.

Tall iron sheeting as far as he could see, and high above the iron screens were the watchtowers. The sentries had the car number and Cathy flashed a card. The spiked chain across the road into the barracks was dragged back and they were waved through.

There was a sudden tiredness on her face.

She told him where to park. She led him to the open sand weapons pit, cleared her weapon, waited for him to do the same.

The colonel wrapped his big arms round Cathy and kissed her forehead as if she were his favoured cousin. The adjutant had brought the tea and his eyes had lingered on Cathy, as if she was God, and had left reluctantly. Bren was introduced, perfunctorily, the decent thing and nothing more, and gestured to sit down by the wall furthest from the electric fire.

"You poor old love, how are you?"

Cathy was flopped in an armchair, legs spread, knees wide. "Tell you what, that bloody mountain is arse-bendingly cold at night."

"Hoped you'd call by . . ."

"Been showing my new man the countryside."

"And the other fellow . . . ?"

"Gone home. The player who was head-jobbed was his. Asking for trouble if he'd stayed. Looking very pretty up there this afternoon ..."

Bren thought she was fighting to keep her eyes open. The colonel sat on the carpet in front of the fire and refilled Cathy's mug and stirred in the sugar.

"How's your mother?"

"Haven't heard, not in the last couple of weeks. She's not riding any more. I suppose she's petrified."

"Yes, well . . . Your father managing?"

"It's getting him down. I've told him to put in a manager. He’d get a top man there. But he won't hear of it. You know the trouble, I know it. He still thinks that one day I'm going to jack this lot in and take over."

"One day,"

"Never the right day, is it? Can you imagine walking away from here?"

"Not ever out of my mind. I dream of dear old Scotland. No newspapers, lousy television reception, walking and fishing and stalking. You should come up in August."

Cathy smiled sadly, "I'd love to."

"How are they when you go home?"

"They look at me, big spaniel eyes, pleading. You know Rupert, 'course you do, Rupert did the damage. After his prostate last year he went down there to rest up, and spilled the beans. Stupid prat, told them what I did. Still . . ."

"You could do worse."

Cathy snorted. "Certainly, be a regular at the Bath and West, trot all round the west country with the Charolais bull trying like buggery to win Best of Breed again? It would kill me . . . You can chase your grouse round Cromarty and do the John MacNab tiling. I could do that for about, well, once, and then I'm bored rigid . . ."

"Their loss, our gain."

"For Christ's sake, don't go soft."

"OK, OK . . . when are you back down?"

"He using the hide . . ." She jerked a thumb behind her. "get the new boy familiarised. Meet the player and so on."