The Journeyman Tailor (23 page)

He reached into the pocket of his anorak and took out his Browning pistol and detached the magazine from the stock and cleared the breech.

He waited, good little patient boy, for
MissPaker
to bring him his pillow and blanket.

She came through the internal door with a pillow and a tartan blanket.

She wore a blue towelling dressing gown.

"You alright . . . ?"

"I'm fine . . ."

"Sorry, did you want something to eat?"

"No."

"Sorry again, did you want the bathroom?"

"After you."

And he hated himself because it was just bloody, bloody, obvious that she was tired. He stood. She put the pillow in place. She bent to arrange the blanket for him. She made it into a sleeve. She was bent over the sofa and the dressing gown gaped and he could see the white bulge of her breasts and he thought she was naked under the dressing gown. She might have only slapped his face, if he had touched her, she might have softened into his arms. No way of knowing . . .

"Thank you," Bren said.

There was an envelope in her hand, the one that Hobbes had taken from his wall safe.

"Let me know what you think of that," Cathy said.

Before her door closed behind her, she had shown him the bathroom and told him where in the kitchen he could find a drink.

He forced himself to read what was in the envelope.

Should have kissed the back of her head . . . The paper was from Ernest Wilkins. The paper was headed DONNELLY J. The paper was the minute of a meeting in London and called for input from Belfast.

Should have been kissing the tiredness from her . . . but in his mind was the view of a farmhouse, seen from the ground with the magnification of binoculars, seen from the height of Altmore mountain.

He was woken by the street-cleaning wagon. Still dark in his room except for the slash of orange light between the curtains from the high sodium lamps on the pavement. Jon Jo had not been asleep more than two hours. It was always difficult for him to sleep at the London house. The bastard was that the sleep was broken and had been so long in coming. After the street-cleaning wagon had gone, moved on, he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling light. When he could not sleep, when he was in London, then his thoughts of the country and the mountain that was his were at their keenest. Little Kevin and Attracta should have been in his picture. But they swam around him. They wore their work-day suits, they carried rolled umbrellas and bags of tools and attache cases. They were decked out in their school uniforms, they gripped their lunch boxes, and their satchels were slung from their shoulders. They were all round him in the brightness of their frocks for the shop floor and their severer skirts and coats for the office. They were the school children, they were the girls and the men and women heading into the capital city. He could see clearly the railway station that was around them. He could not see their faces.

They were the faces of the enemy, and they were hidden from him. He saw what they wore and what they carried and they were always beside the rubbish bin at the end of the ticket windows. Each man was beside the rubbish bin, each child, each girl or woman. They were his enemy ... He was in London because those in Dublin believed he could hate the men and the children and the girls and the women who swam past the red rubbish bin. Holy God, a flash of light, a rumble of thunder . . . a torrent of shrapnel and glass splinters ... a screaming, crying, calling . . . Holy God ... He lay on his back, there was the sound of the night street in his ears, there were the shapes without faces of the men and the children and the girls and the women in his eyes.

He had never wondered it before, whether he could hate enough.

The foxes fled from the dawn and sought the safety of their dens.

The owls took shelter in the wind-racked barns.

The crows flew high to find what carrion was left abandoned in the fields by predators for whom the dawn had come too soon.

In cover, under the groundsheets camouflaged by quickly pulled bracken, down in the ditches that skirted the sodden fields, two sections of troops watched the ground behind them for danger and a crossroads ahead of them for the arrival of a young man who would be waiting for a lift into Dungannon. In three cars, and in a van, were the men who had not slept through the gone night, and they hacked their cigarettes'

muck from their throats, and swore at the cold, and watched the bungalow and the house as they had been told, and talked quietly of their homes in Lurgan town and Armagh city and south County Down and north County Antrim and west Tyrone and east Derry.

It was the man who brought the milk who told the priest. Pius Blaney told the priest that there were strangers in cars and a van on the mountain lanes. Pius Blaney told the priest, as he checked his bill and paid it in cash, that there were strangers, not soldiers and not police, out on Altmore. He took the change that was pecked from Pius Blaney's old leather purse, he pocketed the receipt, he closed the door on Pius Blaney. It was what he had expected, that there would be a tout hunt through his parish, that strangers would come in to ferret out a victim.

The priest knew of no help that he could find. He could have walked or driven to the home of the O.C. or the Quartermaster or the Intelligence Officer. He knew them all, and knew also that his capacity to intervene was negligible. They would all be beyond argument, beyond faith, all except the one who was doomed to die for informing. In the fair isle, in Ireland, it had never been different. He could pray, and his prayers would be uttered in the certainty that a tout's life would not be saved.

Mossie drove away from the bungalow.

In the back of his car were his ladders and tins and dust sheets and brushes.

He did not see it at first. He was halfway to Dungannon before he could be certain that the car twenty yards behind him was tailing him.

He had pulled into a lay-by where the council workers stored grit for the frosts, and the car had not come past him.

He was uncomfortable in his seat. The bleeper was strapped with tape to the inside of his thigh.

A cold sweat on him as he drove, each time he looked into his mirror and saw the tailing car. He was afraid, but always with the fear was the coursing excitement. He could live with the fear, he could not live without the excitement. The excitement was his fuel . . .Mossie Nugent was the big man. Mossie Nugent was
important.
The bitch she needed him . . . The car followed him down into Dungannon town.

Beyond her land, climbing the slope, were the Mahoneys' fields. They were the old couple that Attracta hardly saw. They ran sheep and a few beef cattle. They went once a week to the shop. Their lives were for themselves. Their kids were gone, married and working on the mainland. The Mahoneys were a part of the land, but they had cut themselves off from the community. The bracken was creeping back onto their land and the gorse clumps were thicker.

She walked up the lane with an apple pie and a loaf of soda bread that she had baked for herself and little Kevin.

The Mahoneys would have known that her Jon Jo was away with the Organisation, and they had to have seen the military helicopters that had brought the troops and police to her home. She didn't know whether they would welcome her in, the wife of a Provo fighter, or whether they would slam the door in her face.

She walked up the lane to ask the Mahoneys if it were possible that she could graze her bullocks on their upper fields for perhaps a month She had not enough fodder to last her through the winter. Little enough grass in their fields, but enough for a month.

Attracta would not have needed to ask the favour of the Mahoneys if Jon Jo had been home, if the leaking barn roof had been repaired, if he had not lost a quarter of her winter fodder, rotted under the leak, if she had not been sharp enough to believe that her Jon Jo would never now come home.

When he had his own place, whenever, when he was allowed to move out of the bedsitter in the Malone Road, then there would be flowering bulbs in pots, herbs growing on the kitchen windowsill. There would be bookcases, piles of newspapers, pictures on the wall. One wall all cork for his "memory board": all the Marilyn pictures and especially the poster of La Monroe swathed in towels on a winter beach that he had seen in the shop behind Royal Avenue, and a thousand postcards of Old Masters, a mosaic of himself. His weights, maybe. A cat - he was certainly going to need company. When he had his own place he would engrave his mark on it. His rooms would be
him.
Just in case he got lost in this God-forsaken job and needed to remind himself who he had been. This room said nothing of her ... if it hadn't been for Mr Wilkins'

memorandum and the questions that it posed then the frustration of knowing so little about her might just have had him searching every last inch of the flat for clues. Mr Wilkins preserved his sanity.

The geography made it so obvious. A farmhouse on a hillside, and further down the whitewashed bungalow.

A farmhouse belonging to a P.I.R.A. activist and close to it was a bungalow that was the home of a P.I.R.A. activist turned informer. He didn't need a 2.1 in Modern History to sink that one in a corner pocket.

Bren folded the tartan rug. Her bedroom door was still closed. Song Bird was the solution. Mr Wilkins had to be a very great simpleton not to have cottoned on. Hobbes . . . well,
presumably
he had put it together. A little academic problem, nothing more, taking the heat off Mossie Nugent.

A little brain teaser, how to divert the pressure to Patsy Riordan.

Christ . . .

Nothing that Bren had done in London had prepared him for it. He had pushed paper. He had worked on the surveillance teams for the Arab desk and for the Irish desk. He had never played God. Never been detailed for that one. But he was heading that way, racing up t he ladder, volunteering for Belfast because that way lay the bright prospect of Senior Executive Officer rank. He wondered how he would have explained to his mother and father what his real world was. He might not know much about Cathy Parker, but by heaven he knew that she was strong enough for the real world . . ,

Christ . . .

He tapped on her door. No answer. More firmly. Still no answer. He thought that if he opened it, then he might just get his head blown away.

"Cathy," he said. No answer. He opened the door.

The light from the window was on her. It was another anonymous room. One bed, one wardrobe, one chest of drawers, one chair, clothes on the floor. The bed was a mattress on the floor. She had tossed the sheet and the blankets off her body. She held the pillow in her arms.

Her breasts were against the pillow, the white of her arms was around the pillow. Total calm on her face. He wanted to kneel beside the mattress and kiss the face of the woman who slept with the peace of a child. Her pistol was beside the bed on the carpet, within easy reach if she had loosed her hold on the pillow.

He left a note for her, a page torn from his notebook, on the folded tartan rug.

He was the outsider and the thought was seldom far from Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne's mind, and each time he drove towards Altmore the thought was closer. It was the same country as his home.

He was from County Derry, what D.C. McDonald would have called County Londonderry. The farmers on Altmore were the same kind as his family. On Altmore the people loathed the R.U.C

He drove up through Donaghmore and away past the old Celtic cross,the symbol of his culture.

There was a mountain behind his parents’ land with the bracken and the gorse and the heather and the wind bent trees.Being on Altmore twisted the wound. It was more than four years since he had spoken to his father. To his mother he was a cross of agony because he could no longer come home in safety, and their meetings could only be in Belfast. To his brothers he was a traitor.

D.S. Joseph Browne was the rarity in the force because he had been reared at home and educated at school as a Roman catholic. His point of contact with the man beside him, eight years older, was the job.

When they were together, when they were a car team or an interrogation pair, then the work was the only factor that linked them.

He believed himself, as the token Catholic in the Dungannon R.U.C.

station Special Branch unit, to be widely resented by the Protestants and Presbyterians with whom he served. He assumed it was thought that his promotion owed as much to his religion as to his competence.

The car was armour-plated in the hope that its doors and windows could withstand an attack from high-velocity weapons, and the chassis was reinforced to protect the crew from culvert bombs. They wore their own clothes, he and D.C. McDonald, and he had a pistol in his anorak pocket and D.C. McDonald nursed a loaded Sterling under a raincoat across his knees. They had been told at what time they should reach the pick-up point. They had been shown the exact place on the map. They had been shown the photograph of the youth they were to lift. The number-plates were fresh on the day before, but that was small comfort because the way the armour weighted down the car on its tyres said more than a new set of number-plates.

It was what he had wanted to do.

Bloody-minded, opinionated, stubborn, he knew himself to be all of those when he had told his family that he was accepted into the R.U.C., and his father had left the room, and his mother had cried, and his brothers had thrown their abuse at him.

He had made a frightened misery of their lives, and that he had not intended.

He slowed the car. It was a feck-awful place to be hanging about.

They were at the crossroads, where the lanes running between the high hedges met. The relief sighed in D.C. McDonald's teeth. The youth had appeared, had walked round the corner, ambling without a care, his work tools in the bag on his shoulder. He had been told the area around the crossroads was stiff with army; if they were there he couldn't see them. He reversed hard into a side lane, and then as the youth came past him he pulled out again facing the way that he had come.