The Journeyman Tailor

1

All through the day they had left him to his own thoughts, his own moods.

It was as if the soldiers and the policemen were nervous of him and believed they should give him room, as if they thought his building anger might explode against them.

He stood, alone, in the centre of the lane, and all the time he stared up the rising length of the potted road towards the crest of the hill. In the middle of the day, as they had the day before, they had offered him a hot mug of coffee and a sandwich wrapped in clingfilm, and both times he had declined the chance to eat or to warm himself with the drink. It had been a good morning, low dreamy winter sunshine and a sharp wind, enough to dry the heavy oiled coat closed tight across his body that had taken a drenching from the driving rain of the previous day.

The light was falling now and a rain blanket had gathered over the distant mountain summit that was beyond the horizon of the top of the lane. The cold cut through the protection of his coat, and whipped his trouser legs. He shivered. To either side of him, beyond the uncut hedgerows of thorn and holly and hazel, were the rain- soaked fields.

There were song birds in the hedgerows, feasting on berries and grubbing for worms. Away out in the fields, amongst the rushes that grew in the bog land, ignoring the sheep that had cropped the grass short, the black crows and arrogant magpies strutted in their search for carrion. Hovering above the lane, occasionally masked by the low-flying cloud, was the helicopter.

The helicopter had been up all through the day before and all of that day, and for most of the night it had pierced the darkness of the lane with the power beam of a searchlight. The noise of the helicopter's engine blasted out the sweetness of the birds' excitement in the hedgerow, killed the low voices of the soldiers and the policemen.

Slowly he gazed around him. There were young soldiers from a Fusilier regiment kneeling in the water-filled ditches beside the lane, aiming their rifles and their machine guns out towards the further hedgelines that were now blurred by the first rain spits of the squall that rushed to meet them. There were policemen, encased in their all-weather clothing, clutching their clipboards and Scenes of Crime notebooks, and talking with urgency into their radio sets. There were the small white bungalows further up and further down the hillside, with closed front doors, and peat smoke streaming from the chimneys, where the answer of the farmers and their wives and children would be that they had seen nothing and heard nothing and knew nothing. There were two men, huge in the body armour that they wore under their camouflaged combat uniforms, walking back down the lane, and the one passed the other a bright cigarette packet and dropped the cellophane and gold paper wrapping onto the tarmac, and took a box of matches from his colleague. He saw it all and he hated it all.

There was a stirring of the soldiers and policemen in front and behind him.

The cold bit into him. He had wrapped his scarf tight around the lower part of his face and pulled his flat cap down over his forehead, not against the weather but so that his identity and his features would not be seen by the priest who had earlier been allowed to go forward up the lane to whisper the Last Rites and the Act of Contrition into the ear of the body.

It was three days now since the report had reached his desk of the finding of the body. He hated everything that was around him. He knew, of course, the name of the man who lay dead halfway between where he stood and the horizon of the lane. The fields on either side of the lane had long since been swept by the electronics that the military used, and the hedgerows had been pronounced clear of booby-trap explosives and command wires. The helicopter's vantage point ensured that the high ground to the right of the lane and ahead was free of snipers, and now the bomb men, ambling back down the lane, had passed the body as safe for inspection.

The body was of his man. He had felt it necessary to be there. For the first time in his life he knew the responsibility for the death of a man.

He would not have wished to have been anywhere else.

There was the stamping of feet around him, to inject warmth, and shrill laughter, to pretend that it didn't matter and that life went ahead for the living, and coughing and spat phlegm, to clear the lungs before the walk up the hill to inspect a body that was not wired to a detonator and a pressure plate and explosives.

They had two hundred yards to walk up the lane.

He stepped out briskly. There was an army major leading and two police officers and their photographer were behind him. The rain was in earnest. It fell from the brow of his cap, dripped onto his scarf, ran at the collar of his coat, clung at his trousers, squirmed in his feet.

It was eighteen days since he had last seen his player. A meeting like most of the others of the last year. The dark side of a car park, well away from the front entrance of the hotel, at least a dozen miles from the player's own neighbourhood. The player had been fine, had chain-smoked but that was normal, had talked and even made what passed for a joke – and that wasn't normal. He'd got nothing dramatic, nothing that was going to win the war, but nothing either that indicated any specific anxiety. The player had taken his money. He had slapped his player's back, as he always did, to give him confidence. He had waved the poor bastard away, seen the rear lights of his car head off into the dark.

When they were close to it, almost upon it, he saw the white of the flesh of the shoulder and the glistening black of the dustbin bag.

And then, ten nights ago, he had sat in the car with his colleague for more than two hours, and he had cursed the player for not showing, and cared not to remember that it was the first time in a year that his player had not been on time for a meeting. His temper had been short because of his own fear. Sitting in his car, his weapon loaded and cocked, wondering as the minutes passed whether he and his colleague were compromised and not daring to wonder aloud whether the player was lost. A ghastly two hours until he had thrown in the towel and got the hell out. And all the drive back he had known in his gut the terrible fear that came from his feeling of responsibility for his player.

There were the fiery white flashes from the camera, startling in the coming dusk. The rain buffeted him. The photographer stepped back.

The body was half on the grass verge of the lane and half in the ditch.

The head of the body, hidden in the dustbin bag that was loosely tied at the throat with orange bale twine, was deep in the ditch and damming the flow of the rainwater. The body was naked to the waist. The trousers were sodden. There was more twine binding the ankles, and the bare feet on the road.

When he needed it, he could get a police or an army uniform. The morning after that failed meeting, he had been with a search party of troops that had raided the player's home. A small terraced house, full of bawling kids, on the edge of a barren housing estate. He had stood by as the lieutenant who led the search party had questioned the player's wife. He knew all about the woman. He knew what she had been given for her birthday, and what she was to have been given for Christmas.

He knew the names of all her children. He knew where the roof dripped, and which central heating radiator leaked. Where was her man now? When was he last at home? When was he coming back? Who had called by for him? Good woman, the wife of the player, a good woman because she thought she was married only to a volunteer in an active service unit of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army, and there was no way that she was going to utter a single word to betray the Organisation. Tough woman, too. She hadn't answered anything, but her eyes that were red from weeping had told half the story, and a sergeant who was a family man had extracted from the seven-year-old out of sight on the stairs that her Da had been taken out of the house fighting and kicking and crying for his life. And that had been the start of the waiting time.

By the time the woman saw her man's body she would know what he had been, what he had suffered.

He knelt at the edge of the tarmacadam and carefully turned the body over. The player had seemed a slight man when they had met in car parks, behind pubs, at railway stations and super-markets. But he was dead weight now. The cigarette burns were bright on the pale chest amongst the sparse gingery hairs. The handler shuddered. They had had him for a week, a good clear week since the big men in their combat jackets and their balaclavas had bullocked into his house. A week before they had hooded him, trussed him with twine, put him into the boot of a car or the back of a van, and driven him to the killing ground.

He saw that the hands were tied together at the wrist and seemed to clutch at his privates, as if even at the moment of death he had flinched from another kicking. He heard the sigh of impatience from the major behind him and the fidgeting of the policemen. He couldn't blame them, couldn't blame anyone for wanting to be off this bloody awful hillside before darkness came down.

In time the player might have become seriously important. As it was, he had only been useful. He had wanted to please. That had been the worst thing about him. Pathetically eager to please. Perhaps they had rushed him. He had told the player often enough that his life was sacred, that no risk would be taken with his safety. And he would never know how his player had been discovered. It could have been because of his knowing of the movement of the two Kalashnikovs in the car that had been stopped a month back at the apparently random vehicle checkpoint at which two volunteers had been arrested. It could have been because he had flashed his money in a bar when the whole estate knew he hadn't been in work since he came out of gaol. It could have been because he'd taken drink and the adrenalin of the double life had pushed out some careless remark. Whatever the reason, the player was dead, and the player's life had been his responsibility.

They always hooded them. They always took the shoes off them; in that community it was the ultimate shame to die barefoot. He took the black plastic in his hands and ripped it. He saw the bruising on the face, and the left eye puffed shut, and the front tooth missing. He saw the blood mess of the bullet's entry wound.

He nodded. It was his player. He pushed himself up from the grass.

As he had stepped away they were already bringing the stretcher forward, and moments later the Scenes of Crime men were starting a check of the ground on which the body had been dumped. It had happened before, it would happen again. The handler gazed down into the mutilated and tortured face of his player, and then the face was lost to his view by the slashing zip of the body bag.

He walked fast back down the lane towards the knot of soldiers and policemen. No one spoke to him. He was the handler who had lost his man to the enemy for a week. His man had been beaten and kicked and burned until he shrieked his confession onto the slowly turning spools of their tape recorder. The enemy would know everything of him that Eddie Dignan, codename Tallboy, had known.

Through a farm gateway, he sheltered by the hedge from the wind.

He wanted to be out on the first of the helicopters, with the major and the senior police officers and the body of the informer. He had thought himself a hard man and the tears ran down his cheeks. He would never work in the Province again. Never again play God, hold in his safekeeping the life of an informer. Good riddance. Send in some other bastard, and good luck to you, sunshine.

In the barracks where the helicopter put down, he walked at once to his car. He had to wait at the main security gate because the sentries gave precedence to the hearse coming in. On an empty road, in the darkness, he drove back to Belfast to write his report, to pack his bag, and to get on a flight home. Two and a half years of work come to an end, with his player in a ditch.

"There was this preacher, might have been Paisley and it might not, real red hell-fire merchant, and up the Shankill he's given them two hours of sermon, frightened the wits out of them. First time in two hours and he draws breath, mops his forehead, sweat like it's raining. 'Are there any questions?' Little wee lady, clutching her brolly, at the back, pipes up,

'Do angels have wings?' Big fellow in the front, fast as light, says 'Do they, feck…' And the preacher he shouts back, 'One question at a time

…' Got it?"

Jon Jo laughed out loud. He always laughed at that story, whether he heard it or whether he told it himself.

He thought the driver was all tensed up and needed to wind down.

The driver had missed the last set of lights, gone straight through on red. The joke was to calm the driver. And round the next bend there had been a police car, just cruising. Even Jon Jo, and it was hard to get his temperature up, had felt his heart racing when they had gone past the police car after being tucked in behind it for a full minute when the police car had slowed right down. And over the next mile as the police car sat on their tail.

"I heard it already," the driver muttered, through gritted teeth.

"Did you now?"

"And it was told better the last time."

"Was it now?"

And then the police siren exploded on them and the driver moaned and jammed on the brakes, but the police car was past them, blue lights twirling, and they sat still with the engine off for several minutes, saying nothing.

He had never seen the driver before. He had been given over the telephone the colour and make of the car, its registration number and what time it would pick him up by the taxi rank outside the underground station when he came off the last train of the night. He cuffed the shoulder of the driver to encourage him. The drivers weren't as good as they had been the year before, nor the couriers.

"So just watch the road."

"I will."

The driver's accent was Dublin. Jon Jo Donnelly didn't rate these youngsters from down south. Given his choice, and he wasn't, he would have had boys from his own place, but they sent him drivers and couriers from the south now because they were the ones who weren't on the fingerprint files.

Jon Jo had the map spread across his knees, and he used a torch to track their route into the sprawl beyond Wimbledon. He was wearing pink plastic washing-up gloves. The last thing that he had done before he had identified the car had been to pull on the thin, clammy gloves. It was past one in the morning. He thought the driver was scared out of his mind. He gave the directions quietly and he tried to breathe his confidence back into the kid. They came to the road, the headlights caught the name of the road.

"Well done, that's great."

The driver did not reply.

The road was poorly lit, long stretches of blackness between the street lights. Along the avenue of mock-Tudor homes a very few still showed an upstairs light, and one only had a ground-floor light on. The suburb was asleep. He had walked down the road and round the right-hand bend just before the target's house, in the morning of the day before. He had walked fast and not slackened his speed when he had passed the house that concerned him. The house needed new guttering at the side above the garage, and he had noted the car parked by the front door, and he had seen the bright new burglar alarm box high above the windows on the first floor. There were no lights now in the house.

They drove down the avenue, and then did a figure of eight in the streets at the end. No cars passed them. They came back down the road again.

Two streets away there was a railway station with a sporadic service through the night from Waterloo. The driver parked there, away from the lights. It was the time of night that fathers and brothers and boyfriends would wait outside a station to pick up a girl to save her walking home. Jon Jo rehearsed the driver in his role and then he said,

"Ten minutes, could be fifteen, but you wait for me."

"Good luck."

"Won't be me that's needing luck. You wait, you don't crash out unless there's sirens in my street, you hear me?"

The driver said, "Get the pig."

"You just have the car good and ready." Jon Jo switched off the car's interior light, checked that the car park was empty and slipped out through the door. He closed it quietly behind him. For a moment he saw the driver's face. So bloody young. He walked away from the car carrying a dark brown shopping bag, heavily weighted.

He hugged the shadows. The night was his friend, and had been ever since he could remember.

He was a little over six foot in height, broad and strong because all his life he had known physical labour. He was made more formidable by the quilted charcoal anorak that he wore and the black woollen cap that was pulled down to hide his hair line. Dark clothes, nothing that would catch the eye of a woman letting her cat out, a man taking his dog for a last walk, a taxi driver idling for a fare.

He crossed into the target's road. He was very calm. He knew that because of the even pattern of his breathing, and because there was no tightness in his legs.

The house was well-placed for him, almost exactly halfway between two street lights. A white Metro was parked in the driveway behind the low wrought-iron gates. The car was backed up against the green-painted garage doors. He moved silently along the pavement in his worn old trainer shoes. When he was beyond a street light's reach and still short of the target's house, he dropped to his knees and re tied his shoe's laces. He turned and his eyes swept the road behind him. No dogs, no cats, no taxis. He stood again and looked up the road. He was against a fence and the hedge above it. He stood very still.

He heard the door open.

He heard, "Go on, you little bugger, get on with it."

He heard the door pulled shut.

Jon Jo went forward. He moved fast now. He came to the wrought-iron gates and swung his leg and his bag over, steadied himself, then brought the other leg over, and came down, lightly, onto the tarmacadam driveway. He crouched, waiting. No sound. No light. He walked to the deeper shadow of the passageway between the house and the garage.

The target's car was a Volvo. It would be inside the garage. The Metro would be the wife's. It would make just as much pain to blow the wife away, very influential people British establishment wives, and if they lost one of their kind it might raise the panic scream a ratchet higher. But the target was the driver of the Volvo. Forty times harder to get at. And the Army Council would have the skin off his back if he took the easy road, the Metro.

He reckoned the target would have believed himself at threat and that precautions would be in place. The best location for an electronic beam inside the garage was across the doorway. That's where he thought they'd have recommended putting it. He used a short heavy screwdriver to prise open the small window to the garage set high in the passageway. The surveillance had said that the window was big enough for him. He took the shopping bag in his teeth, so that it half seemed to pull his jaw away and he heaved himself up onto the ridge, holding the window open with one hand, balancing himself, and reaching down inside for a hand-hold with the other. His anorak snagged on the window's fastener, and he believed that the noise he made would have raised half the road. His fingers found a spade handle. It took his weight. He eased himself over the ridge and down, and his foot caught the box of a lawn mower and upended it. He hung on to the window and he lowered himself inch by inch until his feet were firm on the ground. He listened to the silence of the night echoing in his ears.

There was little space for him to move between the lawn mower and the car. He knelt, with his back to the window and took from the plastic bag a box which had once held two litres of vanilla-flavoured soft-scoop ice cream. It was bound tight with adhesive tape, and under the tape across the lid were two circular magnets. With his torch in his teeth, he stripped open the box. His fingers, awkward in the plastic gloves, fiddled to clear the rubber tube that covered the contact pin. He set the clock, from a kitchen timer, for thirty minutes. He checked the wiring of the detonator, the clamps on the battery, the leads to the mercury tilt switch that lay across the mass of the explosive. He wound the tape back across the box.

There was the sharp sound of the magnets thudding onto the underbody of the car. He checked that he had dropped nothing.

In thirty minutes the hand of the clock from a kitchen timer would be stopped against the contact pin. The bomb of four pounds weight of Semtex explosive would be live. Detonation would follow immediately after the mercury tilt switch was jolted and the battery-powered circuit completed. He picked up all the tape and the box, which he crushed, and the plastic bag, and put them in his anorak pocket with the torch and the screwdriver. He set the lawn-mower box upright and rubbed the window catch clean – unthinking instinct, unnecessary because he wore the rubber gloves, care his life style – and then stood still beside the window, listening. When, for a minute, he had heard nothing, he climbed back out and eased the window to its closed position.

Jon Jo went back the way that he had come, in shadow. The car was as he had left it. He dropped down into the passenger seat. The driver looked at him, questioning, and Jon Jo nodded. The excitement would be later, at that moment he felt only the extremes of exhaustion.

They drove away.

He had never seen his target, not even a photograph. All he knew of him was his occupation and his address and the make of his car. The occupation was enough to make him a target.

The streets were dead. They went over Putney Bridge and through central London. He dozed, and hazily he heard the murmur of the driver's song. It was an Irish song of the heroes and the martyrs of the Organisation, a song that he might have heard in any of the bars that were on the mountainside that was his home. So long, near to a full year, since he had last been home. The car stopped beside the entrance to the mainline railway station.

He opened his door, then in play punched the shoulder of the driver.

"Thanks, you were fine."

The words gushed. "You're Jon Jo Donnelly, right? We all talk about you. You're feckin' brilliant. Without the likes of you, this war's over.

It's been my privilege to meet you, Mr Donnelly…"

The words were strangled. He held the driver's throat in his hand.

"Don't ever speak my name again. Don't ever think of going careless with my name. You ever do that and I'll gut you."

He slammed the door and strode away into the shadows, stripping off the gloves. He left the station by the exit on the other side and walked eight blocks to find a rubbish sack to stuff his bag and the gloves in, then more slowly back to the station and onto the concourse to find a bench not yet taken by a dosser where he could stretch himself out until the time of the first train of the morning.

When he had come on duty he had immediately been aware of an atmosphere of minor crisis ebbing in and out of the Section Head's office. Had to be a crisis for Wilkins to have stayed on as late as nine, and his P.A. had been there, and Carthew and Foster. Behind the closed door there had been the clatter of glasses. Then it was all over, Carthew and Foster slipping away like ghosts in the night, the P.A. sliding an empty scotch bottle into her waste bin and leaving as if she'd stood up a date in a restaurant for a couple of hours. Wilkins had just said, as he was shrugging into an overcoat, that he would be at home if a "Priority" came through. And that had been that. The crisis must have been contained, because no trace had spilled over into the Night Desk Officer's vigil.

Two faxes on the secure line from Belfast, neither of them remotely

"priority", a phone call from SO 13 at the Yard asking for a trace on a building worker from Limerick, the usual job of getting the Sit Rep ready for the Section Head's desk for when he came in at one minute to nine o'clock.

The first girl into the typing pool whispered something inaudible to the second girl, and she looked at him and giggled. The office area had begun to fill up. The kettle was on, the telephones had begun to ring.

It was a Friday morning.

The voices played around Bren. He filled his briefcase. Just the box for his sandwiches, his flask and the mug that he had washed up when he had shaved, and the envelope from Personnel with a flimsy on Security Service pensions. He heard all that was said, but he knew that he was an outsider.

The chatter had started.

The talk was of the weekend.

"You be careful down at Archie's. All he gets people down there for is two days of mucking out his bloody stables. It's slave labour. First thing you'll be given is a pitchfork, all the exercise you'll get is carting manure…" "Sybil and I are going to Budapest. No, just for the weekend, out tonight, back at sparrow-fart on Monday morning. She says we'll get all the Christmas presents there for half of what Regent Street'd cost…" "Yes, with Roddy, somewhere in Northants. It's his sister's twenty-first. I had to buy a new dress, four hundred bloody pounds. Some D.J. oick from the Beeb's doing the disco…" "No, really, we're camping. Fiona's into that sort of thing. Exmoor in November, Christ! I said I'd be sleeping in longjohns with the sleeping bag tied at my neck. She's a tough little vixen.. ."

Bren was going nowhere for the weekend. He was going nowhere because he had not been invited anywhere.

He was at the door. No one seemed to have noticed that he was leaving. Bren stood aside to make way for his Section Head.

"Just off then, Bren?"

Well, he was at the door with his raincoat on and his briefcase in his hand… "Just off, Mr Wilkins."

"You didn't call me."

"Nothing came through that was Priority."

"Thank the good Lord for that."

"I checked through the statistics, sir. It's the first week in the last ten that we haven't had either a shooting or a bombing, or even a failure.

Good morning, then, Mr Wilkins."

He looked back at his desk, to be certain that it was cleared, that all the sheets of paper that he had headed DONNELLY JJ had gone to the shredder. There would have been a small frown from Mr Wilkins if he had left any vestige of his night's work on the desk. It was what he wanted, what he prepared himself for, to be taken onto the team working on DONNELLY JJ. He had spent two and a half hours after three o'clock trying to extract from the computer database any pattern in the present campaign of attacks. It was about all that he had come up with, that there had not been a shooting or a bombing for seven days, the longest clear time in ten weeks.

"You at home over the weekend?"

"Yes, Mr Wilkins." There was a gym near his flat and if he left home over the weekend he would go there, pump weights; he would fight the heavy bag on Saturday for two hours and he would do a half-marathon on Sunday.

"Not escaping to the country?"

"No, Mr Wilkins."

"Thank you, Bren…"

Old men with nothing more in their lives to fear came out to walk behind the hearse to the parish church, and women who had slipped into their shopping coats against the cruel wind, and a few children with them. Not more than 150 souls took it upon themselves to accompany the family of Eddie Dignan, the informer, to the funeral Mass. Most of that tight community in the housing estate stayed indoors, or gathered at their front gates. He was the man who had betrayed his own. Eddie Dignan had taken the Crown's gold. His widow, and she was much liked by her neighbours, walked with her children around her, and those that knew her best said afterwards that her face showed more shame than grief. They walked behind the hearse, the widow of the tout, the children of the tout, the friends of the tout. A little tide of hard, pain-etched faces went slowly past the news cameras, and up the steps into the church.

Across the plain coffin, over the small bunches of fresh flowers, over the heads of the widow and her wee ones, over the bowed shoulders of the few inside the great church, the priest said, "… Eddie was trapped between two groups of unscrupulous men, one of which – as covert agents of the state – has a skein of respectability masking its work of dark corruption. They too work unseen, seeking victims like Eddie whom they can manipulate for their own ends…"As they waited for the widow and her children to ride away in the big black car from the graveside, it was muttered that the greater blame lay with the bastard British who had used Eddie Dignan, not with the Provo gunman who had shot him dead.

It was a more comfortable thought.

He had slept on the bench at Paddington railway station, and then he had gone to the Left Luggage and collected the grip bag with his clothes and the canvas holder that held his carpentry tools. He had bought his ticket, paying cash, and taken the early train to the west.

Jon Jo stood on the platform at Newton Abbot. It was near to nine o'clock. The cold morning air seemed to blast off Dartmoor and swirl across the open space of the station. He had come off the fast train, and the slow train was running late. It was nearly nine o'clock. After a hit, there was a room in London that he could use, in Hackney. There was another always available to him in a Victorian house divided up into bedsitters in Guildford. A third room in Reading, west of London, had also been rented for him. Those rooms had been chosen and paid for by deep cover operatives. The room in the Devon summer resort town of Paignton, he had found for himself. It was where he felt most safe.

Jon Jo took a Walkman from his grip. Methodically he untangled the wires and tuned across the babble of the stations until he caught the chimes of nine o'clock. There was the abbreviated news bulletin. The Gulf, the trade figures, the storm force winds approaching the northwest, the still unsuccessful hunt for a missing child, a soccer transfer record for a central defender… The introduction to a phone-in broadcast on Equal Opportunities… He tore off the earphones, and buried the Walkman back in his grip-What the feck had happened? Every morning, winter and summer, the target left for work at twenty minutes past seven. The surveillance report had been definite on that. If the gouging of the window with his screwdriver had been s p o t t e d… Or if the target had sat so heavily into the driver's seat as to shake off the magnets, and the fall had not thrown the tilt switch. I f… But the road of the target house would have been swarming with police. There should still have been, "News is coming in of…"

For the first time since he could remember, the first time since he had crossed the water, he felt the sweat of the fear of failure run in the pit of his back.

The platform was crowded. Men and women and school children jostled their way onto the two-carriage train going south and west to the coast towns. Jon Jo was amongst them, his bottom hp white between his teeth.

His P.A. had been sent with a fistful of loose change to the shop across Curzon Street to buy the sandwiches and two large bottles of Perrier.

They were talking through the lunch break because Wilkins knew that Carthew would be off at three to meet his wife at the airport, and Foster would be wanting to get away early so that he could get onto the M4 before it seized up at the start of his drive to Exmoor. Carthew was certainly work-shy, and Foster might just be certifiable if he intended to pitch a tent against the elements at this time of year.

"So, it's Brennard, is it, until we can get Ferdie back?"

Foster said, "He's the obvious one, the one we'd miss the least."

Carthew said, "He's a prickly little beggar."

Foster said, "Prickly is an understatement."

Carthew said, "You know, when he first came, and I called him Gary, I thought he was going to do me Criminal Assault."

"He's the one that I would think most suitable," Wilkins said quietly.

"It had crossed my mind to move him to the Donnelly team, give him something tougher to cut his teeth on. I'd say he was a little frantic for some meat, in rather a hurry, oh yes. He deserves the chance… but I would be less than honest if I did not make plain my disappointment with the reaction of other members of our section…"

Foster said, "I thought Bill was going to have a coronary…"

Carthew said, "No one in their right mind actually wants to go..

Foster said, "Trouble with Charles is that he's got the private means cushion to fall back on. I think if he were posted he'd quit. Be a waste if we pushed him too hard."

Carthew said, "Ulster's hardly the place for a pressed man…"

Foster said, "The only other one that I could think of was Archie.

Quite simply, he declined. I suppose it's because he's taken on that place in the country. The problem is, Ernest, that no one who has a halfway normal life to lead is going to be ambitious for a posting in that dreadful country."

Carthew said, "Brennard's particularly well-suited…"

Objectively, of course, it was not satisfactory to put in a raw young man, but it was temporary. Foster would check out the position on Ferdie Penn, when he could be recovered from the training programme he was running down in Nairobi. Might be a month, might be two…

Brennard wouldn't need to be told that it was just a temporary thing because that would be demotivating.

They chewed at their sandwiches. Wilkins mused, "It's a life that none of us older men were trained for. Alright, we have our Watchers, and we do that well, but for the most part we are a collating agency. All of this frigging around in ditches, carrying sidearms, running sources, it's a new science… You don't think Brennard will let us down?"

Foster said, "Be working under Parker, won't he?"

Carthew said, "With Parker in charge, you could send a babe in arms."

And so, over beef and salad sandwiches and mineral water, it was agreed by the Section Head and his two principal Higher Executive Officers that Gary Brennard should be invited to offer himself for a posting to the Security Service unit working in the province of Northern Ireland. It was further agreed that the invitation should be made quickly, in order that the vacancy left by the compromised Faber should be filled as soon as possible. Faber's return, regrettable though its cause was, would be an asset to the Desk.

"Don't you trouble yourself about young Faber," said Carthew. "He's as tough as old boots. Put him straight to work, that's my advice. Give him any sort of break and you'll be doing him no favours."

Wilkins talked on about the difficulties with Finance. Carthew defended the quality of the glass that could be bought in Hungary.

Foster recalled that every stitch of his and Marjory's spare clothing had been stolen from a camp site near Nice last summer. They were civilised men. They enjoyed each other's company and conversation.

Ireland, the abscess that governed their lives, was, temporarily, forgotten. The laughter was warm.

His P.A. stood in the doorway.

"Bomb in Motspur Park, probably Irish. One woman, two children, both girls, fatals."

He was the familiar figure.

The Commander of SO 13, the Anti-Terrorist Branch of New Scotland Yard, had travelled to the location of four shootings and five bombings that long autumn. He thought he should be seen to attend the site of every atrocity. He regarded the British public as his last and best hope of defeating the terrorist scourge now visited on the Home Counties.

The landlady of the block of letting rooms, the curious neighbour behind her lace curtains, the inquisitive salesman in the second-hand car yard, the Commander regarded them as his most reliable allies. If he could not be bothered to abandon his schedule and turn out, then he could not expect the watchful and the curious to telephone the police with their suspicions.

He still experienced the sledgehammer blow of shock. He reckoned he always would. He stared grimly across the scene. He had been told in the car coming down that James Tennyson, late of the Northern Ireland Office, now with the Department of Trade and Industry, had been warned that his name was on a list passed from Dublin nine months before, and told also that a local Crime Prevention Officer had been to his home to make recommendations on a security system that wouldn't eat half of a senior civil servant's salary. And he had been told that the man was ill, too ill to go to the office that day, that his wife had taken the Volvo rather than her own smaller car to go with their two children to collect some others for a music class. Tennyson had been taken to a brother's house in Kent.

It was pitiful, they were so naked, these men and their families. The Commander stood alone. He was tall, straight in the back. He tugged continually at his heavy moustache.

The car, metallic grey, was just recognisable as a Volvo. The two nearside doors were completely off. The roof, with the splintered sun hatch at the apex, had expanded to a jagged pyramid. The bonnet was nowhere to be seen and a far-side front wheel was gone. Close to a window frame was the chalked outline of a small body shape and a buckled shoe and one half of a violin case.

The car had cleared the drive, probably bounced in the gutter, and been almost in the middle of the road when the device exploded. The garden fence was flattened back onto the flower bed, the gates were off their hinges and mangled, a bare cherry tree was snapped off at its roots. The front windows of the house were blown in, but the curtains were now drawn and flapping in the wind. He knew the age of the girls, and the name of Tennyson's w i f e… He wasn't even important. He had once been a civil servant doing whatever civil servants do, but in Belfast.

There were neighbours across the road who stared at him. They stood with defiantly folded arms.

A Chief Inspector was at his shoulder.

"The garage had an alarm, and he could have expected that. He still went into the garage. He was prepared to take a hell of a risk. .

"So, was he stupid?"

There was the grate, now, of the shovels gathering up the fragments of glass and the metal mess from the roadway to tip into the dustbins.

They moved across to the pavement to allow the recovery vehicle to pass by with the winch to drag the Volvo onto its trailer.

"Ruthless, I'd say, determined to get it right. He used a heavy tool to get the garage window o p e n… "

The Commander said, "Sounds like him."

"Probably a big screwdriver."

"That's my old love, Jon Jo, taking risks again."

When he couldn't sleep, as he hadn't slept in the last ten weeks, when his wife chucked him out and into the spare room at the back of their house, then the face that filled the Commander's mind was that of Jon Jo Donnelly.

"Brennard? Hope I didn't wake you. Ernest Wilkins here…

Something's come up that I'd like to discuss with you. I can't talk about it on the phone. I hope you haven't anything that can't be switched on Monday morning… Let's say before the chaos starts, eight o'clock.

Goodbye, and have a good weekend."