The Journeyman Tailor

12

In sunshine, rain, snow, gales, he took his black and white cross collie bitch out onto the mountain. The dog's coat was never brushed, but the rushing and diving into bramble and along the rabbit trails in the gorse left the coat shiny and sleek. There was not an ounce of spare weight on the beast. Old Hegarty had the dog's nose and her wiry slimness and the same bright-eyed, questing appearance. They were inseparable. It was said in the community that Hegarty talked more to his dog on their morning walk than he ever exchanged words with any Living being; his sister, certainly, had long since accepted that the dog took first place in his affections. The walk was brisk. Seventy-two years had not slowed old Hegarty's stride, and the dog all the time quartering the country around him.

When they were hunched down in the lee of a great rock or resting together on the cropped grass of a clearing in the forest, he shared the biscuits from his sister's tin and liquorice allsorts from the village shop with the dog, and he told the creature all that he had learned in the Library. The dog knew by now not all but much of what there was to know of the fives of the great architects of Ancient Greece, the highlights of the campaigns of Hannibal and Napoleon, and could probably have recited to herself the best part of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge… a well-versed hound, the cross-collie bitch.

This morning they were at the top of Logue's Hill, to the west of the summit plateau of Altmore, near the Telecom tower. The dog was ahead of him and it was the white flash on the chest of the dog that he continually saw and lost amongst the gorse and bracken and brambles.

His eyesight was fine. He needed glasses only for reading. Fifty yards ahead of him the dog had crouched, belly on the ground, tongue lapping the lower jaw. It was the posture the dog would take if she had found a grazing deer or an unwary fox or pheasant. Old Hegarty had learned to move as silently as any of the mountain's creatures. He came swiftly forward. Beyond where the dog had crouched down, ahead of them, was the dark wall of the close-planted conifer forest. The track that the Forestry men used, past the Telecom tower and into the close-planted trees, was to the right of them. He came without sound to his dog. If it had been a deer and his movement had disturbed it then when they came to their next stop and the sharing of a biscuit he would have apologised.

He could do nothing about the smell of his body or his coat, but he could control his footfall. He knelt carefully beside the dog. Hegarty knew most of the cars that drove on the mountain lanes. He did not know this one… The car would have to have come down the gravelled track past the tower and towards the forestry, and then it would have turned off. A car off the track was a hidden car. It was as if the dog knew that the car was covert business and its jaw was flat to the ground and its eyes were locked to the green and mud-spattered bodywork.

They waited and they watched.

Hegarty was a man who said what he felt. In his youth his sharp tongue had made him unpopular and lonely. In his old age his reputation was of a harmless eccentric. The words were still in his mind. Later he might have justified them to the cross-collie bitch.. . "If the police had your boy, had their claws in him, then I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for him." There was a car off the track and hidden and there was a boy gone missing. The forest was a place they might have taken the boy. The day was clear ahead of him. His books were due back at the Library. He had only the Library to worry him and the woman there who gave him stick if his books were late. But the Library was not yet open. If he found the boy… or found those that held the boy… Well, that was something else… The mountain was quiet around him… If he found the boy, yes, he had his stick and he had his dog… Not to say he'd interfere, not to say he wouldn't, but it was Hegarty's pride that he knew everything of Altmore mountain… The dun brown of his coat merged with the frosted bracken stems. He pulled the collar up about his ears. He sat on the ground beside the dog.

They appeared between the undergrowth clumps, they were hidden again. They were careful.

He never saw the face of the woman, just the floc k of the gold in her hair.

Hegarty saw the face of the young man that was mud smeared, and he saw the pistol that he carried and the camouflaged small pack. He saw that the woman carried a snubbed machine gun.

He watched. There was a whisper growl from his dog and his hand, fleshless and veined, dropped onto the dog's head to smooth the fur and quieten her. When they were fifty yards from the car the man and the woman separated. The man came close to him, not more than a dozen paces, and the woman made a circle round to the far side of the car. He saw the young man go down on his back and search underneath the car.

He heard the crisp English accent.

"You drive."

Hegarty, who knew everything of the life of Altmore mountain, realised the pain of knowing more than he should have known, that there was a covert team on Altmore. He watched the man drive slowly back onto the track, he watched the girl try to erase the marks of the tyres with branches and lightly pushing the bracken into place over the path the car made. He stayed where he was a long time after the last sound of the car had gone.

She hadn’t left Bren in the corridor and she had gone to the door of Colonel Johnny's office and in response to her knock he had come to th the door and there had been short words between them and then he had led her, Bren trailing, to the adjutant's office. Bren hadn't heard what was said.

Cathy dialled a number, let it ring briefly, then put down the receiver. Bren thought that she was counting slowly to ten. She dialled again, let it ring, replaced the receiver. Another wait. She dialled a third time…

This was what infuriated him, when there were no explanations.

They had come back off the mountain. They had driven to the barracks.

They had gone their separate ways to shower and change. They had come to the officers' block to use the telephone. He was not told who she rang, why she rang three times. Since he had watched Mossie smoking his last cigarette out of his back door there had been seven hours of unbroken silence between them, except for the basics of the surveillance, before they had moved out in the half-light. And all she had said then was to tell him to drive…

They were in the corridor, and Rennie came out of an office and Colonel Johnny was with him.

She stood beside Bren. She was dwarfed by the three of them. She seemed to shake herself, to prepare for the challenge she could see coming. Rennie was the big man, she was the little woman. Where she stood she blocked Rennie's way down the corridor.

Bren could only admire her. That was her way, head on.

"Good God, look at this, Bren… It's the Eternal Flame, the policeman who never goes out. Heavens, Mr Rennie, not actually going to get mud on your shoes, are you?"

"Miss Parker, you are deep in shit."

"Put me there, did you?"

"And I won't be around to lift you out."

"We haven't been telling tales out of school, have we? I gave that up in the fourth form…"

"You're running out of time, Miss Parker, and don't say you weren't warned…"

Cathy stood four-square across the corridor, tiny and implacable, the tired bloody-mindedness that was all her own set against Rennie's rising temper.

"… Don't push me, not one inch further."

She mimicked his accent. "Would you fall over?"

She stood aside. She let them pass. Rennie and the colonel strode away and then turned for the Operations Room.

It snapped in Bren. "That's just terrific, Cathy. Bloody wonderful.

That's a man that would go to the wall for you. Don't mind me, I don't matter, I'm just here to do the chores. But that man mutters and you've lost him. By God, I'm learning the lot today, really sophisticated, top operative stuff. Come off your high horse, Cathy, for Christ's sake."

She walked away from him. She- swayed once and he thought she might just have been half asleep.

They were outside the block building, deafened by the helicopter floating down to land. There were soldiers, with their kit and their weapons kneeling in a line, ready to board. Her voice was drowned but shouting at him.

They had time to kill.

How long to kill?

Six hours, seven.

What should he do?

They were going to be eating, sleeping, drinking East Tyrone, he should learn about the place.

How to do that?

Start where everyone starts, in the Library

Where was she going to be?

She was going back to Belfast, she would rolled him in six hours in the Market Square.

Shouldn't he be with her?

"Mooning around after me like a bloody sheep on heat? No, thank you."

She might have punched him.

"I'll see you," Bren said.

Two roadblocks on his way to work. Because he was Charlie One, Stop and Search, he had been out of the car both times and half stripped down at the side of the road, and both times every piece of kit that he took to work, tins, dust sheets, brushes, ladders had been emptied out of the back of the estate for examination. If there had not been a uniformed police constable at both roadblocks then he might have been roughed over by the soldiers. Bitter, snarling taunts from the soldiers, like they were trying to wind him, like the best they could hope for was that his temper would crack. "Heh, you cripple arsehole, why are you making war on your own people, eh?’’ '" "You must be fucking perverts, torturing some little kiddie for your kicks " Got a tout in your knickers, have you? Giving out the inside story, is he?"

"Steady on, Sar'nt, better be nice to this one, maybe he's one of ours."

"Nah, this one's a kiddie-torturer…"It was what they wanted, that he would flail out, and then they could have taken him behind the hedge and given him the real kicking, the hard belting. It was Mossie's secret, and he could hold his temper. The whole of the mountain community had known that the roadblocks ringed the villages. At home, under the false floor of the wardrobe, beside the Building Society account book, was the bleeper. Couldn't have the bleeper strapped between his legs if he were to be stopped and searched by the army and police. It was his secret, one he shared with the bitch.

So he had been late to work. He had been there an hour when there was a message, he was wanted on the telephone.

Siobhan told him there had been three calls, close together, twice she had picked it up, no voice.

He told her he would be late home.

It was the first time he could remember the bitch using her emergency code to call him to a meeting.

The man from Lurgan had the reports. More troops on the mountain than there had been the evening before, more police blocks, derelict buildings had been searched, houses had been raided. The reports came by telephone and by courier. It was confirmation of what he had earlier thought.

The house where they held the Riordan boy was outside the cordon that had been thrown around Altmore. He knew the way the army and the police worked. They would first satisfy themselves that the boy was not inside their present net, then they would expand it. He didn't reckon he had much time left.

If 500 soldiers and police with helicopter support were searching the mountain then it was because of obligation. They had lost one of their own. The man from Lurgan was without remorse, without compassion.

Many years before, when Patsy Riordan who was now upstairs and blindfolded and bound had been in nursery. school, the man from Lurgan had been interviewed by a psychiatrist. He had been in custody, charged with murder. The psychiatrist had declared him to be without mental illness, not reliant on alcohol, emotionally stable and of average intelligence. The forensic evidence against him had failed. The man from Lurgan was quite normal, quite loving, in the company of his family and the friends he acknowledged who were outside the Provisionals. He could handle, effortlessly, the irreconcilable compartments of his life… He would have preferred a confession from the boy. He would have wanted it on tape so that it could be played to the tout's family.

But time was against the man from Lurgan.

On the telephone he named a rendezvous, and he asked for a handgun to be brought to the rendezvous.

"Do you want leave?"

"I do not."

"Do you want transferring out?"

Cathy said, "All I want to know is that you'll stand my corner."

Hobbes thought she was magnificent. He thought she was the sort of young woman who would be found at hunter trials or working her own big estate, or who would very occasionally take time off to be at one of those Sunday drinks in the country where his wife was so happily at home and where he was the abysmal stranger. Darling Charlotte had flatly refused to join him in Belfast, stated right off the bat when his transfer had come through that life was too short to be wasting it in the provinces.

"Damn you for thinking you even need to ask." She grinned. "Their nerve’s going."

"It’s what you'd expect, policemen, civil servants, politicians. I'll stand your corner, always."

He had never understood from where she quarried her strength. She looked to him to be worn out. She obviously needed leave and she probably did need transferring out. Nor could he grasp what seemed to be her compulsion to stay in Northern Ireland. Perhaps it was not his job to understand, just to be thank-full that he had her on his payroll.

He ran six teams in the province, three in Belfast, three for the rest of the territory. She was unique. He would never again be surprised by her, not after the Christmas party the year before last, where all the teams came together. Fancy dress. Cathy, the only woman there, on the table. Cathy dancing a belly dance to the frantic hand-clapping of the men around her. Best Christmas party anyone could remember. She hadn't come last year, hadn't even answered the invitation actually…

She wouldn't be transferred out, they'd need a blow torch to move her.

He did not understand what was the compulsion.

"You go careful."

"And you keep those bastards off my back – till I've got Donnelly here, till I've him stitched."

He showed her out. He went back to his desk and sat beside his telephone and waited for the Triple A, anti-aircraft artillery, to begin to detonate around him.

Mrs Riordan stayed at home. Her man was away at the farm. It was too stressful for him to sit with her by the small fire and while away the uncertain hours. No neighbours visited her. If she had gone to the village shop, all the talk would have stopped while she made her purchases and paid for them, not started again until she had gone back out through the shop door. It was no more than she expected, that her neighbours would shun her, abandon her. It would be known across the mountain that her Patsy had been taken for questioning as a tout. So confused… She had known he was junior with the Provisionals, but through the pain, the agony of imagining her son, screaming in fear, she could think of nothing that might have told her he lived the double life, couldn't, couldn't, couldn't believe it of him. She had said as much to her man. She had gone so far as to say that young Patsy wasn't up to it, not bright enough, but her man wouldn't meet her eye, couldn't bring himself to speak the boy's name. She was so alone she thought her heart would just break.

It would be the priest who would bring the news of the finding of a body.

There was no note taken, no stenographer was present. The Assistant Under-Secretary was on secondment from London. The Chief Constable had been transferred from a northern English force. They were blow-ins. Competing voices because each man sought to preserve the sanctity of his position.

"It's down to Five. Five thinks it can ride roughshod over us. They're unaccountable. They have no place here…"

"They demand support and facilities, and they share nothing."

"It's the arrogance of their people that infuriates me, the constant implication that no one else is prepared to prosecute the war with sufficient ruthlessness…"

"This time they've gone too far."

The Assistant Under-Secretary said, "But your people are involved.

Your people arrested the Riordan boy, directed the finger of suspicion at him…"

The Chief Constable said, "Not at my rank, not at the level of my Deputy, nor my Assistant Chief Constables – way below that."

"All they talk about, Five, is winning the war, they have no comprehension of winning the peace…"

'it's to be stopped. They're to be put out of here. They're a nuisance and an impediment. What I hear, not from them of course, I'm told nothing by that dreadful little Hobbes, what I hear is that all of this fiasco can be laid at the door of just a slip of a girl."

The Assistant Under-Secretary said, "If my Secretary of State back down in front of them, I'll take it to Downing Street…"

The Chief Constable said, "You do that. You will have the gratitude of every senior man in my force, just rid us of them.’’

The voice of the Assistant Under-Secretary dropped, "Did I hear you right? Did you say, a girl…?"

Bren sat in the Library on the town's Market Square.

He was on the first floor, in the wide well lit room that was the reference section. It was the type of library rarely found at home.

Probably a bomb had done for its predecessor, this was new and clean and warm. Most of the square outside, round the cenotaph was recently built, as if the old centre of Dungannon had been blown away, a chunk of used history.

He had started with the back files of the local paper. All of life's tapestry spread before him. Road deaths, local thieving, drunk driving bans, industrial accidents, assaults, vandalism. Jobs hopes and jobs despair, fashion shows, advertisements of Christmas menus at the hotels and restaurants, property for sale. Quite like home… Bullshit.

"… he died after being shot by gunmen as he worked in a friend's garage on the outskirts of…"

"… the chairman of the District Council went on to express sympathy to the family and relatives of…"

"… he called on the R.U.C. to take action following the U.V.F. arson attack…"

"… the Presbytery of Tyrone expresses its deep concern at the Campaign of vicious terrorist violence that goes on unabated…"

"… the two police officers suffered minor shock when the car in which they were travelling was…"

Stories tucked away, given no especial prominence, in the local newspaper. He turned to the current rates at the Farmers' Mart, and the organised day tour to show off a new fiat-deck weaner house for pig breeders. He checked the local gaelic football results and the property prices. The killings and the burnings and the ambushes were given no particular priority. All new to him, and all. old and sickening and ordinary to the people of the community…

He looked up. She was a pretty girl. She carried four volumes of old books. She was sorry she had not been quicker. They would cover the history of Dungannon and the history of Tyrone. She wore bright clothes and careful make-up. He wondered how she closed her mind to killings and burnings and ambushes. She took away the bound files of the newspapers. There were five tables in the room. Three were taken by sixth-formers, quiet and dedicated in their reading.

Dungannon…Dun-genan…Dum was fort on the hill, Genan was the son of Cathbad the druid. Genan, son of Cathbad, had built his strongpoint on the hill that was above Market Square. He gutted the pages Saint Patrick had built a religious house here. Time slipped by Bren. Shane O'Neill, with his seat at Dungannon, launched rebellion against Elizabeth the First of England, defeated in battle, trapped, killed, his head worth?1000. Fine print straining his eyes. Hugh O'Neill, uncrowned king of Ireland and ruling from Dungannon, defeating the English at the battle of the Yellow Ford. Feet shuffling towards him on the parquet floor. Hugh O'Neill destroyed by the army of James the First of England, and the start of the plantation. A chair at his table scraped back. The good lands planted with English and Scots settlers, and the Dungannon Irish driven to the mountain slopes of Altmore, castles built and Dungannon fortified, and seditious speaking a capital offence. The smell was stale rich, of an unwashed body and clothes. The rebellion of Sir Phelim O'Neill, and the English slaughtered in Dungannon and Tullyhogue; a battleground for Cromwell; a campaign land for William of Orange and the deposed James the Second; at the top of the Market Square, below the walls of the castle, had been the high gallows. There was a guttural cough and then the sound of phlegm spat into a handkerchief. He read the name of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly, the dispossessed, the man without teeth whose gums were tough enough to bite through a tin plate who was hunted by the English dragoons, and who…

"They's fine books."

Bren looked up. He saw the strong country face and a thin chin not shaven that day. Behind the man was the sign requesting "Silence". The old man wore a rain-stiffened overcoat and under that was a grey jacket and then a shirt without most of the upper buttons and then a high-necked and yellowed vest.

‘’Yes’’

‘’It 's, the book I like the best here."

"Is it?"

It, the book that tells best of the injustices done to us."

"Really?"

The hand, grimed fingernails and bloodless knuckles, snaked out over the table The old man pulled the book to him.

"So. You’s reading of Shane Bearnagh…?"

"I am.’’

‘’Gave the English a great dance. A whole barracks they built for the soldiers hunting him on the mountain. Is you’s English?’’

"Yes."

There was a cackled laugh. "You've not much of a tongue."

Bren felt the colour in his face. The book was pushed back towards him. "Well,…"

"So, what brings an Englishman to Dungannon to read the history of Shane Bearnagh Donnelly, rebel and patriot?"

"I had time to kill. I've always been interested in history."

"You won't mind me, course you won't, what's your business?"

Bren tripped it out. "Department of the Environment."

"Ah…" As if so much was explained.

"Just learning about this community…"

They were clear and pale blue, the eyes were on Bren's. Bren thought that it was like play at the surface of the eyes, and only mirthless cold behind. To leave now would be to draw attention to himself. It was harmless enough. The eyes followed Bren as he shifted his head.

"Have you's found a fine welcome here?"

"Only just starting."

"You'll find a grand welcome. We're friendly people."

"Yes."

"Even friendly to an Englishman from the Department of the Environment."

"Good to know."

"You'd not get a welcome, but you'd be knowing that, if it was thought you were of the Crown Forces."

"The Department of the Environment has nothing to do…" Bren said.

"Crown Forces aren't welcome, nor their spies."

I wouldn't know," Bren said.

"There's a way round here of showing people they're not welcome, if they're spies."

His page was blurred in front of him. "They're difficult times."

" They don't last, young man, the spies."

Bren looked up and saw that four girls at the next table, trim in their school uniforms, seemed to hear nothing.

‘’Ther’s a nose for spies in this town, on that mountain out there.

Spies smell.’’

"If you'll excuse me,,’’

The sudden smile splintered the weather-beaten face. "Talking too much again, always Hegarty's problem, talking too much. You'll be wanting to be back to your reading."

Bren stood up. He gathered the books from the table. The old man had hunched himself over the day's newspaper. Bren returned the books to the pretty girl downstairs. He thought he might be sick. He walked out through the wide glass doors of the Library and into the end of the afternoon. The wind caught at him and the sweat ran chilled on the back of his spine. A stupid old fart, just a prattling old windbag… So they wouldn't last, the spies. He thought of Cathy, tired and sweet and lovely Cathy. Cathy who would be there tomorrow, and the next month, and the next year, in the town and on the mountain. He had time still to lose, so he walked briskly away from the Library, forcing himself not to look back at the first-floor windows, and he believed that every eye in Market Square was on him.

On the site, two heavy packets of nails and screws and bolts and inns had been delivered. Nothing out of the ordinary. A van driver unknown to Mossie had called at the foreman's portacabin for a signature. A trainee chippy had been sent back to the van to fetch the delivery.

Nothing there to disturb Mossie as he got on with Innslini)', the undercoat onto the fresh plasterwork. But he had 'seen the sullen expression of the apprentice. Next time he passed, he called the boy quietly, not drawing attention to himself, and asked him why so cross, laddie. The boy had spat it out. The driver had been the lippy one at a vehicle check point three nights back when the boy had been tipped out of his old car, and his girl, searched down to his bollocks, given the chat that was always roughest when the U.D.R. part-timers were flaunting their bullet-proof flak jackets and their high-velocity rifles.

The boy had recognised the driver as the soldier who had humiliated him in front of his girl. And Mossie had noted the smart new logo on the side of the van.

He had left work early. He had no problem getting away early because he was on piecework and he had already achieved the account for the day for which he was paid,

He sat in his car. He was down the road from the gates to the builders' merchant's. He saw the van come back, checked the number plate against his memory. He wrote nothing down. His memory served him well. He recognised the driver. It was his task, that of the Intelligence Officer of the East Tyrone Brigade, to identify targets for the Active Service Units. He was way off safe territory, he was up past Stewartstown, and that was danger, particularly for a man who was Charlie One, Stop and Search. He watched the man, changed out of his overalls, drive from the yard in a dark blue saloon car. He followed cautiously. Most often he would have left this work to a young volunteer, a kid, even a girl, who was on the edge of the Organisation's operations, who was being tested. Not always. Mossie thought that it was only sometimes possible to involve the kids, but the time always came when it was necessary for him to take the risk himself. On the far side of Stewartstown he saw the car pull up outside a small and clean-painted bungalow. That was when he held back. A part-time soldier in the Ulster Defence Regiment would have been briefed, had it pounded into his skull, that he was most in danger from ambush when he left his home and when he returned to his home. When the man was inside, through his front door, Mossie drove past the bungalow. He could do that once, only once. He saw an elderly woman, the hem of an apron peeping from under her raincoat, sweeping leaves from the front path, he saw the glower look that the mother of a U.D.R. part-timer would reserve for any car going slowly past her home.

It was a nugget of information. It was a beginning. There was no race to kill a man who was a part-timer with the U.D.R. the critical moment was already past, the linking of the chain, the identifying of the bastard.

He drove away. He looked for the proximity of the part-timer's neighbours, and for the cover that the winter hedgerows would offer, and the fall of the trees back across the first field on the far side of the road. It might take weeks, months even, to learn the habits of the soldier, whether he always left home and returned home on his own, whether he was sometimes collected by a work colleague or a soldier colleague. He would learn at what pub he drank, where he worshipped, his shift pattern at the barracks. He would learn whether his mother always made it her business to be in the garden when he left and returned, and whether he drove away fast, and whether the car was securely locked into the garage at night. He would find the name of the soldier and the history of the soldier. And he would never speak of him to the apprentice boy at work.

A man was marked.

Only when he was quite satisfied would he present his plan to the O.C. That Cathy might then throw away the plan, because he would report all of that business faithfully to his handler, that was of no importance to him. It had grown to be the miracle of Mossie Nugent, that he could live with a life divided.

He was the stranger and he tramped the pavements of the town.

Two great religious buildings, and their matching magnificence to emphasise a community's separation, St Anne's for the Protestants and St Patrick's for the Roman Catholics. Two great school complexes to hammer home a community's division, the Royal for the Protestants and the Academy for the Roman Catholics. Two main shopping streets to bring home the opposition of the. cultures, Scotch Street for the Protestants and Irish Street for the Roman Catholics. Two spreading sports complexes where the people of the town were split, the rugby club to the east for the Protestants and the gaelic pitches to the west for the Roman Catholics.

Bren walked through the town community that was separated, divided.

He was the stranger.

He was the spy…

An old man had frightened him.

He walked because he had been frightened by the queer crack of an old man. God, and he wouldn't be telling Cathy Parker that he had run, tail between his legs, from an old man in a library. They were gathered on each corner of Market Square, the men who watched him.

He would have sworn that every eye was upon him. Old men and young men, cupping then hands across their faces to light their cigarettes, lounged against walls on the corners where Irish Street and Scotch Street and Church Street ran up into the Square. Eyes piercing him and stripping him.

He was trained to move on a street without attracting attention to himself.

It was just idiotic that he should feel fear.

He thought the training was nothing, the reality was the peering eyes from each corner of Market Square.

It was the separated and divided town. There were no high barriers of corrugated iron to divide off each community's ghettos. He learned, as he walked, the unspoken boundaries. The soldiers patrolled the streets that were set aside for Roman Catholic homes, laden with backpacks and radio sets and machine guns, marked the territory of the Roman Catholics. Young men, whipping orders in the patois of the north of England, questioning and frisking kids in a tongue that was foreign and hostile to the town. The police ruled the Protestants' roads and avenues. Crisply turned out, bulged by their bullet-proof vests, powerful with their carbine rifles and sub-machine guns, ties knotted neatly under their laundered collars… Each pace he took, so he felt the growing of the fear.

A community divided by history, tacked together by firepower, separated by suspicion. He thought he could have read for a year in London himself in an hour. A town that was no place for strangers.

"… They don't last, young man, the spies… There's no safety for spies…"

When did it happen?"

"It was two days back, they was here four hours."

It was still daylight outside. The light was filtered through the coloured glass of the old door and magnified the pattern on Jon Jo’s back. He thought the man must have been watching as his car arrived because the door had been opened even before he reached the porch.

He had been hurried inside and the door had been pushed shut immediately.

" There was nothing to find."‘

’But they came…I don't know how long they'd the house watched, and I don't know whether they still have us watched. I was talking last night to friends, they're the other end of Guildford, they're the only other Irish I know in the town, they were turned over two days back as well."

"It won't be for long."

Jon Jo saw the shake of the man's head. "Oh, no… no, no… don't get me wrong, it's been my family's cause more than a century; I stand by it; but, my friend, you don't come back… Perhaps it's just that they're searching everywhere, how do I know? You don't come back to a house that's just been searched. It's not right for you, it's less than right for me. It wasn't just uniformed men that came, it was detectives. .. Whose was the empty room? For any of the family from over the water… Was anyone expected? Not just right now… Why was there fresh bed-linen if no one was expected? Always clean bed-linen

… If no one's expected, why is the room kept free, don't I need the money?

Any time, any of the family might decide to come over… When was there last someone from the family over? Difficult to remember.. .

They searched hard. I don't know, maybe it was just routine, they were four hours going over the place. Jon Jo, hear me, I'm not Having them reason to come back." I have to have a place."

"You have to sort it yourself, and Jon Jo…"

"Do you feel no shame?"

"listen, damn it, they showed your photograph… they showed it to the English that lodge…"

He swayed against the wallpaper in the hallway.

I saw the photograph, what they were showing. It was you.

Didn’t put a name to it, but it was your photograph…"

He felt the shock and the sickness that followed. "I'm sorry, Jon Jo."

He didn’t help the man. He didn't say that he understood. There was the tightness all across him, like a noose at his neck, like handcuffs on his wrists.

‘’Jon Jo, my advice, get yourself out of here, get yourself home, Get yourself where you’re from…’’

’’ I might, I might, just…’’

He was wanted out and he went. Only on the mountain would he know friends.

They took Patsy Riordan, after it was dark, they turned the lights out and carried him out of the front door and they tipped him into the boot of the car that had been backed up close. They had dressed him upstairs. Vest, shirt, sweater, underpants, trousers, socks, anorak. His trainer shoes were carried to the car by a man who wore plastic gloves.

It was the old Irish custom from the dark past. A man with his shoes taken from him is a man disgraced.

His wrists were bound at his back. He was blindfolded. There was a gag at his mouth. The blindfold had been tightened and knotted again.

He was a young man who was going to his death and there was no love around him and no comfort.

The boot lid shut above him. He kicked and writhed and tried to scream. There was no one who would hear him. He was thrown against the spare tyre and bounced as the car hit the pavement edge as it turned out of the drive and made for the open country lanes.

I He struggled to free himself, to draw attention to himself, until he was too weak to move again. He prayed, mumbled words that were muffled by the gag, for the sound of the English soldiers' voices, for the knowledge that the car had run against a roadblock. He knew they went on winding and potholed roads. The Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army had been everything that he admired, everything that he had sought to be a part of. He heard no talk in the car, only the music from the Downtown station. He had lost all sense of direction. He began to lose the sense of time. The blindfold on his eyes was wet from his tears. He had done nothing, he was without guilt .. he was to be killed as a tout.

Patsy Riordan was already dead, his mind blown away by terror, when the car stopped.

He was dragged from the boot.

A bin liner was forced over his head and he lay on the wet, cold grass of the lane's verge as hands reached under the bag to remove the gag and blindfold.

He heard a voice. "Get it done."

He heard the splatter of the rain on the plastic of the bin liner bag that was over his head. He heard the arming of the pistol.

The darkness was all around him. There was the weight of a boot in the small of his back, as if to hold him steady.

"They've shot the Riordan kid."

Bren winced.

Cathy said, "It's not your problem."

"The little bugger had no chance."

Bren was just the minder, and the man with the gun, the protection.

Cathy said, "Don't give me any crocodile tears, Mossie. I don't want to hear 'it's a rotten old world'. You're safe, and you get paid."

"The body's down by the border."

Bren held the Heckler and Koch. It was set to semi-automatic, and his finger lay alongside the trigger guard.

Clathy said, "It's gone and it's past and it was never your problem I told your wife I'd look after you. I keep my promises, don't forget that."

"You's a feckin' awful woman."

Bren felt the muscle tightening in his arms. If Song Bird touched Cathy he would belt him with the stock of the weapon, at night across the back of the head. That was just ridiculous. About half a light year before he could have hit the tout she would have had him flat on his face… He could hear the music from the bar. They had left the car in the parking area, an expanse of

Weeded gravel, They had gone to the darkness behind the propane gas tank, at the back of the bar.

Cathy said, If you've had your whining time, Mossie…"

He’d done nothing, that Patsy."

Bren was the voyeur He just watched her at work, Tough and soft, stick and carrot. She had him in the palm of her hand, and she knew it and her hands dropped off his shoulders as it there was no more need for her to shake the hardness back into him. "You're not a bloody kid, Mossie, you are the best man I have. You are just bloody brilliant, Mossie, and you're safe. Got me?"

"What do you want?"

Bren glanced down at his watch. Near to closing time.

Cathy said, "I want Jon Jo Donnelly back on the mountain…"

The bar was a roadhouse between Portadown and Lurgan. The bar was on a main road and there was no back-up in position. A group spilled out of the bar and Bren went to the edge of the wall that cut off the gas tanks from the car park. He watched the men coming out of the bar and one was staggering and two were helping him. He had his back to Cathy and her Song Bird. He could only hear short snatches of what was said behind him. He ducked back behind the wall as the arc of the headlights swept the car park when the vehicle turned. She talked about money, big money, for Song Bird. He told her that Jon Jo Donnelly was a hero on Altmore. It was what they wanted, she said, Donnelly back home. He said it was all the talk of the Brigade that Jon Jo was needed.

Bren listened. The car park was quiet again. She dominated him, look no hesitancy from him. She said that they wanted Donnelly back soonest, and he said that the O.C. would back it. She said ii wasn't to be in a month, but a week, and he said that the O.C. would go down to Dublin and ask for it, sure as hell. There were more men tripping from the bar. God help you, Mossie Nugent, because no other bastard would.

More talk of money from Cathy, always she returned to the money.

Then Mossie was gone, away round the gas tanks behind the bin, walking hack into the lights of the car park, pulling up his trouser zip and walking unsteadily. Back into his real world. His real world was touts, and a bullet in the head, and money that he couldn't spend, and Patsy Riordan's mother, and his fear for Siobhan and the children, and the meetings in the darkness at the back of a bar's car park.

She was very close. He saw that she was grinning. He could feel the tension rising in him, perhaps she saw it and it amused her

"How long, Cathy?"

"How long what?"

"How much longer do you go on like this?"

"What sort of drivel's that?"

"It can't last."

"You're going soft."

"Like tonight, no back-up."

"Losing your bottle?"

"You've no back-up because you've fouled with Rennie and you're too proud to ask it of the military. You're buggering about on the end of the bloody branch, Cathy, and you're going to fall off. Luck is going to run out on you because you're taking short cuts. No back-up tonight. No back-up on the mountain last night."

"Why don't you just get on the plane out?"

"You're starting to make mistakes, Cathy. It's a mistake to come to a meeting without back-up. It was a mistake to lose Rennie. And most of all, it's a mistake to think you can operate alone here."

"I think we'll have to tell little Mr Wilkins that you're not quite up to it, why not?"

"You're running out of friends, Cathy…"

"Have you finished?"

Bren stood his full height. It was his mistake. He had his back in the car park. He looked down at her. "You go on like this and you go home in a box. Is that what you want? Are we playing the little heroine game? Are we too clever to take the precautions that everyone else takes?"

She looked past him. She hissed, "Behind you…"

He swung. He was wrenching the cocking lever of the weapon His eyes traversed the emptiness of the car park. There was the chuckle of her laughter.

‘’When I'm ready, Bren, then I'll go home."

Bren said, flat "You won't last."

She was still laughing. "Watch me..’’

Mossie shut the door quietly behind him. His car might have woken them all, his Siobhan and his mother and the children, but he paused on the balls of his feet in the hall of the bungalow. There was the light in the hall that was left on so that the children would not be afraid.

Right to leave it on all night, because there was no call for the children to be afraid… God… no cause for his children to be afraid. .. Mother of Mary… like they would have been afraid if they had known the half of their father. He went into the living room and closed the door behind him and he went to the window and eased back the joined curtains, enough for him to see out. He looked up the lane for the flash of a match, for the low glow of a cigarette. From the living room he went to the kitchen and again closed the door behind him and stood in the darkness to look over the fields behind the bungalow. There was faint moonlight. He might have seen a movement if it had been there, he might not. He saw nothing, no sign that they were still watched, that his children had cause to be afraid.. . Jesus… He wondered if in her house Mrs Riordan slept.

He took off his shoes in the hall and went in his socks into their bedroom. He undressed in the dark. He laid his clothes silently on the chair. He took his pyjamas carefully from under the pillow on his side of the bed. Just as any other night when he came back late and his family were asleep. He lay down beside Siobhan.

She hadn't slept. He whispered that they wanted Jon Jo Donnelly back.

"That's a bad boy," Siobhan said softly.

"I's to do what I can to get him back."

She was dragging his arm around her shoulder, nestling closer to him. "She's a stuck-up woman, his."

"He's bombing and killing across the water. They can't find him there, so they wants me to bring him back and mark him for them."

"You do that for her, what'll she do for you?"

She was against his body. He held her closer. "She said I'd have more money."

"What'd we do with the money?"

"What we done with it so far, nothing."

"How much money?"

"She didn't tell."

"You didn't ask her?"

"She just said that if I got Jon Jo back there would be more money."

"I'd have wanted to know how much money… I never could take Attracta Donnelly…"

He pitched his body up on his elbow. He glowered over her. "Does that make it right? More money? That you don't like Attracta Donnelly?"

"Makes it right enough for me."

No way out and no way back. He didn't tell her what he knew of Patsy Riordan. The sweat was on his body. The corpse lay at the side of the lane. The hands were tied and the head was hooded. The corpse wore his own clothes, Mossie's clothes. Not a dream, because sleep was far from him. The head of the corpse that was covered with the plastic bag hung down into the rainwater ditch, and the body that wore his clothes was across the grass, and the feet from which the shoes had been taken were splayed on the tarmacadam surface.

Mossie's body.

The Lynx circled at three thousand feet.

The camera's screen showed them the black of the plastic bag, the yellow of the shirt and the grey of the pullover and the green of the anorak. The jeans on the body were pale blue. White socks on the feet, and the helicopter's crewman wondered why they had taken the shoes from the body.

They had lifted off at first light, within an hour of the first report.

The crewman looked away from the screen and to the helmeted head of the pilot. He flicked his intercom switch.

Tell you what, Barrie. Seeing what they do to their own sort of shrivels my pecker at the thought of what they'd do to us if we came into their loving hands."

The distorted voice in his ear. 'Fly high, Fly sale Best answer to the problem, let the bastards butcher each other, faster the better, more the merrier.’’

When they had photographed the body, they turned to the other equipment they carried, the infra-red that could show them the path of a buried command wire to a booby trap beside the body and they switched on the high-frequency radio signals that would detonate a bomb laid for the recovery team.

They had been up an hour, and from that vantage point they could see across the rolling hills, the steep escarpment mountains, meadow lands, scattered farmhouses, villages, and tiny spires reaching a very little closer to God…

The crewman said, "Forget the body, Barrie, it's a pretty lovely place down there."

The voice crackled in his ear.

"Listen, my old darling…

MacDonagh and MacBride And

Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly; A terrible beauty is born.

That was Mr Yeats for you. 'A terrible beauty is born', but it's an evil beauty. It's beauty best seen at altitude."

The helicopter circled and its shadow flitted over the discarded body.

The priest came early to the Riordans' house. It was the priest who brought the news when a volunteer was killed in action or by the explosion of his own bomb, it was the priest who called when an outcast was executed.

The priest sat in the chair that was usually taken by Patsy's father, Patsy's father, wrapped in an old dressing gown, slumped on the setee in the place that was Patsy's mother's. Patsy's mother was on all fours in front of the fire, cleaning it and lighting it, and refusing to ignore it.

' They think it's the dear boy, but it is the sadness ol these times that it is not yet possible for them to approach him. It’s down in Armagh, a priest has already been to him, that should be of some comfort to you.

We cannot he positive yet because the military have only allowed the local parish priest forward, and briefly, and I am afraid to say that I… advised it may be a long time before he can actually be recovered and identified. There may be bombs put in that place for the military, one shudders at the wickedness of these days we live in We have to be brave and we have to be patient

…"

Patsy's father lit his third cigarette of the morning. "We're disgraced, right, Father? We did everything for the boy. His mother worked her hands to the bone for that little bastard. How does he repay her? He touts… How'll I hold my head up again, the man who fathered a tout, how-"

The priest clasped his hands across his chest. "We are not to feel bitterness, Donal'. We are all to be judged, in time, by God… I offer you this thought. There are many today who will carry the burden of guilt. Those who foully murdered dear Patsy. Those who cynically led him into mortal danger. Take pity on them for their wretchedness

…"

"The Brit feckers."

"May they live with their consciences, those who inveigled dear Patsy to renounce his own people for their false gold."

As Mrs Riordan had the fire alight, the priest was already hurrying away.

He was woken by the sound of broken twigs, scuffed wet leaves and voices and dogs.

The hide he had made was an angled strip of dark green groundsheet tethered by stones and tied with green garden wire to a low branch.

There were voices and then the barking of dogs. There were dead branches laid against the groundsheet. Jon Jo lay very still. He held his breath. A few inches from his hand was the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

The voices moved closer.

He had been warned away from the safe house in Hackney, flatly rejected from the haven in Guildford. It was the first time that he had felt truly threatened. He was more than ever before alone. In darkness he had made for the weapon cache. There had been a man before, one of the finest, a man who had taken the war to the heart of the bastards, and he had been turned away, rejected, when the going was fierce, and he had been alone enough to turn his own gun on himself… Jon Jo had gone to the cache because there was no alternative… He had taken no decision yet as to whether he would go back to the Torbay digs.

They had his photograph, they were checking wherever there were Irish. Not the time to make the decision.

He had fashioned the hide a dozen paces from where the dustbin was buried with the weapons and the explosives.

He had slept for five hours. There was clear light falling between the trellis of the upper branches of the trees. The rifle was within reach, the magazine was loaded. He had often slept rough. In the weeks before he had gone away to England, when he was hunted on Altmore he had made that vast expanse of forest his home, and slipped down to the farmhouse only in darkness, and evaded the surveillance… when he was younger, before marriage, before his first arrest and imprisonment in the Kesh. He could live rough as well as any soldier. Now the voices and the movements were nearer. He edged his body to the front of the hide.

He saw the boots and the bright-coloured stockings and the corduroys and the waterproof coats. He saw men and women. He saw stout walking sticks. He saw the leashed dogs. Thank the Lord. He pushed the rifle sideways under the groundsheet to hide it.

"God Almighty, look at this… It's not allowed, is it, the ranger would throw a fit… get one in and we'll have a whole camp of these people… next thing they'll be lighting fires, short cut to mega-problems… Who the hell are you? What the hell do you think you're doing here?"

His mind raced. His tongue seemed to flap and his lips moved, and there was no voice. He had the idiot smile on his face. To speak was to give himself away. His arms moved with his mouth, as if that were his communication. To show fear would be a catastrophe, to show aggression was disaster. He was thinking well. Irish accent, frightened, aggressive, a hide deep in forest… He gave the whole party the mad grin, and he said nothing. There were seven of them.

One of the women spoke as if he could not hear her, as if he were an imbecile.

"It's really just scandalous, these people should be in care. They've closed down all the sort of places where these people should be.

They're just put out on the streets to fend for themselves. It's criminal.

We've probably frightened the poor man half out of his wits.

Sometimes I look at the new face of Britain and I'm ashamed."

They made a collection. There were 50 pence pieces and pound coins, and the woman gave them to Jon Jo, and he cupped his hands together to receive them from the woman.

"But you've no right to be here." She spoke slowly and loudly. "We don't expect to find you here again."

They moved away. They left him shivering, huddled under the groundsheet.

They met in a house that was on the plateau of the mountain, on the road to Pomeroy. Only Nugent and the O.C., in the back bedroom upstairs. The warmth of the O.C. gushed over Mossie. Not a word of what had happened in the barn. That was past history, forgotten by the O.C.

What Mossie noticed was the number of times that the O.C. touched him. They drank a pot of tea together. They talked of a U.D.R. man who drove a school bus by day, and the new route he had been given.

They spoke of a policeman said to be Catholic who had joined the Special Branch unit at Dungannon. They looked, on a map, at what seemed to be a regular helicopter landing zone where troops were dropped off or collected after forty- eight-hour patrols. Patsy never mentioned, and his body cold on the side of a lane in South Armagh.

The man from Lurgan never mentioned, and gone home to his own town.

"We have to show them we's alive," the O.C. said. "We have to hurt them so's they know they's won nothing…"

Mossie breathed deep. "We need Jon Jo back."

He had interrupted the O.C. "What's that?"

"Jon Jo was the best that ever was on Altmore. The way they'll know that they've won nothing is if Jon Jo's here to hit them."

The O.C. stared at the drawn curtain. "He was great, the best there's been… remember when he took the police in the Market Square?… remember when he was on the big machine gun, 12.7 calibre, Russian job, and he took the helicopter?"

And Mossie hadn't thought it would be so easy. "It's not the big scene down in Armagh now, they're just playing at it Belfast's all talk.

Derry's gone, lost the soul. East Tyrone Brigade, no equal, but with Jon Jo back…"

"How does I do that?"

"You'd be top cat, but you'd have Jon Jo for the hitting… You takes yourself down to Dublin, and you tells them that's what you want. You tells them."

"He's identified, what they did to his house shows…"

"Jon Jo knows the mountain better than any."

"Worth thinking on…"

"Worth acting on," Mossie said, and he squeezed the O.C.'s hand in friendship.

It wasn't quietly smart like Cathy's; it wasn't where Hobbes lived, but Bren thought it was fine.

It was one bedroom and a dining room/living room with kitchen off, a bathroom, and use of a lawn outside. There was an older woman who showed him round the flat, then made him count each last plate, glass, saucepan, and fork and then sign the inventory. When she'd gone, when he had the place to himself, he sat in the easy chair and the pleasure beamed off him. Gone from Malone Road without a backward glance, without even checking to see if the cardboard city man was in his room.

Flat 3, Creagh House, 43/49 Amsterdam Gardens, Lisburn, Co. Down. .. home, with an easy chair. A place of his own. Up from the chair.

Into the kitchen to check again all that was his in the cupboards. He would be home for two years. Back into the bedroom to unpack his cases, folding his shirts again and laying them neatly into drawers, hanging his two suits in the wardrobe and his slacks and his blazer, lopping his ties onto the hooks. The central heating

… He was warm. He felt comfortable. He reached for the remote control beside the television, and flicked through the channels.

Bren saw the picture. It was a telephoto of a winding lane.

"… believed to be that of Patrick Riordan, aged eighteen, from the Dungannon area, reported taken from his home three days ago. A police spokesman said within the last hour it would be at least another day before the ground round the body was declared safe of booby traps and the body could be recovered…"

Bren was slumped in the easy chair. He could hear the righteous ring of his own voice. "… luck is going to run out on you… You're running out of friends, Cathy…" It wasn't a day trip, it was two bloody years.

How much luck would he need for two bloody years?

He snapped the television off.

He locked the front door behind him and went to his car to drive to the shopping centre to buy food and milk and bright indoor plants for his home.

"What I am telling you is that they have to be curbed…"

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was the last viceroy of the whittled empire. He rejoiced in his tiny fiefdom. There were Cabinet colleagues who had turned down the position, others who had previously gone to Belfast sulking and in poor grace. But he loved it, and his wife adored it. They were the great fishes in the small pond. He was a small man and to emphasise his point, he strode up and down the Home Secretary's carpet, jabbing his finger like a hell-fire preacher.

"… I will not permit the Security Service to run riot across the Province…"

The Home Secretary scratched at a trimmed moustache. "I hope you will allow me, as an old friend, to say that your reaction may be slightly excessive."

"A young man died. He was as good as murdered by Five. That is not tolerable."

"We should all be pulling in the same direction, even if different arms by their very natures, by their very specialisations, are using different methods."

Nominally the Home Secretary was considered responsible for the Security Service. The early meetings, when he had first taken the appointment, were etched on his experience. Two men, Director General and Deputy Director General, sitting in his office, drinking his sherry, letting him know that they had forty- two years of service and wisdom between them, making it so clear that in the two or three years he might spend as Home Secretary before electoral defeat or a ministerial reshuffle he would not be welcome at the workface. Done with great politeness, quiet chill, the slamming of the door on his foot.

He hadn't made a fuss there and then and oddly enough he had found as the months went by that, well, the inner workings were indeed perhaps rather less interesting, less of an urgent anxiety than a good deal else crossing his desk.

"I want them out, gone."

"I understand your feelings, but I doubt that's possible."

"I'll go to the Prime Minister over it."

"I'm not sure that's wise."

"I will not allow a young woman to run round Northern Ireland, in the name of this Government, deciding who lives, who dies…"

"I don't think…"

"You never have done… I will take your refusal to the Prime Minister.

I'll have Five out by the end of the year, and that young woman out by the end of the week."

"I'm sorry you feel…"

"I'll fight you and I'll win," the Secretary of State said.

Young Kevin had changed out of his school uniform and into his farm clothes.

It was dark when he returned to the farmhouse, the clear beam of the torch guiding him.

"They’s fine, Ma, they's finding good grass at the top."

She thought him a great boy. She had been too busy that day to hike up to the Mahoneys' fields to check the beef stock. Attracta Donnelly had shopped, mended a skirt torn on barbed wire when she had tried to repair a length of broken fencing, and she had scrubbed through her kitchen. He was a great boy to go away up the mountain slope to the field where the bullocks were. He was a boy that Jon Jo would have been proud of, Each day, just as the satisfaction rested on her, she thought of Jon Jo, and she was flattened.

He had made his cryptic calls, he was expected. He drove fast on the winding lanes as he headed for the open road that would take him across the border and into the south. He would still be the O.C., he believed that, otherwise he would not have countenanced it. He had told Mossie Nugent that the meeting was set up. As he drove into the night he felt the warm glow inside him… if Jon Jo Donnelly were back, the mountain would burn bright again.

Wilkins had been tidying away the papers on his desk for the night when the call came for him. His annoyance cut him, not because of the call that would delay his journey home but because the matter of the day was unresolved. It would have to be a direct order, the way Penn was playing it from Nairobi. The time for suggestion and request was gone. The man was stalling. Another day gone and the decision had been further postponed. The decision was whether to demand the immediate return of Penn from Kenya, and to further demand his prompt transfer to Belfast.. it would be a shame for young Brennard.

The call had come from the Director General's outer office, could Mr Wilkins be so kind as to spare five minutes?

His own area was deserted. Carthew already gone, and Foster. He had missed Bill that day, but then Bill was becoming erratic in his attendance, and Charles was sick, and Archie had been telling anybody who cared to listen since the early morning that he had tickets for the National Theatre and had needed to leave before the tea trolley had reached their end of the corridor. Most evenings after seven, when he cleared his desk, locked all the papers away in his safe, at least Brennard would still have been working. A good young man that.

Hobbes was over the following week and he made a note to enquire how Brennard was making out over there. Archie had hold of some quite extraordinary story of how Brennard had run P.T.I. Terry off his legs and had actually shot at Jocelyn and winged his combat jacket.

That would let some of the hot air out of the pair of them…He climbed the darkened staircase to the top floor.

The Director General painted a rapid picture. Five was at war. The R.U.C. at Chief Constable level were clamouring for blood. The civil service at Assistant Under-Secretary rank were demanding a head. And the Secretary ol State seemed to be blundering round Whitehall, boring little man, preaching morality. Five was back against the wall.

"These bloody people, Ernest, they're going in the Prime Minister.

What defence do we lay out?"

Wilkins stood in front of the Director General's desk, hands clasped in front of his stomach. "The young people I send over to Northern Ireland, and I include Hobbes, are all committed completely to the work there. Those young people, sir, are the finest that the Service can offer. Sometimes I feel humble, privileged, to know them

…"

"Ernest, I know that speech. Can we come very quickly to the point?"

It was his usual stance. His wife had told him, not once but frequently, not to look like a waiter attending on an order. "I just want to point out, sir, that they are the very front line. We must trust them to interpret the evidence as they on the ground see it. They are forced to make exceptionally finely calculated judgments. These involve their own lives as well as other people's…"

"Thank you, but I can do that one, almost word for word. I want you to come clean about this killing of an apparently innocent young man.

Tell me the truth."

So Wilkins told him as much as he knew and what was at stake.

"You'll have to convince the Prime Minister…"

"Not a man of fibre, sadly."

"You had better stand by to do that. I like the bit about only being able to supervise the sewer cleaners if you're prepared to climb down into the tunnels yourself. Keep the sermonising to a minimum And the young woman, can you save her?"

Wilkins shook his head. "Save Cathy Parker? I don't know, sir, and I won't know until I have tried. I can only do mv best.’’

Jon Jo sat in the pub on the Harrow Road and was passed the sealed envelope.

He read the message of approval.

He had moved his hide in the morning and reset his groundsheet in deeper undergrowth further from the buried dustbin. He had stayed in the hide through the day and only emerged from the forest as night had fallen. In the pub he could smell himself, the dank wetness of his clothes and the dirt of his body. The courier was going back on the last flight. Donnelly told the girl, perhaps eighteen years old, that two safe houses were now denied him. The girl was from County Armagh and there was the softness of her accent in his ear, and there was the longing in him for his home. When she had gone, hurrying for Heathrow, he tore the message of approval into small pieces and flaked them into the ash tray and took them to the pub's open fire to burn them. She would carry back with her a sealed envelope. He had been a long time writing the letter it contained.

He had approval to place a bomb in a mainline railway station.

The smells merged over Bren. There was the smell of the polished flooring and of the newly painted walls and of the webbing of the men who passed him in the corridor and the damp of their uniforms and of baked beans heated near to him, and always the tang of cigarettes.

The sounds of the barracks played around him. Helicopters thrusting for elevation and the crack of gunfire from the floodlit small-arms range and the bark of out-of-doors orders and the mutter of conversation from civilian clerks and the Orderly N.C.O. s whose voices dropped further when they used the corridor where Bren waited.

He had been an hour in the corridor outside Colonel Johnny's office.

He had arrived without an appointment, he had been told the colonel was engaged and that he would be fitted in when it was possible. He had read an article in Soldier magazine about tank warfare and the lessons of the First Armoured Division in the Gulf, and discarded it as quite simply irrelevant. It was an impulse that had brought him from his new flat to the barracks at

Dungannon, and with each jerk on the hands of his watch he had thought the impulse more stupid.

The door at the end of the corridor opened.

Colonel Johnny ushering out a middle-aged woman.

The colonel speaking quietly to her, bringing her down the corridor towards where Bren sat. "Don't apologise, please, absolutely not. You had every right to come here."

A small voice, "You've been kind…"

"I wish I could have done more. We did everything we could do to find him and save him. I'm very sorry that we were unsuccessful."

Bren stood. The colonel looked through him. The woman ignored him and was pulling a rain hat from her bag.

"It helps me to know that you tried…"

"Now, how will you get home?" Said kindly.

"My man's in a bar in the town, down Irish Street. I left him there because he wouldn't drive me to the barracks, said it wasn't right."

They were at the far door of the corridor, where it opened onto the parade ground.

"Goodnight… I'm sorry we couldn't do more. Safe home, Mrs Riordan…"

Bren's head twisted. His eyes raked down the corridor. He saw the back of the woman as she went down the step and there was the howl of a night gale to greet her. He saw her face when she turned, the few seconds, to shake the colonel's hand, and then her face was gone and her head was wrapped in the rain hat, and she followed the escort soldier away… Christ… she was the debris he scattered, that he and Cathy Parker threw over their shoulders He stood his ground and faced the colonel. There was no warmth, only crisp recognition. The colonel waved for him to follow him back towards the office.

He was gestured to a chair.

Bren said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"Well, I'm here, you're here, so talk."

"About Cathy…"

"What about Miss Parker?"

There was no sympathy. Bren said, "It's just that I was wanted

… I don't suppose it matters. Forget it. I was just worried about her."

"What way worried?"

"The way she is… you've seen her. It's like people are when they start to make mistakes…"

"Mistakes, oh, that's very good. Going to make mistakes, is she?

Over here, it gets to be a habit, making mistakes. A police inspector I used to know made a mistake, went to church on a Sunday morning with his family, that was a mistake because he was shot dead on the church steps, silly mistake going to worship. One of my soldiers last year made a mistake, went through an open gateway between two fields when he should have pushed through a thorn hedge, a mistake because there was a pressure plate in the gateway, elementary mistake going through a gateway when there was a perfectly good hedge to push through. A little kiddie made a mistake two years ago, my first week here, picked up a box left in a ditch, didn't know that we'd had a call-out and hadn't moved, didn't see the fishing wire from the box to the bomb, dumb little kiddie to be making a mistake like that. Nothing special about making mistakes, gets to be an occupational hazard when you stay around too long. There's no way of stopping Miss Parker from making mistakes either. Mistakes are a part of the job…"

"How can I help her?"

"I doubt you can," Colonel Johnny said. "I doubt any of us can. It's what makes her special to us, all of us, that she's not looking for bloody help, and it's her strength that she's not frightened of making mistakes."

Bren stood, "Thank you for your time."