The Journeyman Tailor

2

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

"They called him Shane. He was from the family of the Donnellys, and they had a small castle at what was then called Ballydonnelly that had been built beside the Torrent river, where there was a ford. People could cross the ford, wade across the river, at that place, so it was right for a castle. Shane was one of the young men of the family of the Donnellys. His father was Patrick Modardha, a funny name because it means that he was called Patrick the Gloomy. It is 350 years ago that this all started. They were the Catholic people, they owned the land, and the English set themselves to drive them off that land just because they were Catholics and to put their own people, thugs and scum, onto that land…

"Patrick led his men in the attack on the castle of Lord Charlemont at Moy. They sacked the castle, drove the English away. That was when Patrick was a young man, and before Shane was born. The years passed, and for a while the Donnellys at Ballydonnelly Castle were left to themselves. Shane was born. He grew up to be a fine young man, good to his neighbours, kind to the family's tenants. Even when he was small he had learned to ride a horse and to shoot and to hunt so that he could live off the land on the Altmore mountain. When he was just twenty years old, the English came again. The Englishmen were led by Sir Toby Caulfield, who was a harsh man. The English came with overwhelming force and they killed Patrick Modardha, and they captured the castle at Ballydonnelly. Shane fought as long as he was able and then slipped away and climbed high up onto the Altmore mountain. From there he could see the burning and pillaging and thieving of the English soldiers and the 'gallowglasses' who were paid to fight for them. On that first evening, as he saw far below him the climbing smoke from the Donnelly home and their cattle barns, Shane swore to himself that he would take his revenge of the English for what they had done. At first he joined the rapparee band of Redmond O'H anion of Armagh, who was called Terror of the Fews, and then when Redmond had been killed, he formed his own band of free men. He lived wild on the mountain with them. All his teeth fell out, and he was known as Shane Bearnagh, which is Shane Gap-tooth. In all of the band he was the most powerful man, and it was said of him that his toothless gums could bite through a thin plate of iron as if it were gingerbread. The band of Shane Bearnagh became the most famous group of resistance fighters in the whole of Ireland. Down in the valley, Ballydonnelly was now renamed Castlecaulfield and Sir Toby Caulfield lived in Shane's castle, and had taken all the land that had belonged to Shane's family…

"The revenge of Shane Bearnagh was on the mountain, but the fear of him spread far and wide. Some of the Englishmen, cowards, paid Shane Bearnagh with money and beef and bread, in the hope that he would leave them alone. He lived in the caves of the mountain, and close to the main coach road that ran between Dungannon and Omagh was where he was happiest. At the very summit of the mountain was a heap of rocks that is to this day called Shane Bearnagh's sentry box…

"His friends in Dungannon would light fires when the coaches left under cover of darkness from Dungannon to make the run to Omagh.

They thought the night would help them, but they were wrong. Shane could see down to Dungannon, and the fires that were lit for him, and he and his men would stop the coaches and take back from the Englishmen what had been stolen from the Irish people. The English feared him more than any fighter in all of the island. They built a barracks on the mountainside, near to the top, and garrisoned it with their soldiers, and the barracks and the soldiers were there only to chase and hunt Shane Bearnagh. They hunted him and they chased him, because he was the bravest free man in all Ireland…"

"Did they catch him, Ma?"

It was the story that had no ending.

She told him that it was time for them to go together to feed the stock cattle in the barn.

A whispered voice spoke into a dictaphone.

The machine fitted snugly into the gloved hand and was held against the lips. The other hand moved the two inch-long joy-sticks that controlled the zoom on the camera and the focus.

The camera was 200 yards forward of the hide and set in a hedgerow above a steeply sloping field. The camera was well placed. On the close-up it could monitor the farmhouse and on the wide-angle it could take in the Nugent bungalow. The bungalow, set close to the narrow road leading up the mountain towards Inishative, west of the village, was sixty paces nearer the camera position than the small farm and its rusted metal outbuildings.

The camera and the cables that controlled its zoom and focus functions had taken two weeks to get into position. It had been in operation now for a month. It was the best that the technical support could manufacture. The camera, twenty-five inches long and with the capability of night vision, was concealed in an old log that had been removed under cover of darkness from the hedgerow, taken back to the Mahon Road barracks in Portadown, hollowed out, and replaced before dawn. In the course of six more nights the control cable had been buried. The ground under the hedgerows had been eased back with the sort of tool normally used for edging lawns, a half-moon blade, and then the slit had been painstakingly pushed back together by hand. Only after that, back up the mountain slope, had the hide been dug out and the command panel installed.

The positioning of the camera, its army serial numbers removed, was regarded as of major operational priority.

Day and night, through close-up and wide-angle, the camera oversaw the comings and goings, and the movements at the Donnelly farm and the Nugent bungalow.

It was easier to speak into a dictaphone than to write the log in the lightless cramped hole that was the hide.

A faint voice, "Attracta and Kevin, taking a bale from the barn to the cow shed, zero nine forty three."

There was the bare click of the dictaphone being switched off, then the faint rustle of a sheet of tin foil being unfolded.

With the penknife that she took from her apron pocket she sliced the twine binding the bale and then reached through the railings to loosen the hay. There were eight bullocks in the shed. In the building next door, before it was light, she had already milked the four cows and then manhandled the churn, rolling it round on its base, down the centre of the lane where the tarmac had not been destroyed by the tractor tyres, and left it for the tanker at the junction with the road. There would have to be one more journey for another bale for the three cows that were in calf in the bay beyond the fattening bullocks. She needed Kevin to help her.

Attracta did not know where her man was. She knew where he had been because she had seen the news the night before. Kevin long since asleep, she had been alone in the small front room, sitting beside the chair that had been empty for almost a year. She had been about to put more logs on the fire when the news had started. She had good pine logs, well seasoned, that her father split for her. She had seen the shattered Volvo and the wedding portrait of the wife, and the school photographs of the two children. The younger of the two was Kevin's age. She had switched off the television and gone to bed. It was the bed in which she had been born, the bed in which she had been alone for almost a year.

There had been a bombing or a shooting every week since before the autumn had set in. Now it was winter. She trudged back across the mud-filled yard for the second bale. It was man's work to clear the mud from the yard. The police and the army had come after the third kill and searched the farm, and called her man a murdering cunt. Later, they had sealed off the road on either side of the lane, stopped her when she had taken Kevin to the school at the village, searched her and the car so thoroughly that the child had been forty minutes late for his classes.

They had called her a Provo's whore, and they had called her son a Provo's bastard.

She never spoke of the war that her husband fought, not to her Ma, not to Siobhan Nugent who was her only neighbour, not to the women at Mass, not to the mothers who gathered at the school gate in the afternoons.

Even in her loneliest times, when Kevin was asleep and when the wind hit the chimney and sang on the electricity cable, she never criticised her man and what he did. She insulated herself with silence.

With her son trying to help she carried the second bale from the barn to the cow shed.

If they trapped him, finally, with a gun in his hand then they would surely kill him. If they hunted him down and he surrendered with his hands raised then they would surely lock him away until his youth and his middle age had been squeezed from him, until he was old.

The voice murmured, was lost in the wind beat on the russet bracken around the hide.

"Mossie off out. Right, and right again onto the village road, thirteen zero four."

The screen in the hide, beside the box that could make a video recording of the picture if that were necessary, blurred at the change of focus. The Nugent bungalow was gone, replaced by the Donnelly farmhouse, seen end on. The dog was clear on the screen, curled up in its kennel. It had good teeth and a persistent yapping bark. If the dog was out in the yard, or quartering the lane to the front of the house then it was impossible to get within fifty yards and remain undetected.

Because of the dog it was necessary to use the surveillance camera. The dog was regarded as a bloody nuisance. There were two policemen from Dungannon who had needed stitches in their arms and anti-tetanus jabs in their backsides because of that dog.

The angle of the house to the camera meant that the back yard and the farm buildings could be seen, and also the lane at the front and the pathway through the small and tidy front garden. It was only the last yard or so to the front door and the kitchen door into the yard that were masked.

In the tiny cramped space of the hide, the dictaphone was laid down next to the camera controls and the recording box, beside the loaded pistol.

Charlie One was Stop and Search. Automatic, no point in arguing it.

Out of the car, side of the road, anorak off, coat off, shoes off, and the army or the police, or both, going over his car.

Mossie could live with it. He had known a long time that he was categorised as a Charlie One.

The roadblock was on the hill leading down into the village. He couldn't tell whether they were British or Ulster Defence Regiment. If it was the British he might be away in ten minutes, if it was the U.D.R. then he might be away in an hour. They had his face and they had his car registration. His was a face that was memorised at every patrol briefing, and the number of his old Cortina.

He passed the machinegunner, lying on his stomach, aiming back up the road. He passed the rifleman kneeling in the ditch, up to his waist in water, aiming back up the mountain. There was a chain with tyre-shredding spikes in it in case he had tried to accelerate through. It would have made their afternoon, getting a Charlie One. He thought they looked all excited, they always were when they waved down a Stop and Search, they couldn't believe they'd find less than a rocket-launcher and warhead under the passenger seat. The face was at the window, cheeks and forehead smeared in camouflage cream.

British accent. "Hello, Mister Nugent, have a little word, shall we?"

"Why not?"

Mossie climbed out of the car. Best that way, best to get out without them pulling him out. Being the Saturday he didn't have his work gear on board. Six weeks before he had had his work gear, the tins of paint, and he had been slow getting out, and they had emptied each last one of the full tins into the ditch, and had a hell of a laugh, and said that the bottom of a tin of paint was just a pretty obvious place to move a firearm or ammunition… His coat came off, and his shirt. They were dropped on the verge. A soldier bent and tugged his shoes off. Another was talking into his radio, another was inside the car and ferreting, another had the bonnet up and was peering down into the engine.

The sergeant sneered, "Off down the pub to get pissed up?"

"No, I'm not."

"That's the Paddy weekend, isn't it, getting arseholed…"

"I'm not drinking, I'm driving."

"… Then, when you're all pissed up, all arseholed, all brave, going out and blowing away a few kiddies, a few little girls. That's the fucking Paddy weekend, eh?"

It was the wind-up, nothing new.

"I'm going down the shop."

"You're real brave bastards, aren't you? Blowing up little kiddies.

Watched it on the news, did we, Paddy, with the Missus and all your own little kiddies? Right fucking heroes, Provo shit."

Mossie Nugent was too old to be wound up. He was thirty- seven years old. Twenty years ago he might have stuck one on the sergeant.

Just what they wanted. Grievous Bodily Harm or Criminal Assault, anything they cared to think up. He held onto the seams of his trousers, kept his hands down. The cold whipped through his cotton vest, and the damp seeped in his socks.

They were bored by the time that Pakkie Henty came along with his tractor and a load of silage, so they let him go. He dressed. He climbed back into his car and drove on.

Mossie Nugent was the Intelligence Officer of the mountain- based Company that was the driving force inside the East Tyrone Brigade.

The men from Altmore mountain dictated everything that went on in East Tyrone. And the Intelligence Officer would never have been stupid enough, knowing that he and his car were Charlie One, to carry a weapon, explosives, ammunition, or documents. He had been going to meet his O.C. They were careful now, all of them, the officers and the volunteers on Altmore. Too many roadblocks, too much military presence. He had been going for a talk. Not any more, not once he had been through a vehicle check point.

He drove to the shop in the village. He bought three tins of baked beans, and a sliced loaf, and a pound of sausages.

And he was stopped again and questioned again on his way back home. When he was let through, he waved to Pakkie Henty whose sileage trailer was still being searched.

The Commander sat straight in his chair, a cup of tea on the table beside him.

"What I can tell you, sir, is that every resource available to me is currently deployed in the hunt for this man. There is absolutely no complacency in SO 13. What it comes down to is patience…

"… Over the last three years we have recovered four lists of targets, and they added up to 210 persons and locations. Currently I have 172 of those under some form of surveillance. As I told you at the time, when your Parliamentary colleague was killed, he had attended a public meeting without notifying us. Two of the earlier bombs were against targets that had not figured on any previous list. Mr Tennyson was on one of the lists, but was not provided with protection because it was not thought he was a priority to our e n e m y… "

There was a sharp intake whistle of breath from the Prime Minister.

The Commander could happily have kicked himself. The last thing he wanted was for the Prime Minister to chide him for not regarding the lives of Tennyson and his family as 'priority'.

"… They have patience, we have to demonstrate the same quality.

Because he is intelligent, he will know that his chances of survival become slimmer with every hit. He has made one mistake alrea dy

… "

The mistake had been on the second attack. The victim, the target, the poor bastard who hadn't done anything worth dying for, had been the principal editorial writer for a tabloid newspaper, and had, late at night, answered the door bell at his mistress's flat. At a range of three feet he had been blasted back across the hallway by five shots, fired semiautomatic from a Kalashnikov rifle. Scenes of Crime had put it together rather well. He had picked up the ejected cartridge cases. He would have been wearing gloves, his hands would have been awkward. Scenes of Crime reckoned that he had shoved the cartridge cases probably into a hip pocket, and in pulling his hand back out he brought with it a?5 note. Probably his hip pocket because he hadn't seen the folded note fall to the floor. Everybody in the block fingerprinted, every regular tradesman, and the pristine thumbprint sent across the water to the R.U.C.

"… We have a name, we have evidence, we have a four-year- old photograph. It's just a matter of time, Prime Minister."

The Commander saw the tired and wan face of the Prime Minister.

He sipped quietly at his tea.

"It's just that we seem so helpless."

"Oh, we'll get him. Some day, some place."

The anger started to the Prime Minister's face, the blood coursed through his cheek veins, bulged corridors on his forehead. "When will you get him, where?"

The Commander had been back eleven days from Belfast. He had been taken for a helicopter ride. Three thousand feet up, rolling in a Lynx, clear of the range of a 12.7 mm heavy machine- gun, he had been shown the small farms, the close-set villages, and the bleak gale-swept landscape.

"When? When he comes home… Where? Where he's from, Altmore Mountain."

There was no complaint from Ernest Wilkins, just a personal sadness. It was so hard to find the right sort of man to send across. He had thought this man ideal, and the sadness came from the knowledge that he had been wrong. He listened.

"You can understand this, Mr Wilkins. It's not what I'm supposed to say… I cared what happened to him."

Wilkins understood well enough, and if he had appeared distracted it was probably because he was trying to imagine Brennard in this experienced man's place. It was a hell of a job to fill. He paid close attention, but he said nothing.

"Most of the time, in the early days, he was so scared that he used to shake when I met him. He was more scared of us than he was of his own, and more frightened of going back inside than anything. He loved those kids. That's what it came down to. I think he'd have topped himself if he'd gone back inside. The money was just gravy, it was the threat of going back inside that held him to us. And then he'd begun to get quite good. It wasn't high-grade stuff because he was only a bottle washer, a volunteer, but he knew what was going on and he drove a bit for them, moving stuff. That's when it starts to get really bloody, when he has something to tell you. It's my fault, you see, I put the report in to Task Co-ordinating Group. Parker wasn't there. God knows where Parker was. So I gave the report to bloody Hobbes, and Hobbes chucked it onto the T.C.G. table. They were going to do a hit. Eddie knew the guns were being moved, but he didn't know the target. It wasn't discussed properly, it was all too fast. They were moving the rifles the next evening, and a V.C.P. was set up. The police wanted arrests. It must have been something said by one of the detectives who questioned them at Gough R.U.C. Somebody slipped up, because as soon as they saw a solicitor the word was back into the system that it hadn't just been an accident. The tout hunt started. The Q.M. knew they were moving the firepower, and Eddie knew because he'd collected them from the cache, and the two guys in the car. It all pointed to Eddie

… You know what Hobbes said? Sorry, but he's such a prick, that man.

He said Eddie was nothing more than a terrorist, and not worth crying over."

Late Saturday afternoon. The street lights on. Curzon Street deserted.

He watched from the upper window of Leconfield House as Faber came out of the main entrance and walked away to find a bus or an underground train.

He shrugged into his anorak. So difficult, Ernest Wilkins thought, to find men who were not degraded and disgusted by the Belfast work.

He came out of his office, closed the door and locked it, and walked past Brennard's clean, cleared desk. So extraordinarily difficult to find men who could cope with the Belfast work, and not be scarred.

He was out to whist that evening and should hurry himself if he was not to miss the first rubber.

"… What I was told to say was that there's a powerful anger here about it. There's people talking on the radio about being ashamed to be Irish. Army Council, Chief of Staff, nobody likes that."

The woman was making the call because the man who would otherwise have made it believed himself to be under close surveillance. They were uncertain in the Organisation as to the capability of the telephone engineers working for Five to trace calls made from pay phones.

There was a queue waiting to use the box. She had turned her back on them so that she could not see their impatience.

"… And I was told to say that next time round they're expecting you to be double certain that it's the target, not his wife and not his kids. They said to tell you they're going to put an apology into An Phoblacht. They said you should know that they don't like having to do t h a t… "

She didn't know the face or the name of the man, and he had said nothing beyond the codeword.

"… They also said that what you done up to this last one was just brilliant… Oh, and the new money's coming through, and they said like can you spend it a bit slower. It's difficult to come by. That's all that I was to tell you."

She put the telephone down and the handle of the receiver glistened.

She felt the sweat in her palm. She was nothing in the Organisation but her brother was in his twelfth year of a life sentence and she was happy to be used. She was sweating because she had had to allow the telephone to ring out at the far end for a full two minutes before it was picked up, before the codeword was given her, and then she had to repeat the message that they had given her. As far as she was concerned, any man who had worked on the mainland was a hero. She thought it quite wrong that he should be slagged for what he had done.

She walked away up the Andersonstown Road of West Belfast.

His enemy were the retired and the elderly who walked on the esplanade with their lap dogs that were wrapped against the sea weather with little monogrammed coats, and the teenagers who smashed what they could not steal, and the fishermen off the trawlers who were waiting for the doors of the bars to open, and the driver who took the empty bus from Torquay to Brixham, and the man who stood beside the heaps of his Sunday newspapers that were covered against the spray by plastic sheeting. They were all his enemy. He had chosen this out-of-season resort town, and it was the only place he felt safe.

Never truly safe, God knows, and among his enemies he would never be content. And on Sunday always more alone, more keenly missing his Kevin and his Attracta. In far too long he had had no word from his Attracta, not heard her voice.

He felt such an ache of homesickness, of longing to be with his boy and his Attracta, it was a physical pain.

The newspaper seller was smiling at him, friendly. He pointed to the papers that he wanted and he searched out the exact change from his pocket. He spoke as rarely as was possible, and never engaged in conversation with anyone he didn't know. He could change his face and his hair and his clothes, his accent he could not alter. The newspaper seller, his enemy, wished him a good morning and thanked him, and made a remark about the weather brightening from the west. He read the headline of the paper on top, and saw the photograph of the destroyed Volvo. Under it was a quote from a retired Secretary of State, one of the worst of the bastards: "These terrorists are addicted to the adventure and thrill of killing."

His fingers were clasped tight. They knew nothing of him, the pensioners and the yob kids and the bus driver and the newspaper seller, and they would lap up the shit that he was "addicted to the adventure and thrill of killing". They knew nothing… And they didn't know much in Dublin and Belfast, the bastards who had a bit of a girl speak to him on the phone like he was a wee brat who had messed his pants on the first day at school and a complaint had been made by the nuns to his Ma, and he a man on their business hunted by every policeman in their enemy's country, by all the detectives of the Anti-Terrorist Branch and the Special Branch, and by the faceless bastards of M.I. 5. That was close to pleasure, the knowledge that they all hunted him, and failed. He would never be complacent, no. But if he were not complacent and never careless then he believed himself impregnable.

But the shits in Dublin, they were something else. So, the kids had got blown away… What was the big deal? Legitimate tactic of war to spread fear in the enemy. Let them show him the army officer, the civil servant who hadn't cringed over his morning paper, or the wife or mother of an army officer or civil servant who wouldn't have been shaken rigid by what the zombies in Dublin and Belfast were going to issue an apology for… Jesus!

A lone figure, wreathed in the mist of the sea fog, wet from the spray of the climbing waves that broke on the sea wall, walking back to the room that he rented behind the open-air swimming pool that was drained for the winter. It was a terrace of old houses. The Bed and Breakfast and the Vacancies signs rocked in the wind. God, and he missed his Attracta… He let himself in. As he closed the door she came out of the kitchen at the back of the hall. She was small, she would have been blown away with a slap. She was his landlady.

"Oh, Mr Robinson, I'm so glad you're back. Would you do me a favour? It's the back door, brand new this summer, and I suppose it's warped. I'd be ever so grateful…"

"I'll get my tools," Jon Jo said.

"You're very kind. And there's something I'd like to say to you. This business in the papers, about the Irish, about the bombs and things. I just wanted to say how sorry I feel for all of you good and decent Irish people. I don't lump you ail together. I have a great respect for all of you hard-working Irish people who are prepared to come over here to find work so that you can keep your families, a very sincere respect. To me, they are the real Irish and not these awful guerrilla creatures. I just wanted you to know that."

"I'll bring my tools down."

Everybody on the mountain had a brother, cousin, friend, neighbour, who was skilled as a brickie or a sparky or a chippy or a painter/decorator. There was never money involved. A brother, cousin, friend, neighbour, did the work that was his trade, and the work was paid for in kind. Mossie Nugent was a painter/ decorator. He had repapered and repainted the two big bedrooms and the living room of the farmhouse, and he hoped that by Christmas he would have little Kevin's room done. In the freezer, in the garage beside the bungalow, he had the greater part of a quarter of a beef bullock from Attracta Donnelly's stock, and each week Siobhan was given free-range eggs. It was the way of the community.

Siobhan had her eggs, and if she didn't like him going down, most Sunday afternoons this past year, to the Donnelly farm, then she could go feck herself.

She was a great girl, Attracta Donnelly and pretty still, and going short because her man was across the water. Up his ladder, scraping off wallpaper, he listened to her quiet song as she washed the plates and saucepans from her lunch.

"An outlawed man in a land forlorn, He scorned to turn and fly, But he kept the cause of freedom safe Up on the mountain high."

He had thought her a great girl since the afternoon that he had finished the first room, her bedroom, and she had climbed the step ladder, stood above him, and stretched up to rehang the curtains. Ankles, knees and the back of her thighs and her blouse riding up the small of her back.

And he had known Jon Jo Donnelly all his life. Jon Jo had been better at school. Jon Jo had been in the gaelic team, always on the bus for away games when Mossie had been left in his day on the substitute side-line, won more praise from the Father. Jon Jo had been big in the Organisation since he had left school and taken on the farm because of his father's arthritis when Mossie was in the Kesh and serving two and a half years for possession of firearms, won more praise from the big men than ever Mossie had had. And Jon Jo had Attracta, who was a great girl, and Mossie had Siobhan who was a hard bitch.

"It's your decision, of course, Bren."

"Yes."

"You are under absolutely no pressure to accept." "No, Mr Wilkins."

"It's really a rather good career opportunity for you." "I see."

"It's the sort of place a young officer gets noticed." "I appreciate that."

"Every older man in Five, who's on a plateau, wishes to God that he could roll back the years and do a real job like this one."

"Do they?"

"You'd be on secondment from us to the Belfast end. Hobbes runs things over there… Day to day you'd be working with Parker…"

"I don't know Parker."

"You'd be directly involved with our Source Unit, which means that you'd be running informers, the Provisionals that we pay for information. It requires very considerable commitment. And, I repeat myself, you'd be noticed, Bren."

"I've no experience…"

"We'll take care of that, and Parker will show you the ropes."

Bren wondered who was Parker. There were men who worked in the next office, who he passed several times a day in the corridor and he did not know their names, nor what they did. Perhaps if he were invited for the weekend in the country he would have known who was Parker.

"If you think I h a v e… "

"No doubts whatsoever. And let me tell you: there are far too many people in this department who exaggerate the danger of working over there. Oh yes, listen to half the old stagers in this office, and you'd have the impression that you only have to put your nose out of the front door over there to get it blown off. That's r u b b i s h. .. A sensible officer, one who keeps his wits about him, will not only enjoy himself in Ulster but will certainly do his career no harm at all. But let me answer your question. I am quite certain you have the qualities to make a very good fist of Northern Ireland operations."

"I'll do my best."

Wilkins smiled and shook Bren's hand. He said that he would phone Hobbes that morning. He suggested that Bren should take forty-eight hours off, get his affairs in order, do something about his flat. He said that he would arrange a fast refresher course with Training Section, his P. A. would give Bren directions. He should report on Wednesday morning.

"Good, that's it then."

"Thank you very much, Mr Wilkins, for thinking of me."