The Journeyman Tailor

3

Mrs Ferguson heard the crunch of the car's tyres on the drive. She was upstairs, in the east wing of the house and making up a bed in one of the single rooms. Now that four lorry loads of fresh gravel stone had been spread out over the length of the drive, hiding most of the weeds and grass, she always heard a new arrival's approach. She busied herself down the narrow corridor that linked the east wing to the main landing and called sharply for George, to warn him. George was in the library, painting the skirting boards. She heard his grunt of acknowledgement, echoed from far below. She wore a new dress and a new apron, and they had been new sheets and pillow cases that she had put on the bed, and George, even in the overalls he wore for painting, was smarter, as any of the visitors who had met him as little as a year before would have agreed. The house itself was much altered because Century House, Six, had agreed with extreme reluctance to share the facility with Curzon Street, Five, and the men who held the purse strings had made the decision and forced it through in the teeth of opposition from the Secret Intelligence Service. M.I. 6 alone could no longer afford the upkeep of the building so M.I. 5, the Security Service, was now a half partner in the running of the house. There was new gravel on the drive, new paint and wallpaper in the common rooms, a new oil-fired Aga in the kitchen, new sheets on the beds… But Mrs Ferguson, the housekeeper, remained. George, too, had survived the cyclone, handyman and gardener. The Rottweiler, older and ever more temperamental, still needed to be shut away behind the stout kitchen door when a newcomer arrived.

The men who came now to the house were different. Mrs Ferguson would have said a little less refined than the men from Century – they had even made a formal complaint about her cooking – but since she was not yet ready to retire she kept her peace. The dog had heard the car and the pounding behind the kitchen door billowed up the wide staircase. She looked down from an upstairs window as the car came to a stop beside Mr Ronnie's Sierra. And that was another thing that she disliked about the Five people, they never gave her their full names, so they were Mr Ronnie and Mr Frederick and Mr Ernest.. . Well, that was just childish.

She was agreeably surprised. A pleasant-looking fellow, well built and as tall as her late husband when he was that age. Neat dark hair with a clean parting. A grey suit and a sensible mackintosh for the time of year. She had been told his name. In the old days she would just have had a call from nice Mr Carter and all the arrangements would have been made on the telephone, now her instructions came ahead by the facsimile machine. It was all laid out who would be arriving and when, how long they would be staying, which room they should have, what meals would be needed. It was a Mr Gary who walked now to the front door, but she had been notified that he was to be called Mr Bren.

They were in the sitting room. The paint was new and the settees were old. They sat either side of the freshly-lit fire. Ronnie stopped in mid-sentence. A big and elderly man, a little bowed at the shoulders, shuffled in with a fresh bucket of coal, tipped it into the scuttle, wheezed, and backed out. Not a word. The door closed heavily behind him. Bren smiled, and there was a soundless curse from Ronnie.

Ronnie said, "I'll get this bloody place sorted out if it's the last thing I do… They're used to Six's pansies. I'll get a bloody grenade up their arses… Where was I?…"

Bren didn't reply, it was his style not to speak when he didn't know of anything useful to say. He had thought Mrs Ferguson like any of the other grandmothers who lived in his parents' road. He had heard the dog, its whine behind the kitchen door, and then the clatter of its paws.

He had met George, who had said, straight off, that he should always knock before coming into the kitchen and that he shouldn't walk round the grounds after dark unless he knew for certain the dog was shut away.

"… Yes, right, now that our gracious coal man has called.. . Over there is the nastiest and most dirty little low-intensity war that you will ever have the misfortune to blunder into. You make one mistake and you'll get your informer shot. If you're cleverer and you make one big mistake then it'll be you that goes into the box. You're being sent – I say

'sent' because if you volunteered then you're addled in the brain – after a small mistake was made and an informer was taken by the opposition.

He was missing for a week. He was tortured, we assume he told them everything he knew about his handler, he was then shot and dumped.

The handler was most likely compromised and we've pulled him out. A great deal of effort and time blown away by one small mistake."

He had been born in November 1963, and on the day that his mother had come out of hospital the President of the United States of America had been assassinated. He had been brought up in a small street of houses in Bristol near the factories at Filton that were now occupied by British Aerospace. They were Aerospace people, his father and mother.

His father drove a minibus, eight hours a day, five days a week, round the works complex, while his mother did the same hours and the same days in the canteen kitchens. They understood so little of their son, an only child, as to make contact points minimal. So little understanding, so few contact points, but throughout all of his schooling they had tried so hard to help and encourage him with his books. They were barely a part of his life now.

"Why me?" Bren said.

"God knows. Presumably, better qualified people are not in position."

"I'm not complaining."

"Well, don't damn well sound like it… and don't, please, since time is short, interrupt me again…

"Informers are our eyes and our ears. Without the informer I doubt we'd still be in there kicking. We know that, and so do they. That's how important it is. But informers don't grow on trees. Take some figures.. . We approach a hundred men, men we have some leverage on, we work very hard on them, pull all the strings and still we might only get five who turn our way. Work on the five and we might, if we are bloody lucky, get two who are halfway useful. Work on those two, and we might just get one who in time will be close to the centre of operations. That is a valuable commodity."

He'd hogged those books, and done the Scouts and the C.C.F., and he'd gained the necessaries from his examinations. Gary Bren- nard had won admission to the University of Surrey at Guildford. There were boys from Esher and Haywards Heath and Went- worth, and girls from Horsham and Cheam and Virginia Water. He met money. For a 'Gary' there was no access into money. Money marked out the kids who were going far because they had the launch pad of connection and opportunity. Within three weeks of starting his first term, Modern History as his major, he had let it be known to anyone who cared to speak to him that his name was 'Bren'. 'Gary' was buried, a terraced house in Filton went down the drain, a father who worked as a minibus driver for British Aerospace and a mother who loaded the dish-washer in the canteen were off-limits. He joined the Conservative Club, worked bloody, bloody hard, and went home less and less frequently.

He was further distanced from his parents, saw them more rarely, didn't know how to cope with it, took no pride in the estrangement.

"… A dead informer is bugger all use to us. Your job is to keep him alive. It is very hard to think of the circumstances that make it worth sacrificing a tout in place… The very suspicion of a live one causes a high degree of chaos and demoralisation. The Provisionals are paranoid about what they call touts. When they have a tout hunt underway – always undertaken by a special unit of the worst killers – then everything else is dropped. It's an obsession with them. The worm eats into the terrorist who's been arrested. He cannot get it out of his head that he's rotting in prison because of the man he thought was his brother in arms. The volunteer who's going to the cache to collect his weapon or his bomb, the guy who's heading for the home of a U.D.R. part-timer or a policeman, he doesn't know whether he's going to get malleted by the Special Forces. Betrayal from within really hurts them.

It's about the only thing that d o e s… "

He had never been quite sure how he had been recruited. His tutorial lecturer had had something to do with it. A remark by Bren, over a cup of coffee, about the Civil Service, something more about the Home Office, a vague aside about wanting work that was worthwhile. He'd sat the Civil Service exam, and a letter had just appeared through the post at the Hall of Residence, an invitation to an interview. Stressed the Scouts and the Combined Cadet Force and the Conservative Club, emphasised the desire to serve in areas that could benefit his country.. . Quite incredibly easy. Afterwards, he'd reckoned they must have just agreed a programme for livening up the intake, getting more graduates in and less officers from Army Intelligence who wanted a civilian life.

"… Sometimes when you move on the ground you will be alone, sometimes you will be with a colleague. There will be long periods when you will be beyond the reach of a Quick Reaction Force. If you get into trouble it'll be up to you alone to get out of it. Now, just in case we've any nonsense in our little heads about Queensberry Rules, cast your memory back to the two corporals who drove into the funeral procession in Andersonstown. They were kicked, beaten, stripped, pistol whipped and shot. That's what they'll do to you if you are ever unlucky enough, or daft enough, to offer them the chance. But remember, the Provisionals will want you dead, the army won't give a toss for you, and the police would like nothing better than to see you fall flat on your face… And all the time you have one thing above all else in your mind: your informer is gold dust. Well, are you up to it?"

Bren felt pounding excitement. "I don't see why not."

"I've painted it black because that's the way it is."

Five minutes before eleven o'clock in the morning, the first morning.

Ronnie went to the cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, muttered that if the drinks weren't locked away then the old beggar in the house would have cleared them, poured a good glass with no water offered, handed it to Bren.

"Thanks."

"I've scared you, but unless you're frightened over there and learn that sense of survival, then you won't win. You'll catch on, just listen to what Parker tells you."

He made his way quietly down the stairs. He liked to be able to come and go without his landlady knowing. Had to be bloody quiet… Jon Jo had his fingers on the handle.

"Off back to London?" She was at the kitchen door.

"Time to be getting back to work."

"When'll you be back?"

"Depends on what I find. Dockland's still got a bit. Might be a week, let's hope it's two or three."

"I'll air the bed and change the sheets… oh, and the door's so much better."

"Bye then, Missus."

He let himself out.

While he was away she would change the sheets and have a thorough search through everything that was his. She was that sort of woman.

But she would find nothing. He had built the place when she was out shopping. His plans, his maps, his lists were under the carpet and under the old wood flooring, in the box that he had made. Unless she pulled the carpet back and took a heavy jemmy and dug about a bit under the floor, she'd find nothing.

He carried his overnight bag and his carpentry tools. The plan and the map and the name on the list he kept in his mind.

The second morning, not yet eight o'clock, and he thought he might just get to do some serious dying. It was the sight of the other man that kept him on his feet.

An hour earlier, at breakfast alone and in his track suit that Ronnie had told him the previous night to dress in, Mrs Ferguson had made the introduction. The housekeeper had called him Mister Terry. The man was a sadist, a torturer, and a Physical Training Instructor, a bumptious little bastard with apple-red cheeks and not a hair on the scalp of his head, and a Geordie. He was at least fifteen years older than Bren, and he looked as if he might just enjoy inflicting pain.

Bren sagged against the back of a garden seat. P.T.I. Terry was on the grass beside the bench, rolling on the crisp frost, making a better job of dying. He wouldn't have done this to him if the silly little man hadn't pushed his luck.

He had been allowed to eat three pieces of toast, drink two cups of tea on top of his orange juice. Nobody had told him that he would settle his breakfast down with a four-mile run over rough country.

His lungs heaved. He heard P.T.I. Terry's groan, and the apple red of the man's cheeks had gone to grey white. Bren wasn't one for team games, but he ran twenty, twenty-five miles every week and he worked out with weights every day and often twice a day at weekends. He didn't talk about it in the office so it wasn't on his file. P.T.I. Terry would not have known that Bren was fit, and Bren would not have broken the little bastard if it hadn't been for the exchange after breakfast, clearly and deliberately for him to hear, between P.T.I. Terry and Mister Ronnie.

"Doesn't look much, does he, Mr Ronnie? What I'd call pathetic

…"

"Young people don't look after themselves these days."

"I'll loosen him up, take him over the four-mile circuit, then you can have him for the rest of the morning, if there's anything left of him.

Your modern young, Mr R o n n i e… I suppose they think there's always a helicopter warmed on stand-by. I don't suppose you told him what happens when the Provies start chasing him over the hills. Strong young lads, used to the outdoor life, running after our little friend with the old A.K. ready to zap him if he doesn't keep running."

Ronnie had grinned, "I'd like to know what he's made of…"

Bren had let P.T.I. Terry set the pace, just sat on his shoulder whenever he tried to turn on the heat, and he'd known when P.T.I. Terry turned for home halfway, that the man was labouring, so he went past him and listened to the wheezing into the back of his neck. Bren had turned and smiled, "It's time they pensioned you o f f… " He upped the pace, and turned again when the gates of the house were in sight. "That's what I'd call pathetic, P.T.I. Terry." He lifted his speed again, all the way up the drive, and let the little man catch him, and then called for press-ups, squat thrusts, knee bends. "Unless, of course, you would prefer to go and lie

down… "

Ronnie poked his finger into Bren's chest, "Very clever, very pretty.

Tells me more about you than a dozen sheets of paper."

"Just that I don't like being taken for a prat."

P.T.I. Terry was retching behind him.

Ronnie said, "That's alright, sonny. Parker'll sort you out."

With a grey mist picture, the image intensifier followed the car up the hill from the bungalow. It was a clear night, bright stars, little moon, the best night for the image intensifier. The words that logged the movement were whispered into the Dictaphone. There was an owl up somewhere, in one of the few trees that had survived the sweep of the winter gales. There was a vixen, coughing a call to a dog fox. The car powered away along the road that already glistened with the first trace of evening frost. The car was gone beyond the range of the camera.

They had an Ordnance Survey map, 1:25,000, and a plan of the fields that had been hand-drawn on a sheet of paper. Mossie had the operational plan. It was for the O.C. to approve or reject it.

They met in a small farmhouse, one of the few remaining older buildings on the plateau at the top of Altmore mountain. It was the usual way. The front door had been left unlocked, and the television played noisily in the kitchen. The front room was theirs, with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits left on a tray.

Mossie explained. The police inspector, three years at the Coalisland barracks, eighteen years in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had taken to hitting golf balls in the field behind his home. He had a dog, a spaniel, that could retrieve game and now was trained to bring him back his golf balls. Most Saturday mornings, early, just after dawn, the police inspector went into the field with his clubs and his balls and his dog and hit his shots for a good half an hour before driving off to play the Dungannon course.

They spoke in low voices. On his close plan Mossie had sketched in where the back-up car would wait. It would be 200 yards from a spinney of silver birches along two hedgerows, past a crumbling cow byre, skirting a final field before reaching a firing position. The shooting range would be 40 yards. Mossie said they would be in the car before the policeman's woman and his kids had gotten out of the house to see what had happened and then back inside to phone or radio through.

That was Mossie's work, to find the targets, co-ordinate the reconnaissance and draw up a bare tactical plan. He alone had worked on the plan. No one other than the O.C. would decide whether it should go ahead, and who should be involved. Only the Quartermaster would know what weapons were to be used, where they were currently hidden. It was the cell system that guaranteed their security.

The map was unmarked, that would go back into the glove compartment of the O.C.'s car. He unfastened his belt, unzipped his trousers and let them fall. He dropped his underpants. He stood, white legs in front of the fire, and folded the plan tight and small and then attached it with a strip of elastoplast to the inside of his groin.

The O.C. pulled up his underpants and his trousers. He was fastening his belt. "You happy?"

"If they get out fast enough."

"It's tight?"

"I saw him myself last Saturday, but what I hear is that he's been out like that the past four Saturdays."

There was the grim smile on the O.C.'s face. "They did the tout proper, the Castlewellan fecker."

"Yes."

"But too good for him, too quick."

"The Dignan bastard should have been hurt more," Mossie said.

All the families on the mountain knew the figures. Nine volunteers arrested the year previous, eleven more held by the army and the police that year and the year not yet finished.

The Castlewellan tout had been in South Down Brigade. And there had been a tout eight months back found in East Belfast, dead. And eighteen months back another tout in Derry Brigade, dead… There had never been a tout found in East Tyrone. Tout hunts, yes… Every last man in the Brigade under suspicion after the Loughgall ambush, women too. There had never been a tout positively identified in East Tyrone.

"Myself," Mossie said, "if I ever got my hands on a tout I'd skin the back off him. They'd hear him scream in feckin' London."

They ran the same route but at a less frantic speed, and P.T.I. Terry cradled a stopwatch in the palm of his hand, and all through the press-ups and knee bends and squat thrusts he stood over Bren and shouted encouragement. It was how it should have been the first morning. At the end of the session there wasn't praise, but there wasn't criticism. Bren could live with that.

Jocelyn had come the previous late afternoon. The first thing he had done after sliding his head round the sitting-room door and announcing his arrival to Ronnie, had been to search out George and demand a good garden spade. Jocelyn had skipped supper and there had been a flashlight beam half the evening out in the garden beyond the vegetable patch. All the time that Ronnie and Bren had been in the sitting room, Ronnie talking and Bren listening, the light had shone down in the vegetable patch. When he had finally come back inside, Jocelyn, with the brushed-back sandy hair, had gone straight to his bath and had not reappeared.

After his hour with P.T.I. Terry, Bren was still panting, still sweating.

He was told to pull a set of heavy dungarees over his track suit. He was led to the vegetable patch. The cabbages were doing well, and the sprouts would soon be ready for collecting, and the parsnips were about ready for lifting. Bren knew about vegetables because his parents' entire back garden was given over to vegetables. Mr Jocelyn opened the wooden box that he had carried. Bren saw, fitted into the moulded casing, two service pistols, and when he looked up, looked around him, he saw two man-shaped targets, one thirty yards away, half behind an oak tree, the second beyond the vegetable patch and mostly concealed by the bramble growth up the old stone wall. In front of Bren was a hole, neatly dug, not more than ten inches across, and back against the wall and nearer than the second target were nine filled fertiliser bags.

Jocelyn would have had access to his file. Bren had done live firing on a range on the last day of the rural surveillance course. He had done live firing and rural surveillance after unarmed combat, before electronic bugging, after Arabic language, before urban surveillance. All of them on the course, and Bren had caught the mood from the others, had treated live firing as a bit of a joke.

Curtly, Jocelyn talked Bren through the exercise.

The hole was the start. Beyond the hole, Jocelyn knelt and lifted off the turf. The turf had been laid on planks. Below the wood was a trench, six feet by two, and eighteen inches deep, lined with old carpet. That was a hide. He was told that the earth and stones had been dug out, filling nine fertiliser bags; he would have to carry at least nine bags' worth of earth and stone a clear mile from a dug hide, and then spread them where they would never be noticed. He dropped down into the space and Jocelyn replaced the wood strips and eased the turfs back over him. He lay on the side of his rib cage and propped himself on his elbow and the brow of his head peeped through the end hole and above the level of the ground. Jocelyn caught his hair, held his head steady, smeared his face and his hair with the soil of the vegetable patch, then kicked leaves over him. He was asked if he was comfortable and his answer didn't seem to matter. He was told that the minimum he would have to spend in such a position was twenty-four hours, and the maximum was seventy-two hours. He wasn't asked if he thought he could manage, just told to keep a sharp look-out and stay invisible. At the end of the first hour, after the numbness had set into his legs, after the ache had started in the shoulder that took his weight, after he had just about decided to piss in the trench, after the two target shapes had merged away into the trunk of the oak and the screen of the brambles… Christ, shit… a hand in his hair… a fist pulling him up from the hole… his scalp alive with the pain and not able to force his hands up to protect himself…

"Wake up, young man, or you'll wake up dead."

Bren sagged in disgust. He hadn't had the slightest warning of Jocelyn's approach.

He was told it would be live firing. His eye line was Jocelyn's boots. He looked up and watched as the bullets were taken from done live firing on a range on the last day of the rural surveillance course. He had done live firing and rural surveillance after unarmed combat, before Jocelyn's pockets and loaded into the magazines of one of the service pistols. He could have done that, although his were now filthy. He was handed the pistol,

"Simulated attack on your hide, where you are, better believe me, vulnerable… Without warning I will run at the hide, you will put down defensive fire on the two static targets, and fast. And you will not forget, my old darling, that these are live rounds. The two static targets represent a lethal enemy. I am not attempting to commit suicide, I am merely trying to create a real situation, so just be slightly careful. Don’t mess me. When I start running, you shoot for your life. Simple enough?'"

Jocelyn drifted away. The numbness in his legs seemed to bother him less, and the ache in his shoulder was forgotten. The rich musty smell of the earth was around him. He watched a robin take a worm. He heard George barking orders at the dog, hideous brute. He was aware of the occasional traffic on the road beyond the gates. He held the gun tight. He saw Mrs Ferguson come out to the line stretched from the back door to the trunk of a sycamore and hang her washing out. He saw everything that moved. He saw Ronnie come out of the front door with a bucket of water and start to soap down the Sierra. He saw P.T. I Terry wandering out onto the lawn with a quarter of a loaf and begin to scatter it for the birds and squirrels. He understood. They had all been sent out to distract him, one after the other. Where was the bastard?

Had to stretch his eyes to see the two target shapes and behind them was just the grey background of a wall and the darker background of the trees, Time was slipping by. Where was the bastard?

O.K., good game, game getting boring. How much bloody longer?

George throwing a ball for the dog, better keep the fiend well away from the vegetable patch or he'd be one dog short in a hurry. Mrs Ferguson bringing her washing back in. Ronnie hoovering away inside the Sierra. Two squirrels and four starlings competing for P.T.I. Terry's bread. And then, he saw him… He was meant to see him.

The shape in the bulky combat jacket coming through the trees. He hated th e bloody m a n God ro t t h e bastard. Pistol u p, pistol at his eye line, pistol on the moving figure and then the further target.

Remembering what he had been told. The moving figure past the target, going wide of it. Shoot the bastard. The hammer of the pistol in his ear. The further target, the moving figure, the nearer target. The whiplash of the pistol like it might take his arm out of the shoulder socket. The nearer target, the moving figure, the further target.

An awful silence around him. His finger was still squeezing the trigger. The ejected cases were beside his forehead.

The dog straining against a leash, George bellowing at him to be quiet.

Mrs Ferguson abandoning her basket and moving smartly towards the kitchen door.

Ronnie gone to ground already.

Jocelyn stood above him, contempt in his eyes. The index finger of his right hand pointed to the hole in the bulging side of his combat tunic.

"You're a right little pillock, you know that? You have one hit on the Target A, not in a stop position. You have three hits on Target B, one of which, give you the benefit of the doubt, might have dropped the man. The nearest you got to a proper hit was this…"

Jocelyn's finger jabbed at the neat hole. Three inches right and it would have been a proper hit.

"Glad I got one fucking thing right," Bren said.

Bren thought that he had actually frightened the man.

Jocelyn said, "My advice, if there's any real shooting to be done, leave it to Parker."

He had the only key to the room in the house in Hackney, upstairs and overlooking the back yard. Inside the room, taped to the underside of the mattress were the keys to the Escort. There was a young couple, over from County Cork more than a year, who rented the house and used the front room upstairs and all of the ground floor. The room was Jon Jo's and, when he needed it, the car.

It would have been possible to keep the rifle and the explosives at the Hackney address, but the word in the Organisation these days was that firearms and explosives had to be kept in caches. If the couple from County Cork were turned over, then at least the hardware stayed intact.

His principal cache was hidden in the forest area between Crowthorne and Bagshot.

It was the time of greatest risk. The cache itself was brilliant. The top of the dustbin was three inches below ground level, and that was under a splayed and hall capsized holly tree. He'd taken three days to dig it, twice being unlucky with roots when he was far down into the hole. It was a good position, but once he had seen a man walking a dog not fifty yards away and the lid of the dustbin had been open, and he had, Christ, frozen. And in the autumn, when it was still warm, he had had to lie off the cache for an hour because there was a couple, men, screwing within sight of the holly tree. He was most vulnerable there because a hundred policemen could have dug in, within 200 metres of where his dustbin was buried.

He had circled the cache, the first time at a radius of 300 yards. A long way down the rough forestry track, he had seen the back of a bird watcher. The second time he came closer, within 100 yards of the cache. Each time was a risk. The cache on the Welsh coast had been watched for seven weeks by more than eighty policemen,. and two good men had been taken, gone down for thirty years. A cache had been found at Pangbourne and more men doing time,

They might shout, they might just shoot, probably they'd shout On the ground, a revolver in his ear, handcuffs on his wrists, they probably wouldn't shoot.

Thirty year s he was looking at, each time he came to a cache.

Jon Jo scuffed the earth and the leaf mould clear. Between the lid and the dustbin there was a minute piece of black insulating tape He knew exactly where it should be. That way he would he would know if the cache had been interfered with. Sometimes if a cache was found they would burrow a homing device into a weapon, or they would disarm it, or they would replace the explosive with a harmless look alike compound, or they would screw up the detonators. Mostly they would lift, or kill, whoever came to collect the weapons.

In the dustbin, in separate plastic bags sealed at the neck, were two car bombs, a larger bomb for a building, and a Kalashnikov A.K. 47 assault rifle. At the bottom of the dustbin were six loaded magazines for the rifle. Heh, and the dustbin had been filled when he had started out ten weeks before… It was like a larder at the end of the week.

He took out the rifle and two magazines.

He replaced the lid, sealed it again with black insulating tape. He pushed back the soil and the dead leaves.

Jon Jo kept watch and listened for a quarter of an hour before he crawled out from under the spread of the holly tree.

The rifle, the stock folded back against the mechanism, was in the pouch pocket of his coat.

Bren came out of the front door. It had been Ronnie's idea. Ronnie had said that it would be no problem for him to get away for five hours.

Two hours driving each way, and an hour in the small house in the Filton district of Bristol. Ronnie had said that the backing of a strong family helped a man enduring stress.

So little that he, their son, could say to Art and Sadie Brennard. His father had cancelled his evening out at the horticulture group, and his mother had missed Friday evening Bingo.

He wished to God that he hadn't come

They had eaten a high tea, scones and cakes, and when it was nearly time for him to take off again, head away out of their lives, he had said that he would be gone some time. That was a sick joke, because it was more than four months since he had last been home. He'd the impression, when they had all sat down, that his mother had expected some momentous announcement, like he'd met a girl. He told them that he was posted to Belfast. His mother, Sadie, had looked as though she might cry. His father, Art, he'd just munched at his food and lowered his head nearer his plate.

The way Bren told it, what he would be doing would be just pretty boring, pushing paper round desks. Of course, nothing about ". source units or surveillance hides, firearms or playing with men's lives or being looked after and having his hand held by Parker, of course not. He left when he could see that neither of them believed a word he said. HIS mother kissed him on the doorstep, and his father held his hand and shook it, and the voices of both of them were lost in their throats.

He tried to smile back at them. He waved from his car. Should have told them, shouldn't he, that across in Bellast there was a man called Parker who was reckoned the superstar So patronising they all were, Wilkins and Ronnie and P.T. I Terry and Jocelyn. All playing the bloody Parker tune. By the time that he had reached the motorway, joined the great horde of his fellow countrymen who gave not a toss about Northern Ireland and its war, Bren had made himself a very binding promise. He would not be bloody Parker's passenger. He was not going to be any man's bag carrier.

One more night and he would be travelling.

Siobhan Nugent stood at her kitchen window and looked out and across at the farmhouse. She was like a widow, that Attracta Donnelly, and widows gathered men to them.

Siobhan Nugent wondered if her Mossie was there, at the widow feckin' Donnelly's. If he was not there then he would be out with the wild boys, bad boys, of the mountain. She knew, certain. All of the wives and the mothers on Altmore knew if their men were involved.

Below her bungalow, below the Donnelly farm, were the scattered lights of the homes of the Altmore people. To so many of those homes, before dawn had broken, the priest had come. It was always the priest who was sent to break the news of the shooting dead of another man.

They all ended dead, or locked away.

Perhaps it were better if her Mossie were at the widow feckin' I Donnelly's.

"Where is he now?"

"Mrs Ferguson's giving him his tea, Mr Wilkins. Then he's just to pack his things, upstairs," Ronnie said.

"I'm going to get his car back to the garage in London," P.T.I. Terry said.

"She's a soft old thing, that Mrs Ferguson. I suppose because of Six, she's used to seeing heroes packed off overseas. She's a bit sentimental," Jocelyn said.

Wilkins put down his whisky and walked quietly across the hall to the dining-room door. Bren's back was to him. Mrs Ferguson sat opposite him and was refilling his mug with tea. George sat beside him and was telling some gory tale from his soldiering in Cyprus. The Rottweiler was crouched on its haunches, saliva at its jaws, love in its eyes, and delicately took the half slice of bacon that Bren offered it.

Wilkins knew that Mrs Ferguson was a shrew whose services should have been dispensed with when the Ark beached, and that George was obstinate and stupid and hadn't a civil tongue in his head, and the dog was potentially vicious and a liability. The young man had been there for barely four days and he had captivated all three of them.

He walked back into the Library.

"Well, what's he been like?"

Ronnie said, "He's raw, but he wants to learn. He'll be fine. He's actually rather tough."

P.T.I. Terry said, "The Provisionals are in for rather a nasty surprise, if you want my opinion, sir. That's a very fit gentleman. Nice long stint in Ulster should suit very well."

Jocelyn said, "He doesn't shoot very straight, and he has no sense of humour. In another three weeks I think I could give you a reasonably competent…"

"I haven't got three weeks, Jocelyn. I have got about three minutes."

Ronnie shrugged, "Well, it's only a short stay, isn't it?"

Wilkins had had the fax back from Nairobi that morning. Ferdie bloody Penn was fighting his corner. Halfway through the course in Nairobi, expensive effort wasted and there would be a right squawk of anger in the Ministry of the Interior if he was pulled out, job not completed.

"I'm not so sure. Your reports of him are rather promising. I think we'll have to regard the posting as open-ended,, for the time being anyway.. ."

Mrs Ferguson came out onto the front step and stood huddled against the cold as they loaded Wilkins' car with Bren's suitcase and grip.

Ronnie and P.T.I. Terry and Jocelyn wished Bren well, slapped his back, shook his hand. George waved at them as they pulled away. The dog ran the length of the drive barking hoarsely at the car's tyres.

"It's so easy to lose sight of the big picture, Bren. The Provisionals are under enormous pressure at the moment. Arrests are up and their attacks are down. We know that a number of their political end would like to sit at some sort of conference table. What's holding back any substantial advance to political dialogue are the hard men, the military activists.

Our most important work of the moment is to penetrate the core of their killers. Destroy them, lock them away, and then peace might just get the tiny chance to breathe. It's a critical time."

They were late at Heathrow because Ernest Wilkins never drove beyond the speed limit.

"Don't think about the majority. The majority are decent people, excessively friendly, hard working and law abiding. You concentrate on the minority, the one in a hundred or maybe even the one in a thousand, the lethal minority…"Bren grabbed his case and his grip and ran.

Wilkins had missed the chance to wish him God speed.