The Journeyman Tailor

4

The aircraft was continually smacked by Force 8 winds. Bren barely noticed. He sat strapped in his seat, very still, refusing food and declining a drink. His mind was running over and over what Ronnie had told h i m… He was headed for a war in which dinosaur traditions governed and destroyed a gentler and more reasoning age. A pitiless war, unremarkable in the context of what had gone before. It was as always; the gravediggers stayed busy, and every time they paused for breath the war would erupt again to bring new soldiers, new patriots and new innocents to the cemeteries. The war was terrifying to the stranger, not least because it was incomprehensible in its brutality and its apparent irrelevance to the twentieth century. He thought only a native might be able to understand it, slim chance for the stranger drafted in to try to help to put a stop to it.

Bren jolted in his seat as the aircraft banged down onto the Aldergrove runway.

The aircraft taxied. He felt a swift thrill of exhilaration. He was a junior Executive Officer of the Security Service. More than anything he wanted to be worthy of the posting. One step at a time.. . and first step was Parker. Parker, he had been told, would meet him at the airport.

He unclipped the belt. He stood and stretched his cramped knees. He had not the faintest idea when he would next see the inside of an aircraft that was heading back to London. He was breathing hard. He walked down the aisle.

A l l so normal.

H e walked in a cavalcade of grannies and carried babies and collapsed pushchairs and young men who had been to a soccer match in London. The life of any other small airport, anywhere, swam around him. Ordinary and happy and relieved and excited people flowed by him, past the armed policemen and the anti- terrorist posters, the same as in any other small airport. But he was different, because he was a junior Executive Officer of Five and from now on a man's life depended on him, and from this moment onwards his own life was on the line. He felt the gush of pleasured excitement, enjoyed it.

She wasn't really a girl, she was more of a woman. It was probably a photograph that she had hidden in her palm. She looked down and then up again at the surge of the passengers. She came forward. She had singled him out. He stopped, put down his suitcase.

"It's Gary, yes?"

"I'm called Bren," he said brusquely.

"Please yourself."

"I was told Parker would meet me."

He thought she laughed at him. She wasn't pretty, certainly wasn't beautiful. The only brightness was in her eyes. He reckoned her accent was money, class.

"I'm Cathy – it's a God awful flight over, right?"

"They said it would be Parker." He heard the snap in his voice, wondered how he could be such an idiot.

"Did they now?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude."

She wore trainers and jeans that were threadbare at the knees, and a quilted anorak that was scuffed at the elbows.

"Lets be on the on the move then."

"Right." Bren bent to pick up his suitcase. She had beaten him to it, He knew it was heavy. She gave him a withering look. She walked away carrying the suitcase and he followed her.

Her head barely came up to his shoulder. There was a pale blue scarf at her throat. She had small hands and he thought that under the anorak there was only a slight body. She had no make-up, and her cheeks glowed with a weathered colour. Her hair was golden red and cut short.

She led the way out through the doors. When he had run for the flight at Heathrow he had had to change hands on the suitcase because of its weight. She didn't change hands. They threaded their way through the car park.

She unlocked an old Astra. The sides and the wheels were mud-spattered. She tossed his suitcase into the hatch. Presumably the people she collected for Parker wouldn't have been expected to bring with them their bone china. She unlocked the passenger door for him. He laid his grip on the back seat.

She settled in the driver's seat. Bren was belting himself in. She unzipped her anorak and took a radio from an inside pocket. Bren didn't understand a word she said into the microphone. Then she drew a Browning automatic from the tight waist of her jeans. She put the pistol on her seat, between her legs, then shrugged out of her anorak and draped it across her lap to hide the weapon. She drove out of the car park and away from the lights.

He saw her grin in the lights of a passing lorry. "I'm Parker," she said. "And since you are so bloody status-conscious, you can call me ma'am. Otherwise I'm just Cathy."

The messenger was glad to be gone.

The O.C. watched young Patsy Riordan run into the darkness and away from the house, and there was the frantic revving of his low-powered motorcycle. He came back inside, slamming the front door behind him. His wife was still in the kitchen, and the baby started to bawl at the hammer of the front door closing, and she did not dare to complain.

He had known by mid-morning that the policeman, hitting his feckin' golf balls, had not been shot. He had been told by lunch- time that his volunteers had made it back to the safety of the mountain. It was not until now, late in the evening, that he had heard the reasons for the failure.

It was the third time in as many months that young Patsy had brought him news of an aborted mission.

The front car, clean, without weapons on board, as was usual, had been a quarter of a mile ahead of the A.S.U.'s vehicle. They had seen the first roadblock, and called back on the C.B. radio. There were two routes to the target. They had tried the second. Again a vehicle checkpoint. They'd quit. The first car had driven the narrow lanes all through the small communities close to the Lough. Well, it could just have been chance. The whole bloody area had been stiff with bastards, not just around the police inspector's home.

Why, that morning, the morning he was to be attacked, had the way not been open to the Chief Inspector's house?

That night, when his wife had gone upstairs to quieten the baby and then to bed, the O.C. sat in front of the dying fire, and the anger whipped his mind.

The congregation spilled out from the chapel. Ten o'clock Mass was no longer the centrepiece of community life, not as it once had been, though the cars and vans were parked for fully 200 yards, both sides of the road. There were gaps among his flock, the Father had noticed, at the very front and the very back. His sermon had been aimed at those very missing teenagers and young people; he had spoken of a youth in their society that was numbed by television, corrupted by the pursuit of material goals. It was a favourite theme of the Father's. He never spoke of violence. The war, the Provos, the consequences of their actions, were never a part of his Sunday sermons. He was a heavy man with a penetrating voice, but he never used his stature to preach against the war. Had he been challenged on the substance of his sermons, he would have said that his parishioners were intelligent, they could make up their own minds on the morality of the campaign of the Active Service units. And in the privacy of his bishop's study, he would have said that his work in the mountain parish made for a lonely life, one that would be lonelier still if he denounced the Provisionals. He married the hard men, he baptised their children,. and if thay were ambushed by the army he buried them in the Republicanl plot in the cemetery field. He had already told his bishop that it was only his study of French Renaissance painting and the companionship of his books on the subject that kept him his sanity and his faith.

They came out into the frosted sunlight.

They were the businessmen, the wealthy; the unemployed, the poor, they were the farmers anil the tradesmen and the skilled workers; they were the volunteers of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. It would have been the Father's opinion, and his information would have been at least as complete as that of the senior Special Branch officer at Dungannon police station, that on any night he might be called out to inform the family of any of twenty-five men that their loved one had been shot dead on active service. From his viewpoint, from the pulpit, he could have counted at least fourteen of the twenty-five celebrating Mass with him that Sunday morning.

Mossie had seen Attracta Donnelly with her Kevin and her parents. He would have had to cross the road to speak to her. And then there were others who stopped to talk to her. Mossie waited. His Doloures held his Patrick's hand, keeping him on the pavement. His Francis carried little Mary. His Francis, eight years old and the eldest, that was a boy to be proud of. Siobhan and his mother talked with his mother's long-standing friend, the housekeeper of the Father. His children were well turned out, better dressed than most, good clothes and good shoes.

Suddenly behind him a baby, the one that had howled through Mass, screamed in protest. Mossie turned. The O.C. carried the baby.

"What the feck happened yesterday?"

"We was unlucky." Mossie ignored the fury of the hissed whisper.

"The place was heavy with them."

"It's what I heard."

"… There was police and army all over."

"That's bad."

"… Was they waiting for it…?"

"How would you know?"

"… Our boys, they had to cut out…"

"Best thing."

"… Had the police, army, information…?"

"I just heard the boys couldn't get through."

"… There was roadblocks all round…"

"Best they cut out."

"… I want to know who knew, everyone who k n e w… "

"Wasn't many, couldn't have been."

"Every last one who knew, because if I've a tout…"

The O.C.'s words died behind the bellow of his baby, and he was gone away up the line of parked cars to where his wife waited.

There was a freeze in Mossie's mind, a chill in his gut. He shouted across to Siobhan and his mother. He took little Mary from Francis. He snapped his fingers for Doloures and Patrick to follow him.

He walked towards his old Cortina. Mossie Nugent was tall and spare and with rounded shoulders under a thin neck. He always wore his best suit to Mass. Heavy, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles dominated a pale, gaunt face. His hair was neatly combed and there were flecks of cream paint behind his right ear. He would have admitted that he was a man without friends on Altmore, but that was the way for those who climbed high in the Organisation. He had not been spoken to by any of the fellow worshippers, other than the O.C.

Few came forward to offer small talk to a man known to be deep in the Organisation. They hung back around him, they waited for his smile and his greeting before coming forward to shake his hand or slap his back. If he caught a man's eye, if he stared back at it, cold, then that man would flinch. That was the power of the Organisation. But he would have claimed that he was liked, and the old people for whom he did unpaid work would have sung his praise, and the young men of the mountain, the Devitt boy and the Brannigan boy and the Riordan boy, would have failed to hide their admiration of him. The younger men, they would have recognised that he had fought the war longer than most, with greater commitment than most. A man who had little to offer in friendship, but who had gained respect for his kindness to the uninvolved, and admiration for his staying power with those who belonged. He was said by the few who knew to be the best, the most thorough, intelligence officer of the East Tyrone Brigade since the twenty-year war had flared again. It was how he would have wished it, that he should be a man alone in the mountain society. His walk was swinging, awkward, the legacy of a fall from a ladder, the damage now past recovery. It was only four years since he had come back to Altmore mountain, and before that he had been on the mainland for six years, in the South for four years, in prison on remand and under sentence for three years. To his own community, where he had been born, reared, schooled, he was something of a stranger.

Mossie was impatient to be gone. He called again to his wife and his mother to hurry themselves.

They were a busy couple. It was what Service life had taught them and retirement had changed nothing.

Sunday was not an exceptional day for them, not a day for rest, it was when they dealt with the week's unanswered letters and other paper work.

Cecily Beck had covered the dining-room table with the receipts from the local branch of the Red Cross, the monthly bills, and would settle them all before tackling the chore that she so enjoyed of writing the weekly letter to her son now flying a jump jet Harrier in Belize.

The village, north of the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was dominated by its magnificent beech trees, certainly more thun a hundred years old, beside the church. Most of the leaves, they annually complained, seemed to fall in their garden, onto their lawns and flower beds. Peter Beck raked leaves, and would not be finished before it was too cold and too dark to stay outside any longer. Then he would work on the speech that he would make next week at the British Legion dinner. It was inevitable that a man who had commanded an infantry battalion would be invited when he retired to the village, to become the British Legion club’s chairman.

He stopped, paused for breath. He watched through the window, his wife hunched over the table, He leaned for a moment on the rake.

Beyond the privet hedge he could just see the head of a man going along their lane. It was fine weather to be out for a walk. He returned to his raking. He set himself to clear the grass and the rosebeds before he finished for the day.

She had knocked sharply and come into his room before he could reply

It was late morning. She wore a thin T-shirt that was creased and not fresh that day and it hung half in, half out of her jeans. Bren saw the reddish blotch on the white of her throat and thought she must have scratched an insect bite.

"You sleep alright?"

"Fine."

"The beds are made for martyrs."

"I slept well."

"I don't know what you're going to do with yourself today… sorry, I'm not about."

"There are no meetings?"

"Don't be too keen…" Again, what he had seen the previous evening, the bright mocking in her eyes.

"Don't I get to meet anyone?"

"This evening, Hobbes. Not till this evening."

"I'd like to go into the city, get some sort of feel for the place."

"There won't be a driver for you. Not on a Sunday."

She said what time he should be back at the house, and what time she would pick him up. He said that he would find a taxi down the road at the hotel, or maybe, if he wanted to be athletic then he could walk the whole way.

"Please yourself, don't wander off too far." The smile was off her face.

Because it had been night when he had arrived he knew only that the house was in the Malone Road. The flat where he had slept was one bedroom, one living room with a kitchen alcove, and a tiny bathroom, on the second floor. She'd gone.

He wore an old anorak and a pair of slacks and good walking shoes.

Bren went down the stairs of the house, and there was music playing from one of the first-floor rooms. In the ground-floor hall he passed a man who looked as though he had come out from the cardboard cities of inner London. The man had four days of stubble, hair that was matted, hands that were grimed, clothes that were torn and filthy, and the man ignored him.

Thirty minutes later, Bren stood in the central square of old Belfast.

So ordinary.

The sun was behind the great block of the City Hall. He saw the banner draped high on the building U LSTER sa ys no. A Land-rover painted in camouflage green drove past him and a soldier protruding through the roof momentarily covered him with the snub barrel of his rifle. He walked through the circular security gates, clattering the steel bars as he pushed them in front of him. He went down a wide shopping street. They were all the High Street names.

Some shops were boarded up, the plywood daubed id graffiti and covered with concert gig advertisements. There were the stores for clothes and furniture and televisions and cosmetics, just as he would have found them anywhere else. He had only seen this street on television, when the fires were burning and the firemen were sprinting forward with their hoses, and shopkeepers were standing on the pavement in shock or in tears. He had never seen the Royal Avenue on television deserted and quiet and ordinary. He turned right, past the shops with the special offers and the travel agents with the cut-price deals and hot bun cafes that were closed, padlocked, shuttered. Ahead of him were the Law Courts. He saw the young soldiers and their sa ngar of sandbags. He was behind the public face of the centre and he went along a road where most of the buildings were derelict, and at the doors that were reinforced with nailed planks he saw the rusted nameplates of solicitors and businessmen who had been bombed into new premises.

In Curzon Street, since joining the Irish desk, he had never volunteered an opinion about the war. Last time round, Charlie had said, "Left to ourselves we could wrap this up in a week, consign them all to the Underground Club." Archie had said, Can’t expect to fight and win if you've a hand tied behind your back,. must fight fire with fire." And Mr Wilkins, muttering under his breath as he passed Bren's desk had said, "Anyone with a solution to Northern Ireland's problems is either demented or merely ill-informed." He’d have an opinion himself, one day, when he came back. He wanted to learn, to make the opinion worth having, He would walk through the city and taste it, smell it.

Twenty minut es later he found there were high block of flats ahead of him, four, five stories, smeared concrete, daubed with slogans, fire scarred. A cluster of youths on the corner of the first block, smoking, watching, lounging. They wore a uniform: ankle boots laced high, faded and patched jeans, denim jackets with pop group logos hand-scrawled on the shoulders and sleeves, cropped hair. He hesitated. He looked across the wide road at the youths, and the youths stared back across the road at him. The Land-rover came down the street from behind him. It braked, swerved towards the pavement. Two soldiers gol out. The soldiers went to the youths. Bren watched. He saw their defiance. They didn't back off, they didn't straighten up, and one of them cleared his throat and spat. He had not seen the second Land-rover pull up behind him.

"You!"

He spun round.

"You… Over here…"

He saw the crouching soldiers, and a rifle aimed at him. He walked towards the soldier. No sweat, no problem, he was…

"Move your arse…"

He stood in front of the soldier. There was contempt in the soldier's face.

"Name…?"

"It's alright, I'm…"

"Last time, name…"

Bren swallowed. He shook his head.

"Your name, arsehole…"

Bren looked him in the face, and looked into the barrel of a high velocity rifle.

"I'm English. I'm a civil servant, and I can't answer your questions."

If you're from the Long Haired Brigade, mate, God help us., Bren reckoned the soldier to be ten years younger than him. The soldier smirked. The Land-rover across the road was loading up. and the youths were left free to smoke and watch and lounge, and the focus of their attention was Bren. The soldier said, ‘’This, old cocker is the unhealthy end of the city. If you’ve no business here, take my advice, piss off out.’’ Thank you " Bren turned, started to walk away.

He heard the laughter, and then the thrust of the engine of the second Land-rover. He pushed up the collar of his anorak. He kept walking, all the way back through the city centre, to the Malone Road.

The rest of the afternoon, not much of it because the dusk came quickly to his room, he lay on his bed and waited for Cathy goddamn Parker to collect him.

The target used two lengths of plywood, one in each hand, to scoop up the leaves and put them into the wheelbarrow. The assault rifle, the tubular steel stock folded hack, was still in Jon Jo's inner pocket. The magazine was in his outer pocket. He watched from beyond the hedge.

The lane behind him was empty. He knew that the target was not regarded as priority. The order was to avoid priority targets who were too well guarded.

The target cursed because the dried leaves spilled from the wheelbarrow onto the lawn again.

He heard the distant call from the cottage.

"Come on, Peter, tea's made. You'll catch your death out there."

"Just coming, darling," the target answered. "One last load."

The target began to push the wheelbarrow across the lawn, towards a corner of the garden where a bonfire smoked through the earlier heaps of leaves.

Jon Jo looked back to his right, up the lane, and to his left, down the lane. The lane was empty. Dusk falling, completing a November Sunday afternoon. The car was a full 150 yards away, parked through an open field gate and hidden by a hedge. He was, at the upper end of the village and on the high ground above the church and the one main road around which the community had formed centuries before. There was a haze of smoke from the chimneys that blurred the setting sun.

He took the rifle from his pouch pocket…

The target had been identified in Dublin. They had good kids who sat in the Trinity Library or the Dublin University reading rooms to browse their way through the English newspapers.

Swift movement!, and the metallic snap of the magazine slotting into the underside of the A.K. 47. The target had stopped, rooted.. .

In the Trinity Library every last book, periodical, pamphlet was collected and available to the student. A lieutenant-colonel, recently retired, formerly officer commanding a Light Infantry battalion, had written to The Times to protest that a B.B.C. documentary unfairly criticised Security Force operations in Northern Ireland. He had written from experience. His last posting had been to Belfast. The letter and the address had been noted.

The smack of the shoulder stock being wrenched back and locking.

The target recognised the sound, turned to run, cannoned into the wheelbarrow, was enmeshed for a long instant in its handles and in the spill of the loose leaves. The rifle was at Jon Jo's shoulder…

Lt-Col. Peter Beck, author of the letter, commanding officer of a Light Infantry battalion, had most vigorously, during his last tour, defended the action of his soldiers after they had shot dead two teenagers, a boy aged eighteen and a girl aged sixteen, who had crashed a roadblock. He had said then, and had been quoted on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph, that the kids were not "joyriders", but "car thieves, no more than common criminals who endanger the lives of civilians and soldiers alike". He'd be a popular hit, because there had been more than a thousand following those kids' coffins to Milltown cemetery.

The target was running into the fog smoke from his bonfire. Jon Jo cocked the rifle. Twenty paces, going on twenty-five. The target stumbled in his fear, was trying to weave, trying to remember everything he had once known as commonplace…

Jon Jo squeezed the trigger. An assault rifle on semi-automatic.

There was the battering at his padded shoulder. Over the foresight and V sight the target was wavering, falling, crawling. He heard nothing. He saw the bullets puff stone shrapnel from the wall of the house, saw them punch into the target.

The rooks fled from the upper branches of the beech trees.

The target was down, deadly still, almost within reach of the back door of the house.

Jon Jo Donnelly ran, up the lane, dismantling the rifle, slowed to a walk at the end of the lane, towards the waiting car

She went in the ambulance with her husband.

It had been quick and that was luck. The retired surgeon being there had been luckier. He had recognised the blast of a high velocity rifle at the top of the village, and run as best he could towards the source of the sound. The surgeon and the ambulance man worked on the body below them to retain life.

She seemed not to hear the siren. She knew that she had left her front door unlocked and her back door wide open and that there was a pot of tea on the kitchen table. She spoke quietly, and it was as if she did not expect the two men bent over her husband to listen to her.

"He knew he was at risk, but what could we do about it? You can't just expect the government to nanny us with bodyguards. There's scores of people in the country much more in danger than we were, they can't all have an armed policeman sitting by the front door. We talked it through, we took sensible precautions like locking the garage when the car was in their, and then we just had to get on with our lives. Thats all you can do, isn't it?"

"Mrs Beck, would you tuck that blanket securely round his feet and hold them still? Thank you." The gentle growled instructions of a man whose attention was elsewhere.

"He's such a lovely man. It's just not possible to believe that anyone could hate him enough to do this to him…"

"Shut up, Cecily, and listen…" The faint, bubbled voice from the stretcher.

She leaned forward. They had scissored through the old pullover and cut his shirt back. There were huge holes in his chest. The voice oozed from the blood mess of his jaw and mouth.

"… Big man, above average. Saw him, twice. Afternoon, second time when he aimed. Blue anorak, red shoulder…’’

"Don't strain." dark hair, short cut, curly. Abnormally pale face. Deep eyes, far down.

Hadn't shaved."

She had left her handbag behind She had no pen or paper. The ambulance man had a syringe poised. They already had the drips in, blood plasma and saline. She pulled a biro from the slot on the ambulance man's shoulder.

"… A.K. 47, sure of that…"

The syringe was bedded against her husband's upper arm. He was so horribly white and his breathing was sporadic, forced as if by great effort. He said nothing more.

She wrote down all that he had said on the back of her hand.

At the hospital a nurse caught her, prevented her from going all the way through into the Casualty's X-ray unit. She was sat on a chair.

She was brought tea, steaming hot and with sugar, and when a policeman came to her, she was able to dictate from her hand the description of her husband's attacker and the weapon he had used.

Bren locked the door behind him.

Cathy looked up at him. She stood square on the balls of her feet. Her hair was a mess. She blocked his way to the stairs.

"We'll just get this over first."

She had come to his room for him when she had said she would, to the minute.

"What?"

"You were just dreadful this afternoon, and it will not happen again."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You walk out of here. You traipse round town. Against my advice, you go wandering off out of the city centre and you end up beside Unity Flats. You're not in bloody Bognor you know, this is Belfast. 'I am a civil servant, I cannot give you my name and address…' How pompous can you get? That soldier was only a boy doing his job, you don't have to speak to him like you're Christ Almighty at a Public School. You come back here and again you take no precautions at all.

You go on behaving like that and you're going to be a serious bloody liability."

It hurt him, but he said it. "It won't happen again."

"I had you followed. I wanted to see if you were worth working with.

Today's report says you are a disaster."

"It will not happen again."

She stared up at him, weighing whether he was worth the effort.

"Come on."

The Commander shook the sleep from his head.

"That's a hell of a good description."

The voice on the telephone was calm. "There's not a great deal, really, but all four specifics, height, hair, eyes and pallor, they're all Donnelly."

"Is my car moving?"

"Be with you in fifteen minutes."

"But it's Jon Jo Donnelly?"

"What we've got. It all matches him."

The Commander put the telephone down. He said the name again. Jon Jo Donnelly… and again… Jon Jo Donnelly… He liked to sleep on a Sunday afternoon, it was the one time in the week when he hoped to crash out of the world of Jon Jo Donnelly. He put on a tie and his suit and he came downstairs to tell his wife to think of something, any bloody excuse to put off the people who were due in an hour for drinks. Sundays were when he made the effort, bloody futile, to keep his work out of his home.

He waited in the hall for his car.

His wife heard what he said, a muttered voice. "Stretching yourself, Jon Jo, old love, pushing it too hard, too fast. Getting careless, old love, and careless is going to finish yo u… "

The steam had misted over the window. Hot tap on. Jon Jo stripped beside the bath. Last, he peeled from his right shoulder the elastoplast that held the foam rubber padding in position. He felt the water, winced. He looked down into the paper bag, the sort that half a hundredweight of potatoes were sold in. There was a newspaper in there and fire-lighter cubes. He turned the hot tap off.

He stuffed all of his clothes down into the paperbag: Shoes, socks, trousers, underwear, shirt, jersey, anorak where the hell was his woollen cap? Christ, and he hadn’t worn his woollen cap. How could he have forgotten to wear his woollen cap?…

Last into the bag was the shoulder pad to take the battering of the assault rifle against the shoulder when he fired on semiautomatic. Two years back, a good man had been taken, and clean, but he'd a bruise, rainbow-coloured, on his shoulder and the bloody police had called in a medic who'd sworn on oath that the bruise had been four days old, and four days old had matched with a strike. His pale skin was unmarked where the padding had been. He tapped at the bathroom door. He heard the footsteps on the staircase. He passed the paper bag out through the door. He climbed into the bath, and forced himself down into the scalding heat of the water. Jon Jo scrubbed his body and his hair with the soap, every inch of his body, again and again, and again his hair. He removed from his skin and his scalp all trace of the gases that would have blown back from the Kalashnikov when he had fired, the fine film that could be found by a forensic scientist. By the time he pushed himself up out of the bath, had the towel draped round him, he could see the glow of the fire through the misted window. The fire burned in the back yard and destroyed all the clothes he had been wearing. In the morning, before it was light, he would leave the Hackney address and drive to the woodland between Crowthorne and Bagshot. He would bury the assault rifle. He would bring the car back to Paddington station. The young man from Cork or his wife would collect the car. He would take the train again to the Devon coast.

In his room he started to dress, then looked at his watch and switched on the radio beside his bed. The news bulletin had started. "… is still undergoing surgery. A hospital spokesman, in the last few minutes, described Colonel Beck's condition as 'critical but stable'…" He no longer listened. His fist smashed onto the pillow. Fifteen shots, maybe more, how had the bastard lived? His eyes were pressed shut, tight. The frustration swarmed in him.

"You will always find me frank to the point of being brutal, Bren. I think it's right, in this theatre of operations, that every man and woman who works for me knows exactly what I am thinking. It may not be quite the same in London…" Hobbes paced in front of the gas fire. He wore carpet slippers and no tie and a primrose cardigan that was unbuttoned. It was still the weekend. The house was in a village beyond Bangor, was less than a hundred yards from the County Down seashore.

Bren could hear the waves on the rocks. Cathy had kicked off her shoes and was stretched out on the settee. She'd let Hobbes make the mugs of coffee.

"… So you won't mind if I say that I am astonished that they sent you. I asked for specific people and they chickened out on me. You are what I have been sent and I have to make do with you – put another way, Cathy has to learn to live with it. Don't yawn, there's a darling woman. The people I asked for have been brought up to the training standards that I require, and you aren't at that standard.. . Very fast, you have to learn what is required of you. You follow me?"

He had heard, vaguely, Hobbes' name spoken in the office at Curzon Street way back, when he was working to Mid-East Desk, Lebanon.

Only odd snippets and as a new boy he had not wanted it thought that he clung to names mentioned in conversations that were not directed at him. Crisis, Iraq, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

There had been a flurry of occasions when Hobbes' name had been used by older members of the desk, but it had been more than two years back and he had not heard the name since. The man was his boss and Cathy's boss. He had seen from the time that he had been welcomed curtly into the house that she recognised his seniority. They had talked for twenty minutes, seemed that long, before his attention had moved to Bren.

They had worked at a large-scale Ordnance Survey and shuffled aerial photographs, and twice he had gone to another room to bring back surveillance pictures of men. She gave his rank deference because each time she made a statement she cocked her head at him and queried with her eyebrows as to whether she had carried him with her argument.

When it was their business they were both quiet, close, as if unwilling to waste words, as if their minds were locked together in respect. All different now, and Bren didn't know why she had to play bored and frivolous, and he had to act the big man with a message to communicate.

Bren sat straight. He cradled the coffee in his hands. "Yes."

Hobbes said, "Tomorrow we'll sort out where you're to live, it's best to be off military premises. We'll establish a cover occupation for you, it's usually Department of Environment, Car, personal weapon, sort all that out in the morning You've a very great deal to learn in a very short time, that will also start tomorrow… About the only thing you've got going for you is that you didn't, I'm told, wriggle when you were propositioned…"

"I'm looking forward to the work."

"Please don't interrupt."

He was a small man, not yet middle aged, wilth a deep voice. There was a chill in that voice. He didn't think this man had ever laughed in his life.

"We'll go over some fundamentals, our ground rules. You work for me, you operate to Cathy. Not one scrap ol your information goes to the police or to the military without that 1 approve it, that Cathy authorises it. We run our own show here, we have our own Source Unit. The war as fought by the police and the army is a quite separate war, perfectly distant. I am not in the business of short-term results. No medals here for you, Bren, no herograms, no Chief Constable's commendations and no Mentioned in Dispatches. We go our own way, as far as is physically possible and safe…"

The coffee mug was cold in his hand. He saw that Cathy stared up at the ceiling, following a fly's flight path.

"That's clear," Bren said.

"Whether you're up to this job is your business. I'm told from London that you are difficult, awkward, obstinate, that you've got some sort of problem that most obviously manifests itself by the ridiculous name you call yourself by. That's all to the good. I like people to be difficult, obstinate and awkward. If you ever get to be half as obnoxious and bloody-minded as our sweet Miss Parker then you'll do very well.."

There was nothing he could say, and nothing that he was expected to say.

"You'll work with Cathy," Hobbes said briskly. It was as if the preamble were finished. "You will do exactly as she tells you, and within a few weeks you will understand the wisdom of that…

We call this man our ‘Song Bird’. His code name is Song Bird because that is the call-sign he uses each time he rings through to us for a meeting. He has to use that code name. It keeps in his mind, very clearly, that he belongs to us. He's in our cage and he sings for us. He believes, and we have encouraged the belief, that if he stops singing, tries to leave the cage, then we will blow him out to his friends. They would most certainly kill him, and hurt him a little bit in the process.

But our aim is to keep Song Bird. To keep the twelve other sources all singing. Quite a little choir we have in the Province, but your exclusive concern until we decide otherwise is to assist Miss Parker in the handling of Song Bird."

The fear came in tiny shock waves through Bren. He wondered which of them in London had turned down Belfast.