The Journeyman Tailor

5

Cathy worked him pitilessly. Every time she allowed him out of the house he thought of freedom, but he didn't argue, he did as he was told.

He knew when he would slip into the cover of a Department of the Environment civil servant, but it was not immediately. She kept him prisoner in the second-floor flat in the Malone Road.

He was allowed out for exercise each morning. It was four miles to the city centre.

She had gone with him the first morning. All the way back up the hill and the carbon monoxide from the car exhausts catching in his throat, dragging into his lungs, the whole time she was jogging comfortably at his shoulder. Once he had lifted his pace, and made no impression on her at all. They had come back inside the house. Bren felt a little sick, and his legs were stiffening again, but that was because of what P.T.I. Terry had put him through. He had trudged up the stairs, paused once to steady himself against the banister, the first morning.

Into his room. He had flopped into the one easy chair.

"Get me a towel," she'd said.

Bren had come back into the living room of the flat, and she had been standing naked in the centre of the room, her track suit and T-shirt and bra in a heap on the floor by her feet.

Thanks," she'd said.

She had dried herself hard. She had pummelled the towel down round her thighs and up round her stomach and across her breasts and under her armpits and across her throat and her neck and her head, and she had tossed the towel back to him and dressed again.

The first morning she had left him with a wad of papers, everything that he needed to know about the Department of the Environment in Northern Ireland.

He had made himself a sandwich at lunchtime, and grilled some sausages for the evening meal.

He knew nothing about Cathy Parker. He had seen the muscles in her body, the biceps and thighs and the tightness of her lower belly. She would know everything about him because she would have seen his file. He had seen the slender dull gold arms of the crucifix that hung low on a chain and rested between her breasts. Everything about him was in the file that would have been sent from Personnel at Curzon Street, his childhood and his education and his earlier work. She had big nipples on shallow breasts, and she had a bruise the size of his palm on her ribs. He knew nothing about her.

And it would be the same on the second morning – the run, the towelling off, and her passing him more papers to read, then leaving him to kill the day with them.

He had never met a woman remotely like Cathy Parker before.

"You didn't find work?"

"No, I got there a day too late. Just missed."

"But it was the weekend." The landlady was confused.

"There's friends of mine, they know what's around, they said there was nothing more."

"You were so hopeful of finding work."

"That's the way it goes, better luck next time I try…"

She thought he had a lovely smile.

"I do hope I'm not interfering, but wouldn't you do better looking for work at home?"

"None there."

He wore a wedding ring. She had noticed that when he had first come to her door in answer to the advertisement she had placed in the

Herald amp; Echo. She thought he must have been married for several years, because since he first chose the ring his hands must have thickened with work and the flesh around the ring now furled over it so that it was tight, too tight to take off if he wanted to wash his hands thoroughly. She was very observant.

"Your wife must miss you dreadfully,"

She saw him start, as if she had nicked the hidden nerve "She understands."

"She sounds a very good woman."

"She knows what has to be done…"

She should not have mentioned the wife, she realised it. She enjoyed so much these brief conversations with her lodger. She was afraid she had spoiled something that was precious to her. She would have rather liked to have told him that she had defended his nationality against the busybody next door, but he had loped away up the stairs.

Later, from the kitchen, she heard him go out again.

The third day of the week. Bren had been ready, waiting in his room and changed, and looking down into the side street that ran to the Malone Road. From the high front window he saw her Astra swing across the traffic flow, causing two motorists to brake and almost collide. He heard the belt of their horns and she seemed to ignore them, didn't slacken her speed until she stopped outside the house.

She looked a wreck when she came through his door.

There was mud on her face and her hands. She wore a boiler suit that was too large for her, navy blue where the material was not obscured by the dirt smears.

"Am I late? Sorry…"

Bren said, "It's only a couple of minutes past eight."

"Sorry…"

She had a duffle bag and she dropped it on the floor.

She started to wriggle out of the boiler suit.

"My things are in there," she pointed down at the duffle bag.

She was kicking off her boots and the mud from them was spread out across the carpet of his room. She was out of the boilersuit, peeling off a sweater and then her jeans.

" Bloody cold old night," she said.

He had the grip open. First into his hand was the Heckler and Koch rifle, stock folded. Second into his hand were the two magazines taped upside down to each other. Third into his hand was the personal radio.

He laid them on the floor.

"Quite a heavy frost," she said.

He found her track-suit trousers and her T-shirt and her running shoes.

He put them on the floor beside her, and then he bent to pick up the mud that she had spread.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," she mouthed. "Does it matter…?"

He didn't ask her where she had been, what she had been doing, and he didn't think she would have told him. In a ditch, or in a hole like the one Jocelyn had dug. Out on a hillside, or damp in a bog field. And he had been asleep, slept pretty well through the night. The weapon was old, its paintwork was scratched, but the grease was fresh on it. He looked down at it. He saw where the serial number had been rasped away. The Heckler and Koch was a killing weapon. He felt the winnowing of the fear in his stomach.

"Are you all right?"

"Course I'm all right…"

"Honestly, Cathy, wouldn't you rather rest up for an hour?"

"Come on," she said, and she was going for the door.

They didn't speak when they ran, and they made up the time that she had been late by running faster.

From her car, back at the house, she gave him his file for the day.

She was in his bathroom, and she hadn't closed the door. The first day he had had the file on the Department of the Environment's work in the province. The second day he had had the file on the state of the war throughout the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, designated SECRET.

The file was marked "East Tyrone Brigade". It was stamped "NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM SECURE PREMISES". It was another SECRET file. He saw there were ninety-three pages, closely typed, and then bound separately inside the outer folder were photographs of men and women and of buildings and of countryside, and there was a large-scale map folded into the back of the file. It was the world he had walked into.

"Would you like some coffee?"

She murmured from the bathroom, "Be great, lots of sugar."

He put on the kettle. He was scared, couldn't hide it, couldn't help but admit it. He thought that it was the skill, the smooth talk and soft soap, of people like Mr Wilkins that they could con young men like himself to join up in total ignorance. The file he had read yesterday, he reckoned that back at Curzon Street they didn't know the half of it. The place had terrified him, and all he had done was read.

The place had him on a barbed hook, He made the coffee. He knocked gently. No answer. He took it into the bathroom.

She was stretched out in the filled bath, the water lapping at her ears and mouth. She was asleep. She looked so bloody vulnerable.

He poured the coffee down the kitchen sink.

After she had dressed, a long time later, gone, left her mud on the carpet, Bren settled with the file. He studied the digest and the faces and the farmhouses and the countryside of Altmore mountain. The names of the officers of the Brigade were typed out. The man who was O.C. and the man who was Quartermaster, and Mossie Nugent who was Intelligence Officer. And the young men who were learning the trade, ranked as volunteers. The names of the hopefuls, the couriers and the watchers… and the same photograph of Jon Jo Donnelly that he had seen on Mr Wilkins' desk in Curzon Street. He would work until his eyes misted in tiredness. He was again a prisoner in the flat on the second floor and would be until the morning, until she came for him again.

"Is he going to live?"

" The hospital say that he's out of danger, sir."

"That's a small mercy," the Prime Minister said.

The commander said, "Colonel Beck was pretty alert before he went under anaesthetic. He gave us a good description."

The pitch of the Prime Minister's voice rose. "So, exactly where does your investigation stand?"

Ernest Wilkins, who was near the window, felt himself witness to the interrogation, but not a part of it, which pleased him. For the last fifteen years he had been a visitor to Downing Street, and taken his share of flack.

‘’There are125,000 policemen who have seen and studied a photograph of Donnelly taken not two years ago in Gough. Likewise Customs, airports and ports. All the addresses we hold, safe houses, sympathetic pubs and so on, they're all being watched…"

"Why don't you publish the photograph?"

"We'd frighten him off, sir. He'd disappear off the face of the earth.

Or that recognisable version of him would. We might put a stop to him for a year, but he'd be back, new cover and new method of operating."

"So. What next?"

"Patient pursuit, sir, that's best. The tedious combing of haunts and possible associates. It has borne fruit before and will again. Every day that passes pushes up the odds against his escaping capture or betrayal.

I've told you before, Prime Minister, that he is the one under pressure

…"

"You will not overlook the pressure my Government is under, Commander, even as I do not underestimate the burden that you personally carry."

"Thank you, Prime Minister, but Donnelly is the one who is suffering. He would appear to be working alone. Probably living alone.

One by one his havens will be shut to him. His weapons are harder and harder of access. His contacts, from what we know, are less and less reliable, that is to say his couriers, his messengers. Some of them are children almost. We have access to one or two of this intake and… well, we are due a little luck, sir."

The Prime Minister stood very close to the Commander. "I don't believe in the wait-and-the-heavens-will-open approach. I would urge a more positive line on you, Commander. At our last meeting, we envisaged a resolution of the hunt in Altmore mountain. Is that the place?"

The Commander hesitated. "Indeed, sir."

The Prime Minister said, "I would like him to go home, your Mr Donnelly, Commander."

"Excuse me, Prime Minister." The tactical intervention was one of the chief accomplishments of Ernest Wilkins. He had been brought up in a hard school. He was a Desk Head. "That is a most interesting suggestion, Prime Minister. It is an approach to the problem that we have been developing. A little more work, and I think Well, leave it with me, Prime Minister."

There was the slight bow. He acknowledged the Prime Minister's satisfaction. He ignored the Commanders dagger glance. The meeting was over.

"He is just one man, and making a lavatory of our country." "Quite so, sir." Ernest Wilkins smiled. "I'll be working on it, be assured, getting Jon Jo Donnelly home…"

He had had his supper, washed up his plate, thrown away the empty Irish stew tin and the banana skin. And he had no coffee.

The music came flooding through the floor and the walls.

The pictures, East Tyrone's finest, were laid out on the carpet, all mug-shots, all police station photographs. He had the pictures of each of their homes beside each face that registered the shock of arrest and the defiance and the contempt. He had separated from the rest the face of Jon Jo Donnelly. Not strictly relevant because he was over the water, but the custody mug-shot was different from the others, cocky and controlled… He couldn't survive unless he had coffee… All day and all evening she had been in his mind. The pearl whiteness of her body in his bath, the hard weight of her Heckler and Koch on his floor.

There was the whip of her tongue and the bright laughter of her eyes.. . Now, without looking at the legend on the back of the photographs, he could put a name to most of them, and a ranking to nearly as many, and a history of previous convictions to several of them. There were eighty-two photographs. To match all of the photographs to names and addresses and "previous", he would be up half the night, but not without bloody coffee… All the time that he failed to concentrate on the photographs and the biographies, she was there in his mind, her face, her body, her voice and her eyes…

He went down the stairs, carrying his empty coffee jar.

It was Debussy, played loud.

He knocked on the door.

The door jumped open, on a chain. He was swiftly scrutinised. The door shut and then was spread wide.

It was the cardboard city man. "Yes?"

"Sorry to disturb you, I wondered if you had any coffee…?"

"Coffee, for fuck's sake?"

The man was in a dressing gown. The bed was unmade. Past him, Bren saw the open book on the bed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, one of the all-in anthologies with print like a telephone directory's. He'd have had a shower since Bren last saw him because the hair on his shoulders and his beard glowed chestnut.

"Just enough for a couple of cups, please."

"Come in."

He went inside. It was a flat the size of his own. The man shuffled barefoot into his kitchen. A tin must have fallen from an upper shelf because there was the impact and then the oath.

He was handed the coffee.

He started to unscrew the top. He intended to pour from the man's jar into his own.

"Don't bother yourself, take it. Gin's my poison…"

"Are you sure?"

He saw the rifle on the far side of the bed, tilted against the wall. The rifle would have been six inches from the hand of the man when he slept. On the top of the rifle barrel was a bulging night-sight. The smell in the room was of the clothes that were heaped by the open window, as if that might carry away some of their stench. There was a pistol on the table, and a pile of bills and an Inland Revenue envelope

…

The man must have followed his eyes. "Those buggers find you anywhere… You're Parker's new boy?"

"Yes."

"She bollocked you out yet?"

"Afraid so."

The man drawled, "How do you find her?"

"I don't know anything about her. I suppose I was surprised to find a woman, well, you know, doing this sort of work."

The man looked into Bren's face. "Are you good enough to work with her?" "Why not..,?"

"I don't know who you are, squire, and I don't know what you know, but I'll tell you something. There's men here would go through walls for that woman, got me?’’

‘’Yes, I only meant…"

"And go through fire… Do you know Henry IV, part 2?"

"No."

"Me neither, so be a good fellow and piss off and let me get into it…

You're a lucky sod, squire, and I hope you realise it, to work with Cathy Parker."

Mossie remembered the heavy-type box in An Phoblacht.

"… No matter how long a person has been working for the enemy if they come forward they will not be harmed. Anyone caught touting will be executed!…"

"We'll go through it, one by one… Who knew?"

Their cars were parked in a farm gateway off the Ballygawley road.

The gateway was on a bend and a steep dip in the road. There was a copse of conifers that masked the gateway from the hillside above.

The O.C. had the farmer, most days, check through the copse with his dogs, so that they could be certain there was not an army observation hide amongst the trees. It was where the O.C. and Mossie Nugent often met.

"I knew," Mossie said.

There was the light brittle laugh of the O.C. "You knew because it was your plan. I knew because I authorised your plan. Who else knew?"

"Quartermaster."

"Knew what he had to provide, only that."

"Kids who moved the guns."

They knew where they had to pick them up and where they had to drop them. That's all they knew."

"Kids who drove the front car."

"My wee brothe, his girl. I'd go to the grave for them."

" There’s been others, with family in the Organisation, they've touted. ,

Not my brother, Mossie, don't ever feckin' say it's my wee brother Who else?"

Those who was going to do the hit."

"Gerry Brannigan’s boy, and the Devitt kid. They were most at risk, tooled up They were looking at ten years Who else?"

Mossie spoke, so slowly, so quietly. "I did one recce. The Riordan boy watched there four weeks in a row."

"He's a little shite."

"If there's a tout we might as well pack it up. Will you call in people from outside…?"

They were the hard men. They would come from beyond the mountain community. They would be from Derry or Belfast. They would interrogate every man and woman in the Organisation. They would watch, perhaps for weeks, maybe for months. The unit would be shut down while they sifted the answers they had been given before they pointed the finger, or called the unit clean. They would interrogate the O.C., and the I.O., and the O.C.'s wee brother and his brother's girl, and the Q.M., and Gerry Brannigan's boy and the Devitt kid. The men from outside would have suspicion of every last one of them. Every volunteer in the unit would have a cause for fear if the men from outside came onto the mountain.

The O.C. shrugged. "I'm not wanting to."

Mossie said, "Best if you don't. Best if you keep it close. The people from outside, they turn every man against his friend."

There was the hiss of the O.C. "I tell you what I want…"

"What's that?"

"I wish to God that Jon Jo was back here."

They talked another half an hour. They talked of the big one that was being put together in the shed of a farmhouse, proper engineering, with a base plate of steel on the back of a flat-top lorry and a cradle welded to the base plate that would take an oil drum lying on its side and the spigot tube that would be filled with explosive powder and throw the oil drum high enough into the air to get it over the barracks' fence and the oil drum could hold just around four hundredweight of fertiliser mix with a five pound Semtex charge to give it the kick. Done before and getting to be time to do it again. Not ready yet, getting ready. And they talked about a repeat of the brilliant one of three years back, one of the best, when they had taken a slurry cart from a farm and a tractor to pull it and hosed the cart out, and filled it with diesel fuel oil and driven it out to the Stewartstown barracks and sprayed all over the walls and roof and put enough automatic fire down, and an R.P.G. launcher, to ignite the diesel and oil. Feckin' magic, and Jon Jo Donnelly on the R.P.G. launcher, last one he'd done before going south to rest up and let the heat off his back. Feckin' brilliant, Jon Jo with the R.P.G. missile launcher on his shoulders.

They went their separate ways.

Bren opened the file stamped SECRET and marked SOURCE UNIT.

He thought that he had opened Cathy Parker's door, seen behind the facade of the cardboard city man. Top of the file was a background paper, four rather messily typed sheets. Probably typed by a Five man with the errors corrected in biro.

The early morning had been as before. Cathy Parker arriving at eight o'clock, looking as though she had been pulled through a hedge, looking as though she hadn't slept, running with him, giving him a new file and retrieving the one that was NOT TO BE TAKEN FROM

SECURE PREMISES. He already treasured the hour, never more, while she ran with him, dried her sweat off in front of him, talked to him. He longed for it all the time that he was shut away with his file and his coffee and his own dismal cooking.

The paper was clinical.

He read of the pressure that could be applied to turn a man to inform against his own. It was set out starkly. Money for a youngster whose girl was pregnant and they had nowhere to live and who could be persuaded to drink in the bars where the men of the organisation met.

The menace of a lost livelihood for the taxi driver picked up drunk, who feared for the loss of his licence, and who could report on the men who used his cab and the men he saw on the street corners at night when he was cruising. The threat of imprisonment, for the man who tried to cut away from the old life, who could be sent back into the A.S.U. s with the pedigree of imprisonment to boost his prospect of promotion. The certainty of maiming, the kneccap or the elbow, for the joyrider, who would keep his eyes and his ears open, or know that his name would be quietly fed to a Provo punishment squad And this was the war he had been selected for? He thought of Mr Wilkins saying that he knew Bren had the necessary qualities, was sure of it.

The second paper in the file was entitled, "Source Unit/Operational Procedures".

God, and it just wasn't real…

A different typewriter, and different handwriting for the corrections.

It was standard procedure that all Handlers had a Divisional Mobile Support Unit patrol or an army covert team in the area when they met with their Player… At all times, at a meeting, there should be two Handlers, both armed, both in a state of maximum alert, maximum fitness… In their relationship with the Player, the Handlers must always seek to dominate… The Player must be protected at all times, unless he killed. The Player could continue, should be encouraged, to take part in P.I.R.A. activities, but not to the point of murder. The Player who killed was not to be tolerated… The Player was never to be trusted… The Handlers should never place themselves in a situation where the Player could control their safety.

The house was quiet around him. He sat on the carpet, where Cathy stood when she dried herself off, and went deeper into the file. Bren felt the tension grow in him as he turned the pages. "Source Unit/Equipment". There was the name and the signature number of the electronic bug that could be secreted in the stock of a weapon that a Player would bring from a weapons cache. There was the miniature camera to be used by the Player to photograph documents he had access to, maps, target plans, personnel evaluations. There was the light beam that was to be put into a cache by the Player and that would be activated when the Quartermaster came to retrieve guns or explosives. There was the bleeper, the size of those carried by a hospital doctor or a Telecom engineer. The bleeper's frequency would be monitored twenty- lour hours.

He could not imagine why any man or woman would turn informer, Had to be in love with death, no question.

He could not imagine how the handlers had the guts or the simple cruelty to shepherd and corral the poor bastards, but he would learn.

The darkness had gathered inside his room.

He found it at the bottom of the file. Seven sheets, stapled together, marked SONG BIRD. No name, no address, no photograph.

The meeting of the Task Co-ordinating Group was over. The major from the Special Air Service had gone fast, with the Chief Superintendent from Special Branch. The colonel from Army Intelligence was on his way to the senior officers' dining room with the Assistant Chief Constable.

Only the two of them left behind, Hobbes and that bloody dour Ulsterman.

"Did they slap your wrist good and hard?"

Howard Rennie was the great survivor. Hobbes knew the history. A part of the war since the beginning. A sergeant in 1969 when it began, an inspector when the British had first sent over their cowboys to trample on half-decent covert work, a chief inspector when the Provies had been on the verge of extinction through the Supergrass programme where he had been responsible for cajoling the informers into the witness box, to come up with the evidence that convicted the fat cats, until the system had been thrown out by the judges as weak law. Now he was a superintendent in Special Branch. He worked in close liaison with a division of the Royal Ulster Constabulary that went under the title of E4. The Provos, his enemy, knew all about E4. Not many others did.

It was a miracle that Howard Rennie had climbed to superintendent rank, because he had sought no favours on the way up. There was no other man in Northern Ireland that Hobbes would have rather had on his side than the huge wide-shouldered Ulsterman, from whom a civil word was hard, bloody hard, to coax.

"I was sorry you lost your player."

"Water under the bridge, Howard."

"Wouldn't have been lost, not if I'd been running him."

‘’I don't doubt it."

There was Rennie's smile, not the smile of a man who was amused If Rennie had had his way, then Hobbes and his kind would have been on the shuttle flying home There would have been just one Source Unit, his, the Royal Ulster Constabulary's. No players handled by Five or by army intelligence…

"I suppose you shipped out that Faber? I didn't rate him."

Hobbes gathered his papers. "You'll surprise me one day. Yes, we sent him back."

"And you'll replace him?"

"We already have," Hobbes said curtly.

"What's your new baby like?"

Hobbes looked into the grey eyes of the policeman. "Oh, the usual thing, another Englishman who doesn't know his arse from his elbow sent to interfere in the war that the R.U.C. have presided over so successfully that it's been running more than twenty years…"

"Fuck you, Hobbes." There was a clout across Hobbes' back.

The story was part of police headquarters folklore. Rennie, new to E4, and meeting for the first time his opposite number from army intelligence. The military boasting that they were running a hundred players. Rennie, all humble, saying that he only had ten… and then very quietly going down the army's list of a hundred, pointing out some who were dead, and several who were in gaol, and one who was in Australia… Everybody at police H.Q. told Hobbes that story, except Rennie.

"Remind me, Howard, where's Jon Jo Donnelly from?"

"He's East Tyrone. Spreading a touch of panic over there, is he?

Tweaking the old lion's tail, eh? Up Altmore mountain. A few little bombs, a few hits, it's too sad. Tell them what happens over here every day. His wife's there…"

"Hassling her, would that bring him back?"

"Doubt it. More likely make him bomb a bit harder, shoot a bit siraighter. They're tough people there, hassle washes off them."

"Be a start, though…"

Rennie was at the door. "Don't try giving me instructions, Mr Hobbes."

" Just a request, Howard, and make it good and heavy hassle."

"Christ Almighty, you're not in bloody insurance…"

Her clothes were old and dirty. He had put on well-pressed grey flannels, well-polished shoes, a check shirt with the collar undone and a lambswool sweater that his mother had sent him his last birthday, and his anorak.

"We're only going for a drive, aren't we?"

"… 'only going for a drive', Jesus! Down there they scent everything that is out of place. They know the faces and the cars that have the right to be there. That I can't help. But I can help that you don't look like you're trying to sell a policy at the weekend. Get those off." And she was gone.

He could smell the clothes the moment she came back through the door.

There was the mischief smile on her face. "Get those on."

"From downstairs?" The trousers were caked in mud.

"Correct."

"He's not there." There were still sweat patches under the armpits of the jersey.

"Second-class lock," she said.

"Don't they have baths down in Tyrone?" The anorak was torn in the sleeve, too large for him, looked to have been rolled in sheep droppings.

She stood back. "You are so wet behind the ears we could shoot snipe off you. Dear God." The smile was back on her face and she reached up and ruffled her fingers through his hair, wrecking the parting. It was the only morning that she hadn't called to take him out to run. He didn't think she had slept on any of the other nights. He saw her bite at her lips, as if that were the way she regained her control of herself.

There was a Subaru pick-up outside the house. It was filthy. There were two bales of hay loosely roped down in the back.

"What's this then? Local colour?"

She told him to drive. She unlocked the car and passed him a Browning pistol from the glove compartment and a magazine, told him to put it inside the anorak. She showed him the map and told him where to go.

She was asleep before they were out of Belfast.