The Journeyman Tailor (26 page)

"... Against our better judgment, certain orders were given in the last forty-eight hours - the background is unimportant now - a boy called Riordan was arrested, questioned, released. I now realise that was an error of professional judgment, and I take no pride in my change of heart. Your intelligence and ours indicates a hunt on the mountain for an informer. Your most recent intelligence and ours indicates that the Riordan boy has been abducted by a P.I.R.A. security unit. He most certainly faces torture, and he most probably faces death. There is no way that Riordan is an informer, he is at worst a low-level courier. I now acknowledge that what we did was
wrong,
tactically and morally. I want that boy found before he is tortured. In Belfast a wasp's nest has been stirred up, and results are demanded. I need that mountain searched clean and I want that boy found alive."

He gave orders for the movements of his duty company and his stand-by company. In the outer office his adjutant was calling up R.A.F.

Aldergrove for helicopter support . . . Faint hearts abroad, he thought . .

. Her hand would be there, he had no doubt of that, Cathy's hand.

Touts, informers, traitors, out on the mountain, that was Cathy's territory. Colonel Johnny was weak with words, but good at listening and evaluating. It was what an upbringing on the Scottish moorlands had given him, that words of justification were usually the cover for the half-truth. There were few words said on those high heathered hills that were of value. "Methinks he doth protest too much." The day a policeman, a Branch man, talked of morality, well . . . He thought it was pique, he thought Howard Rennie might have been crossed.

Cathy was out on the mountain. Her radio signal, her coded call sign announcing her presence had been logged in Communications.

"Five minutes, Patsy ... A confession, signed. A press conference and you go free . . . Or . . . you get handed to the other men. Which is it to be? There's five minutes of a half hour left, Patsy ..."

"I don't know anything."

"God help you if you go to the other men. The clock's turning, Patsy."

"Don't know, can't say what you don't know ..."

From away below in the house, where the smell of the cooking had come from, was the clamour of a telephone's bell.

They lay in the wetness of the hide. They had been in the hide, by Bren's watch, more than five hours. They had heard the helicopters scudding overhead, navigation lights lost in the low cloud. It was the way they had been in the hide before, her half on top of him and her leg thrown between his thighs. They watched the bungalow alternately through the Night Observation Device lens. There was the wind around them, and the occasional bleating call of bullocks that were across the far side of the field and huddled down against the shelter of the thorn hedge on the far side of the field in front of them.

Bren whispered, "Nugent's the key, isn't he?"

"That's what we'll tell Hobbes."

"Song Bird's the jewel?"

So soft her voice, so calm. "Always has been, always will be."

"To bring back Jon Jo Donnelly? He was the star performer here, he was the best they ever had, is that it?"

"He's the stuff of their folklore, their bloody history. It's like they were lost when he went away."

"And the Riordan boy saves Song Bird?"

"Right."

The equations squirmed in his mind and spilled out the questions, and there was the deadness in the back of his legs where her weight pressed down on him.

"Because Jon Jo Donnelly's so important . . . ?"

"Donnelly's public enemy Number One right now in London. You know that."

He heard the hoarseness of his own whisper. "You can live with what happens to the Riordan boy?"

"It's just my job."

"That's what they've always said, the people who ran the Nazi camps, the guards in Stalin's Russia, Saddam's torturers . . . They were just doing their job ..."

"My conscience isn't bruised."

"Should it be?"

"A tiger terrorises a village, it's a man-eater. The villagers call in a marksman. He tethers a goat. The goat is sacrificed. The best moment lor the marksman is when the tiger takes the goat. The tiger is shot, but that's academic for the goat. Tough on the goat...’’

"You believe that?"

She shifted. Her face was beside his. He could see nothing of her. He could feel the warmth from her body and the breath from her mouth.

"You want my bible?"

"Give it me."

" There’s innocent people and good people, and they are suffocated by the killers. There's people out on this mountain who want nothing more than to lead
decent
and
honourable
lives Agonising is a luxury.

Out job is to free them of the suffocation. It's just a matter of priorities It's not nice and it's not pleasant, but it's the job I'm paid to do. End of speech...If i have another bloody question from you then I'll boot you out of here and you can walk home. Got me?"

"One more question."

"One, only one."

"What's it done to you, the job?"

He didn't know what she would have answered. The back door of the bungalow opened. It was his turn on the Night Observation Device. He saw Mossie Nugent come out of the kitchen door and go to the shelter of the back shed, and there was the small flash on the lens of a match striking. He saw Song Bird smoke a cigarette in the wind and the squalled rain of the night. Heh, Song Bird, are you feeling good?

Should be feeling good because there's a poor young bastard out there who is keeping you safe by going through three pints of hell. Heh, Mr Nugent, you'll be safe because Miss God Almighty Parker up here has given you her promise.

"I can't write nothing . . ."

"It's your friends, Patsy, they's given us the story. They's out looking for you with helicopters. They's searching houses. They's got roadblocks all over Altmore. Would they be doing that if you weren't theirs? Would they, Patsy? They've told us, Patsy, that you's a tout . . ."

"It's bollocks. I's not a tout."

". . . They sent an army to find you, Patsy, and that's telling us. It's your feckin' friends, Patsy, that's told us you's a tout."

12

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

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

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

His eyesight was fine. He needed glasses only for reading. Fifty yards ahead of him the dog had crouched,

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

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

They waited and they watched.

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

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

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

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

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

He heard the crisp English accent.

"You drive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Miss Parker, you are deep in shit."

"Put me there, did you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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