The Journeyman Tailor (29 page)

"They've shot the Riordan kid."

Bren winced.

Cathy said, "It's not your problem."

"The little bugger had no chance."

Bren was just the minder, and the man with the gun, the protection.

Cathy said, "Don't give me any crocodile tears, Mossie. I don't want to hear 'it's a rotten old world'. You're safe, and you get paid."

"The body's down by the border."

Bren held the Heckler and Koch. It was set to semi-automatic, and his finger lay alongside the trigger guard.

Clathy said, "It's gone and it's past and it was never your problem I told your wife I'd look after you. I keep my promises, don't forget that."

"You's a feckin' awful woman."

Bren felt the muscle tightening in his arms. If Song Bird touched Cathy he would belt him with the stock of the weapon, at night across the back of the head. That was just ridiculous. About half a light year before he could have hit the tout she would have had him flat on his face ... He could hear the music from the bar. They had left the car in the parking area, an expanse of

Weeded gravel, They had gone to the darkness behind the propane gas tank, at the back of the bar.

Cathy said, If you've had your whining time, Mossie . . ."

He’d done nothing, that Patsy."

Bren was the voyeur He just watched her at work, Tough and soft, stick and carrot. She had him in the palm of her hand, and she knew it and her hands dropped off his shoulders as it there

was no more need for her to shake the hardness back into him. "You're not a bloody kid, Mossie, you are the best man I have. You are just bloody brilliant, Mossie, and you're
safe.
Got me?"

"What do you want?"

Bren glanced down at his watch. Near to closing time.

Cathy said, "I want Jon Jo Donnelly back on the mountain ..."

The bar was a roadhouse between Portadown and Lurgan. The bar was on a main road and there was no back-up in position. A group spilled out of the bar and Bren went to the edge of the wall that cut off the gas tanks from the car park. He watched the men coming out of the bar and one was staggering and two were helping him. He had his back to Cathy and her Song Bird. He could only hear short snatches of what was said behind him. He ducked back behind the wall as the arc of the headlights swept the car park when the vehicle turned. She talked about money, big money, for Song Bird. He told her that Jon Jo Donnelly was a hero on Altmore. It was what they wanted, she said, Donnelly back home. He said it was all the talk of the Brigade that Jon Jo was needed.

Bren listened. The car park was quiet again. She dominated him, look no hesitancy from him. She said that they wanted Donnelly back soonest, and he said that the O.C. would back it. She said ii wasn't to be in a month, but a week, and he said that the O.C. would go down to Dublin and ask for it, sure as hell. There were more men tripping from the bar. God help you, Mossie Nugent, because no other bastard would.

More talk of money from Cathy, always she returned to the money.

Then Mossie was gone, away round the gas tanks behind the bin , walking hack into the lights of the car park, pulling up his trouser zip and walking unsteadily. Back into his real world. His real world was touts, and a bullet in the head, and money that he couldn't spend, and Patsy Riordan's mother, and his fear for Siobhan and the children, and the meetings in the darkness at the back of a bar's car park.

She was very close. He saw that she was grinning. He could feel the tension rising in him, perhaps she saw it and it amused her

"How long, Cathy?"

"How long what?"

"How much longer do you go on like this?"

"What sort of drivel's that?"

"It can't last."

"You're going soft."

"Like tonight, no back-up."

"Losing your bottle?"

"You've no back-up because you've fouled with Rennie and you're too proud to ask it of the military. You're buggering about on the end of the bloody branch, Cathy, and you're going to fall off. Luck is going to run out on you because you're taking short cuts. No back-up tonight. No back-up on the mountain last night."

"Why don't you just get on the plane out?"

"You're starting to make mistakes, Cathy. It's a mistake to come to a meeting without back-up. It was a mistake to lose Rennie. And most of all, it's a mistake to think you can operate alone here."

"I think we'll have to tell little Mr Wilkins that you're not quite up to it, why not?"

"You're running out of friends, Cathy . . ."

"Have you finished?"

Bren stood his full height. It was his mistake. He had his back in the car park. He looked down at her. "You go on like this and you go home in a box. Is that what you want? Are we playing the little heroine game? Are we too clever to take the precautions that everyone else takes?"

She looked past him. She hissed, "Behind you . . ."

He swung. He was wrenching the cocking lever of the weapon His eyes traversed the emptiness of the car park. There was the chuckle of her laughter.

‘’When I'm ready, Bren, then I'll go home."

Bren said, flat "You won't last."

She was still laughing. "Watch me . .’’

Mossie shut the door quietly behind him. His car might have woken them all, his Siobhan and his mother and the children, but he paused on the balls of his feet in the hall of the bungalow. There was the light in the hall that was left on so that the children would not be afraid.

Right to leave it on all night, because there was no call for the children to be afraid . . . God ... no cause for his children to be afraid .

. . Mother of Mary . . . like they would have been afraid if they had known the half of their father. He went into the living room and closed the door behind him and he went to the window and eased back the joined curtains, enough for him to see out. He looked up the lane for the flash of a match, for the low glow of a cigarette. From the living room he went to the kitchen and again closed the door behind him and stood in the darkness to look over the fields behind the bungalow. There was faint moonlight. He might have seen a movement if it had been there, he might not. He saw nothing, no sign that they were still watched, that his children had cause to be afraid . .

. Jesus ... He wondered if in her house Mrs Riordan slept.

He took off his shoes in the hall and went in his socks into their bedroom. He undressed in the dark. He laid his clothes silently on the chair. He took his pyjamas carefully from under the pillow on his side of the bed. Just as any other night when he came back late and his family were asleep. He lay down beside Siobhan.

She hadn't slept. He whispered that they wanted Jon Jo Donnelly back.

"That's a bad boy," Siobhan said softly.

"I's to do what I can to get him back."

She was dragging his arm around her shoulder, nestling closer to him. "She's a stuck-up woman, his."

"He's bombing and killing across the water. They can't find him there, so they wants me to bring him back and mark him for them."

"You do that for her, what'll she do for you?"

She was against his body. He held her closer. "She said I'd have more money."

"What'd we do with the money?"

"What we done with it so far, nothing."

"How much money?"

"She didn't tell."

"You didn't ask her?"

"She just said that if I got Jon Jo back there would be more money."

"I'd have wanted to know how much money ... I never could take Attracta Donnelly ..."

He pitched his body up on his elbow. He glowered over her. "Does that make it right? More money? That you don't like Attracta Donnelly?"

"Makes it right enough for me."

No way out and no way back. He didn't tell her what he knew of Patsy Riordan. The sweat was on his body. The corpse lay at the side of the lane. The hands were tied and the head was hooded. The corpse wore his own clothes, Mossie's clothes. Not a dream, because sleep was far from him. The head of the corpse that was covered with the plastic bag hung down into the rainwater ditch, and the body that wore his clothes was across the grass, and the feet from which the shoes had been taken were splayed on the tarmacadam surface.

Mossie's body.

The Lynx circled at three thousand feet.

The camera's screen showed them the black of the plastic bag, the yellow of the shirt and the grey of the pullover and the green of the anorak. The jeans on the body were pale blue. White socks on the feet, and the helicopter's crewman wondered why they had taken the shoes from the body.

They had lifted off at first light, within an hour of the first report.

The crewman looked away from the screen and to the helmeted head of the pilot. He flicked his intercom switch.

Tell you what, Barrie. Seeing what they do to their own sort of shrivels my pecker at the thought of what they'd do to us if we came into their loving hands."

The distorted voice in his ear. 'Fly high, Fly sale Best answer to the problem, let the bastards butcher each other, faster the better, more the merrier.’’

When they had photographed the body, they turned to the other equipment they carried, the infra-red that could show them the path of a buried command wire to a booby trap beside the body and they switched on the high-frequency radio signals that would detonate a bomb laid for the recovery team.

They had been up an hour, and from that vantage point they could see across the rolling hills, the steep escarpment mountains, meadow lands, scattered farmhouses, villages, and tiny spires reaching a very little closer to God . . .

The crewman said, "Forget the body, Barrie, it's a pretty lovely place down there."

The voice crackled in his ear.

"Listen, my old darling . . .

MacDonagh and MacBride And

Connolly and Pearse Now and in

time to be, Wherever green is

worn, Are changed, changed

utterly; A terrible beauty is born.

That was Mr Yeats for you. 'A terrible beauty is born', but it's an evil beauty. It's beauty best seen at altitude."

The helicopter circled and its shadow flitted over the discarded body.

The priest came early to the Riordans' house. It was the priest who brought the news when a volunteer was killed in action or by the explosion of his own bomb, it was the priest who called when an outcast was executed.

The priest sat in the chair that was usually taken by Patsy's father, Patsy's father, wrapped in an old dressing gown, slumped on the setee in the place that was Patsy's mother's. Patsy's mother was on all fours in front of the fire, cleaning it and lighting it, and refusing to ignore it.

' They think it's the dear boy, but it is the sadness ol these times that it is not yet possible for them to approach him. It’s down in Armagh, a priest has already been to him, that should be of some comfort to you.

We cannot he positive yet because

the military have only allowed the local parish priest forward, and briefly, and I am afraid to say that I ... advised it may be a long time before he can actually be recovered and identified. There may be bombs put in that place for the military, one shudders at the wickedness of these days we live in We have to be brave and we have to be patient

..."

Patsy's father lit his third cigarette of the morning. "We're disgraced, right, Father? We did everything for the boy. His mother worked her hands to the bone for that little bastard. How does he repay her? He touts . . . How'll I hold my head up again, the man who fathered a tout, how-"

The priest clasped his hands across his chest. "We are not to feel bitterness, Donal'. We are all to be judged, in time, by God ... I offer you this thought. There are many today who will carry the burden of guilt. Those who foully murdered dear Patsy. Those who cynically led him into mortal danger. Take pity on them for their wretchedness ..."

"The Brit feckers."

"May they live with their consciences, those who inveigled dear Patsy to renounce his own people for their false gold."

As Mrs Riordan had the fire alight, the priest was already hurrying away.

He was woken by the sound of broken twigs, scuffed wet leaves and voices and dogs.

The hide he had made was an angled strip of dark green groundsheet tethered by stones and tied with green garden wire to a low branch.

There were voices and then the barking of dogs. There were dead branches laid against the groundsheet. Jon Jo lay very still. He held his breath. A few inches from his hand was the Kalashnikov assault rifle.

The voices moved closer.

He had been warned away from the safe house in Hackney, flatly rejected from the haven in Guildford. It was the first time that he had felt truly threatened. He was more than ever before alone. In darkness he had made for the weapon cache. There had been a man before, one of the finest, a man who had taken the war to the heart of the bastards, and he had been turned away, rejected, when the going was fierce, and he had been alone enough to turn his own gun on himself . . . Jon Jo had gone to the cache because there was no alternative ... He had taken no decision yet as to whether he would go back to the Torbay digs.

They had his photograph, they were checking wherever there were Irish. Not the time to make the decision.

He had fashioned the hide a dozen paces from where the dustbin was buried with the weapons and the explosives.

He had slept for five hours. There was clear light falling between the trellis of the upper branches of the trees. The rifle was within reach, the magazine was loaded. He had often slept rough. In the weeks before he had gone away to England, when he was hunted on Altmore he had made that vast expanse of forest his home, and slipped down to the farmhouse only in darkness, and evaded the surveillance . . . when he was younger, before marriage, before his first arrest and imprisonment in the Kesh. He could live rough as well as any soldier. Now the voices and the movements were nearer. He edged his body to the front of the hide.