The Journeyman Tailor (31 page)

The sounds of the barracks played around him. Helicopters thrusting for elevation and the crack of gunfire from the floodlit small-arms range and the bark of out-of-doors orders and the mutter of conversation from civilian clerks and the Orderly N.C.O.s whose voices dropped further when they used the corridor where Bren waited.

He had been an hour in the corridor outside Colonel Johnny's office.

He had arrived without an appointment, he had been told the colonel was engaged and that he would be fitted in when it was possible. He had read an article in
Soldier
magazine about tank warfare and the lessons of the First Armoured Division in the Gulf, and discarded it as quite simply irrelevant. It was an impulse that had brought him from his new flat to the barracks at

Dungannon, and with each jerk on the hands of his watch he had thought the impulse more stupid.

The door at the end of the corridor opened.

Colonel Johnny ushering out a middle-aged woman.

The colonel speaking quietly to her, bringing her down the corridor towards where Bren sat. "Don't apologise, please, absolutely not. You had every right to come here."

A small voice, "You've been kind ..."

"I wish I could have done more. We did everything we could do to find him and save him. I'm very sorry that we were unsuccessful."

Bren stood. The colonel looked through him. The woman ignored him and was pulling a rain hat from her bag.

"It helps me to know that you tried ..."

"Now, how will you get home?" Said kindly.

"My man's in a bar in the town, down Irish Street. I left him there because he wouldn't drive me to the barracks, said it wasn't right."

They were at the far door of the corridor, where it opened onto the parade ground.

"Goodnight . . . I'm sorry we couldn't do more. Safe home, Mrs Riordan ..."

Bren's head twisted. His eyes raked down the corridor. He saw the back of the woman as she went down the step and there was the howl of a night gale to greet her. He saw her face when she turned, the few seconds, to shake the colonel's hand, and then her face was gone and her head was wrapped in the rain hat, and she followed the escort soldier away . . . Christ . . . she was the debris he scattered, that he and Cathy Parker threw over their shoulders He stood his ground and faced the colonel. There was no warmth, only crisp recognition. The colonel waved for him to follow him back towards the office.

He was gestured to a chair.

Bren said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"Well, I'm here, you're here, so talk."

"About Cathy . . ."

"What about Miss Parker?"

There was no sympathy. Bren said, "It's just that I was wanted

. . . I don't suppose it matters. Forget it. I was just worried about her."

"What way worried?"

"The way she is . . . you've seen her. It's like people are when they start to make mistakes ..."

"Mistakes, oh, that's very good. Going to make mistakes, is she?

Over here, it gets to be a habit, making mistakes. A police inspector I used to know made a mistake, went to church on a Sunday morning with his family, that was a mistake because he was shot dead on the church steps, silly mistake going to worship. One of my soldiers last year made a mistake, went through an open gateway between two fields when he should have pushed through a thorn hedge, a mistake because there was a pressure plate in the gateway, elementary mistake going through a gateway when there was a perfectly good hedge to push through. A little kiddie made a mistake two years ago, my first week here, picked up a box left in a ditch, didn't know that we'd had a call-out and hadn't moved, didn't see the fishing wire from the box to the bomb, dumb little kiddie to be making a mistake like that. Nothing special about making mistakes, gets to be an occupational hazard when you stay around too long. There's no way of stopping Miss Parker from making mistakes either. Mistakes are a part of the job . . ."

"How can I help her?"

"I doubt you can," Colonel Johnny said. "I doubt any of us can. It's what makes her special to us, all of us, that she's not looking for bloody help, and it's her strength that she's not frightened of making mistakes."

Bren stood, "Thank you for your time."

14

It was the dawn.

The start of another day.

The dawn was the start of the 342nd day since Jon Jo Donnelly had taken the Aer Lingus to Paris and ban in transit two hours and then been carried on a Lufthansa flight to Munich and then caught the British Airways aircraft to London's Heathrow.

The rain came with the dawn.

It fell hard against the upper branches of the forest.

The rain careered down onto the roofing of the ground-sheet. There was the spatter of the rain above his head.

Jon Jo sat under his cover.

He was cross-legged and his arms were folded over his stomach.

Beside him was the torn wrapping paper of a biscuit packet. He had eaten the whole of the packet of shortbreads.

Perhaps it was because of the rain but there were few birds calling the dawn's arrival, only the robin to which he threw the last of the biscuit crumbs. The robin was without fear of him and strutted close to the hide and challenged him for more of the shortbread biscuits. He watched the robin. He saw the proud in advancing on him. He wondered, if he had not wolfed down the biscuits, if he had filled his hand with crumbs and stretched his hand out whether the bird would have had the courage to come to take crumbs from the palm of his hand.

It was as if he sought to find a peace for himself.

He was .still. He sat quite motionless. The robin danced in front of him.

For 250 of those days since he had come to London he had prepared himself for the campaign that was his own. He had found the safe houses, he had bought the cars that were paid for in cash. He had accumulated the documentation that came from the forgers in Dublin.

He had received the dribble of weapons, and the timing devices, and the detonators, and the explosives that were sometimes hand-carried on the cross-Channel ferry and sometimes landed from a fishing boat on the remote stretch of the north Cornish coast in a cove near Gurnard's Head. For 90 of those days he had fought his war. He sat without movement to find again the strength that was needed of a soldier. He took his strength, bled it, from the home that was his, and the woman that was his, and the boy child that was his. He took strength, leached it, from the mountain that was his. They would none of them know, the mass that would flow through a main-line railway station, of his home and his woman and his child and his mountain.

Only the fall of the rain around him and the cheerful strut of the robin.

He thought of the bar in the village, where there was singing and where there were his friends. He thought of the land around the small farm, where the bracken and gorse had been driven back first by his grandfather and then by his father and then by himself. He thought of the church in the village where he had made his first Communion, and where he had stood awkward in his suit and tight in his collar and held little Kevin for baptism. He thought of the neighbours that he had known, who had never left him to feel alone, good men and good women, Mrs Riordan and Mrs Devitt and Mrs Nugent, and Pius Blaney who drove the milk cart and never cursed not even when there was snow on the mountain slope, and the difficult old bugger who was old Hegarty. He thought of the good times, when the Armalite had pounded against his shoulder, when he had watched through binoculars as the road to Aghnagar had lifted under the unmarked police car, when they had taken over the road from Coalisland to Stewartstown and there had been more than twenty of them and they had blasted the barracks at Stewartstown with machine guns and the R.P.G.7 rocket launcher and sprayed the roof with diesel oil and petrol to get the big fire going . . . good times. It was his place, they were his people. It was Jon Jo's place, the place of his family's graves. It was Jon Jo's home, the home of the war.

The Strength grew in his body The peace nettled on his mind.

For the first time since the dawn light had come he shifted from where he had sat. He crouched over the flattened ground beneath the cover of his hide. Among the dead squashed leaves, among the grass stems, he found more crumbs, and he tossed them out to the robin and he willed the bird to find them where they had scattered.

He moved away from the hide.

Three times, between the hide and the cache, he stopped and froze against a tree trunk and listened to the rain laning in the forest. He listened for voices and for footsteps, and for the sound of a command whistle to a dog. There was only the clatter of the rain dropping from the upper branches.

He lined up the position of the cache. The uprooted base of a tree and away from it the dead elm disfigured with ivy. That was how he always found the holly tree where the dustbin was buried. He dug with his hands, pushed aside the mulch and then the soil. The lightweight kitchen gloves were on his hands, he look the Semtex explosive and the detonator and the wiring and the timer from the dustbin, and the ice cream box and the adhesive tape. It was difficult to work at the assembly wearing the gloves. He was too careful ever to take off the gloves; Jon Jo could have reeled them off, the names ol the men who had made bombs and who had not worn gloves, and who rotted in the mainland gaols.

It took him half the morning to make the bomb.

He scraped the earth and the mulch back over the dustbin. He used a dead twig to scour his footsteps and the indents of his body weight from the ground close to the cache.

The rain had eased.

She hadn't telephoned him, and he wouldn't ring her.

She had the number of the flat and the number of his office at the back of the Department of Environment building, and she hadn't used cither.

If she didn't want to ring him, her problem. If she though he was not up to the job, so be it.

All the while Bren had dressed, and all the while he had eaten his breakfast, he had looked at the telephone in the flat, willed it to ring, cursed it for its silence.

All the while he had sat in his office, turned file papers, made coffee, tried for the hell of it to master the intricacy of the dual carriage projects and the salary restructuring programme for clerical workers, he waited for any of his telephones to ring. The quiet burgeoned round him. Nothing on the receiver that was linked to the building switchboard, nothing on the telephone that Song Bird would have used, nothing on the line that was Cathy's alone. Always talk and always movement in the Curzon Street complex of desks where the Irish unit was housed. This was bloody. Being stuck in a room at the back of a building, where no one came and where the telephone didn't ring, that was a sort of hell to him. He had cracked by the middle of the day. He had rung Hobbes. He'd marked Hobbes down, supercilious bastard, and he was most certainly not going to be spilling to Hobbes that Miss Cathy Parker had cut him out. Trying to be casual. Had time on his hands. Any suggestions as to where he might go, what might be useful?

Hobbes hadn't sounded as if he cared and hadn't sounded as if he was surprised. Just curt. He should try Mahon Road. He should get himself to Portadown. He'd be expected. He was given a name. Hobbes sounded like there was a crisis that he wasn't prepared to share, and Portadown was the sort of place to dump a bored kid. he did as he was told. He drove to Portadown, and the barracks in Mahon Road, and all the way down the motorway he sought to obliterate Cathy Parker from his mind, and the failure hurt him.

High fencing of rusting steel. Black painted watchtowers. Screens of chicken-wire netting that would prematurely detonate an armour-piercing missile. A call on ahead from the taciturn police at the gate check.

It was indicated to him where he should park.

The parking area where he went was separate from the main mass of vehicles. The big area held the shined, washed Cavaliers and Sierras and Escorts, policemen's cars for driving to and from work. Where Bren parked was a junkyard. Old vans without side windows and with convenient mud masking the number plates, and beaten Fords that were scraped and dented, and what might have doubled as a removal lorry, and a Telecom van and another

that had the logo of a bakery with a home delivery service. He went to the weapons pit and cleared his Browning and pocketed it again. From the gate, the two-storey building, dull brickwork, had been pointed out to him.

Bren went inside the outer door. He was stopped. The man was younger than himself and dressed casually and there was a short-barrel machine pistol on the table. Identification . . . Another phone call through . . . Passed on.

He went up the stairs, past bare walls. He walked into the big open area. He gazed around him. Half a dozen men and three women bowed over computer consoles. Two men and two women at banks of radio equipment, smoking and reading newspapers and talking quietly and with head sets over their ears. Five's place, Five's back room.

"Hello there . . ."

A quiet voice close to him. Bren spun on his heel.

He saw the cardboard city man.

"Hello again."

"Jimmy's had to pop out, I said I'd field you."

"Oh, I see . . ."

There were two others sitting with the cardboard city man. They were all three sprawled on chairs at the far side of the big room to the consoles and the radio and their ashtray was filled and a low table near

them was cluttered with their boots and their used coffee beakers.

Bren saw the weapons laid on the floor. They'd have done for farm workers, any of them.

There was a printed sign on the wall above their chairs and their table.

‘Hereford Gub Club. No Entry. Trespassers Will Be Shot'.

Bren could smell them from five paces.

‘’I ll do the introductions. The ugly one's Jocko, the really ugly one's Herbie . . . Don't bloody eat him, guys, he's Cathy's latest ..."

" Pleased to meet you all, I'm Bren."

He felt the pillock. He stood in his slacks and his jacket and he looked down at three men who wore the mud on their jeans and the dirt on their shirts. He felt the daftness of the name he had given himself, could have crawled away