The Journeyman Tailor (35 page)

A helicopter scrambled from the Dungannon barracks pad.

A meal left unfinished by the crewman. A poem left unread by a Lynx pilot. A plate abandoned and a book discarded open on the Mess table.

An officer should never be seen to run by the men he commanded.

Colonel Johnny strode the corridor from his office to the Operations Room.

Herbie drove. He was expert. Along the motorway and overtaking on the outside and the inside. Through the town, past the darkened shops up Church Street, skirting the square, plunging down into Irish street, and then away through the housing estate and out past the town's golf course, and climbing for the mountain. Bren didn't speak. The cardboard city man was beside him, and Jocko in the front had plugged a headphone into the equipment in the glove compartment, and occasionally he muttered the code signals to Herbie that were gibberish to Bren. Short of Donaghmore they screamed on a corner and raced past a man out walking his greyhounds and the dogs stampeded for the verge, and through Donaghmore they had to swerve to avoid a staggering drunk and were close enough to hitting him for Bren to shield his eyes. The car bucked, rolled, at the speed . . . He thought of her. She was the young woman who was closed, secret, hidden from him. He would have said that he could understand, after a fashion, every man and woman that he had worked with in the Service. He could spot greed, vanity, ambition; he could locale motivation; he could identify courage and cowardice. Greed, vanity, ambition, were perpetually in the show cases of the office in Curzon Sireet. Motivation was what he thought that he had bred for himself, and he had seen others at the recruits' seminars who had more of it than himself, men and women that he sometimes passed in the corridors, sometimes sat with in the canteen. Cowardice and courage he had seen on the endurance courses that the new intake had been subjected to . . . She had no greed, vanity, ambition, that he had seen. Her motivation was hidden from him. He reckoned her without cowardice and courage was what she would have sneered at ... He wondered if she were dead ... He wondered il she were captured.

Fear tumbling in his mind. If she were dead, if she were cap- tured, they would skin him, the cardboard city man and Colonel johnny and Hobbes and Mr Wilkins, even Rennie who had cold- shouldered her.

The man who lost Cathy Parker. Fear for her an at him. The car surged on the road. Jocko held the earphone light against his head, then swung round and gestured for the cardboard city man to look ahead. They were both bent down, the cardboard city man and Bren, heads together and peering through the windscreen.

He saw the helicopter. The helicopter was high above them and there was the the beam of its searchlight powering down, and the red flashes of the navigation lights.

No word said in the car, and there was the clatter of the cardboard city man and Jocko arming their weapons.

Herbie had slowed. The windows were down, the weapons jutted out into the night air. There was the battering roar of the helicopter's engine splashing the interior of the car.

The road wound. A rabbit ducked to safety in front of their wheels.

Bren saw her.

She was on the forward edge of the light that shone down in a narrow cone from the hovering helicopter.

She was walking in the centre of the road. The white light was behind her. The light caught the road and the hedges and petered away in the fields. A crowd walked in step with her seemingly held back by the furthest edge of the light. It was as if the crowd shepherded her away from their homes and their mountain. The voice, staccato, amplified, beat at Bren's ears. ". . . Keep back. Do not go closer. If you go closer I will open fire. Keep back . . ." Behind her was the helicopter's light and behind the light was the crowd. Bren understood.

The light would dazzle the crowd, burn out their eyes, she would be only a vague shape to the crowd that followed her. "... Keep back. You have been warned. I shall open fire. Keep back . . .", the metallic resonance of the voice above. None of them in the car spoke as they closed on her. Once her knees seemed to sink under her and she half pitched forward and then had to push herself up. Her face was shadow but the light caught at her hair. The car stopped. Herbie reversed hard into a gateway and the wheels spun on mud as he powered the three-point turn. She was thirty yards from them. There was the grunt from Jocko, and then he was speaking, hushed, into the radio microphone.

The cardboard city man out, and Bren scrambling to follow.

He ran to her.

There was blood at her mouth. Her right eye was almost closed. Her mouth was bruised, a scraped graze on her temple. He took the pistol from her. The cardboard city man on one side and Bren on the other, and tugging her away, running with her back towards the waiting car.

Bren had his arm round her waist to take the weight of her, and it was nothing.

She fell into the back of the car. Bren on one side and the cardboard city man on the other. She was sandwiched between them, head down.

Bren looked back once. He could see the shape of the crowd, held against the light barrier. They went away fast, and before he wound up the window he heard the helicopter's engine gaining power for altitude. He felt the shiver of her body against his. Dear God ... he had thought lie might have found her dead.

The cardboard city man said, "Nothing serious r'"

She shook her head.

"You're a bit of a mess ..."

The grin cracked her face. "Some of them are worse."

Bren held her hand, as if he hoped that would give her comfort.

Herbie drove, like there was no tomorrow, for the military hospital at Musgrave Park on the outskirts of Belfast.

Word spread in the night of an incident on the mountain.

Hobbes was told. "Right, thank you. Tell her that I'll speak to her in the morning ..."

Colonel Johnny was told. "The Good Lord smiles on her. Tell her we're so pleased."

Rennie was told. "Getting too old, starting to be sentimental. Tell her not to be so bloody stupid again."

Word spread in the night of an escape from the mountain.

The Quartermaster dabbed antiseptic on his bitten hand. "Wasn’t me to blame . . . but credit to the wee cow, credit the hardness of her."

The O.C. felt the rivers of the pain as the doctor from Omagh bound the broken wrist. "Was our fault because we bloody played with her, like she was just a bloody woman."

The young man lay in Casualty in Monaghan town and the words whistled from deep in his bruised throat. "Why didn't they bring the gun faster? You's has to shoot a woman like that.’’

Mossie sat with Siobhan in front ol the guttering fire. ‘’It was like they were all frightened ol her. Even before the helicopter came, it was like they didn't dare go close to her. She'd have shot them down, right to the last bullet ..."

She slept on her back.

Bren was beside the bed on the hard-backed chair and all the time, through the night, he held the small hand in his.

He held her hand even when the nurses and the doctor came into the small room to check her. He ignored the disapproval of their glances, and their hostility when their eyes lighted on the pistol that he had placed on the low table beside him.

The first grey light smeared through the window blinds. He heard the coughing spit of the Military Policeman on the door. He looked down at her face, cleaned and calm. Her hand rested in his, unresponding.

He had thought he had lost her.

The afternoon paper said that anti-terrorist squad detectives were swooping on known haunts of Irishmen. More than twenty Irishmen had been taken into custody for questioning. All over the country, it said, landladies and the owners of boarding and guest houses were being quizzed about Irish lodgers. According to police sources, the identity of a prime suspect was known and the biggest manhunt ever mounted in the present terrorist campaign was under way. The newspaper said that a school soccer match had been cancelled in respect for a pupil, dead. A secretary on her way to her elderly mother's birthday party was dead; a man, his wife seven months pregnant, was dead. The flag at London's Cavalry Club hung at half-mast in tribute to a one-time Desert Rat, a many times decorated veteran, dead; a 22

year-old West Indian social worker, in intensive care, fought for his life.

Jon Jo turned the pages of the newspaper.

Photographs of the wrecked concourse. Condemnation of th e killings from political and religious leaders in Britain and in the Republic.

He always read the newspapers after an attack. He heard the slap of her feet on the pavement. There was the grate of her key in the door.

The whine voice of her neighbour.

"The police were here. I said you were at your basket class."

Jon Jo moving on stockinged feet to the window.

"What for?"

"It was on the radio yesterday, they want to know where all the Irish are. I rang them about your lodger...?’’

"You'd no call to do that '

"But you wern’t here when they came. I told them he was| here, gone, here again. They waited an hour in my kitchen.

They said I was to tell you to ring them as soon as you were in’’

‘’I’m ringing no one.’’

‘They’ll be back,"

He heard the front door slammed.

He peeled back the carpet and lifted the loose plank in the flooring and took everything out, his lists, his passports, the weopon, the ammunition. He emptied each drawer, and the wardrobe. He worked as silently as he could because he listened for the brake of a car and the ringing of the bell. He filled his suitcase and his tool bag. She would have been too lightly built for him to hear her coming up her thick-carpeted stairs. They were all oiled, all the door fittings in the house. When the door opened behind him, he was aware of the light from the landing, he was on his knees in front of the chest of drawers and the gloves were on his hands and he was wiping every inch of wood with the cloth that he kept in his tool bag to clean his hands, he turned.

"Time I was gone, missus."

"Going without telling me?"

The wide and bright smile that she loved, that she spoke of. Thinking fast. "Heard from a mate, over on the Continent, says it’s all played out in London. The plan for work is Germany or Holland."

The police called, they're checking everywhere there are Irish lodgers. What do I tell them?"

"Just doing their job, you tell them what you know.’’

She looked at him, and at the packed bags, and then at the newspaper on the bed, the photograph of a happy schoolboy.

"If I were to go downstairs, ring the police . . ,"

"You've no cause to be afraid of me, missus I'd not touch a hair on your head."

"Why should a schoolboy have had cause to be afraid?’’

"Because . . . because . . . how long's a piece of string, missus? Where does it start? It's like when you walk in a bog field. It sucks at you.

First it's the ankles, then the knees, then the thighs, then your waist. It takes you down."

She kneeled on the floor beside him. His head was against his shoulder. The tears ran from his eyes and onto her blouse.

His voice choked, he asked her would she make him a cup of tea.

He finished the wiping of the room.

The kettle was whistling on her stove as he let himself out through the front door. He walked down the pavement with his grip and his suitcase and his tool bag, not looking back.

The Secretary of State blustered, "But you gave me your word."

The Prime Minister flushed, "I gave you ,a preliminary opinion."

"You swore to me that you'd toast them’’

I've learned of a new world that you cared not to inform me of."

"You've reneged on your ..."

"Before you put yourself irrevocably on the road to resignation, you will be so patient as to allow Mr Wilkins to give you the benefit of some recent intelligence, some other aspects of the whole picture. Mr Wilkins."

So Ernest Wilkins had his turn.

'There were a few brush strokes of embellishment. Started with Jon Jo Donnelly. All justified by the capture of Jon Jo Donnelly, or if capture were not possible ... a dropped voice, a matter not necessary to be explained. The story of a young woman. Oh yes, women had a role to play. A young woman who had been through all all of the endurance courses on the Brecon mountain range, pushed to the same limits as any male A young woman who had been subjected to the same tests of marksmanship at Aldershot and close-quarters unarmed combat as any man. A young woman who had been trained to the highest levels of surveillance and counter-surveillance procedures. A young woman who had nurtured the most valuable player in the Source Programme

... He explained, going slowly as if talking to fools, that a young woman could move in areas where it would be suicidal for a man to attempt to follow. He listed the Service pedigree of a young woman.

Recruitment, proven experience, bravery that would not and should not ever be acknowledged. A young woman who would within the next two hours be released from hospital. He listed wounds, injuries, abrasions. He spoke of the rumour that the vine carried, a bitten hand and a broken wrist and a battered windpipe, and a crowd that had been held back by a single young woman, half kicked to death, who weighed 8 stone 3 pounds and measured 5 foot 4 inches in height.

Ernest Wilkins, hands held in diffidence, said, "It's your decision, gentlemen. Do you want Jon Jo Donnelly, or do you not?"

The Secretary of State, doubt in his voice, said, "I have warned you .

. ."

The Prime Minister said, "Unleash the pack on him. Run him to ground."

Ernest Wilkins hurried back to Curzon Street to send the necessary signals in confirmation of a programme now authorised.

Called back. Ordered

home.

The tang of the mountain in his nose. The

touch of his wife against his body. The feel

of the hand of his boy.

Jon Jo took the train west, to Plymouth, for the early sailing of the ferry to the Spanish port of Santander.

A gun dumped, a parcel of explosive ditched, a carton of wires and timers and detonators and papers discarded, called home. Ordered back.