The Journeyman Tailor (9 page)

They came out into the frosted sunlight.

They were the businessmen, the wealthy; the unemployed, the poor, they were the farmers anil the tradesmen and the skilled workers; they were the volunteers of the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army. It would have been the Father's opinion, and his information would have been at least as complete as that of the senior Special Branch officer at Dungannon police station, that on any night he might be called out to inform the family of any of twenty-five men that their loved one had been shot dead on active service. From his viewpoint, from the pulpit, he could have counted at least fourteen of the twenty-five celebrating Mass with him that Sunday morning.

Mossie had seen Attracta Donnelly with her Kevin and her parents. He would have had to cross the road to speak to her. And then there were others who stopped to talk to her. Mossie waited. His Doloures held his Patrick's hand, keeping him on the pavement. His Francis carried little Mary. His Francis, eight years old and the eldest, that was a boy to be proud of. Siobhan and his mother talked with his mother's long-standing friend, the housekeeper of the Father. His children were well turned out, better dressed than most, good clothes and good shoes.

Suddenly behind him a baby, the one that had howled through Mass, screamed in protest. Mossie turned. The O.C. carried the baby.

"What the feck happened yesterday?"

"We was unlucky." Mossie ignored the fury of the hissed whisper.

"The place was heavy with them."

"It's what I heard."

". . . There was police and army all over."

"That's bad."

". . . Was they waiting for it . . . ?"

"How would you know?"

". . . Our boys, they had to cut out . . ."

"Best thing."

" . . . Had the police, army, information . . . ?"

"I just heard the boys couldn't get through."

" . . . There was roadblocks all round ..."

"Best they cut out."

" . . . I want to know who knew, everyone who k n e w . . . "

"Wasn't many, couldn't have been."

"Every last one who knew, because if I've a tout . . ."

The O.C.'s words died behind the bellow of his baby, and he was gone away up the line of parked cars to where his wife waited.

There was a freeze in Mossie's mind, a chill in his gut. He shouted across to Siobhan and his mother. He took little Mary from Francis. He snapped his fingers for Doloures and Patrick to follow him.

He walked towards his old Cortina. Mossie Nugent was tall and spare and with rounded shoulders under a thin neck. He always wore his best suit to Mass. Heavy, tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles dominated a pale, gaunt face. His hair was neatly combed and there were flecks of cream paint behind his right ear. He would have admitted that he was a man without friends on Altmore, but that was the way for those who climbed high in the Organisation. He had not been spoken to by any of the fellow worshippers, other than the O.C.

Few came forward to offer small talk to a man known to be deep in the Organisation. They hung back around him, they waited for his smile and his greeting before coming forward to shake his hand or slap his back. If he caught a man's eye, if he stared back at it, cold, then that man would flinch. That was the power of the Organisation. But he would have claimed that he was liked, and the old people for whom he did unpaid work would have sung his praise, and the young men of the mountain, the Devitt boy and the Brannigan boy and the Riordan boy, would have failed to hide their admiration of him. The younger men, they would have recognised that he had fought the war longer than most, with greater commitment than most. A man who had little to offer in friendship, but who had gained respect for his kindness to the uninvolved, and admiration for his staying power with those who belonged. He was said by the few who knew to be the best, the most thorough, intelligence officer of the East Tyrone Brigade since the twenty-year war had flared again. It was how he would have wished it, that he should be a man alone in the mountain society. His walk was swinging, awkward, the legacy of a fall from a ladder, the damage now past recovery. It was only four years since he had come back to Altmore mountain, and before that he had been on the mainland for six years, in the South for four years, in prison on remand and under sentence for three years. To his own community, where he had been born, reared, schooled, he was something of a stranger.

Mossie was impatient to be gone. He called again to his wife and his mother to hurry themselves.

They were a busy couple. It was what Service life had taught them and retirement had changed nothing.

Sunday was not an exceptional day for them, not a day for rest, it was when they dealt with the week's unanswered letters and other paper work.

Cecily Beck had covered the dining-room table with the receipts from the local branch of the Red Cross, the monthly bills, and would settle them all before tackling the chore that she so enjoyed of writing the weekly letter to her son now flying a jump jet Harrier in Belize.

The village, north of the Buckinghamshire town of Aylesbury, was dominated by its magnificent beech trees, certainly more thun a hundred years old, beside the church. Most of the leaves, they annually complained, seemed to fall in their garden, onto their lawns and flower beds. Peter Beck raked leaves, and would not be finished before it was too cold and too dark to stay outside any longer. Then he would work on the speech that he would make next week at the British Legion dinner. It was inevitable that a man who had commanded an infantry battalion would be invited when he retired to the village, to become the British Legion club’s chairman.

He
stopped, paused for breath. He watched through the window,
his wife hunched over the table, He leaned for a moment on the rake.

Beyond the privet hedge he could just see the head of a man going along their lane. It was fine weather to be out for a walk. He returned to his raking. He set himself to clear the grass and the rosebeds before he finished for the day.

She had knocked sharply and
come into his room before he could reply

It was late morning. She wore a thin T-shirt that was creased and not fresh that day and it hung half in, half out of her jeans. Bren saw the reddish blotch on the white of her throat and thought she must have scratched an insect bite.

"You sleep alright?"

"Fine."

"The beds are made for martyrs."

"I slept well."

"I don't know what you're going to do with yourself today . . . sorry, I'm not about."

"There are no meetings?"

"Don't be too keen ..." Again, what he had seen the previous evening, the bright mocking in her eyes.

"Don't I get to meet anyone?"

"This evening, Hobbes. Not till this evening."

"I'd like to go into the city, get some sort of feel for the place."

"There won't be a driver for you. Not on a Sunday."

She said what time he should be back at the house, and what time she would pick him up. He said that he would find a taxi down the road at the hotel, or maybe, if he wanted to be athletic then he could walk the whole way.

"Please yourself, don't wander off too far." The smile was off her face.

Because it had been night when he had arrived he knew only that the house was in the Malone Road. The flat where he had slept was one bedroom, one living room with a kitchen alcove, and a tiny bathroom, on the second floor. She'd gone.

He wore an old anorak and a pair of slacks and good walking shoes.

Bren went down the stairs of the house, and there was music playing from one of the first-floor rooms. In the ground-floor hall he passed a man who looked as though he had come out from the cardboard cities of inner London. The man had four days of stubble, hair that was matted, hands that were grimed, clothes that were torn and filthy, and the man ignored him.

Thirty minutes later, Bren stood in the central square of old Belfast.

So ordinary.

The sun was behind the great block of the City Hall. He saw the banner draped high on the building U LSTER sa ys no . A Land-rover painted in camouflage green drove past him and a soldier protruding through the roof momentarily covered him with the snub barrel of his rifle. He walked through the circular security gates, clattering the steel bars as he pushed them in front of him. He went down a wide shopping street. They were all the High Street names.

Some shops were boarded up, the plywood daubed id graffiti and covered with concert gig advertisements. There were the stores for clothes and furniture and televisions and cosmetics, just as he would have found them anywhere else. He had only seen this street on television, when the fires were burning and the firemen were sprinting forward with their hoses, and shopkeepers were standing on the pavement in shock or in tears. He had never seen the Royal Avenue on television deserted and quiet and ordinary. He turned right, past the shops with the special offers and the travel agents with the cut-price deals and hot bun cafes that were closed, padlocked, shuttered. Ahead of him were the Law Courts. He saw the young soldiers and their sa ngar of sandbags. He was behind the public face of the centre and he went along a road where most of the buildings were derelict, and at the doors that were reinforced with nailed planks he saw the rusted nameplates of solicitors and businessmen who had been bombed into new premises.

In Curzon Street, since joining the Irish desk, he had never volunteered an opinion about the war. Last time round, Charlie had said, "Left to ourselves we could wrap this up in a week, consign them all to the Underground Club." Archie had said, Can’t expect to fight and win if you've a hand tied behind your back,. must fight fire with fire." And Mr Wilkins, muttering under his breath as he passed Bren's desk had said, "Anyone with a solution to Northern Ireland's problems is either demented or merely ill-informed." He’d have an opinion himself, one day, when he came back. He wanted to learn, to make the opinion worth having, He would walk through the city and taste it, smell it.

Twenty minut es later he found there were high block of flats ahead of him, four, five stories, smeared concrete, daubed with slogans, fire scarred. A cluster of youths on the corner of the first block, smoking, watching, lounging. They wore a uniform: ankle boots laced high, faded and patched jeans, denim jackets with pop group logos hand-scrawled on the shoulders and sleeves, cropped hair. He hesitated. He looked across the wide road at the youths, and the youths stared back across the road at him. The Land-rover came down the street from behind him. It braked, swerved towards the pavement. Two soldiers gol out. The soldiers went to the youths. Bren watched. He saw their defiance. They didn't back off, they didn't straighten up, and one of them cleared his throat and spat. He had not seen the second Land-rover pull up behind him.

"You!"

He spun round.

"You . . . Over here . . ."

He saw the crouching soldiers, and a rifle aimed at him. He walked towards the soldier. No sweat, no problem, he was . . .

"Move your arse ..."

He stood in front of the soldier. There was contempt in the soldier's face.

"Name . . . ?"

"It's alright, I'm ..."

"Last time, name . . ."

Bren swallowed. He shook his head.

"Your name, arsehole . . ."

Bren looked him in the face, and looked into the barrel of a high velocity rifle.

"I'm English. I'm a civil servant, and I can't answer your questions."

If you're from the Long Haired Brigade, mate, God help us. , Bren reckoned the soldier to be ten years younger than him. The soldier smirked. The Land-rover across the road was loading up .and the youths were left free to smoke and watch and lounge, and the focus of their attention was Bren. The soldier said, ‘’This, old cocker is the unhealthy end of the city. If you’ve no business here, take my advice, piss off out.’’ Thank you " Bren turned, started to walk away.

He heard the laughter, and then the thrust of the engine of the second Land-rover. He pushed up the collar of his anorak. He kept walking, all the way back through the city centre, to the Malone Road.

The rest of the afternoon, not much of it because the dusk came quickly to his room, he lay on his bed and waited for Cathy goddamn Parker to collect him.

The target used two lengths of plywood, one in each hand, to scoop up the leaves and put them into the wheelbarrow. The assault rifle, the tubular steel stock folded hack, was still in Jon Jo's inner pocket. The magazine was in his outer pocket. He watched from beyond the hedge.

The lane behind him was empty. He knew that the target was not regarded as priority. The order was to avoid priority targets who were too well guarded.

The target cursed because the dried leaves spilled from the wheelbarrow onto the lawn again.

He heard the distant call from the cottage.

"Come on, Peter, tea's made. You'll catch your death out there."

"Just coming, darling," the target answered. "One last load."

The target began to push the wheelbarrow across the lawn, towards a corner of the garden where a bonfire smoked through the earlier heaps of leaves.

Jon Jo looked back to his right, up the lane, and to his left, down the lane. The lane was empty. Dusk falling, completing a November Sunday afternoon. The car was a full 150 yards away, parked through an open field gate and hidden by a hedge. He was ,at the upper end of the village and on the high ground above the church and the one main road around which the community had formed centuries before. There was a haze of smoke from the chimneys that blurred the setting sun.

He took the rifle from his pouch pocket . . .

The target had been identified in Dublin. They had good kids who sat in the Trinity Library or the Dublin University reading rooms to browse their way through the English newspapers.

Swift movement!, and the metallic snap of the magazine slotting into the underside of the A.K.47. The target had stopped, rooted . . .

In the Trinity Library every last book, periodical, pamphlet was collected and available to the student. A lieutenant-colonel, recently retired, formerly officer commanding a Light Infantry battalion, had written to
The Times
to protest that a B.B.C. documentary unfairly criticised Security Force operations in Northern Ireland. He had written from experience. His last posting had been to Belfast. The letter and the address had been noted.