Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"I've painted it black because that's the way it is."

Five minutes before eleven o'clock in the morning, the first morning.

Ronnie went to the cabinet, unlocked it with a key from his pocket, muttered that if the drinks weren't locked away then the old beggar in the house would have cleared them, poured a good glass with no water offered, handed it to Bren.

"Thanks."

"I've scared you, but unless you're frightened over there and learn that sense of survival, then you won't win. You'll catch on, just listen to what Parker tells you."

He made his way quietly down the stairs. He liked to be able to come and go without his landlady knowing. Had to be bloody quiet… Jon Jo had his fingers on the handle.

"Off back to London?" She was at the kitchen door.

"Time to be getting back to work."

"When'll you be back?"

"Depends on what I find. Dockland's still got a bit. Might be a week, let's hope it's two or three."

"I'll air the bed and change the sheets… oh, and the door's so much better."

"Bye then, Missus."

He let himself out.

While he was away she would change the sheets and have a thorough search through everything that was his. She was that sort of woman.

But she would find nothing. He had built the place when she was out shopping. His plans, his maps, his lists were under the carpet and under the old wood flooring, in the box that he had made. Unless she pulled the carpet back and took a heavy jemmy and dug about a bit under the floor, she'd find nothing.

He carried his overnight bag and his carpentry tools. The plan and the map and the name on the list he kept in his mind.

The second morning, not yet eight o'clock, and he thought he might just get to do some serious dying. It was the sight of the other man that kept him on his feet.

An hour earlier, at breakfast alone and in his track suit that Ronnie had told him the previous night to dress in, Mrs Ferguson had made the introduction. The housekeeper had called him Mister Terry. The man was a sadist, a torturer, and a Physical Training Instructor, a bumptious little bastard with apple-red cheeks and not a hair on the scalp of his head, and a Geordie. He was at least fifteen years older than Bren, and he looked as if he might just enjoy inflicting pain.

Bren sagged against the back of a garden seat. P.T.I. Terry was on the grass beside the bench, rolling on the crisp frost, making a better job of dying. He wouldn't have done this to him if the silly little man hadn't pushed his luck.

He had been allowed to eat three pieces of toast, drink two cups of tea on top of his orange juice. Nobody had told him that he would settle his breakfast down with a four-mile run over rough country.

His lungs heaved. He heard P.T.I. Terry's groan, and the apple red of the man's cheeks had gone to grey white. Bren wasn't one for team games, but he ran twenty, twenty-five miles every week and he worked out with weights every day and often twice a day at weekends. He didn't talk about it in the office so it wasn't on his file. P.T.I. Terry would not have known that Bren was fit, and Bren would not have broken the little bastard if it hadn't been for the exchange after breakfast, clearly and deliberately for him to hear, between P.T.I. Terry and Mister Ronnie.

"Doesn't look much, does he, Mr Ronnie? What I'd call pathetic

…"

"Young people don't look after themselves these days."

"I'll loosen him up, take him over the four-mile circuit, then you can have him for the rest of the morning, if there's anything left of him.

Your modern young, Mr R o n n i e… I suppose they think there's always a helicopter warmed on stand-by. I don't suppose you told him what happens when the Provies start chasing him over the hills. Strong young lads, used to the outdoor life, running after our little friend with the old A.K. ready to zap him if he doesn't keep running."

Ronnie had grinned, "I'd like to know what he's made of…"

Bren had let P.T.I. Terry set the pace, just sat on his shoulder whenever he tried to turn on the heat, and he'd known when P.T.I. Terry turned for home halfway, that the man was labouring, so he went past him and listened to the wheezing into the back of his neck. Bren had turned and smiled, "It's time they pensioned you o f f… " He upped the pace, and turned again when the gates of the house were in sight. "That's what I'd call pathetic, P.T.I. Terry." He lifted his speed again, all the way up the drive, and let the little man catch him, and then called for press-ups, squat thrusts, knee bends. "Unless, of course, you would prefer to go and lie

down… "

Ronnie poked his finger into Bren's chest, "Very clever, very pretty.

Tells me more about you than a dozen sheets of paper."

"Just that I don't like being taken for a prat."

P.T.I. Terry was retching behind him.

Ronnie said, "That's alright, sonny. Parker'll sort you out."

With a grey mist picture, the image intensifier followed the car up the hill from the bungalow. It was a clear night, bright stars, little moon, the best night for the image intensifier. The words that logged the movement were whispered into the Dictaphone. There was an owl up somewhere, in one of the few trees that had survived the sweep of the winter gales. There was a vixen, coughing a call to a dog fox. The car powered away along the road that already glistened with the first trace of evening frost. The car was gone beyond the range of the camera.

They had an Ordnance Survey map, 1:25,000, and a plan of the fields that had been hand-drawn on a sheet of paper. Mossie had the operational plan. It was for the O.C. to approve or reject it.

They met in a small farmhouse, one of the few remaining older buildings on the plateau at the top of Altmore mountain. It was the usual way. The front door had been left unlocked, and the television played noisily in the kitchen. The front room was theirs, with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits left on a tray.

Mossie explained. The police inspector, three years at the Coalisland barracks, eighteen years in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, had taken to hitting golf balls in the field behind his home. He had a dog, a spaniel, that could retrieve game and now was trained to bring him back his golf balls. Most Saturday mornings, early, just after dawn, the police inspector went into the field with his clubs and his balls and his dog and hit his shots for a good half an hour before driving off to play the Dungannon course.

They spoke in low voices. On his close plan Mossie had sketched in where the back-up car would wait. It would be 200 yards from a spinney of silver birches along two hedgerows, past a crumbling cow byre, skirting a final field before reaching a firing position. The shooting range would be 40 yards. Mossie said they would be in the car before the policeman's woman and his kids had gotten out of the house to see what had happened and then back inside to phone or radio through.

That was Mossie's work, to find the targets, co-ordinate the reconnaissance and draw up a bare tactical plan. He alone had worked on the plan. No one other than the O.C. would decide whether it should go ahead, and who should be involved. Only the Quartermaster would know what weapons were to be used, where they were currently hidden. It was the cell system that guaranteed their security.

The map was unmarked, that would go back into the glove compartment of the O.C.'s car. He unfastened his belt, unzipped his trousers and let them fall. He dropped his underpants. He stood, white legs in front of the fire, and folded the plan tight and small and then attached it with a strip of elastoplast to the inside of his groin.

The O.C. pulled up his underpants and his trousers. He was fastening his belt. "You happy?"

"If they get out fast enough."