Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

Wilkins put down his whisky and walked quietly across the hall to the dining-room door. Bren's back was to him. Mrs Ferguson sat opposite him and was refilling his mug with tea. George sat beside him and was telling some gory tale from his soldiering in Cyprus. The Rottweiler was crouched on its haunches, saliva at its jaws, love in its eyes, and delicately took the half slice of bacon that Bren offered it.

Wilkins knew that Mrs Ferguson was a shrew whose services should have been dispensed with when the Ark beached, and that George was obstinate and stupid and hadn't a civil tongue in his head, and the dog was potentially vicious and a liability. The young man had been there for barely four days and he had captivated all three of them.

He walked back into the Library.

"Well, what's he been like?"

Ronnie said, "He's raw, but he wants to learn. He'll be fine. He's actually rather tough."

P.T.I. Terry said, "The Provisionals are in for rather a nasty surprise, if you want my opinion, sir. That's a very fit gentleman. Nice long stint in Ulster should suit very well."

Jocelyn said, "He doesn't shoot very straight, and he has no sense of humour. In another three weeks I think I could give you a reasonably competent…"

"I haven't got three weeks, Jocelyn. I have got about three minutes."

Ronnie shrugged, "Well, it's only a short stay, isn't it?"

Wilkins had had the fax back from Nairobi that morning. Ferdie bloody Penn was fighting his corner. Halfway through the course in Nairobi, expensive effort wasted and there would be a right squawk of anger in the Ministry of the Interior if he was pulled out, job not completed.

"I'm not so sure. Your reports of him are rather promising. I think we'll have to regard the posting as open-ended,, for the time being anyway.. ."

Mrs Ferguson came out onto the front step and stood huddled against the cold as they loaded Wilkins' car with Bren's suitcase and grip.

Ronnie and P.T.I. Terry and Jocelyn wished Bren well, slapped his back, shook his hand. George waved at them as they pulled away. The dog ran the length of the drive barking hoarsely at the car's tyres.

"It's so easy to lose sight of the big picture, Bren. The Provisionals are under enormous pressure at the moment. Arrests are up and their attacks are down. We know that a number of their political end would like to sit at some sort of conference table. What's holding back any substantial advance to political dialogue are the hard men, the military activists.

Our most important work of the moment is to penetrate the core of their killers. Destroy them, lock them away, and then peace might just get the tiny chance to breathe. It's a critical time."

They were late at Heathrow because Ernest Wilkins never drove beyond the speed limit.

"Don't think about the majority. The majority are decent people, excessively friendly, hard working and law abiding. You concentrate on the minority, the one in a hundred or maybe even the one in a thousand, the lethal minority…"Bren grabbed his case and his grip and ran.

Wilkins had missed the chance to wish him God speed.

The aircraft was continually smacked by Force 8 winds. Bren barely noticed. He sat strapped in his seat, very still, refusing food and declining a drink. His mind was running over and over what Ronnie had told h i m… He was headed for a war in which dinosaur traditions governed and destroyed a gentler and more reasoning age. A pitiless war, unremarkable in the context of what had gone before. It was as always; the gravediggers stayed busy, and every time they paused for breath the war would erupt again to bring new soldiers, new patriots and new innocents to the cemeteries. The war was terrifying to the stranger, not least because it was incomprehensible in its brutality and its apparent irrelevance to the twentieth century. He thought only a native might be able to understand it, slim chance for the stranger drafted in to try to help to put a stop to it.

Bren jolted in his seat as the aircraft banged down onto the Aldergrove runway.

The aircraft taxied. He felt a swift thrill of exhilaration. He was a junior Executive Officer of the Security Service. More than anything he wanted to be worthy of the posting. One step at a time.. . and first step was Parker. Parker, he had been told, would meet him at the airport.

He unclipped the belt. He stood and stretched his cramped knees. He had not the faintest idea when he would next see the inside of an aircraft that was heading back to London. He was breathing hard. He walked down the aisle.

A l l so normal.

H e walked in a cavalcade of grannies and carried babies and collapsed pushchairs and young men who had been to a soccer match in London. The life of any other small airport, anywhere, swam around him. Ordinary and happy and relieved and excited people flowed by him, past the armed policemen and the anti- terrorist posters, the same as in any other small airport. But he was different, because he was a junior Executive Officer of Five and from now on a man's life depended on him, and from this moment onwards his own life was on the line. He felt the gush of pleasured excitement, enjoyed it.

She wasn't really a girl, she was more of a woman. It was probably a photograph that she had hidden in her palm. She looked down and then up again at the surge of the passengers. She came forward. She had singled him out. He stopped, put down his suitcase.

"It's Gary, yes?"

"I'm called Bren," he said brusquely.

"Please yourself."

"I was told Parker would meet me."

He thought she laughed at him. She wasn't pretty, certainly wasn't beautiful. The only brightness was in her eyes. He reckoned her accent was money, class.

"I'm Cathy – it's a God awful flight over, right?"

"They said it would be Parker." He heard the snap in his voice, wondered how he could be such an idiot.

"Did they now?"

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be rude."

She wore trainers and jeans that were threadbare at the knees, and a quilted anorak that was scuffed at the elbows.

"Lets be on the on the move then."

"Right." Bren bent to pick up his suitcase. She had beaten him to it, He knew it was heavy. She gave him a withering look. She walked away carrying the suitcase and he followed her.

Her head barely came up to his shoulder. There was a pale blue scarf at her throat. She had small hands and he thought that under the anorak there was only a slight body. She had no make-up, and her cheeks glowed with a weathered colour. Her hair was golden red and cut short.

She led the way out through the doors. When he had run for the flight at Heathrow he had had to change hands on the suitcase because of its weight. She didn't change hands. They threaded their way through the car park.

She unlocked an old Astra. The sides and the wheels were mud-spattered. She tossed his suitcase into the hatch. Presumably the people she collected for Parker wouldn't have been expected to bring with them their bone china. She unlocked the passenger door for him. He laid his grip on the back seat.

She settled in the driver's seat. Bren was belting himself in. She unzipped her anorak and took a radio from an inside pocket. Bren didn't understand a word she said into the microphone. Then she drew a Browning automatic from the tight waist of her jeans. She put the pistol on her seat, between her legs, then shrugged out of her anorak and draped it across her lap to hide the weapon. She drove out of the car park and away from the lights.

He saw her grin in the lights of a passing lorry. "I'm Parker," she said. "And since you are so bloody status-conscious, you can call me ma'am. Otherwise I'm just Cathy."

The messenger was glad to be gone.

The O.C. watched young Patsy Riordan run into the darkness and away from the house, and there was the frantic revving of his low-powered motorcycle. He came back inside, slamming the front door behind him. His wife was still in the kitchen, and the baby started to bawl at the hammer of the front door closing, and she did not dare to complain.