Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

He stuffed all of his clothes down into the paperbag: Shoes, socks, trousers, underwear, shirt, jersey, anorak where the hell was his woollen cap? Christ, and he hadn’t worn his woollen cap. How could he have forgotten to wear his woollen cap?…

Last into the bag was the shoulder pad to take the battering of the assault rifle against the shoulder when he fired on semiautomatic. Two years back, a good man had been taken, and clean, but he'd a bruise, rainbow-coloured, on his shoulder and the bloody police had called in a medic who'd sworn on oath that the bruise had been four days old, and four days old had matched with a strike. His pale skin was unmarked where the padding had been. He tapped at the bathroom door. He heard the footsteps on the staircase. He passed the paper bag out through the door. He climbed into the bath, and forced himself down into the scalding heat of the water. Jon Jo scrubbed his body and his hair with the soap, every inch of his body, again and again, and again his hair. He removed from his skin and his scalp all trace of the gases that would have blown back from the Kalashnikov when he had fired, the fine film that could be found by a forensic scientist. By the time he pushed himself up out of the bath, had the towel draped round him, he could see the glow of the fire through the misted window. The fire burned in the back yard and destroyed all the clothes he had been wearing. In the morning, before it was light, he would leave the Hackney address and drive to the woodland between Crowthorne and Bagshot. He would bury the assault rifle. He would bring the car back to Paddington station. The young man from Cork or his wife would collect the car. He would take the train again to the Devon coast.

In his room he started to dress, then looked at his watch and switched on the radio beside his bed. The news bulletin had started. "… is still undergoing surgery. A hospital spokesman, in the last few minutes, described Colonel Beck's condition as 'critical but stable'…" He no longer listened. His fist smashed onto the pillow. Fifteen shots, maybe more, how had the bastard lived? His eyes were pressed shut, tight. The frustration swarmed in him.

"You will always find me frank to the point of being brutal, Bren. I think it's right, in this theatre of operations, that every man and woman who works for me knows exactly what I am thinking. It may not be quite the same in London…" Hobbes paced in front of the gas fire. He wore carpet slippers and no tie and a primrose cardigan that was unbuttoned. It was still the weekend. The house was in a village beyond Bangor, was less than a hundred yards from the County Down seashore.

Bren could hear the waves on the rocks. Cathy had kicked off her shoes and was stretched out on the settee. She'd let Hobbes make the mugs of coffee.

"… So you won't mind if I say that I am astonished that they sent you. I asked for specific people and they chickened out on me. You are what I have been sent and I have to make do with you – put another way, Cathy has to learn to live with it. Don't yawn, there's a darling woman. The people I asked for have been brought up to the training standards that I require, and you aren't at that standard.. . Very fast, you have to learn what is required of you. You follow me?"

He had heard, vaguely, Hobbes' name spoken in the office at Curzon Street way back, when he was working to Mid-East Desk, Lebanon.

Only odd snippets and as a new boy he had not wanted it thought that he clung to names mentioned in conversations that were not directed at him. Crisis, Iraq, the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston.

There had been a flurry of occasions when Hobbes' name had been used by older members of the desk, but it had been more than two years back and he had not heard the name since. The man was his boss and Cathy's boss. He had seen from the time that he had been welcomed curtly into the house that she recognised his seniority. They had talked for twenty minutes, seemed that long, before his attention had moved to Bren.

They had worked at a large-scale Ordnance Survey and shuffled aerial photographs, and twice he had gone to another room to bring back surveillance pictures of men. She gave his rank deference because each time she made a statement she cocked her head at him and queried with her eyebrows as to whether she had carried him with her argument.

When it was their business they were both quiet, close, as if unwilling to waste words, as if their minds were locked together in respect. All different now, and Bren didn't know why she had to play bored and frivolous, and he had to act the big man with a message to communicate.

Bren sat straight. He cradled the coffee in his hands. "Yes."

Hobbes said, "Tomorrow we'll sort out where you're to live, it's best to be off military premises. We'll establish a cover occupation for you, it's usually Department of Environment, Car, personal weapon, sort all that out in the morning You've a very great deal to learn in a very short time, that will also start tomorrow… About the only thing you've got going for you is that you didn't, I'm told, wriggle when you were propositioned…"

"I'm looking forward to the work."

"Please don't interrupt."

He was a small man, not yet middle aged, wilth a deep voice. There was a chill in that voice. He didn't think this man had ever laughed in his life.

"We'll go over some fundamentals, our ground rules. You work for me, you operate to Cathy. Not one scrap ol your information goes to the police or to the military without that 1 approve it, that Cathy authorises it. We run our own show here, we have our own Source Unit. The war as fought by the police and the army is a quite separate war, perfectly distant. I am not in the business of short-term results. No medals here for you, Bren, no herograms, no Chief Constable's commendations and no Mentioned in Dispatches. We go our own way, as far as is physically possible and safe…"

The coffee mug was cold in his hand. He saw that Cathy stared up at the ceiling, following a fly's flight path.

"That's clear," Bren said.

"Whether you're up to this job is your business. I'm told from London that you are difficult, awkward, obstinate, that you've got some sort of problem that most obviously manifests itself by the ridiculous name you call yourself by. That's all to the good. I like people to be difficult, obstinate and awkward. If you ever get to be half as obnoxious and bloody-minded as our sweet Miss Parker then you'll do very well.."

There was nothing he could say, and nothing that he was expected to say.

"You'll work with Cathy," Hobbes said briskly. It was as if the preamble were finished. "You will do exactly as she tells you, and within a few weeks you will understand the wisdom of that…

We call this man our ‘Song Bird’. His code name is Song Bird because that is the call-sign he uses each time he rings through to us for a meeting. He has to use that code name. It keeps in his mind, very clearly, that he belongs to us. He's in our cage and he sings for us. He believes, and we have encouraged the belief, that if he stops singing, tries to leave the cage, then we will blow him out to his friends. They would most certainly kill him, and hurt him a little bit in the process.

But our aim is to keep Song Bird. To keep the twelve other sources all singing. Quite a little choir we have in the Province, but your exclusive concern until we decide otherwise is to assist Miss Parker in the handling of Song Bird."

The fear came in tiny shock waves through Bren. He wondered which of them in London had turned down Belfast.

Cathy worked him pitilessly. Every time she allowed him out of the house he thought of freedom, but he didn't argue, he did as he was told.

He knew when he would slip into the cover of a Department of the Environment civil servant, but it was not immediately. She kept him prisoner in the second-floor flat in the Malone Road.