Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Is he going to live?"

" The hospital say that he's out of danger, sir."

"That's a small mercy," the Prime Minister said.

The commander said, "Colonel Beck was pretty alert before he went under anaesthetic. He gave us a good description."

The pitch of the Prime Minister's voice rose. "So, exactly where does your investigation stand?"

Ernest Wilkins, who was near the window, felt himself witness to the interrogation, but not a part of it, which pleased him. For the last fifteen years he had been a visitor to Downing Street, and taken his share of flack.

‘’There are125,000 policemen who have seen and studied a photograph of Donnelly taken not two years ago in Gough. Likewise Customs, airports and ports. All the addresses we hold, safe houses, sympathetic pubs and so on, they're all being watched…"

"Why don't you publish the photograph?"

"We'd frighten him off, sir. He'd disappear off the face of the earth.

Or that recognisable version of him would. We might put a stop to him for a year, but he'd be back, new cover and new method of operating."

"So. What next?"

"Patient pursuit, sir, that's best. The tedious combing of haunts and possible associates. It has borne fruit before and will again. Every day that passes pushes up the odds against his escaping capture or betrayal.

I've told you before, Prime Minister, that he is the one under pressure

…"

"You will not overlook the pressure my Government is under, Commander, even as I do not underestimate the burden that you personally carry."

"Thank you, Prime Minister, but Donnelly is the one who is suffering. He would appear to be working alone. Probably living alone.

One by one his havens will be shut to him. His weapons are harder and harder of access. His contacts, from what we know, are less and less reliable, that is to say his couriers, his messengers. Some of them are children almost. We have access to one or two of this intake and… well, we are due a little luck, sir."

The Prime Minister stood very close to the Commander. "I don't believe in the wait-and-the-heavens-will-open approach. I would urge a more positive line on you, Commander. At our last meeting, we envisaged a resolution of the hunt in Altmore mountain. Is that the place?"

The Commander hesitated. "Indeed, sir."

The Prime Minister said, "I would like him to go home, your Mr Donnelly, Commander."

"Excuse me, Prime Minister." The tactical intervention was one of the chief accomplishments of Ernest Wilkins. He had been brought up in a hard school. He was a Desk Head. "That is a most interesting suggestion, Prime Minister. It is an approach to the problem that we have been developing. A little more work, and I think Well, leave it with me, Prime Minister."

There was the slight bow. He acknowledged the Prime Minister's satisfaction. He ignored the Commanders dagger glance. The meeting was over.

"He is just one man, and making a lavatory of our country." "Quite so, sir." Ernest Wilkins smiled. "I'll be working on it, be assured, getting Jon Jo Donnelly home…"

He had had his supper, washed up his plate, thrown away the empty Irish stew tin and the banana skin. And he had no coffee.

The music came flooding through the floor and the walls.

The pictures, East Tyrone's finest, were laid out on the carpet, all mug-shots, all police station photographs. He had the pictures of each of their homes beside each face that registered the shock of arrest and the defiance and the contempt. He had separated from the rest the face of Jon Jo Donnelly. Not strictly relevant because he was over the water, but the custody mug-shot was different from the others, cocky and controlled… He couldn't survive unless he had coffee… All day and all evening she had been in his mind. The pearl whiteness of her body in his bath, the hard weight of her Heckler and Koch on his floor.

There was the whip of her tongue and the bright laughter of her eyes.. . Now, without looking at the legend on the back of the photographs, he could put a name to most of them, and a ranking to nearly as many, and a history of previous convictions to several of them. There were eighty-two photographs. To match all of the photographs to names and addresses and "previous", he would be up half the night, but not without bloody coffee… All the time that he failed to concentrate on the photographs and the biographies, she was there in his mind, her face, her body, her voice and her eyes…

He went down the stairs, carrying his empty coffee jar.

It was Debussy, played loud.

He knocked on the door.

The door jumped open, on a chain. He was swiftly scrutinised. The door shut and then was spread wide.

It was the cardboard city man. "Yes?"

"Sorry to disturb you, I wondered if you had any coffee…?"

"Coffee, for fuck's sake?"

The man was in a dressing gown. The bed was unmade. Past him, Bren saw the open book on the bed. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, one of the all-in anthologies with print like a telephone directory's. He'd have had a shower since Bren last saw him because the hair on his shoulders and his beard glowed chestnut.

"Just enough for a couple of cups, please."

"Come in."

He went inside. It was a flat the size of his own. The man shuffled barefoot into his kitchen. A tin must have fallen from an upper shelf because there was the impact and then the oath.

He was handed the coffee.

He started to unscrew the top. He intended to pour from the man's jar into his own.

"Don't bother yourself, take it. Gin's my poison…"

"Are you sure?"

He saw the rifle on the far side of the bed, tilted against the wall. The rifle would have been six inches from the hand of the man when he slept. On the top of the rifle barrel was a bulging night-sight. The smell in the room was of the clothes that were heaped by the open window, as if that might carry away some of their stench. There was a pistol on the table, and a pile of bills and an Inland Revenue envelope

…

The man must have followed his eyes. "Those buggers find you anywhere… You're Parker's new boy?"

"Yes."

"She bollocked you out yet?"

"Afraid so."

The man drawled, "How do you find her?"

"I don't know anything about her. I suppose I was surprised to find a woman, well, you know, doing this sort of work."

The man looked into Bren's face. "Are you good enough to work with her?" "Why not..,?"

"I don't know who you are, squire, and I don't know what you know, but I'll tell you something. There's men here would go through walls for that woman, got me?’’

‘’Yes, I only meant…"

"And go through fire… Do you know Henry IV, part 2?"

"No."

"Me neither, so be a good fellow and piss off and let me get into it…

You're a lucky sod, squire, and I hope you realise it, to work with Cathy Parker."

Mossie remembered the heavy-type box in An Phoblacht.

"… No matter how long a person has been working for the enemy if they come forward they will not be harmed. Anyone caught touting will be executed!…"

"We'll go through it, one by one… Who knew?"

Their cars were parked in a farm gateway off the Ballygawley road.

The gateway was on a bend and a steep dip in the road. There was a copse of conifers that masked the gateway from the hillside above.

The O.C. had the farmer, most days, check through the copse with his dogs, so that they could be certain there was not an army observation hide amongst the trees. It was where the O.C. and Mossie Nugent often met.

"I knew," Mossie said.

There was the light brittle laugh of the O.C. "You knew because it was your plan. I knew because I authorised your plan. Who else knew?"

"Quartermaster."

"Knew what he had to provide, only that."