Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

Hobbes said, "I feel like I want to throw up."

Cathy said, "Please yourself, Mr Hobbes."

Hobbes said, "It's just a fucking awful job."

Cathy said, "And hand wringing won't make it a better job."

Hobbes swayed as he led them into the hall. Once he grasped the bottom of the banister rail. They passed the open dining-room door.

The laughter and the conversation cut. Bren saw the eyes peering at them through the doorway. The men wore suits, the women were dressed well. He thought that some of them round the dinner table would have known, in general terms, what was Hobbes' work, and they would have been curious. They would have allowed their imagination to let rip at the reason for the young man and the young woman, casual and scruffed, who had taken their host from the table and into the kitchen. It was a real war, that sort of crap, that intruded into a private dinner party, Bren thought it was that sort of shit. Hobbes let them stand in the hall, and he went into the living room that was well furnished by government procurement standards, and he pushed a small chest aside, near the fireplace, and exposed the wall safe. He took a key from his pocket and unlocked the safe and took out a thin envelope, passed it to Cathy. He relocked the safe and heaved the chest back, flush to the wall again.

He had no more to say.

Hobbes showed them to the door.

They walked off down the drive under the brightness of the security lights.

Cathy chuckled, "He's going to be a ball of fire the rest of the evening, the life and soul of the party."

Bren stopped at the car. It had welled in him. "What you do, don't you care?"

"Christ's sake, it's not a big decision. It's not strategic. It doesn't have to go to Curzon Street or up to Cabinet. It's just day in day.. listen, young man, you are just a little cog, so am I. East Tyrone, Song Bird, just one operation running here, and over each hill there's another.

What we do doesn't win the war, maybe it stops us losing it a little.

Learn, young man, that you're not the centre of the universe… That curry he'd done, smelt revolting.’’

There was just the wind in the roof and the singing at the telephone wire and the beat of the rain on the windows.

Her head was in the crook of his arm.

She whispered in his ear.

He lay rigid on his back and it was as if there was a coldness over his body.

"She was just wonderful. She was great. There's no side to her. She said that I wasn't to be worrying, that I was to leave everything to her.

Funny word she used, she said that 1 wasn't to 'fret'. 'I'll take care of everything,' that's what she said. She said that I was to trust her. She's a lovely way with words, that one. She said the children looked so good

…"

"What's she going to do?"

"Just said that you'd be safe, that was her promise."

"Did you give out to her?"

"I did not." Siobhan whispered, "I trust her."

She heard the bitter wheeze of his voice. "She hooked you, like she hooked me, the bitch."

To Rennie it was a madness. Anyone else, anyone who was not Cathy Parker, would have had short shrift from his tongue. He was on his doorstep and the wind blew leaves into the hallway behind him, and the rain spattered the legs of his pyjamas below his dressing gown. The bell had woken his wife, disturbed his daughters, and he had taken his pistol down the staircase with him and held it ready to shoot before he had identified her through his spyhole. She looked half drowned. The young fellow was behind her but with his shoulders turned away as if he guarded her back. It was a madness to come banging on doors when the clock in his hall showed past midnight. No one else, only Cathy. ..

He'd have had the skin off the back of any of his own men who had come and kept a finger on the bell until his whole family was shaken from sleep. He didn't argue. He wanted them gone. He agreed. A long time ago, before her nerve had gone, his wife had bred dogs for showing. Such a long time ago, before the present phase of the war had started, before he had gone into Special Branch, before it had become unsafe for him to walk alone in the fields and woodlands close to where they lived with their labradors. It would have been insane now, just as it had been for twenty years. It was the price he paid, that the dogs were gone. It was the price his wife had paid, ever since their home had been invaded by a scumbag with an automatic rifle. There was a phrase from those days, such a long time ago, when he walked the labradors and his wife took them to shows. The jet-black bitch, dead now, had been called by a vet their alpha female. The top bitch who could quieten a flood of puppies with a growl… He thought Cathy was the alpha female. He listened to her, and he saw the way that the young fellow watched her back, the one with the idiot name. She was top bitch and the way he looked at her, it was obvious that the silly bastard was soft on her.

Rennie said, "I will make the calls, I will go back to bed, I will try to get to sleep, and I will see you tomorrow. Now, please, piss off…"

If he had been the young fellow's age then he might have been soft himself on the alpha female, bloody nuisance woman.

He was still up when the message was received on the secure teleprinter line.

He was often up, prowling the barracks far into the morning's small hours.

When he had first come to the province, two decades earlier, as a young lieutenant, then it had been the day of military rule. Now, in his eighth tour of duty, the accent had shifted. It was the time now of police primacy. The message on the battalion teleprinter was not a request but a requirement that he provide back-up for an operation the following morning. His third and fourth tours had seen the change of emphasis and he could remember the resentment that all soldiers had felt then. By now, it was accepted.

Colonel Johnny spent much of the night drifting between his Operations Room and his office and the Mess where there was coffee on tap. So much of his operational work was carried out under the cover of darkness. More patrols, more roadblocks, more surveillance teams at night than during the day. He lived in a twilight world of dozed sleep and catnapped rest. Because the tasking for the morning was a requirement and not a request, he immediately set about the orders. He noted the name of the suspect and where he was to be arrested. He studied the police plan. He was to provide protection. Even in daylight there was the need for great vigilance. Colonel Johnny had learned that of Altmore, always to take every possible care. Two sections to be in position before dawn. The first section that would be to the north of the pick-up block would have the heavy machine gun, the second section on the lower ground to the south would have the 66 mm anti-tank missile launcher. He had the Night Duty Officer bring him the photographs of the crossroads where the arrest would be made.

He was always thorough. Colonel Johnny could not tolerate the military funerals that were the mark of commanders who were not thorough.

When the two sections had gone, tramped out of the barracks into the darkness laden with their weaponry and their signals equipment, he could wonder why an operation was to be mounted at such short notice to lift a kid who hardly figured on his Intelligence Officer's files. But within ten minutes of his two sections disappearing from the barracks' lights he was asleep in his office, splayed out on the sofa dreaming of deer to be stalked, grouse to be driven, peace.

"I'm dead," she said.

Bren thought that he ought to have offered to drive. There was little traffic on the road, but he turned to look at her face when the next car approached them. She was pale as marble in the lights of the oncoming car.