Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Where are we?"

"Near to my place…"

"I'll get a taxi."

She stifled her yawn. "Taxis take for ever this time of night."

"Then I'll…"

"Bed down at mine," Cathy said.

The next car rushing towards them, and he looked at her again. She was expressionless, impassive. And the light was gone fast from her face. He shifted in his seat, awkward. She drove fast. There were no police roadblocks, no military checkpoints. He wondered if it had been like this for his predecessor, the man who had been compromised and withdrawn. She had the heating on in the car and the all-night radio station was playing quietly. It was Jim Reeves on the radio and that was about right for Ulster in its time warp. Wondering all the time that she drove, wondering whether she was just lonely, wondering whether he would just be a fix or a different hypodermic. She turned off a side road. She headed through the opened gates and pulled up outside a two-storey block of modern flats. She leaned across him and her elbow brushed his knee and she took her personal radio from the glove compartment and tucked the pistol from under her thighs into her jeans.

Bren fumbled the door handle before he could get the lever in his fingers. He hurried round the back of the car and opened her door for her. When she was out of the car and locking her door then it was so obvious that she was vulnerable. So small, so huddled in the vastness of her anorak. He walked into the building a pace behind her. The gold of her hair was in front of him. He thought she was so precious and he was afraid to touch her. It was a smart block, well decorated. Up a flight of stairs. Her door had a spyhole that was too low for him, right for her height. He didn't know when he should touch her. Two locks, two keys.

The lights flooded on in front of her after she opened the heavy door.

She walked inside and Bren followed her.

"It's not bad…"

She pointed to the wide, three-seat sofa.

"… I'll get you a pillow and a blanket."

Cathy was away across the room and a door closed behind her. He sat on the sofa. He could have laughed and he could have wept. She wasn't lonely, didn't need a fix from him. She was just too tired to drive all the way down the bloody Malone Road and drop him off. His head was in his hands. He might have kissed the back of her head while she was opening the door… He might have slipped his arms round her in the moment before she had switched on the lights. What would she have done, if he had touched her? Probably she'd have kicked his kneecaps off.

Bren sat on the sofa and took off his shoes, and he slipped off his anorak and dragged off his sweater.

He reached into the pocket of his anorak and took out his Browning pistol and detached the magazine from the stock and cleared the breech.

He waited, good little patient boy, for MissPaker to bring him his pillow and blanket.

She came through the internal door with a pillow and a tartan blanket.

She wore a blue towelling dressing gown.

"You alright…?"

"I'm fine…"

"Sorry, did you want something to eat?"

"No."

"Sorry again, did you want the bathroom?"

"After you."

And he hated himself because it was just bloody, bloody, obvious that she was tired. He stood. She put the pillow in place. She bent to arrange the blanket for him. She made it into a sleeve. She was bent over the sofa and the dressing gown gaped and he could see the white bulge of her breasts and he thought she was naked under the dressing gown. She might have only slapped his face, if he had touched her, she might have softened into his arms. No way of knowing…

"Thank you," Bren said.

There was an envelope in her hand, the one that Hobbes had taken from his wall safe.

"Let me know what you think of that," Cathy said.

Before her door closed behind her, she had shown him the bathroom and told him where in the kitchen he could find a drink.

He forced himself to read what was in the envelope.

Should have kissed the back of her head… The paper was from Ernest Wilkins. The paper was headed DONNELLY J. The paper was the minute of a meeting in London and called for input from Belfast.

Should have been kissing the tiredness from her… but in his mind was the view of a farmhouse, seen from the ground with the magnification of binoculars, seen from the height of Altmore mountain.

He was woken by the street-cleaning wagon. Still dark in his room except for the slash of orange light between the curtains from the high sodium lamps on the pavement. Jon Jo had not been asleep more than two hours. It was always difficult for him to sleep at the London house. The bastard was that the sleep was broken and had been so long in coming. After the street-cleaning wagon had gone, moved on, he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling light. When he could not sleep, when he was in London, then his thoughts of the country and the mountain that was his were at their keenest. Little Kevin and Attracta should have been in his picture. But they swam around him. They wore their work-day suits, they carried rolled umbrellas and bags of tools and attache cases. They were decked out in their school uniforms, they gripped their lunch boxes, and their satchels were slung from their shoulders. They were all round him in the brightness of their frocks for the shop floor and their severer skirts and coats for the office. They were the school children, they were the girls and the men and women heading into the capital city. He could see clearly the railway station that was around them. He could not see their faces.

They were the faces of the enemy, and they were hidden from him. He saw what they wore and what they carried and they were always beside the rubbish bin at the end of the ticket windows. Each man was beside the rubbish bin, each child, each girl or woman. They were his enemy… He was in London because those in Dublin believed he could hate the men and the children and the girls and the women who swam past the red rubbish bin. Holy God, a flash of light, a rumble of thunder… a torrent of shrapnel and glass splinters… a screaming, crying, calling… Holy God… He lay on his back, there was the sound of the night street in his ears, there were the shapes without faces of the men and the children and the girls and the women in his eyes.

He had never wondered it before, whether he could hate enough.

The foxes fled from the dawn and sought the safety of their dens.

The owls took shelter in the wind-racked barns.

The crows flew high to find what carrion was left abandoned in the fields by predators for whom the dawn had come too soon.

In cover, under the groundsheets camouflaged by quickly pulled bracken, down in the ditches that skirted the sodden fields, two sections of troops watched the ground behind them for danger and a crossroads ahead of them for the arrival of a young man who would be waiting for a lift into Dungannon. In three cars, and in a van, were the men who had not slept through the gone night, and they hacked their cigarettes' muck from their throats, and swore at the cold, and watched the bungalow and the house as they had been told, and talked quietly of their homes in Lurgan town and Armagh city and south County Down and north County Antrim and west Tyrone and east Derry.

It was the man who brought the milk who told the priest. Pius Blaney told the priest that there were strangers in cars and a van on the mountain lanes. Pius Blaney told the priest, as he checked his bill and paid it in cash, that there were strangers, not soldiers and not police, out on Altmore. He took the change that was pecked from Pius Blaney's old leather purse, he pocketed the receipt, he closed the door on Pius Blaney. It was what he had expected, that there would be a tout hunt through his parish, that strangers would come in to ferret out a victim.