Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

Siobhan was no safer than himself. The nightmare spread in him. If he were pulled in. If he were worked on by the security team, then sooner or later he would crack, and when he cracked he would name his Siobhan as tout's accomplice… Who would hold the children's hands in a churchyard? And if he fled, then his friends in hiding would be the bitch and her minder. He would have no other friends…

Mossie started the engine. He drove home to collect the second ladder. He could not scour from his mind the pain-streaked face of Mrs Riordan, walking in the lane and walking against the wind.

He was blindfolded. He was stripped naked. He was tied at the wrists and ankles. He lay on the bed.

They searched his privates and his nostrils and ears and mouth, and between the cheeks of his buttocks, and he felt the cold touch on his skin and Patsy Riordan's numbed mind told him that they used a metal detector over his body.

He was lifted from the bed.

He was taken across the room. He felt the thin carpet below his feet.

He was pushed down onto a chair.

The voice was in his ear. "You know who we are, Patsy?"

So difficult to speak. The fear strangled the words. "Yes."

"You know why you're here, Patsy?"

"I done nothing."

"You're a touting bastard, Patsy."

"No… no…"

"And you're going to tell me, Patsy, that you're a touting bastard

…"

The voice beat in his ears.

He was clearing his mind. It was the rubbish bin that had his attention.

After the Victoria bomb they had taken away all the rubbish bins, but the stations had become so filthy and fifteen months later with no more main line stations attacked they had quietly, no fuss, reintroduced the rubbish bins. The rubbish bins were back, but he didn't know how often they were emptied, and how often they were checked, and he didn't know where they had placed new security cameras at the stations. He had drawn the plan so that he could better work out where cameras might be placed, so that he could examine the possible fields of vision that the cameras might have…

"Hi, there, how you doing?" His mind was swept of the rubbish bin.

"We wanted to say…"

"Just tell him," the woman snapped.

It was a soft accent, it was real Cork, being in London hadn't harmed it. The young man blurted, "We wanted you gone…"

"Gone now," she said.

"I've got work, there's another baby coming…"

"We don't want it going on…"

"We'll not have our lives ruined."

He stood. Under his feet was the loose floorboard. Under the floorboard was a pistol and a timing device, and ammunition, and detonators and a circuit board. The anger was rising in him.

The young man said, "So, we'd be glad if you were gone…"

"By tomorrow."

He stood his full height. He sought to dominate with his physique, and he felt himself punched.

The young man said, "It's averages, really, sooner or later they'll have you. If they have you then they have us…"

Always his wife, she reinforced him. "The beginning and the end of it is that we've grown out of your games. We don't want them any more."

The anger bubbled in him. He said, "Wait, wait, easy, easy… Don't come in here feckin' telling me what suits you…"

"There's no call for language," the young man said. ,. Don't think you can feckin' push me. Don't think you can just throw me out on the street What’ll happen to you, you thought of that?

What'll happen when it goes back to Dublin that a snivelling little prick, a snappy little cunt, have put me out on the street? You thought. ..?"

Gerald Seymour

The Journeyman Tailor

"Don't threaten me," he said.

"… you thought what'll happen when I pass the word?"

She looked at him. He could see that she was not afraid. "Is that all you're at, making fear? I'll tell you something, this isn't home, this isn't where you run things. What are you going to do? You going to shoot us, because we want you out? It's a different place this, it's not your place. Your place is back where your bloody home is. You do what you bloody like where your bloody home is. I want you gone by tomorrow. .."

"Or what?"

She gazed back at him. She met his eyes. Donnelly looked away, He turned his face from her eyes. He heard her voice.

"Try me."

He heard the door close. He sat on the bed. He bent forward and pulled away the carpet and then with a savage strength He dragged up the loose floorboard. The ring of a voice in his ear. The voice of a brother. The voice of the brother who had gone; away. Not even a Christmas card now from the brother who had been gone nine years.

He took the folded sheet of paper, the plan, from its hiding place. The voice of a younger brother who now lived outside Albuquerque in New Mexico, and who was a big man and an executive in an electronics company, with a wife and a bungalow and a pool and two young ones.

The bell of a voice, I’m going, and I'm not coming back, because of people like you People like you make a shit of everybody's world You think you’re the big smart bastard but you're just rubbish, and i’m going somewhere where people like you would just squashed out of existence. You're not loved. All you have is the fear of your feckin’ gun. I despise you Jon Jo, and I am ashamed to be your family…’’He tried to read he plan, but there were tears running on the face of Jon Jo Donnelly.

‘’What we could do, we could hang you by your legs, hang you upside down, and we could cut the balls off you. You could blather all you wanted, no one'll hear you. We'll get it out of you, you bastard little tout…"

"I wasn't touting."

"What were you for at the barracks?"

"They pulled me in."

"Why'd they send a car for you?"

"To lift me."

"Why'd they let you go?"

"Don't know."

"Who was they?"

"Didn't give their names."

"Had you called them?"

"I hadn't."

Voices around him. The accusations dinning in his head. "Why'd they send a car to collect you… Where'd the money come from for your bike… How many times you met them…?"

Patsy screaming. "No… no… no…"

The quietest voice. "You knew, Patsy, you knew what was planned in Dungannon. Good men, Vinny and Jacko and Malachy. They was set up, Patsy. They was shot down like dogs . And you got money for a bike, and they sent a car to collect yon.

You say they just lifted you. Why should they lift you? Why didn’t they charge you?"

"I don't know…"

I Know, Patsy, I know because I can smell a tout when I'm close to him."

He sat on the chair. The darkness of the blindfold was around him.

The tightness of the binding cut at his wrists and ankles. Patsy Riordan knew no way to make them believe him.

She went to Sean Heggarty.. Hegarty sat in the hard oak chair and his pipe smoke mixed with the scent of the peat blocks on his fire, and his sister brought in tea and then scuttled for the safety of her kitchen.

I’m like everyone else on Altmore, Mrs Riordan. I know nothing and i see nothing and I hear nothing. I don't want to know anything, see anything, hear anything. There's an evil on the mountain, Mrs Riordan, and I live my life around it. I don't hold with murder, believe me, but I don't hold with touting either. If the police had your boy, had their claws in him, then I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for him, I can’t tell you anything that'll help, Mrs Riordan. I'm just sorry, for you…"

She went to the house of the man she knew to be the O.C. of East Tyrone Brigade.

The O.C. let her no further than the kitchen door.

"I don't know why you came here, Missus, it’s nothing that's my business. You go shouting your mouth round here, you go saying that I'm in the Armed Struggle, then you've got real trouble, Missus. I don't know who took Patsy away, I don't know why they took him away, I don't know what he might have done. No point in you, Missus, coming to me and asking that I speak up for your Patsy because I don't know who took him, why, what he might have done… only thing I'll tell you, Missus, if there's a tout from off this mountain and he's dead then you won't find it tears on me…"