Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"I don't know anything."

"God help you if you go to the other men. The clock's turning, Patsy."

"Don't know, can't say what you don't know…"

From away below in the house, where the smell of the cooking had come from, was the clamour of a telephone's bell.

They lay in the wetness of the hide. They had been in the hide, by Bren's watch, more than five hours. They had heard the helicopters scudding overhead, navigation lights lost in the low cloud. It was the way they had been in the hide before, her half on top of him and her leg thrown between his thighs. They watched the bungalow alternately through the Night Observation Device lens. There was the wind around them, and the occasional bleating call of bullocks that were across the far side of the field and huddled down against the shelter of the thorn hedge on the far side of the field in front of them.

Bren whispered, "Nugent's the key, isn't he?"

"That's what we'll tell Hobbes."

"Song Bird's the jewel?"

So soft her voice, so calm. "Always has been, always will be."

"To bring back Jon Jo Donnelly? He was the star performer here, he was the best they ever had, is that it?"

"He's the stuff of their folklore, their bloody history. It's like they were lost when he went away."

"And the Riordan boy saves Song Bird?"

"Right."

The equations squirmed in his mind and spilled out the questions, and there was the deadness in the back of his legs where her weight pressed down on him.

"Because Jon Jo Donnelly's so important…?"

"Donnelly's public enemy Number One right now in London. You know that."

He heard the hoarseness of his own whisper. "You can live with what happens to the Riordan boy?"

"It's just my job."

"That's what they've always said, the people who ran the Nazi camps, the guards in Stalin's Russia, Saddam's torturers… They were just doing their job…"

"My conscience isn't bruised."

"Should it be?"

"A tiger terrorises a village, it's a man-eater. The villagers call in a marksman. He tethers a goat. The goat is sacrificed. The best moment lor the marksman is when the tiger takes the goat. The tiger is shot, but that's academic for the goat. Tough on the goat…’’

"You believe that?"

She shifted. Her face was beside his. He could see nothing of her. He could feel the warmth from her body and the breath from her mouth.

"You want my bible?"

"Give it me."

" There’s innocent people and good people, and they are suffocated by the killers. There's people out on this mountain who want nothing more than to lead decent and honourable lives Agonising is a luxury.

Out job is to free them of the suffocation. It's just a matter of priorities It's not nice and it's not pleasant, but it's the job I'm paid to do. End of speech…If i have another bloody question from you then I'll boot you out of here and you can walk home. Got me?"

"One more question."

"One, only one."

"What's it done to you, the job?"

He didn't know what she would have answered. The back door of the bungalow opened. It was his turn on the Night Observation Device. He saw Mossie Nugent come out of the kitchen door and go to the shelter of the back shed, and there was the small flash on the lens of a match striking. He saw Song Bird smoke a cigarette in the wind and the squalled rain of the night. Heh, Song Bird, are you feeling good?

Should be feeling good because there's a poor young bastard out there who is keeping you safe by going through three pints of hell. Heh, Mr Nugent, you'll be safe because Miss God Almighty Parker up here has given you her promise.

"I can't write nothing…"

"It's your friends, Patsy, they's given us the story. They's out looking for you with helicopters. They's searching houses. They's got roadblocks all over Altmore. Would they be doing that if you weren't theirs? Would they, Patsy? They've told us, Patsy, that you's a tout. .."

"It's bollocks. I's not a tout."

"… They sent an army to find you, Patsy, and that's telling us. It's your feckin' friends, Patsy, that's told us you's a tout."

In sunshine, rain, snow, gales, he took his black and white cross collie bitch out onto the mountain. The dog's coat was never brushed, but the rushing and diving into bramble and along the rabbit trails in the gorse left the coat shiny and sleek. There was not an ounce of spare weight on the beast. Old Hegarty had the dog's nose and her wiry slimness and the same bright-eyed, questing appearance. They were inseparable. It was said in the community that Hegarty talked more to his dog on their morning walk than he ever exchanged words with any Living being; his sister, certainly, had long since accepted that the dog took first place in his affections. The walk was brisk. Seventy-two years had not slowed old Hegarty's stride, and the dog all the time quartering the country around him.

When they were hunched down in the lee of a great rock or resting together on the cropped grass of a clearing in the forest, he shared the biscuits from his sister's tin and liquorice allsorts from the village shop with the dog, and he told the creature all that he had learned in the Library. The dog knew by now not all but much of what there was to know of the fives of the great architects of Ancient Greece, the highlights of the campaigns of Hannibal and Napoleon, and could probably have recited to herself the best part of the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge… a well-versed hound, the cross-collie bitch.

This morning they were at the top of Logue's Hill, to the west of the summit plateau of Altmore, near the Telecom tower. The dog was ahead of him and it was the white flash on the chest of the dog that he continually saw and lost amongst the gorse and bracken and brambles.

His eyesight was fine. He needed glasses only for reading. Fifty yards ahead of him the dog had crouched, belly on the ground, tongue lapping the lower jaw. It was the posture the dog would take if she had found a grazing deer or an unwary fox or pheasant. Old Hegarty had learned to move as silently as any of the mountain's creatures. He came swiftly forward. Beyond where the dog had crouched down, ahead of them, was the dark wall of the close-planted conifer forest. The track that the Forestry men used, past the Telecom tower and into the close-planted trees, was to the right of them. He came without sound to his dog. If it had been a deer and his movement had disturbed it then when they came to their next stop and the sharing of a biscuit he would have apologised.

He could do nothing about the smell of his body or his coat, but he could control his footfall. He knelt carefully beside the dog. Hegarty knew most of the cars that drove on the mountain lanes. He did not know this one… The car would have to have come down the gravelled track past the tower and towards the forestry, and then it would have turned off. A car off the track was a hidden car. It was as if the dog knew that the car was covert business and its jaw was flat to the ground and its eyes were locked to the green and mud-spattered bodywork.

They waited and they watched.

Hegarty was a man who said what he felt. In his youth his sharp tongue had made him unpopular and lonely. In his old age his reputation was of a harmless eccentric. The words were still in his mind. Later he might have justified them to the cross-collie bitch.. . "If the police had your boy, had their claws in him, then I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for him." There was a car off the track and hidden and there was a boy gone missing. The forest was a place they might have taken the boy. The day was clear ahead of him. His books were due back at the Library. He had only the Library to worry him and the woman there who gave him stick if his books were late. But the Library was not yet open. If he found the boy… or found those that held the boy… Well, that was something else… The mountain was quiet around him… If he found the boy, yes, he had his stick and he had his dog… Not to say he'd interfere, not to say he wouldn't, but it was Hegarty's pride that he knew everything of Altmore mountain… The dun brown of his coat merged with the frosted bracken stems. He pulled the collar up about his ears. He sat on the ground beside the dog.