Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

They appeared between the undergrowth clumps, they were hidden again. They were careful.

He never saw the face of the woman, just the floc k of the gold in her hair.

Hegarty saw the face of the young man that was mud smeared, and he saw the pistol that he carried and the camouflaged small pack. He saw that the woman carried a snubbed machine gun.

He watched. There was a whisper growl from his dog and his hand, fleshless and veined, dropped onto the dog's head to smooth the fur and quieten her. When they were fifty yards from the car the man and the woman separated. The man came close to him, not more than a dozen paces, and the woman made a circle round to the far side of the car. He saw the young man go down on his back and search underneath the car.

He heard the crisp English accent.

"You drive."

Hegarty, who knew everything of the life of Altmore mountain, realised the pain of knowing more than he should have known, that there was a covert team on Altmore. He watched the man drive slowly back onto the track, he watched the girl try to erase the marks of the tyres with branches and lightly pushing the bracken into place over the path the car made. He stayed where he was a long time after the last sound of the car had gone.

She hadn’t left Bren in the corridor and she had gone to the door of Colonel Johnny's office and in response to her knock he had come to th the door and there had been short words between them and then he had led her, Bren trailing, to the adjutant's office. Bren hadn't heard what was said.

Cathy dialled a number, let it ring briefly, then put down the receiver. Bren thought that she was counting slowly to ten. She dialled again, let it ring, replaced the receiver. Another wait. She dialled a third time…

This was what infuriated him, when there were no explanations.

They had come back off the mountain. They had driven to the barracks.

They had gone their separate ways to shower and change. They had come to the officers' block to use the telephone. He was not told who she rang, why she rang three times. Since he had watched Mossie smoking his last cigarette out of his back door there had been seven hours of unbroken silence between them, except for the basics of the surveillance, before they had moved out in the half-light. And all she had said then was to tell him to drive…

They were in the corridor, and Rennie came out of an office and Colonel Johnny was with him.

She stood beside Bren. She was dwarfed by the three of them. She seemed to shake herself, to prepare for the challenge she could see coming. Rennie was the big man, she was the little woman. Where she stood she blocked Rennie's way down the corridor.

Bren could only admire her. That was her way, head on.

"Good God, look at this, Bren… It's the Eternal Flame, the policeman who never goes out. Heavens, Mr Rennie, not actually going to get mud on your shoes, are you?"

"Miss Parker, you are deep in shit."

"Put me there, did you?"

"And I won't be around to lift you out."

"We haven't been telling tales out of school, have we? I gave that up in the fourth form…"

"You're running out of time, Miss Parker, and don't say you weren't warned…"

Cathy stood four-square across the corridor, tiny and implacable, the tired bloody-mindedness that was all her own set against Rennie's rising temper.

"… Don't push me, not one inch further."

She mimicked his accent. "Would you fall over?"

She stood aside. She let them pass. Rennie and the colonel strode away and then turned for the Operations Room.

It snapped in Bren. "That's just terrific, Cathy. Bloody wonderful.

That's a man that would go to the wall for you. Don't mind me, I don't matter, I'm just here to do the chores. But that man mutters and you've lost him. By God, I'm learning the lot today, really sophisticated, top operative stuff. Come off your high horse, Cathy, for Christ's sake."

She walked away from him. She- swayed once and he thought she might just have been half asleep.

They were outside the block building, deafened by the helicopter floating down to land. There were soldiers, with their kit and their weapons kneeling in a line, ready to board. Her voice was drowned but shouting at him.

They had time to kill.

How long to kill?

Six hours, seven.

What should he do?

They were going to be eating, sleeping, drinking East Tyrone, he should learn about the place.

How to do that?

Start where everyone starts, in the Library

Where was she going to be?

She was going back to Belfast, she would rolled him in six hours in the Market Square.

Shouldn't he be with her?

"Mooning around after me like a bloody sheep on heat? No, thank you."

She might have punched him.

"I'll see you," Bren said.

Two roadblocks on his way to work. Because he was Charlie One, Stop and Search, he had been out of the car both times and half stripped down at the side of the road, and both times every piece of kit that he took to work, tins, dust sheets, brushes, ladders had been emptied out of the back of the estate for examination. If there had not been a uniformed police constable at both roadblocks then he might have been roughed over by the soldiers. Bitter, snarling taunts from the soldiers, like they were trying to wind him, like the best they could hope for was that his temper would crack. "Heh, you cripple arsehole, why are you making war on your own people, eh?’’ '" "You must be fucking perverts, torturing some little kiddie for your kicks " Got a tout in your knickers, have you? Giving out the inside story, is he?"

"Steady on, Sar'nt, better be nice to this one, maybe he's one of ours."

"Nah, this one's a kiddie-torturer…"It was what they wanted, that he would flail out, and then they could have taken him behind the hedge and given him the real kicking, the hard belting. It was Mossie's secret, and he could hold his temper. The whole of the mountain community had known that the roadblocks ringed the villages. At home, under the false floor of the wardrobe, beside the Building Society account book, was the bleeper. Couldn't have the bleeper strapped between his legs if he were to be stopped and searched by the army and police. It was his secret, one he shared with the bitch.

So he had been late to work. He had been there an hour when there was a message, he was wanted on the telephone.

Siobhan told him there had been three calls, close together, twice she had picked it up, no voice.

He told her he would be late home.

It was the first time he could remember the bitch using her emergency code to call him to a meeting.

The man from Lurgan had the reports. More troops on the mountain than there had been the evening before, more police blocks, derelict buildings had been searched, houses had been raided. The reports came by telephone and by courier. It was confirmation of what he had earlier thought.

The house where they held the Riordan boy was outside the cordon that had been thrown around Altmore. He knew the way the army and the police worked. They would first satisfy themselves that the boy was not inside their present net, then they would expand it. He didn't reckon he had much time left.

If 500 soldiers and police with helicopter support were searching the mountain then it was because of obligation. They had lost one of their own. The man from Lurgan was without remorse, without compassion.

Many years before, when Patsy Riordan who was now upstairs and blindfolded and bound had been in nursery. school, the man from Lurgan had been interviewed by a psychiatrist. He had been in custody, charged with murder. The psychiatrist had declared him to be without mental illness, not reliant on alcohol, emotionally stable and of average intelligence. The forensic evidence against him had failed. The man from Lurgan was quite normal, quite loving, in the company of his family and the friends he acknowledged who were outside the Provisionals. He could handle, effortlessly, the irreconcilable compartments of his life… He would have preferred a confession from the boy. He would have wanted it on tape so that it could be played to the tout's family.