Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

The call had come from the Director General's outer office, could Mr Wilkins be so kind as to spare five minutes?

His own area was deserted. Carthew already gone, and Foster. He had missed Bill that day, but then Bill was becoming erratic in his attendance, and Charles was sick, and Archie had been telling anybody who cared to listen since the early morning that he had tickets for the National Theatre and had needed to leave before the tea trolley had reached their end of the corridor. Most evenings after seven, when he cleared his desk, locked all the papers away in his safe, at least Brennard would still have been working. A good young man that.

Hobbes was over the following week and he made a note to enquire how Brennard was making out over there. Archie had hold of some quite extraordinary story of how Brennard had run P.T.I. Terry off his legs and had actually shot at Jocelyn and winged his combat jacket.

That would let some of the hot air out of the pair of them…He climbed the darkened staircase to the top floor.

The Director General painted a rapid picture. Five was at war. The R.U.C. at Chief Constable level were clamouring for blood. The civil service at Assistant Under-Secretary rank were demanding a head. And the Secretary ol State seemed to be blundering round Whitehall, boring little man, preaching morality. Five was back against the wall.

"These bloody people, Ernest, they're going in the Prime Minister.

What defence do we lay out?"

Wilkins stood in front of the Director General's desk, hands clasped in front of his stomach. "The young people I send over to Northern Ireland, and I include Hobbes, are all committed completely to the work there. Those young people, sir, are the finest that the Service can offer. Sometimes I feel humble, privileged, to know them

…"

"Ernest, I know that speech. Can we come very quickly to the point?"

It was his usual stance. His wife had told him, not once but frequently, not to look like a waiter attending on an order. "I just want to point out, sir, that they are the very front line. We must trust them to interpret the evidence as they on the ground see it. They are forced to make exceptionally finely calculated judgments. These involve their own lives as well as other people's…"

"Thank you, but I can do that one, almost word for word. I want you to come clean about this killing of an apparently innocent young man.

Tell me the truth."

So Wilkins told him as much as he knew and what was at stake.

"You'll have to convince the Prime Minister…"

"Not a man of fibre, sadly."

"You had better stand by to do that. I like the bit about only being able to supervise the sewer cleaners if you're prepared to climb down into the tunnels yourself. Keep the sermonising to a minimum And the young woman, can you save her?"

Wilkins shook his head. "Save Cathy Parker? I don't know, sir, and I won't know until I have tried. I can only do mv best.’’

Jon Jo sat in the pub on the Harrow Road and was passed the sealed envelope.

He read the message of approval.

He had moved his hide in the morning and reset his groundsheet in deeper undergrowth further from the buried dustbin. He had stayed in the hide through the day and only emerged from the forest as night had fallen. In the pub he could smell himself, the dank wetness of his clothes and the dirt of his body. The courier was going back on the last flight. Donnelly told the girl, perhaps eighteen years old, that two safe houses were now denied him. The girl was from County Armagh and there was the softness of her accent in his ear, and there was the longing in him for his home. When she had gone, hurrying for Heathrow, he tore the message of approval into small pieces and flaked them into the ash tray and took them to the pub's open fire to burn them. She would carry back with her a sealed envelope. He had been a long time writing the letter it contained.

He had approval to place a bomb in a mainline railway station.

The smells merged over Bren. There was the smell of the polished flooring and of the newly painted walls and of the webbing of the men who passed him in the corridor and the damp of their uniforms and of baked beans heated near to him, and always the tang of cigarettes.

The sounds of the barracks played around him. Helicopters thrusting for elevation and the crack of gunfire from the floodlit small-arms range and the bark of out-of-doors orders and the mutter of conversation from civilian clerks and the Orderly N.C.O. s whose voices dropped further when they used the corridor where Bren waited.

He had been an hour in the corridor outside Colonel Johnny's office.

He had arrived without an appointment, he had been told the colonel was engaged and that he would be fitted in when it was possible. He had read an article in Soldier magazine about tank warfare and the lessons of the First Armoured Division in the Gulf, and discarded it as quite simply irrelevant. It was an impulse that had brought him from his new flat to the barracks at

Dungannon, and with each jerk on the hands of his watch he had thought the impulse more stupid.

The door at the end of the corridor opened.

Colonel Johnny ushering out a middle-aged woman.

The colonel speaking quietly to her, bringing her down the corridor towards where Bren sat. "Don't apologise, please, absolutely not. You had every right to come here."

A small voice, "You've been kind…"

"I wish I could have done more. We did everything we could do to find him and save him. I'm very sorry that we were unsuccessful."

Bren stood. The colonel looked through him. The woman ignored him and was pulling a rain hat from her bag.

"It helps me to know that you tried…"

"Now, how will you get home?" Said kindly.

"My man's in a bar in the town, down Irish Street. I left him there because he wouldn't drive me to the barracks, said it wasn't right."

They were at the far door of the corridor, where it opened onto the parade ground.

"Goodnight… I'm sorry we couldn't do more. Safe home, Mrs Riordan…"

Bren's head twisted. His eyes raked down the corridor. He saw the back of the woman as she went down the step and there was the howl of a night gale to greet her. He saw her face when she turned, the few seconds, to shake the colonel's hand, and then her face was gone and her head was wrapped in the rain hat, and she followed the escort soldier away… Christ… she was the debris he scattered, that he and Cathy Parker threw over their shoulders He stood his ground and faced the colonel. There was no warmth, only crisp recognition. The colonel waved for him to follow him back towards the office.

He was gestured to a chair.

Bren said, "I wanted to talk to you."

"Well, I'm here, you're here, so talk."

"About Cathy…"

"What about Miss Parker?"

There was no sympathy. Bren said, "It's just that I was wanted

… I don't suppose it matters. Forget it. I was just worried about her."

"What way worried?"

"The way she is… you've seen her. It's like people are when they start to make mistakes…"

"Mistakes, oh, that's very good. Going to make mistakes, is she?

Over here, it gets to be a habit, making mistakes. A police inspector I used to know made a mistake, went to church on a Sunday morning with his family, that was a mistake because he was shot dead on the church steps, silly mistake going to worship. One of my soldiers last year made a mistake, went through an open gateway between two fields when he should have pushed through a thorn hedge, a mistake because there was a pressure plate in the gateway, elementary mistake going through a gateway when there was a perfectly good hedge to push through. A little kiddie made a mistake two years ago, my first week here, picked up a box left in a ditch, didn't know that we'd had a call-out and hadn't moved, didn't see the fishing wire from the box to the bomb, dumb little kiddie to be making a mistake like that. Nothing special about making mistakes, gets to be an occupational hazard when you stay around too long. There's no way of stopping Miss Parker from making mistakes either. Mistakes are a part of the job…"