Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

The Prime Minister broke off. There had been the faintest knock at the door, barely heard by Ernest Wilkins. The aide's shoes slid silently across the carpet. A notelet was passed. There was that shiver of annoyance on the Prime Minister's face, not a man who could take interruption. He read the message and the door closed on the aide.

The colour was gone from him.

His eyes closed momentarily.

He seemed to rock.

Ernest Wilkins waited on him.

"Oh, God…"

Held his peace.

"… the wicked bastards…"

Gave him time.

"… Bomb at Marylebone, at least three dead, many injured, no warning, no chance…"

It had been the intention of Ernest Wilkins to let the storm blow itself over before he had launched himself..He would have allowed the Prime Minister's anger to exhaust itself before offering defence of the Service's operations. He took the cue.

His voice was gentle, so reasonable. "That'll be Jon Jo Donnelly, sir.

You'll remember when the name was last talked of, and the suggestion that the man be encouraged to return to his home, because there we would stand a greater chance of trapping him. I said then that I would be working on it, that you should leave it in my hands. There's a young woman in Northern Ireland, I don't think it wise you have her name, one of my best. Donnelly comes from the mountain country of Tyrone.

I tell you, sir, in the greatest confidence, we have an informer inside that community. He is our informer, sir, not the army's and not answerable to the police. At our instigation there have been meetings inside the Provisional I.R.A., East Tyrone Brigade and Army Council level, that should, we hope, earn the recall to home territory of Donnelly. The informer, I don't think you need that person's identity, will tell us of Donnelly's return and give us the location of his hiding place.

That young woman, sir, so heavily criticised by the ill informed, has taken very grave risks to her personal safety to lake us thus far

… Oh, yes, what you should be told, our informer, vital to us, was threatened last week with exposure. We felt it necessary, for the greater good of the greater number, to divert the threat…"

"I want that bastard, that Donnelly animal, dead…"

"Of course, sir. I never doubted that, sir."

He seemed to Ernest Wilkins to be in pain. "God, that bloody awful place…" "And much worse there, sir, when it's not left to the professionals."

"Do what's necessary."

"If I might say so, sir, a very wise attitude."

Outside, in the corridor, Ernest Wilkins paused to wipe the first sweat beads off his forehead. He thought he had done well, really rather well.

In the evening, the undertaker brought home the body of Patsy Riordan.

The open coffin was laid on trestles in the front room. The boy's face had been cleaned but a patch of hospital gauze covered that part of his jaw where the killer bullet had exited.

His mother sat stone-faced and dry-eyed beside the head of the coffin.

His father stood near to the door with a filled whiskey glass in his hand. Some neighbours came and took tea or a small glass and muttered embarrassed condolences. They were the few.

Patsy Riordan had been executed for touting.

The few paid their respects, the majority gathered in the village bar.

"Should she have come by now?"

There was the sharp look into Bren's face from the cardboard city man.

"You work with her, I don't."

"Please, I don't need any bloody sarcasm. I'll repeat my question.

Should she have come by now?"

The cardboard city man said, "I'd have expected her an hour or two back, but you can't tell with her."

They played cards, the cardboard city man and Jocko and Herbie. The night duty had taken charge of the computers and the banks of radio equipment. Outside the rain beat the windows and the wind whined in the telephone wires.

Bren waited. And he promised that he would never let Cathy Parker, alone, loose out there again.

They had rowed through the evening. Siobhan had finally followed Mossie into the bedroom to hiss in a spat and hushed voice that it was right for her to go to Mrs Riordan's home.

He had a feeling, small, for what he thought was right; a feeling, sometimes, for what he knew was wrong. He thought it was not right, that it was wrong, that his Siobhan should be away down to the Riordan house.

"You can't, not after what was done."

"It's respect for her."

"You'd be a sham."

"It's respect for the family."

"I'm not going with you, I'd not have the face."

"I was never asking you to be with me."

"I don't know how you'd have the face."

Siobhan said, cunning, "It'd cause more talk if I didn't, and she's a good and decent woman."

It had been the usual way that they argued. They found the corners of the bungalow, away from his mother, out of earshot of the children.

They had been silent through the tea, him asking the children to ask their mother to pass him the brown sauce, her asking his mother to ask him whether he wanted more chips. His mother and the children wouldn't have known that they rowed over whether Siobhan should attend the house of a shot tout.

He sat on the bed. The fight was gone from him. He looked to her for comfort.

"Will us ever be forgiven for what we've done?"

He saw the hard set of her mouth, it was a new mouth for her to wear.

"Get paid, don't we?"

He repeated what she'd said, the bitterness in his voice. "Get paid, don't we?"

"You'll wait outside, they'd not be expecting the likes of you, there'll be none like you there… and we'll go after and take a drink."

It was accepted. He could never fight her and win. The only time that she had not won her way was when they had returned from Birmingham to his mother's bungalow. Only the once. Every other time they fought, she won. They came out of the bedroom and he let her slip her arm round his waist, like it was a sign to the children and to his mother that the hidden problem was solved. If it had been he that was shot, if it had been Mossie Nugent killed for touting, then he reckoned that Mrs Riordan would have called for her respects. The lie burdened him, he thought the weight of the lie grew each day he woke.

He gave her time to change, the dress she wore often for Sunday Mass. He helped his mother with the washing of the plates and pans, and then he romped and larked with the kids and built bricks for Mary.

Mossie drove to the Riordan house.

If the boy had been shot by the army, if he had died in the ferrying of a bomb, then the lane in front of the house would have been filled with cars. The cars would have stretched a quarter of a mile in front of the house. He had been executed by his own. There were six cars parked outside the Riordan house. If it had been the army that had done him, or his own bomb, if he had been the volunteer 'tragically killed on active service', then the neighbours would have flown black flags from their upper windows. The neighbours showed what they thought, front-room curtains open, lights blazing, televisions blaring. He parked away from the house. He let Siobhan walk a hundred yards. He sat alone in the car and he smoked a cigarette.

Shit, and he was his own man. Shit, and he had the laugh on all of them. None of them knowing, all of them ignorant, that Mossie Nugent was his own man. The smile played at his lips. It was when he could cope best, when he was alone with himself and the night was around him, when he had the laugh on all of them. There was the rap at the window of his car.

He saw the O.C.'s face, grinning. He wound down the window.

"Surprise…"

"Missus gone in, I'm not. We's going for a drink after. You're not going in?"

"I am not. Just seeing who is, like to know."