Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

He walked out into the night.

They were at the back of the parking place… There was no backup. Christ. Now he could only pray that it would be fast… They were behind the cars and near to the shadow shape of a tractor, grotesque shapes, dancing in the high light thrown from the gable end of the bar.

The Quartermaster and one of the lads held her, and Mossie saw the whip of her head going back as the O.C. punched her. Where in God's name was the young man, the one that minded her and didn't speak?

Her arms were pulled back and the punches were going into her. They didn't shout questions, like she was not softened enough, and she didn't scream her cover back at them, like there was no point. He stood by the door of the bar. It was where the compartments of his life merged. He was Mossie Nugent, Intelligence Officer, and he was Mossie Nugent, Song Bird, and he knew he would lift not a finger, nor raise his voice, to aid her.

"Are you not going to help the boys?" the grate of old Hegarty's voice behind him.

Mossie said, "They're not needing help. It's four of them, and a bit of a girl."

"She's a Brit spy."

"So you've said…"

Blows going into her, and a boot onto her knee or her shin. He wondered if she'd seen him. He was rooted. There was old Hegarty's sharp whistle and the dog came back off the grass to heel. He knew that the Hegarty house had been searched more often over the last twenty years, and in the campaign before that, than any other house on Altmore, and he knew that fifteen years back Hegarty had taken a bad, bad, beating from the police and been an old man then.

"She was just an idiot to be here," old Hegarty said, and was away up the road, not waiting for the end.

Mossie watched. He thought she was about to go down. If she went down, she was done for. There was the punch into the stomach that seemed to bend her and he thought that if she had not been held then she would have gone down. He told himself that there was nothing he could do. She should never have been there… It was when he knew that she was about to go down that she seemed to pull the Quartermaster's arm across her face. His shout slashed the night air.

The Quartermaster lost his grip on her, staggered away clutching his bitten hand. So fast, the movements. Her free hand swinging the short hook into the throat of the one who held her other arm. The O.C. threw himself at her. The beam of the high light caught them. They thrashed, rolled, struggled, on the ground, and all the time the O.C. was swinging at her to beat her head back onto the gravel. Again, so fast… The O.C. was pitched onto his stomach. Her knee was into the small of his back.

His right arm was twisted up towards his shoulder, and there was the crack of his wrist breaking and then his moan of pain.

The crowd was behind Mossie. They had spilled from the door. They would have seen what he saw. There was a young man backing away from her and the fear of her glistened in his eye. There was the O.C. writhing. There was a man down and with his legs flailing haphazard strikes into the gravel. There was the Quartermaster bent over the pain of his hand and hugging the shadow safety of the fringe of the light.

The young man, backing away, shouted which was her car, and he had the power over the crowd, and there was a slow surge towards the green Astra, until it was surrounded. She rocked on her feet. Mossie thought her strength had gone. He stood with Siobhan beside him and he watched her. She reached inside her coat, and pulled at her sweater and there was the glimpse of her white skin and suddenly the dark outline of a pistol.

Mossie saw the petrol cap of the car thrown up over the heads of the crowd, and there was the flash of a match and the crowd started back, and the flames burst across the car, shafted through the interior of the green Astra.

He could see her face, he could see the set of her chin.

She walked towards him and she held the pistol loosely against the seam of her jeans. The car burned behind her. No one blocked her way.

There was blood dribbling from her lip. She was silhouetted against the flames. He thought it was only the will-power that kept her on her feet.

She walked deliberately, as if each step was a challenge. She looked into the face of each man and woman that confronted her. She looked through Mossie. He saw the blood running down her jaw and the pain in her face and the strength that carried her on, and out into the road.

She walked, slowly, never hurrying, away down the road and into the night.

The radio operator's head ducked, the concentration immediate. The woman scribbled on her pad.

Earphones off. "Emergency, 242's signal…"

The man behind her on the radio racks swinging the dials in front of him.

Jocko and Herbie grabbing weapons from the floor, running for the door. Feet pounding on the staircase.

The second operator hurrying across the area, thrusting the paper with the co-ordinates into the cardboard city man's hand.

Bren dragged, then pushed, down the stairs, out into the night sprinting for the car where the engine already roared.

A helicopter scrambled from the Dungannon barracks pad.

A meal left unfinished by the crewman. A poem left unread by a Lynx pilot. A plate abandoned and a book discarded open on the Mess table.

An officer should never be seen to run by the men he commanded.

Colonel Johnny strode the corridor from his office to the Operations Room.

Herbie drove. He was expert. Along the motorway and overtaking on the outside and the inside. Through the town, past the darkened shops up Church Street, skirting the square, plunging down into Irish street, and then away through the housing estate and out past the town's golf course, and climbing for the mountain. Bren didn't speak. The cardboard city man was beside him, and Jocko in the front had plugged a headphone into the equipment in the glove compartment, and occasionally he muttered the code signals to Herbie that were gibberish to Bren. Short of Donaghmore they screamed on a corner and raced past a man out walking his greyhounds and the dogs stampeded for the verge, and through Donaghmore they had to swerve to avoid a staggering drunk and were close enough to hitting him for Bren to shield his eyes. The car bucked, rolled, at the speed… He thought of her. She was the young woman who was closed, secret, hidden from him. He would have said that he could understand, after a fashion, every man and woman that he had worked with in the Service. He could spot greed, vanity, ambition; he could locale motivation; he could identify courage and cowardice. Greed, vanity, ambition, were perpetually in the show cases of the office in Curzon Sireet. Motivation was what he thought that he had bred for himself, and he had seen others at the recruits' seminars who had more of it than himself, men and women that he sometimes passed in the corridors, sometimes sat with in the canteen. Cowardice and courage he had seen on the endurance courses that the new intake had been subjected to.. . She had no greed, vanity, ambition, that he had seen. Her motivation was hidden from him. He reckoned her without cowardice and courage was what she would have sneered at… He wondered if she were dead… He wondered il she were captured.

Fear tumbling in his mind. If she were dead, if she were cap- tured, they would skin him, the cardboard city man and Colonel johnny and Hobbes and Mr Wilkins, even Rennie who had cold- shouldered her.

The man who lost Cathy Parker. Fear for her an at him. The car surged on the road. Jocko held the earphone light against his head, then swung round and gestured for the cardboard city man to look ahead. They were both bent down, the cardboard city man and Bren, heads together and peering through the windscreen.

He saw the helicopter. The helicopter was high above them and there was the the beam of its searchlight powering down, and the red flashes of the navigation lights.