Gerald Seymour - The Journeyman Tailor

"Give my regards to Mr Wilkins,"

"They know your face, your work, and they know your style.

Nowhere's safe for you. Vulnerable, do you hear any thing?"

"Not your worry… Thanks for the concern. I'll cope."

He wondered if he fooled himself, if she would talk round Hobbes, batter Wilkins into submission, if she would be staying. He wondered if she deluded herself, if he would meet her in a corridor in Curzon Street within the month, if she would nod at him and smile and share the coffee machine, if she would ignore him. He looked into her face.

He gazed down at the red-gold peep of hair jutting from under the scarf. Of course she was compromised, of course she should go home.

He thought she was beyond the reach of his love.

He would never forget…

Cathy said, "We were going well, in time we'd have made a good team."

Bren mouthed it quietly, "I'm going home before I'm destroyed…"

"… There won't be much for you, Bren, not with you walking out of here, but then you'll have thought that through…"

Bren said, "I'm going home before I am destroyed, before I know for certain that there is no light, no hope, no future. I wouldn't want to know that, not for certain.’’

He reached to shake her hand. She kissed his cheek.

Bren walked away to his car. He could see up the lane. In the yard behind the farmhouse a young boy was carrying a bale of hay from the barn. The bright sunlight was on the mountain slope, catching the dead bracken.

He turned. He looked back for her. She had stood her ground beside the gate. She waved to him.

He would drive back to the flat, and pack and go to the airport. He would be in London by the end of the day. He unlocked the door of his car. He was not strong enough for life without light and hope and a future. It was her world, Cathy Parker’s world, in front of him, behind him, around him

He sat in his seat, and he leaned forward against the steering wheel.

He watched a hawk circling high. He didn't understand why the hawk had no fear of the hovering Lynx helicopter above it.

He knew where she would be, later that day She was in the eye of his mind. She would be hemmed around by her men, her people. There would be the cardboard city man, and Herbie and Jocko. There would be the guns that they carried to protect her. Near to her, but warned back from coming too close, would be the soldiers and the policemen.

He saw her walking the length of the hill, going up the middle of the lane between the bare hedgerows. There would be the bodies in the ditch, dumped. There would be the dustbin bags over the heads of the bodies, and the bale twine cutting at the wrists of the bodies, and there would be the bare and lifeless feet of the bodies. When the bags had been cut away from the heads of the bodies she would look down into the faces of her Song Bird and her Song Bird's woman. She would not have shrunk from making the identification. And she would be gone from the lane, gone from the consequences of her work. It was what Bren imagined…

He drove away. A last time he looked, back over his shoulder for the hawk. The bird soared, floated, feathered.

"God keep you safe, Cathy…"

The hawk dived to kill, brilliant in the low winter sunlight, without fear.