It was the story that the small boy loved best, the story that had no ending. .. All the time they were moving more troops onto the mountain to hunt Shane Bearnagh. There were men brought from Charlemont with their families to the Altmore barracks, worse even than the dragoons, they were called the 34th Foot. There was no good Irishman that was safe from the English soldiers and the gallowglasses, those were the paid men that came with them. If a man helped Shane, fed him, gave shelter to his wife and his little one, then the roof was burned over that man's head, and his crops were ploughed in, and his cattle were taken.
But for all the suffering there was no resentment, not amongst the decent folk, for what Shane stood for. He embodied the freedom that his people yearned for. The poor people stayed loyal to Shane Bearnagh.
"More troops came, more cavalry. They did everything they could to terrorise the people into telling them where they could find the patriot.
Every day that passed made life more dangerous for Shane. Of course, he could have left. There were many Catholics who had gone abroad into exile and safety, but that was not the way of Shane Bearnagh.
"One day Shane was out walking with his wife, as pretty and fair as any woman on the mountain, and his boy who was a fine wee fellow, and the soldiers on their horses saw them. He told his wife and his son to hide and he ran off across open ground so that the soldiers would follow him. He saved his wife and his son and drew away the dragoons. In his ears he could hear the thunder of their horses' hooves and he could hear them yelling their excitement as if he were a fox they chased. He led them on, across moorland, through forests and all the time they were gaining on him. When they were close to him, when the breath was panting in his lungs, when the leading soldiers were little more than a sabre's cut from him, Shane reached a gorge. A hundred feet below him the mountain river tumbled on sharp rocks.
The sides of the gorge were too steep for him to scramble down. Shane jumped. Jesus was with him, and the Mother of Mary. He jumped the gorge, and the gorge was too wide for the horses of the dragoons to follow, but Shane Bearnagh had jumped it. He was gone into the trees leaving them to curse their anger. If you know where to look, if you go to the gorge, there is said to be the place where you can see, set in a stone, the footprint of Shane Bearnagh's boot, where he leaped from to clear the gorge…"
"Did they ever catch him, Ma?"
It was the story without a finish.
"It's time you was asleep, Kevin."
Ronnie's voice was low, as if the suspicion of being overheard was always with him, even in the heart of a Special Branch section in the core of Lisnasharragh barracks. Bren sat against the back wall, listened. Cathy Parker was in front of Rennie's desk, straight backed on a hard chair, sometimes giving him her attention and sometimes staring vaguely out of the one window. Rennie was talking softly but urgently.
Palsy Riordan had been taken into police custody. First to Dungannon police barracks and then to an interview room at the regional holding centre in Gough barracks, Armagh. He would be held overnight, and interrogated.
Attached by a tangle of wires to Rennie’s desk telephone was a small tape recorder. Next to the desk was a black and white television set and a radio, both on a wheeled table beside which was a computer console. There were two filing cabinets, each with a padlocked bar running top to bottom that prevented their being opened.
The following morning he would be taken back to Dungannon, and released.
"That’s it…" Rennie reached into a desk drawer for his pipe.
" Thank you.'
"coffee?"
"No, thanks."
"Perhaps your colleague would like coffee?"
"He wouldn't, no."
The pipe was filled, lit. "Heh, come off your high horse, Cathy."
"We don't want coffee, thank you."
Rennie leaned further forward, waving away the pipe smoke. No longer the policeman of Special Branch, no longer trying to play the cold man who didn't know emotion. Trying now to play the friend.
"Cathy, you know what you're at? You know what you're into… ?"
"I don't need telling."
"You know what'll happen?"
"I'm not a fool."
Sharp, staccato. "Heh, Cathy, it's a big boys' game out there."
"Don't patronise me."
"That's speeches, Cathy, that's not you."
There was the flush on her face, Bren saw it. She seemed so small to him, and he could see that her eyes blazed back at the big detective, and her chin jutted defiance at him.
More matches, more tobacco smoke.
"I've done what I was asked."
"And I'm grateful."
"I'm not asking for bloody thanks. I want paying in kind."
"What's that mean?"
"I want Song Bird."
She snorted. "Go jump…"
Rennie slammed his fist on the desk and said so softly Bren hardly heard him, "I want Song Bird's name and I want partial control."
She shoved her notepad into her handbag. The bag was formidable, heavy leather, she handled it like a weapon. She pushed herself up out of the chair.
"No way, no bloody way."
"You owe it me…"
Bren watched.
She turned to him, "Come on."
Rennie hissed, "You stay where you bloody are. Parker, you are the biggest pain up my arse. Don't play the arrogant English Miss with me
…"
She smiled. Bren saw the slow spread of the grin across her face, like she loved the hard-edged policeman. "And don't you go getting yourself a coronary, Howard." ‘"I want him."
"Well, get it into that thick Ulster skull that you shan't have him."
"I'll go to Hobbes…"
"Wasting your time."
"I'll cut you off."
Her laugh was a tinkle. "Then I'll do without you."
Rennie was up out of his chair. He was pacing the room, his clenched right fist pounding the palm of his left hand for emphasis. "You can't go on as if you're the only person fighting this war… You have to share the pressure… Go on like this, Cathy, playing the bloody queen and all of us dancing for you, and you won't have a friend left, not a bloody squaddie and not a copper, you'll be alone. .. we're not all dirt, Cathy, we're not every one of us idiots. And you don't have the God-given right to walk into our backyard and piss all over us. If you're alone, Cathy, then you're finished…"
She stood. "So be it."
Rennie came to her, put his hands on her shoulders. "Understand me, you can't do it alone."
"You’re shouting, Howard."
He shook her, as if to exorcise the exasperation. "Did you sleep last night?"
She moved his hands off her shoulders. "Why not?"
Damn you, because of the Riordan boy…"
She went to the door. She gestured for Bren to follow. "I'll he in touch Howard, and thanks for the help "
They had held him for twenty four hours. He had been brought to them three times for interrogation. To D.S. McDonald it was just routine. Most of the Provo names in the area were brought in at least once a year, sometimes twice. D.S. Browne would have said that Patsy Riordan, courier, look-out, errand boy, had done well. Doing well was buttoning the lip and looking at the ceiling and refusing to answer any questions beyond name and address. They were taught how to do it, and taught well. It was very rare that you would get a Provo to incriminate himself during questioning.
D.S. Browne and D.C. McDonald had been given no operational reason as to why the boy should have been singled out for questioning.
Twenty-four hours after they had picked him up they set him down in the Market Square of Dungannon. Joseph Browne liked his fishing.
He liked particularly to go after good-sized pike. When he had hooked them, played them, netted them and weighed them, then he slid them back carefully into the water. They seemed to take a moment to sense their surroundings, then dived for the cover of the reed beds. He thought of the pike when they let Patsy Riordan out of the car.
A moment's hesitation, then the kid was running for Irish Street, gone from sight.
At the end of the day she heard his key in the door.
Mrs Riordan asked her boy where he had been.
Patsy told his mother that he had been lifted.
She asked him why.
He told her that if she wanted to know why, then she should ask the bastard police.
Was he in trouble…?
He could handle it…
She told him that men had called for him.
Who had called for him?
She felt the bad taste in her mouth. She disliked to talk of them. They were strangers to her. They had come twice to the door of the house as if they had the right to come. Even early in the morning.
"I didn't know who they were. They weren't from here. We was at tea when they came yesterday, and they came again this morning and woke us, and the man said they'd be back again for you's this evening.
Who was they?"
"I don't know who they was."
"Why's they want you?"
"You worries too much, Ma, you worries when there's nothing to worry for."
He walked out on her. He left his bag of tools in the hall. She watched him walk off to the garage. Later she heard the whining of the engine of his motorcycle.
She was in the kitchen and turning the sausages when there was the sound of a car braking. She was about to shake the chips in the fat when there was the noise of doors slamming. The table was laid. Her man was in the bathroom and washing off the dirt of the farm where he helped two afternoons a week, work-shy and thought it was full employment. She went into the hall. There was a car parked outside the front gate and its exhaust spewed fumes into the evening. She could see the shape of the driver's head but not his features. There was a man who walked away up the drive-way from the garage and her Patsy was following behind him, and there was a third man who walked behind Patsy and close to him. The light was falling. It was difficult for her to see the laces of the men. The man who walked behind Patsy, his hand was on her son's elbow. She wanted to shout out, yell the warning to him, and the shout and the yell were dead in her throat. She couldn’t see Patsy's face, just his hunched back. She didn't know whether he went smiling or went frightened.
He sat in the chair close to the fire.
The chair was as close to the fire as it could be without the legs scorching. The O.C. was hunched forward for the warmth. His wife watched the television and his kiddie played on the carpet with a toy.
He didn’t hear the television, he didn't see his kiddie, He looked at the jumping flames of the fire and felt the cold on his back and in his groin, He had been told that the Riordan boy had been seen getting into an unmarked police car, and that the Riordan boy had been gone for a full twenty lour hours and then turned up for work in Dungannon.
He no longer ruled on the mountain. Altmore was taken over by strangers.
A forty minute drive. No conversation in the car. Nothing spoken to Patsy and nothing said amongst them. The explanation had been curtailed in the garage beside his home, where they had found him crouched over the engine of the motorcycle. He was to be taken to a meeting. In the car he was not unduly alarmed. He had seen signposts lit by the headlights. The journey took them beyond Pomeroy and out towards Carrickmore. In a village, just before they stopped, he saw illuminated over the driver's shoulders a sign that was strung from a lamp post. The sign was the silhouette of a volunteer with his head hidden by a balaclava and with the outline of an Armalite rifle in his hands. The slogan on the sign was "Careless Talk Costs Lives". He was still thinking of the sign and the slogan when the car came to a stop. In Coalis-land or Cookstown or Dungannon, even in the villages of Altmore mountain, the army and police would have torn down the Provo poster. He was in the no-man's-land where the army and police chose not to patrol. The front passenger and the man who had sat silent beside him in the back of the car led him to the front door of a darkened house. They unlocked the door. Patsy walked inside, into the blackness.
The door closed behind him. There was the blow on the back of his head, and his feet were tripped from underneath him, and as he fell there was the hard kick into his rib cage.
Mossie drove towards home that lunchtime.
It was not usual for him to go home for lunch from work.
He went home because the third and fourth steps of his ladder had cracked, and he kept a spare ladder in the shed at the back. After his injury he was always fearful of a further fall that might completely disable him.
He was two miles from the village when he saw her.
A lonely woman walking against the wind.
He slowed so that he would not splash her from the road's rain puddles as he went by her. She had the collar of her coat turned up and a plastic rain hat was knotted tight under her chin. There was little of her face to see. It was only when he was on her that he recognised Mrs Riordan. It was a moment, fast gone, but time enough for her face to be clear to him.
The face was pain… and he was gone by.
She was a decent woman and her son had done him no harm.
There had been no tail on his car that morning.
He pulled into a farm gateway. The mountain, dark, stretched away above him. Distanced, small, he could see his own home. He could see the whitewashed walls where was Siobhan and his mother. He had switched off the engine. He was slumped in his seat… Who would be his friends? If he quit and ran, who would be his friends? If he stayed, who would be left to bury him…? So many were buried. The day he had come back, on the Heysham to Belfast ferry, with Siobhan and the kids then born and the loaded car, the day the bitch had sent him back, that had been the day that Charlie Mcllmurray, taxi driver from Belfast, had been found shot dead on the border. The day he had first found work had been the day that Tommy Wilson had been killed. Maguire had followed, and McKiernan and McNamee. The day Siobhan had gone into hospital to give him little Mary had been the day that Joe Fenton had been put to rest, and his Francis' birthday had been the day of the abduction of John McNulty before the torturing and the killing and the dumping. He could remember the day, bitter cold and bitter frightening, that he had heard on the vine through which whispered information flowed that Paddv Flood, volunteer from Derry, had been taken from his home for questioning by the security team. Who would bury him, if he stayed? Siobhan was involved now and that was his weakness. She was a as trapped as himself. They had shot Gerry Mahon, tout, and they had shot Gerry Mahon's wife, accomplice.
Siobhan was no safer than himself. The nightmare spread in him. If he were pulled in. If he were worked on by the security team, then sooner or later he would crack, and when he cracked he would name his Siobhan as tout's accomplice… Who would hold the children's hands in a churchyard? And if he fled, then his friends in hiding would be the bitch and her minder. He would have no other friends…
Mossie started the engine. He drove home to collect the second ladder. He could not scour from his mind the pain-streaked face of Mrs Riordan, walking in the lane and walking against the wind.
He was blindfolded. He was stripped naked. He was tied at the wrists and ankles. He lay on the bed.
They searched his privates and his nostrils and ears and mouth, and between the cheeks of his buttocks, and he felt the cold touch on his skin and Patsy Riordan's numbed mind told him that they used a metal detector over his body.
He was lifted from the bed.
He was taken across the room. He felt the thin carpet below his feet.
He was pushed down onto a chair.
The voice was in his ear. "You know who we are, Patsy?"
So difficult to speak. The fear strangled the words. "Yes."
"You know why you're here, Patsy?"
"I done nothing."
"You're a touting bastard, Patsy."
"No… no…"
"And you're going to tell me, Patsy, that you're a touting bastard
…"
The voice beat in his ears.
He was clearing his mind. It was the rubbish bin that had his attention.
After the Victoria bomb they had taken away all the rubbish bins, but the stations had become so filthy and fifteen months later with no more main line stations attacked they had quietly, no fuss, reintroduced the rubbish bins. The rubbish bins were back, but he didn't know how often they were emptied, and how often they were checked, and he didn't know where they had placed new security cameras at the stations. He had drawn the plan so that he could better work out where cameras might be placed, so that he could examine the possible fields of vision that the cameras might have…
"Hi, there, how you doing?" His mind was swept of the rubbish bin.
"We wanted to say…"
"Just tell him," the woman snapped.
It was a soft accent, it was real Cork, being in London hadn't harmed it. The young man blurted, "We wanted you gone…"
"Gone now," she said.
"I've got work, there's another baby coming…"
"We don't want it going on…"
"We'll not have our lives ruined."
He stood. Under his feet was the loose floorboard. Under the floorboard was a pistol and a timing device, and ammunition, and detonators and a circuit board. The anger was rising in him.
The young man said, "So, we'd be glad if you were gone…"
"By tomorrow."
He stood his full height. He sought to dominate with his physique, and he felt himself punched.
The young man said, "It's averages, really, sooner or later they'll have you. If they have you then they have us…"
Always his wife, she reinforced him. "The beginning and the end of it is that we've grown out of your games. We don't want them any more."
The anger bubbled in him. He said, "Wait, wait, easy, easy… Don't come in here feckin' telling me what suits you…"
"There's no call for language," the young man said. ,. Don't think you can feckin' push me. Don't think you can just throw me out on the street What’ll happen to you, you thought of that?
What'll happen when it goes back to Dublin that a snivelling little prick, a snappy little cunt, have put me out on the street? You thought. ..?"
Gerald Seymour
The Journeyman Tailor
"Don't threaten me," he said.
"… you thought what'll happen when I pass the word?"
She looked at him. He could see that she was not afraid. "Is that all you're at, making fear? I'll tell you something, this isn't home, this isn't where you run things. What are you going to do? You going to shoot us, because we want you out? It's a different place this, it's not your place. Your place is back where your bloody home is. You do what you bloody like where your bloody home is. I want you gone by tomorrow. .."
"Or what?"
She gazed back at him. She met his eyes. Donnelly looked away, He turned his face from her eyes. He heard her voice.
"Try me."
He heard the door close. He sat on the bed. He bent forward and pulled away the carpet and then with a savage strength He dragged up the loose floorboard. The ring of a voice in his ear. The voice of a brother. The voice of the brother who had gone; away. Not even a Christmas card now from the brother who had been gone nine years.
He took the folded sheet of paper, the plan, from its hiding place. The voice of a younger brother who now lived outside Albuquerque in New Mexico, and who was a big man and an executive in an electronics company, with a wife and a bungalow and a pool and two young ones.
The bell of a voice, I’m going, and I'm not coming back, because of people like you People like you make a shit of everybody's world You think you’re the big smart bastard but you're just rubbish, and i’m going somewhere where people like you would just squashed out of existence. You're not loved. All you have is the fear of your feckin’ gun. I despise you Jon Jo, and I am ashamed to be your family…’’He tried to read he plan, but there were tears running on the face of Jon Jo Donnelly.
‘’What we could do, we could hang you by your legs, hang you upside down, and we could cut the balls off you. You could blather all you wanted, no one'll hear you. We'll get it out of you, you bastard little tout…"
"I wasn't touting."
"What were you for at the barracks?"
"They pulled me in."
"Why'd they send a car for you?"
"To lift me."
"Why'd they let you go?"
"Don't know."
"Who was they?"
"Didn't give their names."
"Had you called them?"
"I hadn't."
Voices around him. The accusations dinning in his head. "Why'd they send a car to collect you… Where'd the money come from for your bike… How many times you met them…?"
Patsy screaming. "No… no… no…"
The quietest voice. "You knew, Patsy, you knew what was planned in Dungannon. Good men, Vinny and Jacko and Malachy. They was set up, Patsy. They was shot down like dogs . And you got money for a bike, and they sent a car to collect yon.
You say they just lifted you. Why should they lift you? Why didn’t they charge you?"
"I don't know…"
I Know, Patsy, I know because I can smell a tout when I'm close to him."
He sat on the chair. The darkness of the blindfold was around him.
The tightness of the binding cut at his wrists and ankles. Patsy Riordan knew no way to make them believe him.
She went to Sean Heggarty.. Hegarty sat in the hard oak chair and his pipe smoke mixed with the scent of the peat blocks on his fire, and his sister brought in tea and then scuttled for the safety of her kitchen.
I’m like everyone else on Altmore, Mrs Riordan. I know nothing and i see nothing and I hear nothing. I don't want to know anything, see anything, hear anything. There's an evil on the mountain, Mrs Riordan, and I live my life around it. I don't hold with murder, believe me, but I don't hold with touting either. If the police had your boy, had their claws in him, then I'm just sorry. I'm sorry for you, not for him, I can’t tell you anything that'll help, Mrs Riordan. I'm just sorry, for you…"
She went to the house of the man she knew to be the O.C. of East Tyrone Brigade.
The O.C. let her no further than the kitchen door.
"I don't know why you came here, Missus, it’s nothing that's my business. You go shouting your mouth round here, you go saying that I'm in the Armed Struggle, then you've got real trouble, Missus. I don't know who took Patsy away, I don't know why they took him away, I don't know what he might have done. No point in you, Missus, coming to me and asking that I speak up for your Patsy because I don't know who took him, why, what he might have done… only thing I'll tell you, Missus, if there's a tout from off this mountain and he's dead then you won't find it tears on me…"
She walked in the rain up the lane spattered with tractor mud to the house of the man who had twice in the last three months called at her home for Patsy.
The Quartermaster took her to the back of his garage.
"It's not my business, Mrs Riordan, and you're making trouble for yourself by coming here. It's the business of the Organisation, and I don't know anything about that. You'd best be asking them, Mrs Riordan, but don't be asking me where you'd find them. Not a clue.
Mrs Riordan, I wouldn't have the first idea. I'll tell you this though, if your boy's clean then he'll come to no harm."
The wind blew her coat hard around her as she came to the farmhouse far up the mountain slope.
Attracta Donnelly was in her barns and shovelling manure off the concrete and her brat was sweeping what she missed.
‘’You’ve an impertinence, Mrs Riordan, coming to me. What am i supposed to do? If your son's a tout, good riddance. Touts have destroyed fine men from here. There'll be no snivelling for the death of a tout in this house You want to complain, well don't complain to me.
Get yourself down to Dungannon barracks and make a complaint to the Chief Inspector there, the 'Branch bastard, complain to him about the entrapment of good young boys to spy against their own community. I don't know what you think I could do, and I don't know where you'd the idea that I was someone to speak to. The people I mix with, Mrs Riordan, are patriots, they'd sooner die than inform on their own. Good evening to you…"
She sat in her wet shoes in the priest's office.
He had made her tea and she held the cup in both hands to control her shaking, and the cake he had brought her went untouched.
"I talk very frankly to you, Mrs Riordan. I speak in the knowledge that you will hold what I say in confidence. I am a person of convenience here. I baptise the children, I marry the adults, I bury the dead. That is what is required of me, to be a functionary. I venture to say that I have no influence in those areas of wickedness that afflict our society. I can stand in my pulpit and I can demand, or I can appeal, for your Patsy to be released. I would not be heeded. I would be ignored. It hurts me to say it to you, but I am as helpless as you are. The men who hold your Patsy would have no fear of God's wrath. They surround themselves with armour that is ignorance and hatred. And, Mrs Riordan, I have to tell you what you know already, that this community holds powerful feelings against those persuaded by the police to inform against the men of violence. I can only pray, I can only urge you to pray…"
She did not know what else she could do. Mrs Riordan walked home.
She was not to know of the friend of the priest, who had grown up with him in a village in Antrim and who now worked high in the civil service administration at Stormont Castle, and who had the ear of the Assistant Under-Secretary, the Security Co-ordinator. She could not know that the priest would telephone his friend.
She could only go home to make her man's tea, to wait, and to pray.
The civil servant, the school friend of the priest, stood beside the Assistant Under Secretary, the Security Co-ordinator. He heard the blustering anger as the Englishman shouted at the phone link to the Chief Constable
"… There is a rule of law in this province, I don’t care what Five says. I don't give a brass farthing for the realpolitik of Mr Hobbes, or how he justifies his his sordid, dishonourable operations. I hold you accountable for the finding and rescue of that boy…"
"Patsy, I'm your friend
The voice in his ear.
"… I want to help you, Patsy
Hunger was in him, and tiredness, and, overwhelming all, fear.
"… Listen to what I'm saying, Patsy
There was the smell of cooking from downstairs.
"… You have half an hour, Patsy. You've that time to think on it.
In half an hour I'll give you paper and a pen and you will write out all your contacts and all the money they've given you, and all the operations that you've told them about. If you write everything down then we will take you to a press conference and you will read out the statement, and then you will be free to go…"
The breath beside his ear was of stale tobacco.
"… If you keep on with your lies, after half an hour, then you'll be given over to other men. We haven't treated you badly, Patsy, fair's fair, you'd see that. It'll be different if you get handed over to other men. They're animals, Patsy. There'd be cigarettes on you, there'd be electricity. I wouldn't want to reckon what they'd do to you, Patsy.
You've a half an hour to think on it…"
"Wait,"
‘’You going to talk? That's being sensible."
"Ask Mossie…?’’
‘’Ask Mossie what?’’
‘’Mossie ‘ll tell you I worked to Mossie. l's no tout, Mossie’ll know I’s no tout. Go to Mossie, ask Mossie, Mossie’ll speak for me…Mossie’s a grand man, he'll tell you I's no tout..’
The voice was murmured close to him. ‘’It was Mossie that named you.’’
A soft footfall slithering away on the carpet. He was left sitting on the chair and he thought his bladder would burst and his bowels would break.
There were a few times when he was told everything, and a few times when he was told nothing. Most often Colonel Johnny was given a partial truth.
He played host in his office to the Chief Superintendent from Division, and to Howard Rennie from Belfast and the Branch. He worked most days hand in glove with the Chief Superintendent from Division, but he had met Rennie only on a previous tour when he had served in the Intelligence section at H.Q. Northern Ireland. He thought that the Chief Superintendent from Division was present for form's sake. It was Rennie that he listened to. He remembered Rennie as a cheerful and no-nonsense man, and he was taken aback by the coldness of the Special Branch officer.
"… Against our better judgment, certain orders were given in the last forty-eight hours – the background is unimportant now – a boy called Riordan was arrested, questioned, released. I now realise that was an error of professional judgment, and I take no pride in my change of heart. Your intelligence and ours indicates a hunt on the mountain for an informer. Your most recent intelligence and ours indicates that the Riordan boy has been abducted by a P.I.R.A. security unit. He most certainly faces torture, and he most probably faces death. There is no way that Riordan is an informer, he is at worst a low-level courier. I now acknowledge that what we did was wrong, tactically and morally. I want that boy found before he is tortured. In Belfast a wasp's nest has been stirred up, and results are demanded. I need that mountain searched clean and I want that boy found alive."
He gave orders for the movements of his duty company and his stand-by company. In the outer office his adjutant was calling up R.A.F.
Aldergrove for helicopter support… Faint hearts abroad, he thought.. . Her hand would be there, he had no doubt of that, Cathy's hand.
Touts, informers, traitors, out on the mountain, that was Cathy's territory. Colonel Johnny was weak with words, but good at listening and evaluating. It was what an upbringing on the Scottish moorlands had given him, that words of justification were usually the cover for the half-truth. There were few words said on those high heathered hills that were of value. "Methinks he doth protest too much." The day a policeman, a Branch man, talked of morality, well… He thought it was pique, he thought Howard Rennie might have been crossed.
Cathy was out on the mountain. Her radio signal, her coded call sign announcing her presence had been logged in Communications.
"Five minutes, Patsy… A confession, signed. A press conference and you go free… Or… you get handed to the other men. Which is it to be? There's five minutes of a half hour left, Patsy…"
"I don't know anything."
"God help you if you go to the other men. The clock's turning, Patsy."
"Don't know, can't say what you don't know…"
From away below in the house, where the smell of the cooking had come from, was the clamour of a telephone's bell.
They lay in the wetness of the hide. They had been in the hide, by Bren's watch, more than five hours. They had heard the helicopters scudding overhead, navigation lights lost in the low cloud. It was the way they had been in the hide before, her half on top of him and her leg thrown between his thighs. They watched the bungalow alternately through the Night Observation Device lens. There was the wind around them, and the occasional bleating call of bullocks that were across the far side of the field and huddled down against the shelter of the thorn hedge on the far side of the field in front of them.
Bren whispered, "Nugent's the key, isn't he?"
"That's what we'll tell Hobbes."
"Song Bird's the jewel?"
So soft her voice, so calm. "Always has been, always will be."
"To bring back Jon Jo Donnelly? He was the star performer here, he was the best they ever had, is that it?"
"He's the stuff of their folklore, their bloody history. It's like they were lost when he went away."
"And the Riordan boy saves Song Bird?"
"Right."
The equations squirmed in his mind and spilled out the questions, and there was the deadness in the back of his legs where her weight pressed down on him.
"Because Jon Jo Donnelly's so important…?"
"Donnelly's public enemy Number One right now in London. You know that."
He heard the hoarseness of his own whisper. "You can live with what happens to the Riordan boy?"
"It's just my job."
"That's what they've always said, the people who ran the Nazi camps, the guards in Stalin's Russia, Saddam's torturers… They were just doing their job…"
"My conscience isn't bruised."
"Should it be?"
"A tiger terrorises a village, it's a man-eater. The villagers call in a marksman. He tethers a goat. The goat is sacrificed. The best moment lor the marksman is when the tiger takes the goat. The tiger is shot, but that's academic for the goat. Tough on the goat…’’
"You believe that?"
She shifted. Her face was beside his. He could see nothing of her. He could feel the warmth from her body and the breath from her mouth.
"You want my bible?"
"Give it me."
" There’s innocent people and good people, and they are suffocated by the killers. There's people out on this mountain who want nothing more than to lead decent and honourable lives Agonising is a luxury.
Out job is to free them of the suffocation. It's just a matter of priorities It's not nice and it's not pleasant, but it's the job I'm paid to do. End of speech…If i have another bloody question from you then I'll boot you out of here and you can walk home. Got me?"
"One more question."
"One, only one."
"What's it done to you, the job?"
He didn't know what she would have answered. The back door of the bungalow opened. It was his turn on the Night Observation Device. He saw Mossie Nugent come out of the kitchen door and go to the shelter of the back shed, and there was the small flash on the lens of a match striking. He saw Song Bird smoke a cigarette in the wind and the squalled rain of the night. Heh, Song Bird, are you feeling good?
Should be feeling good because there's a poor young bastard out there who is keeping you safe by going through three pints of hell. Heh, Mr Nugent, you'll be safe because Miss God Almighty Parker up here has given you her promise.
"I can't write nothing…"
"It's your friends, Patsy, they's given us the story. They's out looking for you with helicopters. They's searching houses. They's got roadblocks all over Altmore. Would they be doing that if you weren't theirs? Would they, Patsy? They've told us, Patsy, that you's a tout. .."
"It's bollocks. I's not a tout."
"… They sent an army to find you, Patsy, and that's telling us. It's your feckin' friends, Patsy, that's told us you's a tout."