It was the story that the small boy loved best, the story that had no ending."… When he had jumped the gorge, when he had escaped from the dragoons, Shane Bearnagh had to make the long way round the mountain of Altmore to avoid the troopers. They were furious at their failure to trap him, and they burned fodder barns and slashed the legs of the few cattle that the Catholic people had. More troops were sent for, from Armagh and from Omagh, and they searched all over the mountain. But the great mountain and the wild land behind, on either side of the road to Pomeroy, held its secret. It was no longer safe for a large group of men to be with him. Some deserted, some he asked to leave because he could not feed them."Hard times for Shane and his wife and his little boy. It was more difficult for him to bring them food, more dangerous for him to light fires to cook what little he had.
It was impossible now for him to stop the coaches that came up the mountain from Dungannon on the long road to Pomeroy and Omagh and then to Deny, because all the coaches were escorted by the dragoons. They lived mainly from eating wild berries, it was a great treat for him to find a stray sheep and kill it and cook. His beard grew, he was the wild man of the mountain. His wife and his little boy never complained of their life, and on the times when Shane would try to persuade her to go back down the mountain to her family, his wife would refuse. The poor people from the town would sometimes come up the mountain with food and fresh clothes for his wife and his boy, but they took great risk when they did so. If they were caught then their homes were burned and men would be thrown into the gaol in Armagh."The reward for information leading to Shane's capture was increased, but the people stayed loyal to him because they believed he was the last man in all Ireland to win the fight against the English who they hated. But the English were patient, they waited for a traitor.
There were some down below the summit who knew which caves were used by Shane Bearnagh, under which rock crags he sheltered with his wife and his little boy. The English waited…
"There were two journeymen tailors. They travelled the road from Dublin to Deny. They could repair the dresses of the fine ladi es in their mansions, they could make grand suits for the English gentlemen.
They were not from Altmore… It was winter, there was snow on the mountain. There were no berries to be eaten. There was no stray sheep to be killed because all had been taken down to the farms on the lower ground. Shane was starving. He had left his wife who was thin to the bone, and his little boy who cried at night from hunger. He took the great risk of coming to the road to find food for them. The journeymen tailors had horses and a donkey that they led behind them and that carried the cloths from which they made the suits and dresses, and their needles and their threads. They gave him food, but there was evil in their hearts. They gave him a small amount to eat and they fed him sweet words. They said they would be back in an hour with more, enough for him to take to his wife and to his boy. There was greed in their hearts. They thought nothing of the patriot. They thought only of the gold and silver pieces they would earn from the English.
"They came to a check point, where the dragoons searched all travel-lers. God rot them… They told the dragoons where they had seen Shane, and they said they had told him they would be back within the hour. Evil men, the lowest of the low, traitors… The dragoons found Shane and they rode their horses off the road to chase him and ride him down. At first he could hold them off. He had the long-barrelled musket with which he was a fine shot. He would stop and fire, and run, and load again, and fire, and run again. They were frightened, the English dragoons, they had no cause to die for, they were far from their own homes. But to keep them back he must shoot, and each time he fired on them so the small pouch where he kept his musket balls was lighter.
". All through the afternoon they chased him. The exhaustion grew in him. He was without food, without water, and running from men on horseback. He fired his last shot, and he ran. Each time he fired they came closer to him. He had no more shot for his musket… Shane tore the buttons from his coat. Now, he rammed the buttons down the barrel of the musket. They were just buttons that he fired at them, but still they feared him, they would not dare to approach him. He fired the last button from his coat. He stood on a high boulder. He was alone on his mountain. They circled him. The dragoons were all around him. He could see the road far off, and on the rood were the journeymen tailors who waited for their reward, he could no longer defend himself…"
"Did they kill him, Ma? Did the bastard English kill the patriot?"
"It's time for your light to be off if you're to be good for school in the morning."
Ronnie, just about to go in, heard the voices, checked, dropped his hand from the door, and listened.
Charles would do the watch duty the first night, and Bill would do the second, and then Archie would do the third, then Charles again.. .
Charles protesting: "We're throwing a thrash for the eldest, her birthday."
Bill complaining: "There's a college concert and Harry's on the cello."
Archie arguing: "Long-standing dinner engagement, been fixed for ages."
He heard Ernest Wilkins, the man who was walked over, the man whose temper was always secured.
"I don't think in his present mood, with the importance of the operation currently being launched by the Service, that your Director General would take kindly to backsliding, but you are at liberty to try him… Good, excellent. We'll be taking over the E.O. room in an hour when the domestics have scrubbed it through."
Jorelyn heard, and looked out of his office to check it, Ernest Wilkins striding down the corridor and whistling the theme to
'Carousel’, and there were two ladies with mops and buckets and clean sheets and laundered pillows working over the Emergency Operations room, and there was a Curzon Street engineer carrying into the E.O. room enough radio equipment to fit out a frigate, and an apprentice behind him festooned with telephone handsets and cable.
It would have been four years, maybe longer, since Emergency Operations had been manned round the clock.
"What I heard," said Jocelyn to Ronnie, "it's Ernest's finest hour. He's enmeshed the P.M. He's got Charles and Bill and Archie sleeping on the job…"
"When did they not?"
"No bloody joke… Poor old Mr Donnelly, I'd say he's a bad bet for insurance."
They went down the corridor. They looked into the E.O. room where the engineers tested the radio and confirmed the phone lines. There was a full-face picture of Jon Jo Donnelly, life-size, on the wall above one of the two iron-framed beds, and on the pillow of that bed was a pair of folded, ironed, pyjamas.
On the upper deck of the big ferry boat Jon Jo leaned on the rail. The salt was in his lungs, the wind cleaned his throat, the air scoured his cheeks. Winter stars above him, and the swell of the waters of the Biscay below him. He felt freedom, and the love that a man has for the going home from work hard done.
The dawn had not yet given way to day when death came again to the mountain.
He was ambushed halfway between Donaghmore village and the start of the mountain climb. Death was carried by a burst from a Sterling sub-machine gun and two aimed rounds from an F.N. rifle.
The milk cart was slewed across the road. The driver's window was smashed. A body was slumped over the steering wheel. Blood seeped in the cab. A foot was rooted down onto the accelerator pedal and the drive wheels spun wildly in the rain ditch.
A car, stolen by Protestant para-military sympathisers, would later be found, burned through, at a picnic site on Lough Neagh, and later still a statement would be issued in the name of the
U.V.F. claiming that the dead man had been a known Republican activist.
Dead in the cab of his milk cart was the man who believed that he had no living enemy.
The widow of Pius Blaney stumbled, dazed, around her kitchen to make tea for the priest. She urged him to let it be k nown that she wished for no retaliation, that Pius, the softest-hearted man you could find in all Ireland, he would have wished for no retaliation.
The corpse in the mortuary not yet cold, a post mortem examination of gouged bullet tracks not yet completed
The O.C. met Mossie Nugent.
The urgency spilling in him, the eyes gleaming. "I want a target."
Mossie stalling. "Would you not do better to wait for Jon Jo, not go rushing?"
"I want a target and quick."
"I'll think on it."
"You'll do more…"
"It takes setting up…"
They sat in the O.C.'s car. The O.C. had interrupted him on his way to work. The fingers below the plaster on his wrist were swollen sore, resting on the wheel.
"You got a problem, Mossie?"
"I got no problem."
"Why the bloody cold water, why the bloody ice"
"I was just saying…"
"Why d'you kill what I want, Mossie?"
The eyes searched him. Same eyes, same strip search, as in the barn.
" There's no call for you's and me to quarrel, Mossie… We wait a few days and the mountain will say the Organisation is soft. You let those Prod feckers kill Pius Blaney on the mountain without an immediate response we can pack the whole war in. I don't need a Jon Jo back to tell me that. Give me a target, Mossie, and quick."
Mossie said, "There's a U.D.R. bastard, drives the bus from Stewartstown. He carries a gun, but he'd never reach it…" "Too small.
For Pius Blaney, people'd want something better." "There's a place where they've put patrols down from a Puma. The helicopter's used the same pad two limes in the last month. Could stake it…"
"Needs six men, needs a heavy-calibre, you could be waiting for ever. I want now."
"There's a Catholic in the Special Branch in Dungannon. He's Browne…" "Do us great."
He gave an address. He listed two sets of car registration plates.
Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne. He gave the name and the address and the make of the car. "How'd you do it?" "What's it to you, Mossie?"
The eyes cut him. Mossie was getting out of the car. "Just asking
… just talking." Mossie gave his O.C. the full smirk. "And I wouldn't be wanting to see another disaster like there was with that wee woman."
He was the master of the Task Co-ordinating Group meeting. They had no alternative, Hobbes was in the chair. The major and the Assistant Chief Constable and the colonel and Rennie of the Branch and the Assistant Under-Secretary, they could only listen.
"… This is a Five operation which we will direct. When we require help we will request it. Any shortfall in co-operation will be reported immediately to London and then to the Prime Minister's office. We believe that Jon Jo Donnelly has already left mainland Britain. In our view, he will return quite shortly to his home territory, to Altmore mountain. From midnight an area with a radius of five miles from his home there will be declared Tactical Out of Bounds. There will be no military or police movement inside the area without my express permission. Overall direction of the operation against Donnelly will be handled from Curzon Street. I will have my people on the mountain and they will have discreet support. They will wait for Donnelly, and when the time comes a hit force will be moved in. This is the way it will In Questions…?"
Bren, sitting behind Hobbes, watched the face. And mid stares, and no questions. Not finished, not quite, binding the last blood.
"… In London, they want Jon Jo Donnelly's head and I aim to give it them."
He shuffled his papers together. Bren saw the smirk on his face.
And he saw the dry smile of the major who would provide the back-up, and the dented pride of the Assistant Chief Constable, and the suppressed fury of the colonel, and the flustration of the Assistant Under-Secretary who already knew that his master had been overruled. Rennie sucked at his pipe, he shut the briefcase, and leaned towards Hobbes, out of earshot ol the others
"You're an arsehole, Hobbes, and sending her back onto Altmore makes you simply a bigger arschole
He had been on the upper deck all through the night. He felt that the sea air had purged the memories, the fear of mainland Britain.
He had used one of the British passports to go through the port immigration. He left the ferry boat behind him, whre it dwarfed the fishing fleet that was clustered under the shelter of the harbour wall. Donnelly took the bus from Santander to the airport at Bilbao. He felt freedom within his grasp, and his Attracta and his Kevin, and he felt the joy grow in him that a man has in the going home from work hard done.
They stood by the cars.
Hobbes said, "Just get over to her, and the both of you start moving."
"She told me to pick her up this morning, I think she should be allowed to rest…"
When she needs a nanny then I'm sure she'll ask for one. In the meantime look at yourself, get a bit of drive into your system."
Hobbes walked away from him. Bren went to his own car. The radio came on as he switched the ignition. A milk delivery driver, Catholic, shot dead by gunmen, Protestants… Christ, what a bloody awful war to be a part of… All the funerals going through his mind that were daily catalogued on the local television. A dog handler, and his Alsatian trotting behind the hearse with the police coat on its spine. A soldier, the union flag and his beret on the coffin carried by the bearer party from his platoon. The little escort behind Patsy Riordan's family, furtive as if they hoped their presence didn't give offence to those who had taken his life. A taxi driver in Belfast, his cortege made up of the cabs of his fellow Protestant workers. An English scaffolding erector, murdered for working at the new police station in Strabane, and his wife on sedation and eight months pregnant and supported by family who wouldn't have known where Strabane was… The war he was a part of.
Some had been warned that they were targets, most knew only generally that they were at risk.
The detective sergeant sat with the other plain-clothes police. He was opposite the Press seats, close to the witness box, side on to the dock, half facing the Lord Chief Justice, and he was already nodding.
Crumlin Road, No. 1 Court, always had the central heating turned up as if the Lord Chief Justice had been imported from the Caribbean, not Carrickfergus. He was there to see Brady go down, and preferably for a tenner. Some of those that he saw, between the moments that his head dropped, would have been warned of specific danger, more would just have accepted the general risk to their lives. Judges were shot by the P.I.R.A., defence lawyers were shot by the Protestants, the prison officers guarding the dock were detested equally… He was the man who had turned his back on his history, his family. He worked for Protestants. His wife of three years, Catholic upbringing, lived wiih their eight-month-old baby amongst Protestant neighbours.
Detective Sergeant Browne wore his pistol under his coat. Policemen were allowed to carry their guns into court.
He dozed because he had not slept, the baby's teeth, and close lto him was the exhibits bench for the case against Brady, and laid on the bench were a Kalashnikov rifle, and a Remington rifle, and a Luger pistol, and their ammunition, all wrapped in plastic bags, killing weapons.
He had heard on his car radio of the murder of Pius Blaney, the milk-cart driver. There would be reprisal, Detective Sergeant Browne knew it. It was inevitable.
He drove via the Department of the Environment office. The message was on the answer phone. He transcribed it and then rang Cathy. He spoke to her recording machine which didn't answer him back, heard him out.
Bren walked into the city centre, through the security gates and down Royal Avenue, and into a florist's and chose four dozen amber and gold chrysanthemums.
He drove out to her flat. The radio said Pius Blaney was sixty- four years old, a man who had publicly and all his life rejected violence, who was respected by Catholic and Protestant customers alike. He caught himself thinking, well, they would say that, wouldn't they, and resolved to ask Colonel Johnny next time he saw him what was the truth about Pius Blaney. And would someone In- saying the same thing one day about Jon Jo Donnelly, farmer, respected by all his neighbours, devoted family man, violence an anathema to him… Mr Mossie Nugent, painter/decorator, a pillar of the community, no known association…
‘’Responsibility for the murder of Mr Blaney has been claimed by…’’
Bren snapped off the radio. Shut out the madness that was the real world. Wasn’t ready for this real a world. Hadn't learned the code yet.
Mr Gary Brennard had no known association Mr Gary Brennard, Bren to his intimates, needed a known association. Needed it one or two hundred light years from Belfast, for starters.
He took the stairs three at a time, carrying the flowers and wondering if she'd accept them.
Bren rang the bell He waited. He rang the bell again. A man in a pinstripe and with an attache case came out of a flat on the same landing and stared at Bren, seemed to quiz him. He might have been a Five man or a 14th Intelligence man or a Special Military Intelligence Unit man. On the other hand, he might have been an accountant, a sales rep, a bank deputy manager, and he might have rejected violence all his life… There had to be another life, another world. Did accountants, sales reps, bank deputy managers believe there was hope for this world? The man smiled at him, and went down the stairs. He kept his finger on the bell.
Just reflex, he tried the handle. The door opened for him.
He called her name. On the floor were her anorak and her shoes and her jeans and her sweater, a not very straight path to her bedroom.
He crossed the room.
Bren pushed the bedroom door.
The curtain was not drawn, the curtain had been left open. The light flooded the room.
She lay on the bed.
She held her pillow against her. Her eyes were open. She stared at the pillow and the wall ahead of her. The bedclothes were rucked half over her body.
Bren knelt beside the bed. He put her open hand on the flowers and closed her fingers on the stems. The flowers shared the pillow with her.
He took her other hand from the pillow and he held it between his own.
He saw the blood red of her eyes and the rose pink of her face. He thought that if she had slept then she had cried herself to sleep. Beside her hand, beside the flowers, beside the pillow, was the low table on which was the light and a handwritten letter and her pistol. A firm feminine hand, he thought it would be a letter from her mother, he thought it would be everything safe like his own mother's letters would be, everything that a mother scared half out of her wits would write to her child who was covert in Northern Ireland. He moved the pistol to the floor, so she could see the flowers, not the pistol.
"You're a bastard…" she said, "for coming here, finding me."
There was no strength in her hand. He saw the bloodshot eyes and the bruising. He saw the scars on her temple. Bren put his arm gently under her neck and he lifted her head and shoulders and he held her against him. He tried to kiss, softly, the bruising and the scraped scars.
Her head was against his chest.
A small voice. "I hadn't been so frightened, not since I was a child.
The cat brought a rabbit into the kitchen. The rabbit was alive. The cat held the rabbit by the throat. What frightened me was the fear in the rabbit's face, it was a big animal, nearly as big as our cat, but it was so frightened that it just let itself be killed by the cat
…"
His fingers were in the short cut of her hair. He kissed her mouth, where the hand had punched the blood from her lip.
"… It was only when I thought I was going to die that I fought them. I'd given up, and I don't know where it came from. It was the last chance I had. It's all about fear… I shouldn't have been alone, it was my fault. It wasn't your fault… Cathy Parker, not a nerve in her body, she'll no anywhere, not a nerve in her bloody body. I'm the living, walking, talking bloody legend. It's what I live with, that they'll get to find that Cathy Parker is just scared stiff. I went there for myself. It was only bullshit, it was to show myself that I could take it, cope with being so bloody scared that I could shit myself. Fear of failure, that's what drives you on. You have to keep proving it, testing it, that you're not scared. You said I'd make a mistake. I did, bloody fool, I showed them my voice. I was just so tired… and the bloody legend'll go on.. ."
He held her close against him. He kissed her cheek where the fist that had worn a signet ring had belted her.
Do you understand?"
" There has to be hope."
" They shouldn't know."
Bren said, "There has to be light for us."
"I couldn't survive it, not if they knew the legend was a bloody s ham."
"I want a future for us."
"You wouldn't tell them, Hobbes and Colonel Johnny and the boys?"
He' thought of them. Hobbes, who supplied the tourniquet of pressure, and who talked of Five's show, and who had only shaken her hand and kissed her cheek without emotion. Colonel Johnny, sad and caring and loving her as an uncle would a favourite niece. The boys, gruffly worshipping her and driving up the mountain in controlled silence and not knowing whether they were heading straight for a free-fire ambush situation, the cardboard city man and Jocko and Herbie.
"Not theirs, it's our business."
There was at her broken mouth something that he had not seen before. It was the trace of shyness. Her eyes, red, pouched, squeezed between bright bruising, dropped. She kissed him back.
Bren said, "If there is no hope and no light and no future then there is no point, no bloody point at all, in us being here…"
She kissed the words away from him. Then she pushed him gently back. She threaded the coat from his shoulders, and pulled the sweater over his head. She unbuttoned his shirt, pushed it off his arms. She loosed his belt, she reached to prise away his shoes and his socks. She reached up to the curtains and pulled them closed, and stiffly drew off her T-shirt. She took the flowers in her arms and lay down with them.
He took off his trousers and his shorts. She reached up a hand to him.
She pulled him down onto her. There was the wet cold of the stems on the sheet. Her shoulder crushed the chrysanthemum blooms, amber and gold. The petals merged in her hair, gold and red. The nakedness of her against him.
"I love you, Cathy Parker…"
Her legs close around his, pinioning him. Her mouth brushing his, welcoming him.
Later, she made him tea. Later, she went to the living room, and as he lay on his back he heard his message to her, that Song Bird wanted a meeting. Later, she took the battered flowers and put them in a water jug and carried them back to beside her mattress. Later, when she was dressed, he heard the sounds, metal on metal, sis she loaded the magazine into her pistol. Later, he had called to her that an emergency operations room was in place at Curzon Street, and that it was thought Jon Jo Donnelly was travelling back to the mountain.
He had told her that he loved her and she had not replied. But she had kissed him after she had made the calls and loaded her pistol, and heard him out,
She stood in the doorway of the bedroom. The calm was once more in her face.
"I love you, Cathy. I will never let you be alone again. I believe in the hope and the light and a future beyond this bloody place."
"Come on, my pretty boy, let's go to work."
"He comes back, we nail him, you go home."
"Let's just take it one step at a time."
The flight for Geneva left Bilbao airport, carrying Jon Jo Donnelly, travelling as James McHarg, on the wide route back to the mountain.
The Commander said, "You say he's gone… well, all I can tell you is that the ferry ports, Channel and east coast, have been put on a high state of alert, and all the airports, and all the Irish routes, and there's not sight nor sound of him."
Wilkins was the closed door. "Is that so?"
"His landlady was adamant that he was headed for Germany or Holland…"
"Of course, what I would expect."
"I'm going to crank Dublin up, just in case he's dumb enough to go direct…"
"I wonder if that's wise. I don't think so. Where are they now, their transferable goal posts, on the extradition issue? Close to the h alfway line? I wouldn't think it necessary to involve our Irish colleagues. I recommend the matter be resolved on our own grounds."
"It's your funeral…"
Ernest Wilkins smiled. "My funeral or my party, we'll have to wait and see."
He despised senior policemen, and disguised his feelings under a bed of humility and politeness. They were such different men. He thought the policeman, the Commander of the Anti-Terrorist Branch, would retire to the boardroom of a major industrial company and augment a good pension with a fat salary. He, himself, and the office clock and the sherry gathering for colleagues in the Director General's office was beckoning, would slip away after thirty-two years of service to a Cornish cottage, to oblivion.. There would be no bar-fly anecdotes from Ernest Wilkins, only the closeted memories of the young men and young women that he had sent into the field.
With obsequious courtesy he escorted the Commander to the side-door exit of the building, then hurried back, not waiting for the lift, up the stairs to the Emergency Operations room. He was told Song Bird had rung for a meeting. He was told Parker and her minder were on the move. He felt a rare flush of excitement… he would detest the Cornish cottage and oblivion.
"… they's going to do a hit, a policeman."
Cathy incisive. "His name?"
"Browne. Detective Sergeant."
"Working out of?"
"Dungannon barracks, Special Branch."
"When?"
She was riding him, taking him, roughly, under her control.
"I don't know."
"What do you mean, you don't know?"
"Wasn't told."
"Why weren't you told?"
"They're keeping everything feckin' tight."
"Where then?"
"Don't know that either."
"What do you know, Mossie?"
"I gave you his name."
"Tell me when."
Mossie said, "Want to do it fast. Want to hit him while the anger's hot on the mountain. There was plenty of love for Pius Blaney."
Bren saw that Mossie couldn't keep his eyes from her face. He stood to the side of the quarry, a little away from them. Some of the time he listened closely, and most of the time he watched the road at the quarry entrance and the rim of the steep bank. The back-up was somewhere up the road, with difficulty squeezed on the telephone from Rennie.
"Heh, miss, you did well out there. But, Jesus, you frightened me. Can you's do your drinking in some other bar now?"
He heard her light laugh. "How are they, our friends?"
"It was the O.C.'s wrist you broke, and you half bit off the Quartermaster's hand, the lad's in hospital…"
She gave him a new telephone number. Bren watched. A fox was slipping by the top of the quarry wall. He heard Donnelly's name. The fox stopped and stared at him, the intruder. He heard a sum of money mentioned. The fox darted away.
"Miss, if there's patrols and things there, if it's obvious they've been touted… it can come back to me."
She slapped his shoulder. "Just get on home, Mossie. I'll take care of you."
Mossie's car, no lights until he was well down the road, skidded away.
He put his hand loosely on her shoulder. She let it stay there, only a moment, then shrugged it off.
Bren heard her mutter, "Shit, why the hell did he have to tell me?"