She was her withdrawn and distant self. She had told him when they had come back from the meeting with Song Bird that she needed to sleep and given him a peck on the cheek at her door, told him when she would collect him. She had been full of the cold business of the morning and he had tossed through the night, alone in his bed, where the words of hope and light and a future had pierced his mind.
They were round Hobbes' kitchen table, dabbling with cornflakes and toast and coffee.
"It's just a problem we could have done without, but it won't go away, and it has to be addressed."
Cathy said, "The nub of it is Song Bird's physical security."
"The nub of it – let me put it in a slightly different way – is that, to protect the policeman, do we endanger our Song Bird?"
Cathy said, "Saturate the area round the policeman and you might just as well send up a barrage balloon trailing a message 'Come in Mossie Nugent, your time is very nearly up'."
"I don't think I can be hearing you right, Cathy."
"You said it was a problem, I've not disagreed."
There was the quiet round the table. The neon beamed down on them.
It was still grey outside. There was a curry take-away carton on the draining board and an empty wine bottle. Bren wondered, in the silence, how much Hobbes minded that his wife was not over here with him.
"You're saying the policeman's nothing more than a nuisance…"
Cathy said, "No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that in a finely calculated arrangement of priorities, which I by God didn't ordain, Sony Bird comes first
It was a policeman's life, a man's life.
Bren was about to burst. The anger steamed in his tiredness.
"Hell of a shame he told you…"
Cathy said, "But he did, and I told you…"
Bren's finger jabbed alternately at Hobbes and Cathy. Past breaking point. "Jesus, this is not a bloody board game, this is just goddamn stupid. This is a man's life…"
Hobbes cut him off. "What's your difficulty?"
Bren shouted, control gone. "It's not a difficulty, it's a man's life."
Cathy said, "But it's Song Bird's life."
Bren's fist slammed onto the table. "It isn't one or the other. You have no choice but to protect D.S. Browne. You have no choice but to protect Song Bird. That's your obligation. You're not God, sitting in bloody judgement…"
"Steady down, young man."
Cathy said, "Put the lid on it, Bren."
"Sorry, Cathy, this isn't the sort of thing you put a lid on. I was a party to Patsy Riordan being fingered, I have learned and it will not happen again. I will not wash my hands of a policeman's blood."
Hobbes looked across at him, not even bothering to be angry. "You're like the whole dismal crew of them in London. Nobody wants to accept that it's a war here. They're just pussy-footing around. Killing in the way of the real fighting… Bloody delicate it’ll have to be."
Cathy seemed to understand what he meant, seemed satisfied that a compromise had been reached. He didn't, couldn't, know whether he had saved the life of a policeman at Dungannon, or whether he had simply made a bigger idiot of himself than before. She had slept alone in the bed where he had loved her. Cathy sipped at her coffee. She stared past him into the lightening day. He had been on her bed and loved her and he knew nothing of her beyond what had fallen into his hands in the one moment of weakness.
Hobbes was telephoning Rennie, making an appointment for them.
The wind off the runway caught at his face, and he rejoiced at it.
They had come in over the sea to the north of the city, swung over the coastline ol the villages and the inlets and the tiny harbours, broken through the bottom of the low cloud to see the sharp green of the fields, then banked for the airfield, he had been gone close to a year.
Passengers streamed around him, hurrying away towards the car-park area. Home… It was where Attracta was, and little Kevin. A hand on his sleeve. It was a girl who met him. He thought she was nervous of him. She drove. She took a perimeter road round the edge of the city, and she looked in her mirror often enough to have been on a driving test. He thought that she had been told not to speak to him. She took him to a house in the Tallaght estate. It was what he loathed, grey houses on grey streets under a grey sky. Where there had been grass there were kids' bike tracks and tinkers' horses and mud.
She pointed to a house. She was away before he had reached the door. They were waiting for him in the house. The greetings were in Irish. A young man and an older man. He had met them before, didn't know their names. He was told the girl had gone for petrol. He was told of a new team going onto the mainland… The war going hard in the Six Counties… New blood needed on the mainland, and new blood needed in the North… He was told of discord in the Organisation, of the chasm between those who wanted to fight on and those who wanted to cut and run for the negotiating table…
"It's what the Brits are working at, dividing us, splitting us, weakening us. Soft words to deceive, and there are some, the eejits, who are believing them," the older man said.
"It's said that if we haven't won in twenty years then we're never going to. I say if the Brits haven't won in twenty years then they're never going to. They're losing, and I'd say they've started to know it.
Hurt them, Jon Jo, so's they scream," the young man said.
He was told that there was a heavy-calibre machinegun in a cache on Altmore, and that he could have use of another. There was an R.P.G. 7, never fired, and eight warheads. There was 83 lb of Semtex, and more when it was wanted. There were automatic rifles, sniper rifles and handguns. There was what he needed, and there were men who would follow him. He should live rough and he could do that 'cause he was Jon Jo Donnelly and the mountain was his. Jon Jo told them of problems on the mainland, and neither of them wanted to know, said that was all in the past for him. He complained about the communications, the criticisms, but they slapped his back and said he'd done a fine job, not to worry himself about the recent slip-ups, they weren't going to be held against him. Sandwiches were fed him, and drink was given him. He was to set the mountain on fire, this was the now, and the year in England was over.
But he asked the question. The question had been in his mind all through the last night in Geneva, in his mind all through the flight via Zurich to Dublin.
"I'm taking it there's no touts on Altmore?"
"There was one…" the older man said.
"… and he was blown away," the young man said. "Altmore's clean."
Jon Jo said, "You'll hear them screaming, all the way down here, you'll see the fire, if there's no touts."
He was doing the late shift, noon till eight.
He kissed his wife and he kissed their baby's forehead.
The car was in the drive. He had already taken the car out of the garage and gone down the avenue to the shop for her. He was always careful. Detective Sergeant Browne had checked underneath his car at the start of the day. He kept a doormat in his garage and a light on an extension lead. He laid the mat on the concrete and knelt on it a nd craned under the chassis. He had looked under the centre of the car and then under the hidden wheel spaces. He looked behind the wheels on the other side.
They kept themselves to themselves in the housing estate, Catholics among Protestants, only on nodding terms with their neighbours. It would have been known that he was a policeman. It was the life he had chosen, and she had chosen to share it with him. The door was already closed on her as he slipped the key into the ignition. She never watched him drive away. She had told him once, not recently, but soon after they were married, that she sometimes went to the bathroom after she had heard the car drive away and threw up into the lavatory.
He was careful about his routine.
Detective Sergeant Browne went to work.
Mrs Wilkins had responded to her husband's decision to sleep in the Emergency Operations room with regular bulletins to his P.A. on the immersion heater and the apparently unending quest for a plumber.
Wilkins had put down the telephone on her, banged it down in ungovernable impatience. His P.A. was at the door. Why on earth had she put the call through? He was wanted in the E.O. room. He hurried down the corridor. God, how was he supposed to know where a reliable, and not extortionate, plumber could be found?… Archie handed him the secure fax message.
He gutted Hobbes' report. Through the open window, open because Archie smoked and Charles complained, came the steady drone of inner London's traffic. A policeman's life known to be at risk, targeted by the P.I.R.A., an informer's cover more or less on the other end of the same see-saw at hazard. There was a delicate trailing plant on the window ledge, a gesture of homeliness installed by Bill. A risk and a hazard getting in the way of the whole damn business. Archie's eyes questioned him. Ernest Wilkins was the man who had promised the Prime Minister… He had never been in the field. He was Curzon Street Man. And he had been a Leconfield House man before the move down the street to the new premises. Collater rather than hunter.
"Could demolish the whole thing," Archie said. "Could put us down the plug hole."
He felt age creeping up on him. He sent young people, men and women, into the field. He understood so little of what actually confronted them.
Archie said, "Can't for the life of me see why they didn't keep their mouths shut, let things roll."
Wilkins said, "I don't think the Service could survive it, if it went wrong."
Archie muttered, "Any war throws up casualties, stands to reason. I suppose they've gone native and got too close to things. That's what usually happens."
Wilkins sat at the table. He started, with his penknife, to sharpen pencils. He whittled away, assessing the worth of the life of a policeman.
Rennie exploded. "You ask anyone who knows, not inside your pathetic little point-scoring division, any soldier that's done proper time here. He'll tell you the R.U.C. should be the only ones handling informers. We have the skills, we have the patience. We're not looking for a bloody victory parade. We may have to wait two years for an arrest, to put together the evidence that'll stand in court, but we can wait. We're not fast-fix heroes…"
Bren thought every detective on the floor must have heard him and that, no doubt about it, was his intention.
‘’The sooner you are out of here then the better I am pleased.
In Christ’s name, what did you think you were doing, Cathy? You sit on a police target for fourteen hours – fourteen bloody hours. I, the likes of me, I could have been knocking on his wife’s front door.
Fourteen hours you sat on the information that a police officer's life was in danger. What am I supposed to say? I don't know where I'll find the charity to forgive this of you… For starters, when we get to Dungannon, it'll be you that I line up to explain to D.S. Browne that for fourteen hours you pissed about with his life. See if he understands your point of view. See if he's any more charity than I can manage…
It's our war, we know how to fight it, and we don't want clever bastards playing with our lives. You're dead in this province, Miss Parker
…"
She looked him square in the face. "We pay the bills…"
"Don't think you can pull the strings behind my back, young lady.
And don't you go thinking that I cared when I heard you were gone missing, that you damn near got yourself killed. Don't think that I was fussed…"
Cathy touched his hand. "Thanks."
At the Dungannon barracks two constables had been detailed to provide Detective Sergeant Browne with immediate close-quarters protection. They were waiting for him. His superior, the Detective Inspector of Special Branch who had taken Rennie's call, had set in train the process of transferring D.S. Browne and his wife and child.
Two detectives in plain clothes, women, armed, had slipped discreetly into the house, like friends calling for a coffee morning, to guard her and the baby and to help her with the packing of essentials.
Why wasn't D.S. Browne on the radio in his car, the Detective Inspector had asked of D.C. McDonald? Malfunctioning, in repair, been reported, should be in working order tomorrow.
The motorcycle had been stolen in the early hours of the morning in the Creggan estate of Derry, away to the west. It had not been seen on the motorway that linked Lisburn to Dungannon, but now it was at the wide roundabout at the end of the motorway, between Derrycreevy and Moygashel. Many motorists and lorry drivers saw the motorcycle on the Donnydeade side of the road, and saw the two men in their black leather gear and their crash helmets, bent over the engine parts. The messages came to them by portable radio. The first that the car had turned out of the avenue and onto the main road. The second that the car was turning onto the motorway. The third that the car had not used the alternative route from the motorway turn-off at Tamnamore, thai it was coming the safe way, the fast way. They had the make and the colour of the car and the registration. A van driver, carrying building equipment, saw the two men finish their repairs and straddle the 500 cc motorcycle and gun the engine. The car. came steadily into the roundabout. The motorcycle powered forward, drew level with the policeman's car.
There was the dark line of the high ground ahead. They were east of Crossmaglen and west of Forkhill. The girl had said that it was a good route, and it was the one that she knew best. Himself, he would have gone far to the west, almost to the Atlantic seaboard, before crossing the border, but he couldn't fault the girl's choice. There were no patrols, no roadblocks. The border was only a bump and a lurch from the car.
They crossed where the army had cut a ditch ten years before, where ten years less a couple of days ago the local people had filled the ditch in again. The lurch of the car told Jon Jo that he was home.
He saw a helicopter far away, a high speck. He saw the watchtowers of the Brit army on the hilltops. He saw the dark purple of the winter-scarred heather and the old gold of the bracken and the worn green of the fields. He settled back against the seat. He wound down the window and let the cold air rip into his face. The tension slipped from him. Jon Jo Donnelly was back among his own.
The car had gouged twin tyre tracks through the grass verge and down the bank. Bren stood beside the driver's window. The glass had gone with the gunfire. He stood and stared at the face of the come and she had looked at the dead, cold face and she had gone back to her car that was parked behind Rennie’s. Rennie’s driver was out of his car and smoking hard.
The back of the head was smashed to hell and gone but the face was recognisable. A young man’s face, and the moustache that all policemen in the province seemed to need, His tie was neatly knotted at his throat still and the shirt was soaked in blood. Bren stood a few feet away and Rennie was at his shoulder. He stood back because the Scenes of Crime men men, white overalls, were already at work, and the photographer. Subdued voices all about. Necessary stuff about camera angles and spent bullets, one of them chipped and, oh aye, out of shape, embedded in the inside of the front passenger door.
They had come off the motorway, following hard on Rennie 's car, swept the roundabout, past the football pitches, been short of the rugby club, when they had seen the rotating blue lights on the cars and on the police Land-rovers. A policeman saluting, leaning down, explaining to Rennie, and Rennic had been out of his car and walking briskly back to them. They might be interested, they might care to follow him. Cathy had walked down the bank behind Rennie and had withstood his terrible silence, not rejecting his fury, not denying the blame he was determined to wound her with.
She had absorbed it and she had gone back up the slope to the car. Bren knew nothing worthwhile to say. There seemed to be no anger around him. Too soon for that. Too much to get on with. It wasn't them, this time it was another poor bastard. He thought they had seen it all before, and would do it all and see it all again. He stayed until the men in black suits brought the plain wood coffin awkwardly down the steep bank.
He turned away. He didn't want to see the body manhandled out of the car.
He stood at the top of the bank and he gulped for air.
Cathy had her arms folded across her chest, watched him.
"I'm sorry," Bren said.
Rennie's voice was utterly flat. "That's very good. I'm very gratified that you're sorry. I'd be sorry if I'd sat on something for fourteen hours and not thought through the consequences. We could drive back to Lisburn and you could say the same thing to a young woman, that you're sorry, and you could help her change her baby, and you could tell her that for fourteen hours you slept on a little bit of information that had happened your way. Would you like to do that?"
He wondered if Rennie were about to hit him, if the big fist were about to belt him. The men in the black suits came past him, mud on their polished black shoes. Bren shook his head. "I don't think I've the strength…"
"To face up to the consequences? No, not many do. They leave that to other people." And without a glance at Cathy, he went to his car, slammed the door, and was gone.
Cathy said softly, "You have to hack it, Bren. There's no other way."
He saw the defiance on her face.
He saw no love in her, only her strength. He loved her and he felt his fear of her.
He was always tuned to the B.B.C.'s Radio Ulster when he worked. The B.B.C. didn't have the good music but it had the news on the hour. The news carried the condemnations:
The Secretary of State – "a bestial and pointless crime…"; theM.P. -
"… this dreadful murder of a young man who had the courage to stand up and be counted…"; a bishop – "… every decent-minded person will be revolted by this killing, this disgusting sectarian killing…"; and the Chief Constable – "… the force I have the honour to command will not for one instant be intimidated from its duty by the men of violence who prey on our society…"
Mossie heard them all. His hand shook and the brush strokes wavered. The bitch had let a policeman be blown away to keep him in place. No doubt on it. She had had all of a night and a morning to clear the policeman off the patch, and the policeman was dead. There was the trembling in his hand and he told the foreman that he was sickening with the 'flu, and that he was packing it in for the day.
The kids not yet returned from school. His mother was out, thank the Christ. Mary was asleep in her cot.
He told Siobhan of his power and saw the shock spread across her face.
"They'd do that for you…?"
‘’For me to get them Jon Jo."
"Does it frighten you?"
‘’Half out of my skin."
Jon Jo Donnelly had been the big man on the mountain. He had been the man the kids whispered of and the man the girls eyed. He had been the man that the soldiers hunted. When Jon Jo had been on the mountain then no policeman and no soldier had felt himself safe.
Mossie knew all the tales. Donnelly with the heavy-calibre, and with the culvert bomb, and with the long-barrel sniping rifle. There had been a big man in South Derry, and another down in Fermanagh, and another from Cullyhanna near the border in Armagh, all shot down, and there had been Jon Jo Donnelly. It was the stuff of stories.
"How much’ll they give you?"
"Don't know."
"It'd be thousands?"
"Sure to be."
As if the walls had ears, they sat against each other on the settee, they whispered to each other. The guilt bled him further with each of her questions, and she held his arm in both her hands.
"If he's so important to them…"
"He's all they talk about."
"To make it worth losing one of their own, has to be thousands."
"Be decent money."
"When does we get out of this feckin' place?"
"There's never a way out for a tout…"
He told her what the life was. He knew what had happened to others.
It always started fast. The flash of the bleeper. The interception of a hit car. Troops and police round the house, and sweet precious nothing of time to pack and get the kids together or drag them out from class, and the stampede out of the area. Eventually to England, chased through the military section of Aldergrove and onto an R.A.F. transporter. A pair of semidetached houses in some nowhere town in England. The minders sleeping next door, and spending their waking hours, their duty shifts, always with the family, always answering the telephone when it rang, always reading any mail, always with their guns. Go shopping and the minders drive. Go drinking and the minders buy. God knows how the children got schooled. Can't work because the minders don't allow it. Can't row because the minders'll break it up. Living on top of each other, suffocated. They all wanted to come back, he told her. They all ended the same way, scribbling letters to the priest pleading to be allowed back. And, sooner or later, they all came back, and they all ended in the ditch with the dustbin bag over the head…
"So what's the money for?"
"It's so's she can own me better."
It had been his decision, and she had gone with it, that the car should be minimum four miles further back from when they had last been to the hide. The car was off the road in forestry halfway to Pomeroy. It had taken them two hours and twenty minutes to reach the hide, fast going in rough country, in darkness.
She talked softly in his ear, but she rambled, not the Cathy of before.
"… if it hadn't been Browne it would have been someone else. They have the targets all drawn up. If we'd blocked Browne there'd only have been another target. They're never short of targets… They're so bloody clever. He'd have looked for the bomb under the car, and he'd have looked for a strange vehicle in his road, and he'd have stayed off using the back lanes. He'd have done everything right…"
He didn't want to hear. He could see all too clearly the white face of the dead policeman. He wanted her quiet.
"… So bloody good at the unexpected. They hit him where he just couldn't anticipate, and there's no defence for one man driving a car against two men on a motorcycle. That's where we lose, can't you see it? We're the procedure people. We have the duty rosters and the computers and we have the set-out way of doing things. They don't.
The Provos don't have a software system, they don't have banks of library folders, they make it up as they go along. We've never found anything approaching an archive system, yet there are people out there who know as much about how Colonel Johnny's battalion operates as he does himself. They don't have Operations Rooms and telexes and faxes, they hardly ever use the telephone. They don't have manuals. It's stone age stuff, and they're running us ragged."
"Let it go, Cathy."
The cattle were on the move in the field below the hedgerow where they were dug in. He thought she was talking because the strength was cracking.
‘’You have to understand that, because then you know the way to fight them. Company formations, battalion units, brigade groups, all with the back up, the civilian clerical workers and the Personnel section and the electronics, that's not the way. That's the structure that ties down half your force guarding installations, putting up fences and watchtowers and cutting yourself off from the war. God knows what the percentage is of people over here who are just indexing the war.
You can't index war and keep up with it, any more than you can index fog. I don't suppose Clause- witz said that but if he'd been in Northern bloody Ireland, he'd have said it alright."
"Cathy, will you shut up."
"We have to learn, and learn sharp. We have to fight body to body, at close quarters…"
"I want you to shut up so that I can concentrate."
He felt her stiffen away from him, but there was nowhere for her to go. They lay together in the hide. The cattle were drifting in convoy up the field towards their camera's position. They were dark shapes, ships in the night, in the grey haze wash of the screen. He zoomed the lens back so that he could see the advancing cattle. He panned off the cattle.
He searched the hedgerows down near the farm house. He focused as tight as possible on the outbuildings. He wondered how she would be, if the legend was taken from her. He wondered if she would last an hour, a day, a week, if her strength cracked. The cattle were coming forward. He raked the hedgerows and the outbuildings again. He looked for the shadow figure on the move. A light rain was falling. The hood of his anorak was up, but the water had started to dribble on his face. It was what he was paid to do, it was his bloody job of work. The picture was lost, then found again. There was the faint squelching of the hooves across the field, there was the bulk shape of a bullock on the screen. There were the big eyes, and then the snort of the nostrils. He saw the tongue stretch to envelop the picture image. He stared at the screen, at the misted blur. "Shit…"
The picture was gone again. He could break cover, he could get out into the field and chase the animals away from the camera…
"That is the goddam limit…"
In a stinking hide, in the pissing rain, wanting to use the plastic bottle and urinate, out in God's own death country, and the bloody tongue of a bloody bullock had licked the Night Observations Device lens, smeared it…
"That is beyond belief…"
Her lip brushed his cheek. "Try not to be pompous, Bren, it doesn't suit you."
She snuggled back against him.
"It's the hum that attracts them. Nothing you can do about it. Sheep are worse. Cattle'll move on, sheep'll stand round your camera all day.
Ask any of the farmers on Altmore to find a hide, and they'll put sheep in the field, three hours and they'll know where it is. Cattle get bored."
He turned his body. They were entangled. He smelled the clean and natural breath of her. No toothpaste, no garlic, no tobacco, because they were in the hide.
"What'll happen to us, Cathy?"
"That's not for now."
"What's our future?"
"That's for after Donnelly. Until then there isn't a future."
She wriggled out of the hide. He heard the faint sounds as she moved away up the hedgerow. They wouldn't understand, the Curzon Street crowd, not even Mr Wilkins, none of them would understand what it was to lie up in a hide and watch for a man to come home to his wife, and to know the man was for killing or capturing. That was Cathy's world, and she didn't bloody share.
Away to his right there was the lowing of a bullock. The cattle moved on, in search of the sound. And then the image was clear again.
Clearer than before. Cathy Parker, Night Observations Device lens polisher to Her Majesty. When she came back, she pushed herself down into the hide. There was the sweet warmth of her against him.
Bren whispered, "What do you want? Do you want him dead, or do you want him alive?"
No answer.
No reply.
He stared at the darkened farmhouse and the black outline of the farm buildings.
It was as he had left it. There was the gap in the wire that he remembered, tied up with twine. There was the hole in the hedge where the old dumped tractor wheel had broken the thorn down. There was the bog mud behind the barn. He circled the farm twice.
Home.
He came to the buildings very slowly, bent double He had come down from the mountain where he had made his sleeping place. Crawling the length of the hedge behind the field that backed onto the buildings.
He was soaked to the skin. There was a dull light in the hall, where it had always been at night. Crawling again by the barn and the low stone wall that protected the patch where Attracta grew her vegetables he could stay beyond the range of the light. He passed the frame of the swing that he had concreted into the back yard for Kevin. He came without sound.
Suddenly, from the kennel, the raucous and angry barking. Jon Jo whistled low. The barking died. The dog came to him. He knelt in the pitch darkness and he rubbed his hand on his dog's throat, and the dog lay on his back and thrashed his tail.
The key to the kitchen door was in the kennel, where it had always been.
"The dog barked," Cathy said. "Jon Jo's dog." "You meant it?" "What did I mean?"
"That it has to be body to body, at close quarters?" She mocked him. "You going to be around?"