dangers. He was the greatest Patriot that ever came from the mountain, and never forget that he was a Donnelly. He was cheeky with the English dragoons, he played games with them, and all they could do was curse al him from a distance..,
‘’The English farmers complained bitterly to the English soldiers; how could one man for so long outwit all their soldiers? So a new officer was sent from England to hunt Shane. His name was Black Jemmy Hamilton. He was the cruellest of all the officers who ever came to Altmore. He tried to terrorise the native Irish into betraying Shane Bearnagh, but they never knew where he was. One of Shane's tricks was to colour the coat of his horse so that they would not recognise him. One day, when Black Jemmy Hamilton was away searching with his horsemen, Shane came down to the unguarded barracks and he was fed by the wives of the English soldiers. He took everything that he wanted. It was as if the wives of the English soldiers were shamed by the way their own men behaved to the downtrodden Irish folk.
Hamilton and his soldiers came back from another wasted day on the mountain tired and angry and found that their larders were empty. His fury was terrible. All of the wives were beaten, and Hamilton swore that he would not rest until Shane Bearnagh Donnelly was captured and hanged…'
'Did they ever catch him, Ma?'
It was the story that never ended… She told him it was time for them to go to feed the cattle.
Ernest Wilkins had done it before, and he would do it again.
The afternoons of a weekend were a good time to reach the Prime Minister's aide. The Principal Private Secretary could always ensure that a brief message reached his man.
He had travelled into London from his home.
'… The Prime Minister made a quite excellent suggestion at our last meeting. I would like him to know that it is already being acted upon.
We are starting rather a vigorous programme this evening. You'll make quite certain that this is reported to him? I am very grateful
…'
All the way into London at a weekend, into the near-deserted Curzon Street building, to make one secure telephone call. It was the way he had advanced to Desk Head. Within ten minutes of entering the building he was leaving it.
It was a cold, grey day, with a mist hanging in the valley. There was a fleck of sleet in the air. They looked down from the crest of Altmore mountain.
Bren no longer smelt his own clothes, nor could he smell Cathy.
Bitterly cold in the cardboard city man's anorak, no gloves in the pockets. He could see the villages and on down to the Ballygawley road, and at the edge of his vision, before the cloud took over, were the towers and the smokier haze of Dungannon. It was a journey's end, it was where he had been volunteered to work. Beneath them the bracken and heather ran down a long way to the farmland below; the gold brown of the dead bracken and the dull dark green of the heather. There was no sign of life in the upper part of the mountainside. There were trees that were bent and stunted. His gaze shifted to lower down. The farms on the high ground were the smallest, the houses and the fields on a seemingly smaller scale. Bren knew nothing of agriculture, but it didn't take a trained eye to recognise that this was mean land. He saw a man walking with a dog along the edge of a field. He saw a car speeding along a narrow lane. Cathy passed him a pair of binoculars, the sort an ornithologist would have in his pocket on a weekend hike.
His vision roved further down the slope, larger farms, larger houses, larger fields. He found a village, then another with a tall steeple, with a graveyard behind the church, and he could see the black marble of the stones and the colour flicker ol flowers.
She slipped her arm round his waist. He felt the warmth of her, She scratched with her finger at his hip, as if she were teasing him, like tickling under a cat's chin. 'Don't panic,' she said. 'It's only in case we're watched.'
He had the Browning automatic pistol in his belt, and she had the Heckler and Koch in her hand, hidden under her anorak. 'It's just like home,' he said.
'Is that right?' She was grinning at him. Her head was against his shoulder.
'Stupid, but 1 can't feel the threat.'
'Concentrate and listen.'
She talked, and the binoculars were hard against his eyes. 'The village, the top one… There was a U.D.R. man used to do a milk round, didn't think that anyone knew he did soldiering at night One day he had the flu, lucky for him, because that was the day they were going to kill him Another man did the round
He died in the street near the shop. See the bar? The shop's beside the bar. Everything was fine, though. They apologised for murdering the wrong man… Go to the top end of the village, where the bend is. That's where the S.A.S. man crashed his car. They had a guy pounding him with an A.K. sticking out through the sun-roof of their motor, real Wild West stuff. It was very sharp thinking to get his car into a ditch, gave him cover and two free hands. He did really well, he closed them down with his pistol, scared them off, hit at least one of them. We know he hit one of them because there was a stake-out, an ambush, nine months later and one of them who was killed then had scars in his gut… Got the little road, running across us, north to south? Got the bridge? They had a come- on bomb under there, eight dustbin loads of fertiliser mix.
They got the army up there and set off the secondary bomb, the killer, took a whole group of squaddies right out… Go back to the village, far side of the road, near the bar, the flagpole and the heap of rock, that's the memorial to a hunger-striker, dead before they called it off… The village down the hill, tiny place, get the church and the cemetery at the back. The big Celtic cross, that is the Republican plot, there's half a dozen of their best in there… Go on down the road, away from the village, that's where they killed three police, culvert bomb, you can't see the new tarmac from here… The guys who do the heavy stuff over in Europe, they're from here, and on the mainland too. Forget Belfast, this is where the aggravation is. Time we were off. Put the binoculars away.
Been out here too long. Just hold on to me for a moment. Try and look as though you were enjoying it. Lie back and think of England, Bren.'
The heat of her body had found him. He felt a spreading fear, a growing excitement. Bren gazed down the mountain slope over her shoulder. He saw the smoke from the chimneys of the lonely and dotted farmhouses. He heard, so faintly, the shout of the man walking his dog, and the dog was two fields away and springing in pursuit of something too small for Bren to see. It was where Jon Jo Donnelly was from, the home of the man whose photograph he had seen briefly on Mr Wilkins' desk. He wondered how a man from here, the raw countryside, could survive in any city.
'Are they watching us?'
'Might be, might not be… the third or fourth time, if we were recognised again, if the vehicle became a habit, then we would be. Does that frighten you?'
'There's nothing to see to be frightened of.'
'When you do see something it's probably too late. Come on, you smell revolting.'
Her arm was away from his waist. He stood his ground. 'Where is he?'
'Who?'
'Where's Song Bird?'
'Down there, somewhere.'
She had reached him, spread the fear in him. 'In God's name, how does he stand it?'
'I don't know and I don't care. It's only important to me that he keeps singing.'
She snatched at his sleeve. She dragged him away.
He let her into the Subaru. 'Is this where you come when you're out at night?'
'Come on,' she said. 'Let's get a cup of tea.'
Bren drove.
In the village, on the corner by the bar, near the hunger striker's memorial, a group of youths watched them go by. Past a small and well-built school with a tarmacadam playground, and a gaelic pitch.
Prosperous bungalows on the edges of the villages. And Cathy was alert beside him. He had seen nothing that was different, out of the ordinary. She showed him where a police reservist driving a lorry had been ambushed and shot dead. He turned onto the Dungannon road and she nodded to the low wall, told him they had hidden behind it when they had waited to shoot and kill a police inspector.
