pictures and especially the poster of La Monroe swathed in towels on a winter beach that he had seen in the shop behind Royal Avenue, and a thousand postcards of Old Masters, a mosaic of himself. His weights, maybe. A cat – he was certainly going to need company. When he had his own place he would engrave his mark on it. His rooms would be him. Just in case he got lost in this God-forsaken job and needed to remind himself who he had been. This room said nothing of her… if it hadn't been for Mr Wilkins' memorandum and the questions that it posed then the frustration of knowing so little about her might just have had him searching every last inch of the flat for clues. Mr Wilkins preserved his sanity.
The geography made it so obvious. A farmhouse on a hillside, and further down the whitewashed bungalow.
A farmhouse belonging to a P.I.R.A. activist and close to it was a bungalow that was the home of a P.I.R.A. activist turned informer. He didn't need a 2.1 in Modern History to sink that one in a corner pocket.
Bren folded the tartan rug. Her bedroom door was still closed. Song Bird was the solution. Mr Wilkins had to be a very great simpleton not to have cottoned on. Hobbes… well, presumably he had put it together. A little academic problem, nothing more, taking the heat off Mossie Nugent.
A little brain teaser, how to divert the pressure to Patsy Riordan.
Christ…
Nothing that Bren had done in London had prepared him for it. He had pushed paper. He had worked on the surveillance teams for the Arab desk and for the Irish desk. He had never played God. Never been detailed for that one. But he was heading that way, racing up t he ladder, volunteering for Belfast because that way lay the bright prospect of Senior Executive Officer rank. He wondered how he would have explained to his mother and father what his real world was. He might not know much about Cathy Parker, but by heaven he knew that she was strong enough for the real world..,
Christ…
He tapped on her door. No answer. More firmly. Still no answer. He thought that if he opened it, then he might just get his head blown away.
'Cathy,' he said. No answer. He opened the door.
The light from the window was on her. It was another anonymous room. One bed, one wardrobe, one chest of drawers, one chair, clothes on the floor. The bed was a mattress on the floor. She had tossed the sheet and the blankets off her body. She held the pillow in her arms.
Her breasts were against the pillow, the white of her arms was around the pillow. Total calm on her face. He wanted to kneel beside the mattress and kiss the face of the woman who slept with the peace of a child. Her pistol was beside the bed on the carpet, within easy reach if she had loosed her hold on the pillow.
He left a note for her, a page torn from his notebook, on the folded tartan rug.
He was the outsider and the thought was seldom far from Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne's mind, and each time he drove towards Altmore the thought was closer. It was the same country as his home.
He was from County Derry, what D.C. McDonald would have called County Londonderry. The farmers on Altmore were the same kind as his family. On Altmore the people loathed the R.U. C
He drove up through Donaghmore and away past the old Celtic cross, the symbol of his culture.
There was a mountain behind his parents’ land with the bracken and the gorse and the heather and the wind bent trees. Being on Altmore twisted the wound. It was more than four years since he had spoken to his father. To his mother he was a cross of agony because he could no longer come home in safety, and their meetings could only be in Belfast. To his brothers he was a traitor.
D.S. Joseph Browne was the rarity in the force because he had been reared at home and educated at school as a Roman catholic. His point of contact with the man beside him, eight years older, was the job.
When they were together, when they were a car team or an interrogation pair, then the work was the only factor that linked them.
He believed himself, as the token Catholic in the Dungannon R.U.C. station Special Branch unit, to be widely resented by the Protestants and Presbyterians with whom he served. He assumed it was thought that his promotion owed as much to his religion as to his competence.
The car was armour-plated in the hope that its doors and windows could withstand an attack from high- velocity weapons, and the chassis was reinforced to protect the crew from culvert bombs. They wore their own clothes, he and D.C. McDonald, and he had a pistol in his anorak pocket and D.C. McDonald nursed a loaded Sterling under a raincoat across his knees. They had been told at what time they should reach the pick-up point. They had been shown the exact place on the map. They had been shown the photograph of the youth they were to lift. The number-plates were fresh on the day before, but that was small comfort because the way the armour weighted down the car on its tyres said more than a new set of number-plates.
It was what he had wanted to do.
Bloody-minded, opinionated, stubborn, he knew himself to be all of those when he had told his family that he was accepted into the R.U.C., and his father had left the room, and his mother had cried, and his brothers had thrown their abuse at him.
He had made a frightened misery of their lives, and that he had not intended.
He slowed the car. It was a feck-awful place to be hanging about.
They were at the crossroads, where the lanes running between the high hedges met. The relief sighed in D.C. McDonald's teeth. The youth had appeared, had walked round the corner, ambling without a care, his work tools in the bag on his shoulder. He had been told the area around the crossroads was stiff with army; if they were there he couldn't see them. He reversed hard into a side lane, and then as the youth came past him he pulled out again facing the way that he had come.
'Patsy Riordan?'
'Who wants to know?'
D.C. McDonald flashed his card and there was the barrel ol the Sterling to reinforce it.
'It's R.U.C.'
The fear glowing.
D.S. Browne saw it.
'So?'
'So get in,' McDonald growled.
Joseph Mullins was a detective sergeant and on the force to show there was no discrimination against Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
'No problem, lad, just get in,' he said quietly.
He heard the door close behind him. He pulled away.
He glanced up at his mirror… Down the lane, behind them, a car was stopped.
11
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
