The Journeyman Tailor by Gerald Seymour

mistake."
    He had been born in November 1963, and on the day that his mother had come out of hospital the President of the United States of America had been assassinated. He had been brought up in a small street of houses in Bristol near the factories at Filton that were now occupied by British Aerospace. They were Aerospace people, his father and mother.
    His father drove a minibus, eight hours a day, five days a week, round the works complex, while his mother did the same hours and the same days in the canteen kitchens. They understood so little of their son, an only child, as to make contact points minimal. So little understanding, so few contact points, but throughout all of his schooling they had tried so hard to help and encourage him with his books. They were barely a part of his life now.
    "Why me?" Bren said.
    "God knows. Presumably, better qualified people are not in position."
    "I'm not complaining."
    "Well, don't damn well sound like it . . . and don't, please, since time is short, interrupt me again . . .
    "Informers are our eyes and our ears. Without the informer I doubt we'd still be in there kicking. We know that, and so do they. That's how important it is. But informers don't grow on trees. Take some figures . .
    . We approach a hundred men, men we have some leverage on, we work very hard on them, pull all the strings and still we might only get five who turn our way. Work on the five and we might, if we are bloody lucky, get two who are halfway useful. Work on those two, and we might just get one who in time will be close to the centre of operations. That is a valuable commodity."
    He'd hogged those books, and done the Scouts and the C.C.F., and he'd gained the necessaries from his examinations. Gary Bren- nard had won admission to the University of Surrey at Guildford. There were boys from Esher and Haywards Heath and Went- worth, and girls from Horsham and Cheam and Virginia Water. He met money. For a 'Gary'
    there was no access into money. Money marked out the kids who were going far because they had the launch pad of connection and opportunity. Within three weeks of starting his first term, Modern History as his major, he had let it be known to anyone who cared to speak to him that his name was 'Bren'. 'Gary' was buried, a terraced house in Filton went down the drain, a father who worked as a minibus driver for British Aerospace and a mother who loaded the dish-washer in the canteen were off-limits. He joined the Conservative Club, worked bloody, bloody hard, and went home less and less frequently.
    He was further distanced from his parents, saw them more rarely, didn't know how to cope with it, took no pride in the estrangement.
    " . . . A dead informer is bugger all use to us. Your job is to keep him alive. It is very hard to think of the circumstances that make it worth sacrificing a tout in place . . . The very suspicion of a live one causes a high degree of chaos and demoralisation. The Provisionals are paranoid about what they call touts. When they have a tout hunt underway - always undertaken by a special unit of the worst killers -
    then everything else is dropped. It's an obsession with them. The worm eats into the terrorist who's been arrested. He cannot get it out of his head that he's rotting in prison because of the man he thought was his brother in arms. The volunteer who's going to the cache to collect his weapon or his bomb, the guy who's heading for the home of a U.D.R.
    part-timer or a policeman, he doesn't know whether he's going to get malleted by the Special Forces. Betrayal from within really hurts them.
    It's about the only thing that d o e s . . . "
    He had never been quite sure how he had been recruited. His tutorial lecturer had had something to do with it. A remark by Bren, over a cup of coffee, about the Civil Service, something more about the Home Office, a vague aside about wanting work that was worthwhile. He'd sat the Civil Service exam, and a letter had just appeared