Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

There was no tremble in his gait and he didn’t look frightened in the least. I didn’t like that and it put me on my guard.

The study was small, with a desk and a few metal filing cabinets.

There were signed pictures on the wall.

Freddie with Vanessa Redgrave. Freddie with Senator Ted Kennedy.

He pointed at the desk and began walking towards it. I shoved the gun in his back and he froze. I pushed him to the ground, stepped over him and opened the desk drawer.

The gun in the drawer was a Beretta 9mm.

I checked that it was loaded and put the cap pistol back in my pocket.

Freddie sighed.

“Can we speak now? There’s no tape going. It’s not turned on, is it? I mean, what’s the point? It’s just me here,” Freddie said.

“Show me,” I said.

He got to his feet and looked ruefully at the gun barrel of his own pistol aimed at his chest. He pulled open the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets.

“Look in there,” he said. “If it was recording, the spools would be going round, wouldn’t they?”

I looked in the filing cabinet.

Two enormous spools of tape on an expensive looking recording device.

The thing was evidently turned off and the spools were not going round.

Of course there could have been a back-up somewhere in the house.

“Is there a back-up? The truth now, Freddie,” I whispered to him.

“Back-up? That one cost two grand. Those cheap bastards are not going to install a bloody back-up, are they?” he said with an attempt at levity.

I tried to impart the seriousness of my question with a waggle of the Beretta.

“No! There’s no back-up. This is it.”

I believed him.

We returned to the living room.

I switched off the TV.

I motioned him to sit down in the leather recliner and I sat on the glass coffee table opposite him.

“Talk,” I said.

“About what?”

“Tell me everything.”

That sleekit handsome hatchet-face broke into a grin. “What do you wanna know?”

“What happened on Christmas Eve, 1980?” I asked.

“With Lucy, you mean?” he asked.

“Aye. With Lucy. The train. The aborted abortion.”

“You know about that?” he asked, surprised.

“You got her pregnant and there was only one way out of it. The abortion special. Ferry to Larne, train to Glasgow. One night in the hospital. Back for Christmas Day.”

His left cheek twitched, the first minute chink in that force field of confidence. We’re all projecting multiple images of ourselves all the time but for Freddie it must be so much harder to maintain the likeness …

“Her mum decided to get the Belfast train and she was looking for Lucy at the Barn Halt but she didn’t see her because Lucy was on the other platform, wasn’t she? The Larne side. She was going to Larne,” I said.

“She was. Lucy saw her mother stick her big bonce out the train window and the poor girl almost had a heart attack.”

“What did she do? Hide in the shelter?”

“She hid in the shelter until the train left. But that was where it all fell apart. Seeing her mother really spooked her. We’d arranged to go to Scotland together on the boat train. I got off the train at Barn Halt but of course she wasn’t bloody there. She was supposed to meet me on the platform but she’d got cold feet. I knew she’d bottled it. She finally came to see me and I suppose I should have ended it there and then but she was bawling her eyes out and I felt sorry for her.”

“How long had you been seeing her?”

“A few months. It wasn’t that serious. She was very beautiful but there was no way I could ever get heavy with a comrade’s wife. Even an ex-wife. The powers that be wouldn’t allow it. They’re very conservative. And of course then she got pregnant …”

“And refused to get the abortion.”

“Quite the dilemma, eh?”

“So what did that big brain of yours cook up, Freddie?”

“You know what we did, Sergeant Duffy.”

“Aye, I do. She moved in with you and you got her to write a bunch of postcards and letters to her family and you went down to the Republic and posted them. Everyone thought she was living in Dublin or Cork or wherever but in fact she was only a hop skip and a jump away living with you — until she had the baby, right?”

“It wasn’t so onerous. The thing was due in five months. What was five months? She could stay with me. Cook and clean the place. Nice wee feminine touch. The baby’s born, we give it away and then she goes back to her parents like the prodigal daughter. And who knows, maybe after a decent interval and with Seamus’s OK, we could begin a formal courtship.”

“But then Seamus went on hunger strike. Didn’t that complicate things?”

Freddie shook his head. “Not really. I knew he wouldn’t go through with it. Not him. He didn’t have the stones for it. He was only in for gun possession. That’s a hell of a thing to die for. Lucy was a little upset though. He joined the hunger strike just a couple of days before she was due. I told her not to worry about it, that I’d have a word and we’d get him off. And we did too. He was no martyr.”

I understood. It had to be exhausting to be in cover this long, to play that game.

“So the plan is: Lucy gives birth, gives the baby away, returns to her parents and no one knows that she was ever pregnant or that you’re the father of her baby.”

“That’s the plan. Of course people would gossip and her mother’s an intelligent woman but with no actual proof … I mean, technically Lucy and Seamus are divorced. But not in the eyes of the church.”

“Seamus told me as much.”

“The first sin was divorcing him. That was bad enough. But then to get herself pregnant with some other bloke while her husband was martyring himself for Ireland? Not good my friend, not good. I was protecting her as well as me. Maybe ‘after her return’ she even goes to see Seamus in the H Blocks. Or you know what? Maybe we’ll get lucky and Seamus will go through with the bloody hunger strike or have a heart attack or something and she’ll be the grieving widow. Ha! And after a decent interval I could see her on the QT.”

“But you weren’t worried about her living with you during the pregnancy?”

Freddie tapped the side of his head and grinned. “Who do you think you’re dealing with? My house is out of the way and I don’t encourage visitors.”

“What if they did find out?”

“Trouble!” he laughed. “Best-case scenario they kneecap me, court martial me, kick me out of the IRA and exile me permanently from Ireland.”

“So Lucy lived with you and she gave birth and you gave the baby away.”

“Yes. Mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead.”

He lit up. He licked his dry lower lip and took a long drag on the cig. He was a young man still, but his eyes were hollow. He looked a little like one of those old priests you found in the West of Ireland who was weary after decades of the same dreary confessions.

“You knew how to deliver a baby and everything?”

“God no. I got a midwife. You never did find her, did ya?”

“What do you mean?”

“You see what I’m talking about? I outsmarted all of you. She lived in East Belfast. Wee flat by herself. I told her there was an emergency job. I drove her and she delivered the baby and I paid her well. And of course after it all went wrong I had to call on her again and disappeared her.”

“You killed the woman who acted as Lucy’s midwife?” I asked.

“Yes. You don’t need to know about it. It’s all taken care of. I did it the night I got back from my IRA interrogation in Dundalk. Before she would have heard the news about Lucy. It was a busy couple of days for me.”