Adrian McKinty - The Cold Cold Ground

“I can imagine.”

“But unlike the queers, I didn’t want the police to find her body. I buried her in the Mourne Mountains. She’s gone forever. Don’t worry about it.”

Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about it? Why did he think I had come here? Just for a chat? To clear the air?

He was talking again: “So everything went according to plan. Plan B anyway. Lucy lived with me from Christmas onwards. We wrote letters to her family. Boiler-plate stuff. She said she was doing ok, she wanted a second chance in Dublin. And then when I was down South, I posted them. Easy. Piece of cake.”

“And you liked having her around? She wasn’t moody?”

“I loved having her around. Very good-natured girl. Lovely wee lass so she was. Have you seen any pictures of her? She was gorgeous.”

“So what went wrong? Why’d you kill her?”

“Well, the baby’s born. I give the midwife a thousand quid, tell her to keep her mouth shut, everything’s fine. Wee baby girl. We keep it for a couple of days, but then it’s time to give the little bairn away, isn’t it? That’s part two of the plan. Lucy comes back from Dublin, moves in with her parents for a bit, all is forgiven … But nobody can know she was ever pregnant. Too many questions. So I take the bairn and leave it in a stolen car in the Royal Victoria Hospital car park. I call them up and I watch them come out, look in the window and take the poor wee thing away. I suppose we were lucky they didn’t think it was a bomb and blow the car up!”

He started laughing at that.

“So they took your daughter away,” I said loudly to stop his cackling.

“Aye, ok, my daughter, big deal. Maybe if it had been a wee boy … but that’s another story, isn’t it?”

“Did you tell MI5 about Lucy?”

“Why would I do a thing like that? They’d go crazy.”

“It’s quite the game you’re playing, isn’t it, Freddie? Deceiving your handlers, deceiving Sinn Fein … I’m amazed that you could keep it all together.”

“A lesser man would have cracked.”

“So what happened next, Freddie? After you gave the baby away?”

“So then I get back from the RVH and she’s acting very strange. This is the climax of the hunger strikes, you understand. Bobby Sands is in the ground just a couple of days before and it’s my busy time. We’re all running round like mad things, driving people places, doing interviews with American TV. I’m protecting the top guys, doing this, doing that, getting orders from Tommy Little as well as my regular press job. Running myself ragged from morning till night and every time I get home it’s yap yap yap, where’s my girl? Boo fucking hoo. And then she starts with the yelling and the screaming, ‘You’re this and you’re that’ and I give her a wee slap or two just to get that noise out of my head. And then she’s really bawling. It does your head in that stuff. I’m going for a drive, says I, you better get your fucking act together.”

“Something happened then, didn’t it? After you hit her and left the house.”

“Something happened all right.”

“You go for a drive and she … what? She starts rummaging in your stuff looking for a gun to shoot you with when you come back. But instead of finding a gun she finds … something more interesting.”

“Oh, you’re good, Duffy.”

“She finds checks from MI5? A book of contacts?”

“Very good. It was receipts. Those incompetent fools make me get receipts for everything. I had an envelope full of receipts and I had them all itemised for my handlers. And she finds them and she doesn’t really know what it all means. But she knows it’s not good.”

“She finds the receipts and she knows you’re an informer.”

“She’s gotta turn me in, but I suppose she’s worried that we’ll both go down for it. Both of us dead in some border sheugh with a bullet in the brain. So she calls up Tommy Little. She tells him to meet her at my house and she gets Tommy to promise not to tell a soul about it until he talks to her.”

“And Tommy is surprised to hear from her cos he thinks she’s in Dublin or dead or whatever, so of course he comes,” I said. “So what happened when you got back from your drive?”

“Tommy parked his car in a layby a little further down from the house, so I waltzed into the kitchen expecting Lucy to have made me a cake as a way of apologizing and there’s Tommy Little, my bloody boss at the FRU, standing there with her. He must have just got there a couple of minutes before me. ‘How do you explain all this?’ he asks holding up the receipts. ‘Like this,’ says I and I pull out my Glock and shoot him in the chest. Jesus! What an eejit. I mean, what is he doing standing there in my kitchen like that? He must have heard the car. If it was me I’d have been out the back door and into the woods. Instead he had to be a hero, had to confront me!”

“What about Lucy?”

“Lucy. Jesus. She’s another eejit. She’s screaming her head off and I put my hand over her mouth to shut her the fuck up and she’s fighting me and I’m covering her mouth and she’s still screaming. Christ! The lungs on her. ‘Who else did you tell?’ I ask her and she says only Tommy and I give her the old one two in the gut and she’s screaming again. So I can’t take it no more. ‘Give my head peace!’ says I and I locked her in my elbow and choked her to death.”

He was exhausted by this little speech and he reached over for his bottle of Peroni. I shook my head. No beer bottles. Nothing he could throw.

“What did you do next?”

“You’re me, what would you do?” Freddie asked.

“You tell me.”

“Well, you have two options. The first is that you pull the plug. You call the boys in County Down and they come and-”

“The boys in County Down?”

“MI5!”

“Oh, I see.”

“They come and you tell them what’s happened and they parachute you out. And I’m fucking living in some godawful Sydney suburb for the next forty years getting skin cancer and trying to acquire an interest in rugby league. I’m a low priority agent so there’s no secret knighthood or a million a year retirement salary for me.”

“Couldn’t they just clean it up for you? Fix everything.”

He shook his head and smiled condescendingly. “You’re a bit simple, aren’t you, Duffy? At that stage I was only a cog in the machine. A cog that’s just killed Tommy Little and a hunger striker’s wife! Tommy they might give me at a squeeze but not Lucy and certainly not both of them. Saluta Jesus da parte mia! as they say in these parts. Thank you for your services, Freddie, now here’s your ticket for Australia, don’t call us, we’ll call you. And, hell, maybe they’ll even chuck me in prison. Who knows? Perfidious Albion and all that!”

“So what was the second option?”

“Get rid of the bodies. Make like I never saw them. Rub out all connection with them. Just go on with my life, oblivious. Pity about Lucy but them’s the bloody breaks.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Yeah. And I’ve done it before. You saw off the hands, saw off the head, bury the torso in a bog, dissolve the head and hands in HCL. Piss easy.”

“What went wrong?”

“Well, I’m literally just done killing Lucy. Like, not even time to make a cup of tea and I get a call from Ruari McFanagh. He’s the chief of northern command. Number Two in the Army Council. (That’s just between us, by the way.) So he asks me if Tommy came by. Tommy was a cautious cove, he stopped at a call box and told Ruari he had business at Billy White’s and then he was on his way over to see me. And I said, ‘Tommy didn’t come over here, did he say what it was about, Ruari?’ And Ruari says no and nobody can reach him. ‘Well,’ says I, ‘I have no idea where he is, I’m just in myself.’ So he says ok and he hangs up the phone and literally a minute later it rings again and it’s Lee Caldwell. Lee is the IRA Quartermaster for Down and Armagh and he asks me if I could come to see him tomorrow morning about shipping a new lot of AK-47s up from Newry. So I say ok, no problem. But I know, I know . Tomorrow morning while I’m down at Lee’s place Ruari is going to have a couple of boys over, going through my house from top to bloody bottom.”