The Cold Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “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.”

  “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.”

  I understood. I understood it at all now. The necessity of doing everything quickly. Why he had to get rid of Tommy immediately. Why he had to get rid of Lucy as fast as he could. “Go on,” I said.

  “So now what do I do? I’m fucked. They’re sending a couple of boys over to my place to suss me out. I’ve got seven or eight hours at the most. And the streets are full of rioters and army and peelers are everywhere and there’s checkpoints and roadblocks. So again I’m thinking: parachute your way out. Escape. Run.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No. Because I am the alpha wolf. I am fucking Finn McCool.”

  “You knew you could outwit them?”

  He was grinning at the memory of it. He was impressed by himself. “I had to think quickly. Nobody would buy an argument between me and Tommy or something crazy like an accidental discharge of my weapon. No way. They wouldn’t buy Tommy getting killed by the army, the cops, or the loyalists. Tommy’s a protected man and nobody’s killing him without starting World War Three.”

  “So you thought outside the box.”

  “The IRA high command is ultra-conservative. Tommy was a queer, everybody knew it and they didn’t like it. Tommy was only tolerated because he was very good at his job. Tommy was the best of us. But he was vulnerable because he was a poofter. I mean, who knows what they get up to?”

  “So you killed him to make it look like that?”

  “The queer angle was my lifeline. He had to be meeting someone before he met me and that someone was a queer pal and that queer pal killed him. That was the story I was going to go with. No, sorry lads, never heard from Tommy, don’t know where he is. And then Tommy’s body shows up. Some sicko’s killed him. Shock, horror!”

  “You had to make it weird.”

  “Something to get the lace curtains twitching. Something to get you coppers all in a tizzy. And then I thought why not a serial killer? Tommy is just the first in a series of victims. The IRA Army Council is not even going to want to think about that. A serial killer going around shooting queers? How dare he take publicity away from the hunger strikers? How dare Tommy get himself mixed up in this disgusting business?”

  “So you realized you were going to have to kill Andrew Young too?”

  He sighed. “Andrew Young was the only other queer I knew. I’d seen him at the record shop and at the Carrick festival. Nice enough fella but a bender and so he had to die, poor sod. I had eight hours. The clock was ticking. I mean, first things first. I carried Lucy deep into Woodburn Forest. I hung her from a tree and I left her ID at her feet so everybody would know who she was. I wasn’t worried about her at all. Her husband’s on hunger strike, she’s run away from home, she’s feeling guilty, your pathologist is going to find out that she gave birth, more guilt, guilt, guilt. That’s the Irish condition. So that’s an easy one.”

  “And you’re not worried because there’s no link to you.”

  “Right. Nobody knew about us! Nobody. We were so careful. Only the midwife and I already told you about her. Anyway I hung Lucy, went back to the house, removed all traces of her from the place and burned all her clothes in the incinerator out the back. Even hosed down the ashes and scooped them out.”

  “And then you cut off Tommy’s hand and put the note up in his rectum?”

  “Did you like that? I had to link him to Young. Make you peelers think this was a sex crime. More importantly, make the IRA and FRU think it was a sex crime.”

  “Why not cut his dick off?”

  “I considered cutting his dick off and swapping his dick with Andrew’s d
ick, but then I wondered if your patho would spot that, you know? One dick looks pretty much like another. And hands have fingerprints, so I settled for his hand. I cut his hand off and shot him in the head. I took the hand, got in the car and drove to Young’s house in Boneybefore.”

  “How did you know his address?”

  “He was in the phone book like you. Anyway, I park the car. Knock on his door, check there’s no one around. Knock, knock, knock. Finally he opens the door. I ask him if he’s alone. He says yes, I shoot him in the forehead with my silenced Glock and push him into the hall. Then it’s out with the old hacksaw. I leave Tommy’s hand with him and I take his. I knew you boys would eat up the stuff about the music so I left another wee note. I’m in and out of Young’s house in two minutes flat. He could have had the Vienna Boys Choir upstairs and I wouldn’t have known about it.”

  I nodded. “It was easy after that. You drove Tommy’s body to Barn Field where it would be discovered fairly soon. Then you went down to your meeting with the quartermaster in Newry while the FRU boys searched your house and found nothing.”

  “That’s right. Easy. I burned and buried everything: receipts, women’s clothes, the whole shebang. Drove Tommy’s car deep into the woods, torched that. They searched the house and they found nothing. I was as clean as a whistle. So they told me afterwards when I became their boss.”

  “What about me? Carrick CID?”

  “I needed to get that serial-killer angle running as quickly as possible so I found out your name from your switchboard and the address was easy.”

  “The stuff you wrote on the postcard was just meaningless? Right? Like the list?”

  “Of course. Just random shit off the top of my head.”

  “I spent days looking at that bloody thing.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Then what?”

  “And then I went and took care of Martha.”

  “Martha?”

  “The midwife!”

  “You killed her?”