“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?
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?’
