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.
“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 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 dick, 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.”
