“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?”
“Of course. I had to. She knew everything.”
“And then I just waited for twenty-four hours cos I knew that when it all came out I would be in the clear. Tommy got mixed up with some queer nutcase, poor old Tommy.”
“What about the others? The bar in Larne?”
“Hell, yeah. I knew I had to do maybe one or two more attacks just to establish the pattern. You boys love your patterns.”
“After you typed that hit list you got rid of the Imperial 55?”
“Nice work tracing the typewriter. I knew you would, though, so, aye, of course I got rid of it. Thought about planting it in your man Seawright’s office, but that was only a passing fancy.”
I sighed. “You got us excited, Freddie. We finally thought we had an ordinary, decent killer on our hands.”
Freddie laughed. “Yeah. I got you jumping. Patterns. Codes. Once I had the time I read up on the Yorkshire Ripper and the Zodiac killer and I …”
I stopped listening.
Of course there were more questions: the phone calls, the hoaxes, was it all part of the smoke trail or did he just enjoy messing with us? But none of that mattered.
It all seemed so distant now.
It was like events that had happened long ago in another age.
He talked and I pretended to listen and finally his mouth stopped moving.
He was looking at me. He had asked me a question.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Did MI5 contact you after the hospital?” he wondered.
“Yes, just a few days ago,” I replied.
“Aye, that’s when they pulled me in for questioning. I told them everything of course. By then I knew it was ok. It didn’t matter how close you got. I had been appointed head of FRU. I knew I was safe. They needed me. I am the head of IRA’s internal security. Can you imagine it? The head of IRA internal security is a British agent! The guy who’s in charge of investigating every informer, double agent, and piece of intel. What a joke!”
He leaned back in the chair and put his hands behind his head. He was smiling again. It was a confident, infectious smile that I could not bring myself to hate. Even after all he had done.
“Why did you pick those particular pieces of music? Puccini and Orpheus?”
He shrugged. “I liked them. I played them on the piano.”
“And of course
“I thought that was hilarious! Even with all the shit going down, that cracked me up. Of course I had the score for the piano and I hoped that you’d find out the words … I considered writing them in but I just didn’t have the bloody time. I knew a detective with time on his hands would really burrow into that. Go off on some fucking tangent, really think it was a devious psycho nutcase.”
“That I did.”
Freddie laughed. “That’s brilliant, isn’t it?”
“They weren’t clues? To Lucy? In
He seemed shocked. “God no! Lucy? The last thing I wanted was anybody thinking about Lucy.”
I nodded. They were tells. Maybe I’d exaggerated them but they’d been tells none the less. If he hadn’t been rushed maybe he would have seen that.
“You were lucky, Freddie,” I said.
That ticked him off a little and his expression clouded. “No, you were lucky! Your government was lucky to get someone as sharp as me. Look at me! The head of FRU! Everything the IRA does for the next twenty years will be known about by me. And hence by your government. In advance.
I reached in my pocket and took out the box of Italian cigarettes.
I lit one and blew smoke towards the ceiling,
I let the ash fall on the carpet.
Yes, we were lucky to have Freddie Scavanni on our side.
He had killed five people to protect his sorry ass.
He had killed dozens in a sordid career.
As head of FRU he would undoubtedly kill and torture dozens more.
He was a monster. He was a serial killer by any definition of the word. It didn’t matter if it was for politics or to protect his own skin. He
He looked at me, and seemed a little worried. “What are you doing here, Duffy? They told me that they put the fear of God into you. They told me that the Sean Duffy problem was finished.”
“It’s not finished.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think so. I knew different. I knew that your sort can never see the big picture.”
“What’s the big picture, Tommy? The hunger strikes?”
“Of course. It’s a big victory. For both sides. Mrs Thatcher hasn’t publicly conceded anything to the IRA prisoners and her reputation as the Iron Lady has only become enhanced among the electorate. The martyrdom of ten IRA and INLA prisoners who starved themselves to death has been a recruiting poster for both organizations. They were desperate to find volunteers in the late ’70s and now they’re turning away men by the score. And there’s the political angle: Sinn Fein has shifted from being a minor political party of extremists into a major electoral force in Northern Ireland politics. The whole match has changed.”
“And you’re at the centre of it.”
“Damn right!”
“You can’t blame people like me for feeling like pawns.”
He shook his head. “I don’t blame you, Duffy, but you’re tangling with the big boys now and, as Clint Eastwood so rightly says, a man’s got to know his limitations.”
I took another draw on the ciggie, coughed and looked out the window. Snow was falling in big flakes.
“I’ve investigated six murders since becoming a detective and not had a conviction on any of them.”
“That’s a shame,” he replied with a sneer.
“What am I going to do with you, Freddie?”
He laughed. “You’re not going to do anything. We’re on the same side. Like I say, it’s a win/win for everyone, isn’t it?”
You could look at it that way. Freddie had only been protecting himself. The war was long but one day peace was going to come to Northern Ireland and it was going to come because of people like him.
“Don’t you feel bad for the innocent civilians, Freddie?”
“Who? The fucking queers? We probably should ship them all off to some island like Seawright says. And Lucy? Fucksake, look at the state of her. Her husband’s up for a stretch and she’s banging me? Come on, you don’t do that.”
