The Cold, Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  “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 che gelida manina. Another joke, right?”

  “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 La Bohème Mimi’s real name is Lucia.”

  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. You were lucky!”

  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 was a sociopath.

  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.”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  He yawned. “Look, Duffy, it’s getting late and I’ve told you all you need to know. So grow up, put the gun away, get out of my sight and we’ll say no more about this. I won’t report you to your betters.”

  I didn’t know what I was going to do.

  I still wasn’t sure.

  After all this time and travelling.

  “I don’t think I can go just yet, Freddie,” I said.

  “Well, I’ve had enough of this. You’re boring me. You’ve bored me from the start. I don’t need to explain myself to the likes of you. What’s going on in that head of yours, Duffy? Forget your wee stupid case and appreciate the big picture. Appreciate it on the plane back to Belfast.”

  I nodded and stamped the cigarette out on his living room floor.

  “I see the big picture, Freddie, but I wonder … I wonder if you’re missing the big gallery the picture’s hanging in?”

  “What do you mean by that?” he said with a snarl.

  “If you’re so valuable why have I been allowed to live? Why have I been allowed to know. Why am I here? Who’s pulling my strings?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Let me give you one possibility that’s occurred to me and that might intrigue you. What if there’s an even bigger rat than you, Freddie? What if it’s one of the very top guys. I mean the very top guys. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, Marty Ferris, Ruari, one of them boys. What if MI5 turned one of them and has been running them for the last decade?”

  His brown eyes
darkened and he shook his head. Ah, so this thought had occurred to him too.

  “I’m their agent, I’m the best they’ve bloody got! I’m the best there’s ever been. I’m Garbo. I’m Kim Philby!”

  “I’m sure you are, Freddie. I’m sure you are. But it makes me wonder a wee bit why I was told that you were in Italy. It couldn’t possibly be that MI5 didn’t want to rub you out, but some crazy, pissed-off copper … well, that would be quite another thing, wouldn’t it? I mean, look at the mess you’ve made. Look at the big bog trail of shite you’ve made covering your tracks. Maybe, just maybe, Freddie, you’ve become, oh, I don’t know … dispensable. Did you ever think about that?”

  He leapt at me, one hand going for the gun, another punching me in the kidney. He took me completely by surprise, knocking the gun out of my hand and winding me. The gun flew across the room and clanged off the plate-glass window.

  He hit me with his left, a hard metallic blow in my ribcage, and he followed quickly with a gut punch. He shoved my shoulders, forcing me down into the glass coffee table which smashed underneath me. He dived for the gun and grabbed it.

  “Nessuno me lo ficca in culo!” he yelled delightedly.

  I ducked as Freddie’s first shot missed me by a cigarette length.

  I scrambled out from under the smashed coffee table, rolled to one side, grabbed a broken table leg and threw the bloody thing at Freddie. He dodged it and shot again. I picked up a shard of glass with my gloved hands and threw it at him and this time he couldn’t get out of the way. I hit him on the forearm and before he could shoot again I jumped him. He smacked me with the butt of the Beretta, but it was a glancing blow off my scalp and with both my hands I squeezed the wrist of his gun arm until he winced in pain. His fingers slackened and I wrestled the gun out of his grip and pistol-whipped him across the face.

  He collapsed to his knees, got to his feet and then staggered backwards into the TV set, knocking it off its stand and exploding its cathode ray tube.

  The lights flickered, went out for two seconds and then came back on again.

  “Now you’ve wrecked my telly! This has gone beyond a joke, Duffy! Get the fuck out of here!” Freddie yelled.

  I shook my head. I wasn’t going anywhere. Not now that I had seen the real Freddie Scavanni. It was a question of trust, wasn’t it? I knew Freddie’s identity. Freddie knew that I knew. Laura knew. He knew about her too. Could we really leave our lives in the hands of a man like him?

  I raised the Beretta.

  “You know why they sent me to Carrick RUC? They sent me to learn, Freddie. And you know what? I have learned. I’ve grown up.”

  “Is this about the queers, Duffy? Fuck the queers! And Lucy? I gave her every chance. At least it was over quick!”

  “Quick? Is that what you think? I cut her down, Freddie. She was still alive when you strung her up. You hadn’t quite killed her. She got one finger between the rope and her neck. She wanted to live. She fought to live.”

  “This isn’t justice, Duffy, this is revenge!”

  “What’s the difference?”

  The nearest house was 400 metres away.

  Perhaps they heard a crack and then one more crack almost immediately after the first. Perhaps if they’d been looking in the right direction at the right time they would have seen a sudden flash of light through the plate-glass windows.

  I had thought about making it look like a suicide but there wasn’t much point after all this.

  I left the gun on the floor and went into Freddie’s study.

  I checked myself in the mirror. There were a couple of holes in my leather jacket from the glass table, a few cuts and bruises but hopefully nothing that would attract too much attention.

  I opened the filing cabinet and took the big spool of tape from the MI5 machine and put it in my rucksack. This would be my insurance from the blowback.

  I closed the front door and walked down the valley, back into Campo to the bus station. At 6 a.m. a van dropped off the morning papers outside the cafeteria. I looked at the headlines. The big news was from Egypt: President Sadat had been assassinated in Cairo. The story came with pictures. Men with machine guns firing into a crowd.

  Finally the bus pulled in on ice tyres. It had set out early from St Moritz and was nearly full.

  The driver was cautious and I arrived at Milan Airport with only minutes to make my plane.

  The flight was uneventful. I bought Laura a bottle of Chanel in the duty free. We touched down at Prestwick Airport outside Glasgow just after 11.

  I knew that if I really hoofed it I could catch the noon ferry from Stranraer to Larne …

  The crossing was rough, the North Channel a mess of chuddering green sea and white-storm surf. I had a smoke, buttoned my duffle-coat hood and went to stare at the cauldron-like wake over the rear deck rail.

  I watched Scotland slowly fade behind me.

  I watched Ireland loom ahead.

  This was the only acceptable place to be in these barren lands. On that grey stretch of sea between the two of them.

  It was raining in Larne.

  It was always raining in Larne.

  I caught the train, got off at Barn Halt, said a brief Ave for Lucy, grabbed a six-pack of Harp from the off licence and a fish supper from the chippie. I strolled up Victoria Road eating the chips in the rain. On Coronation Road there were few cars and only a couple of kids kicking a ball around. A man was walking the streets with a handheld megaphone proclaiming the imminent return of the Messiah.

  “Are you ready for Christ’s return, son?” he asked me.

  “In about twenty minutes I will be,” I replied.

  #113.

  I opened the gate, walked up the path, put the key in the lock, went upstairs, lit the new paraffin heater, stripped out of my wet clothes.

  I poured myself a pint-glass vodka gimlet and listened to Ghost in the Machine, the brand new album by The Police. Classic case of three good tracks and eight fillers.

  I called Laura in Straid and she asked how I was doing and I said I was doing just fine. I drank the six-pack and the vodka and by 8 o’clock I was a long way gone. I went to bed singing rebel songs.

  The next morning, early, there was a knock at the door.

  Big guys. Plain Clothes. Special Branch/MI5/Army Intelligence. Something like that. One with a ginger moustache, the other with a black moustache.

  “Are you Sean Duffy?” Ginger asked.

  “Could be,” I said cagily.

  Ginger pulled out a silenced 9mm and shoved it in my face. I took a step backwards. His mate followed him into the hall and closed the door behind him.

  “First things first. Where’s the tape?” Ginger said.

  “What tape?”

  Ginger pointed the revolver at my right kneecap.

  “We’ll shoot you in both knees, both ankles and both elbows. Then we’ll go to work with the blowtorch. Why don’t you save us all some trouble?”

  “In my rucksack. It’s still in my rucksack in the kitchen.”

  Ginger’s mate went and got it.

  “Ok. Now we’d like you to come with us,” Ginger said.

  “Let me get my kit on,” I said.

  They watched while I got changed and they led me outside not to a Land Rover but to an unmarked Ford Capri – which was a bit of a bad sign.

  A tight squeeze too. A driver. Them two boys. Me.

  We drove through Carrick, Greenisland, Newtownabbey, Belfast.

  After Italy I saw the city anew.

  A fallen world. A lost place.

  Ruined factories. Burnt-out pubs. Abandoned social clubs. Shops with bomb-proof grilles. Check points. Search gates. Armoured police stations.

  Smashed cars. Cars on bricks.

  Stray dogs. Sectarian graffiti. Murals of men in masks.

  Bricked-up houses. Fire-bombed houses. Houses without eyes.

  Broken windows, broken mirrors.

  Children playing on the rubbish heaps and bombsites, dr
eaming themselves away from here to anywhere else.

  The smell of peat and diesel and fifty thousand umbilical cords of black smoke uniting grey city and grey sky.

  We drove to the top of Knockagh Mountain.

  There was no one else around.

  No one for miles.

  “Get out,” Ginger said.

  “What is this?” I asked, scared now.

  They pushed me out.

  “What is this?” I asked again, panic clawing at my throat.

  They shoved me to the ground, took out their revolvers.

  “For some reason. For some unearthly reason, they like you, Duffy,” Ginger said.

  “Who likes me?”

  “They like you and that’s why they’re letting you live,” Ginger said. He pulled the trigger, the cylinder turned, the hammer came down. It was only a mock execution. They should have told me about the reprieve afterwards. I wanted to laugh. They’d botched it.

  “The Moore case is over. Is that understood, Inspector Duffy?” black moustache said with an English accent.

  “Aye, I understand,” I replied.

  “You watch your step, now, ok?” Ginger added.

  They got back in the Capri and drove away.

  The rain pattered my face.

  The tarmac under my back felt reassuringly solid.

  I lay there and watched the clouds drift past a mere hundred yards above my head.

  I got to my feet. Belfast was spread out before me like a great slab of meat in a butcher’s yard.

  Who liked me?

  Why had they let me live?

  Why had they called me Inspector?

  These were things to think about.

  It would keep my mind busy on the long walk home.

  Don’t miss book II of Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy trilogy

  I Hear the Sirens in the Street

  Look, if it weren’t for the geography, the people and the climate, Belfast would be a great city to do business.

  – John DeLorean, interview, Irish News (1981)

  1: MIDNIGHT MASS

  An afternoon of sun after a long, rainy Ulster winter. After those grim January days when the darkness came at 3 p.m. After the hunger strikes and an IRA bombing campaign and a period when it looked as if Northern Ireland was on the brink of civil war …