The Cold, Cold Ground

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 babygirl. 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