The Cold, Cold Ground

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 know . Tomorrow morning while I’m down at Lee’s place Ruari is going to have a couple of boys over, going through my house from top to bloody bottom.”
    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