The Cold Cold Ground

24: THE WILDERNESS OF MIRRORS

That sleekit handsome hatchet-face broke into a grin. “What do you wanna know?”

“What happened on Christmas Eve, 1980?” I asked.

“With Lucy, you mean?” he asked.

“Aye. With Lucy. The train. The aborted abortion.”

“You know about that?” he asked, surprised.

“You got her pregnant and there was only one way out of it. The abortion special. Ferry to Larne, train to Glasgow. One night in the hospital. Back for Christmas Day.”

His left cheek twitched, the first minute chink in that force field of confidence. We’re all projecting multiple images of ourselves all the time but for Freddie it must be so much harder to maintain the likeness …

“Her mum decided to get the Belfast train and she was looking for Lucy at the Barn Halt but she didn’t see her because Lucy was on the other platform, wasn’t she? The Larne side. She was going to Larne,” I said.

“She was. Lucy saw her mother stick her big bonce out the train window and the poor girl almost had a heart attack.”

“What did she do? Hide in the shelter?”

“She hid in the shelter until the train left. But that was where it all fell apart. Seeing her mother really spooked her. We’d arranged to go to Scotland together on the boat train. I got off the train at Barn Halt but of course she wasn’t bloody there. She was supposed to meet me on the platform but she’d got cold feet. I knew she’d bottled it. She finally came to see me and I suppose I should have ended it there and then but she was bawling her eyes out and I felt sorry for her.”

“How long had you been seeing her?”

“A few months. It wasn’t that serious. She was very beautiful but there was no way I could ever get heavy with a comrade’s wife. Even an ex-wife. The powers that be wouldn’t allow it. They’re very conservative. And of course then she got pregnant …”

“And refused to get the abortion.”

“Quite the dilemma, eh?”

“So what did that big brain of yours cook up, Freddie?”

“You know what we did, Sergeant Duffy.”

“Aye, I do. She moved in with you and you got her to write a bunch of postcards and letters to her family and you went down to the Republic and posted them. Everyone thought she was living in Dublin or Cork or wherever but in fact she was only a hop skip and a jump away living with you — until she had the baby, right?”

“It wasn’t so onerous. The thing was due in five months. What was five months? She could stay with me. Cook and clean the place. Nice wee feminine touch. The baby’s born, we give it away and then she goes back to her parents like the prodigal daughter. And who knows, maybe after a decent interval and with Seamus’s OK, we could begin a formal courtship.”

“But then Seamus went on hunger strike. Didn’t that complicate things?”

Freddie shook his head. “Not really. I knew he wouldn’t go through with it. Not him. He didn’t have the stones for it. He was only in for gun possession. That’s a hell of a thing to die for. Lucy was a little upset though. He joined the hunger strike just a couple of days before she was due. I told her not to worry about it, that I’d have a word and we’d get him off. And we did too. He was no martyr.”

I understood. It had to be exhausting to be in cover this long, to play that game.

“So the plan is: Lucy gives birth, gives the baby away, returns to her parents and no one knows that she was ever pregnant or that you’re the father of her baby.”

“That’s the plan. Of course people would gossip and her mother’s an intelligent woman but with no actual proof … I mean, technically Lucy and Seamus are divorced. But not in the eyes of the church.”

“Seamus told me as much.”

“The first sin was divorcing him. That was bad enough. But then to get herself pregnant with some other bloke while her husband was martyring himself for Ireland? Not good my friend, not good. I was protecting her as well as me. Maybe ‘after her return’ she even goes to see Seamus in the H Blocks. Or you know what? Maybe we’ll get lucky and Seamus will go through with the bloody hunger strike or have a heart attack or something and she’ll be the grieving widow. Ha! And 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 baby girl. 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 head in that stuff. I’m going for a drive, says I, you better get your fucking act together.”

“Something happened then, didn’t it? After you hit her and left the house.”

“Something happened all right.”

“You go for a drive and she … what? She starts rummaging in your stuff looking for a gun to shoot you with when you come back. But instead of finding a gun she finds … something more interesting.”

“Oh, you’re good, Duffy.”

“She finds checks from MI5? A book of contacts?”

“Very good. It was receipts. Those incompetent fools make me get receipts for everything. I had an envelope full of receipts and I had them all itemised for my handlers. And she finds them and she doesn’t really know what it all means. But she knows it’s not good.”

“She finds the receipts and she knows you’re an informer.”

“She’s gotta turn me in, but I suppose she’s worried that we’ll both go down for it. Both of us dead in some border sheugh with a bullet in the brain. So she calls up Tommy Little. She tells him to meet her at my house and she gets Tommy to promise not to tell a soul about it until he talks to her.”

“And Tommy is surprised to hear from her cos he thinks she’s in Dublin or dead or whatever, so of course he comes,” I said. “So what happened when you got back from your drive?”

“Tommy parked his car in a layby a little further down from the house, so I waltzed into the kitchen expecting Lucy to have made me a cake as a way of apologizing and there’s Tommy Little, my bloody boss at the FRU, standing there with her. He must have just got there a couple of minutes before me. ‘How do you explain all this?’ 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. Saluta Jesus da parte mia! as they say in these parts. Thank you for your services, Freddie, now here’s your ticket for Australia, don’t call us, we’ll call you. And, hell, maybe they’ll even chuck me in prison. Who knows? Perfidious Albion and all that!”

“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 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 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.”

“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 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 Boheme 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, dreaming 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.