Northern Spy(8)

I can tell it was the right decision. Across the table, Fenton drags his hand down the side of his face. He’s already recalculating. He might be considering how to advise the officers who are out hunting for her. The government won’t want to be responsible for the death of a pregnant woman, even if she is a terror suspect. Or, especially if she’s a terror suspect. The situation is volatile enough already without the police accidentally turning a pregnant terrorist into a martyr.

“How far along is she?” he asks.

“Six weeks.” If this lie comes out, he could, in theory, charge me with obstructing an inquiry, but that’s less important.

“Who’s the father?” he asks.

“Her ex-boyfriend,” I answer without pausing. “Jacob Cooke. He lives in London, they saw each other when he was back in April.”

Fenton considers me from across the table. Traffic inches along the motorway, the neon sign above the pub blinks. I twist the ring on my right hand. Marian gave me the ring, a meteorite stone, to mark Finn’s birth.

She wept the first time she held him. I remember her standing up, in the waiting room outside the maternity ward, her face shining and collapsing into tears when she saw him.

“She’s not a fanatic,” I say.

The detective leans his arms on the table. His expression has changed. I might have convinced him, finally.

He says, “But was she lonely?”





4


MY MOTHER IS GIVING Finn his bath when I get home. He squawks to greet me, and I kneel on the mat beside her, pushing up my sleeves. It feels so good to see him, sitting with his small legs straight in front of him in the warm, shallow water.

She starts to soap Finn’s hair, and the room fills with a mild, astringent smell. I remember opening the bottle of baby shampoo during my pregnancy and thinking, This is what he’ll smell like after a bath. Toward the end of my pregnancy, I was impatient to hold him and see him, and I smelled the shampoo the way you smell someone’s shirt when they’re away.

My mother tips water over his head with a beaker. “Are you okay?” I ask.

“Two detectives were out here,” she says. “They think Marian’s in the IRA.”

“I know.”

“They asked me if she’s ever talked about killing police officers.”

Both of us look down at Finn, blinking the water from his wet lashes. He doesn’t seem alarmed by our words, or my appearance, or the tension radiating from my mother. He’s still so young. Though he already loves Marian. If she were to walk in right now, he would dip his head, shy and pleased.

Her name will be on a whiteboard in an incident room now. A counter-terrorism unit will be assembling a picture of her, trying to work out when she was radicalized, who she knows, what she has done. Officers from SO10 might be driving out to her old shared house on the Ormeau Road, to her last boyfriend’s high-rise by the quays, to her ambulance station in Bridge End. They might be asking her friends about her pregnancy, and I imagine their surprise.

My mam’s thick blonde hair is pulled up in an elastic, and she has on a loose pink t-shirt, darkened in places with bathwater. I can imagine her at the start of her day, reveling in the hot weather, opening all the windows as she cleaned the Dunlops’ house, ruffling their labradors’ heads before taking them for a walk, and now she’s rigid, with pouches under her eyes. I’m still catching up with the idea that my mam’s not about to comfort me. She’s not going to say, as she always does, It’s all right, darling, you’ll sort it out.

I swish my hands in the warm water, making the toy boat rock on the waves. Finn heaves himself toward it and tries to fit the boat in his mouth. I smile, and he looks up at me, with both hands clutching the boat, his jaw wide.

I want us to leave. I want to get him away from here, but the decision isn’t mine alone. My ex-husband and I share custody. I might be able to petition the court, but then Finn would grow up without his father.

“Are you not scared of something happening to him here?” I asked Tom recently.

“No,” he said. “Look at the numbers. He’s in more danger in the car.”

The numbers change, of course. That’s the problem.

My mother holds up a towel and I lift Finn into it. He throws back his head and howls at the cold air. Even once he’s dry, he lets out a few last cries, like he wants to be sure his complaint has been lodged.

He maneuvers his arms out from the towel and reaches a hand toward my face. We consider each other. His skin is cool from the water, and he looks pensive in the dim room. His legs bicycle in anticipation as I lower him to my chest to nurse.

Finn is old enough to sit up on his own now. He has rosy feet and toes that appear double jointed, and dry creases at his wrists and ankles. He sometimes has a milk rash on his cheeks. He always ends his yawns by rasping, and he always sighs after sneezing. He hates being dressed, and has started trying to roll himself off the changing table. He likes having his pram pushed over gravel, he likes to grip the tag on his blanket, he likes to watch me cook from his carrier, and will stare down with fixed concentration at, say, eggs being whisked. The lines on his palm have the exact same proportions as mine, and though I don’t believe in palmistry, I am still glad he has a long life line. When someone new tries to hold him, he wails until they hand him back to me. He won’t sleep through the night, and at this point I’m convinced he never will, that I’ll always be this tired. “When did you feel rested again?” I asked my mam, and she laughed and laughed.