Northern Spy

water pour into the sea.
“Did anyone go on the trip with her?”
“No.”
“Have you spoken to her since she left?”
I open our messages and hand him my phone. He scrolls up, reading our texts, pausing at the picture she sent yesterday morning from Ursa Minor of two cream horns. I can’t bear to look at it, to think of her sitting in a bakery, working through her pastries, not realizing what was about to happen.
“Are you certain she went alone?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Who took this picture, then?” he asks, turning the phone toward me, at the photo of Marian laughing on the rope bridge.
“I don’t know. She must have asked another tourist.”
“Has Marian made any other trips recently?”
“No.”
“Does she have travel documents in any other names?”
“Of course not.”
I remember how distressed she was after the Victoria Square attack in April, how pinched her face looked. Marian was off duty during the attack, but still ran to help. The IRA had planted an incendiary device, which went off prematurely, when the complex was full of shoppers. Hours later, when she appeared at my house, her jeans were stiff with blood from the knee to the ankle. She said, “When is it going to stop?”
I slowly lift my head to look at the detective. “Is she working for you? Is she an informer?”
“No.”
“Would you know?”
“I’d know.”
Detective inspector. How many ranks are there above him? Fenton checks his watch. I look down at the traffic on the Westlink, where the cars have slowed almost to a standstill as the sky opens, releasing the downpour.
“Does Marian visit extremist websites?” he asks.
“No.”
News broadcasts sometimes show IRA videos, though. She may have seen those. Men with ski masks over their faces, setting out their demands, or sitting at a table in silence, assembling a bomb.
The detective seems to think Marian has been groomed. That someone has been taking her away on trips, sending her extremist material to read. I know what they say, the recruiters. Come where you are needed. Come where you are loved.
“Does Marian have access to any industrial chemicals?”
“No. Look, this is absurd.”
“We only want to find her,” he says, which anyone from here would know isn’t true. The police don’t search for a terrorist the same way they search for a missing person. Let’s say they find a house and send in a special operations team. The team will have different instructions for a raid than an extraction, they will behave differently if someone inside the house needs to be protected.
“She’s pregnant,” I say.
The detective takes in a breath. I wait for a moment, like I’m silently checking Marian’s response. This was the first tug on the lock, this lie.
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