Brute Force

13

We turned off the N14 at Letterkenny and onto the N56 for the next fifty miles to Dungloe. The cottage was just a couple of miles beyond that.

As Tallulah nodded off too, my thoughts drifted to Little Miss Camcorder on the ferry. If she was working for Richard Isham, I was glad Tallulah had stopped her getting any more footage.

Richard Isham had joined the IRA at the age of twenty, a couple of years after the Troubles broke out. By the time of Bloody Sunday he was already high up in the Derry command.

When he was convicted of terrorist crimes by the Republic of Ireland's Special Criminal Court in 1974, he declared he was a member of PIRA and proud of it. They sentenced him to nine months' imprisonment.

After his release, he became increasingly prominent in the political arena. Our paths had crossed when he was in contact with the Firm during the hunger strikes in the early eighties, and later in the early nineties, by which time he was a fully fledged member of the IRA Army Council.

We never had the proof, but were pretty sure that Isham was responsible for a string of murders of members of the security forces, Protestant paramilitaries and alleged PIRA traitors.

Worst of all, in my book, he was a high-ranking member of PIRA's Northern Command in 1987, and had advance knowledge of the Enniskillen bomb. He and his mates could have stopped the carnage if they'd wanted to.

There was a lot of blood on Isham's hands, and if the lovely Mairead really was his press secretary, she was doing a good job at keeping it under wraps. After the Good Friday Agreement, any media investigation into his background had been actively discouraged, if not suppressed, and his membership of the Good Lads' Club was being protected on all fronts.

Which made me wonder briefly where the heavy in the front of the BMW fitted in. I had a feeling PR wasn't his game.