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SQUINTER: Sorry, what was that again?
Let’s see if Squinter’s got this right. You’ll let him know, of course, if he’s
missing anything here.
UDA man Steven McCullough (39) approaches a Royal Irish Rangers patrol in the
city centre and tells them he has information about the murder of 20-year-old
Catholic postman Danny McColgan. The RIR respond by calling the RUC, who duly
arrive on the scene.
The RUC acts quickly. Do they smuggle him to a safe house? No. Do they bring
him to an interview room and pump him for information? Do they alert Special
Branch? Well, not really... they arrest him on suspicion of drunk-driving.
Before we go any further, perhaps Squinter might be able to ask a question –
and if any Trevors are reading this over a tin of Coke and a Mars Bar in
Woodbourne or Grosvenor, feel free to chip in. What exactly, if it’s not an
impertinent query, does arresting someone “on suspicion of drunk driving” mean?
Isn’t it the case, hasn’t it been widely and loudly trumpeted, that any driver
in the North involved in even the slightest bump is going to be breathalysed on
the spot? And in the unhappy event that the officers were unable for whatever
reason to breathalyse Mr McCullough on the spot, wouldn’t it be the case that
he would be tested immediately on arrival back at the station? And if we accept
that, then how long would it take to establish whether he was drunk or not?
Five minutes? A half-hour? An hour?
Well, it was four days after the event that the PSNI told us that Mr McCullough
had been arrested “on suspicion of drunk driving”. You’d think that by then the
“suspicion” might have been replaced by something a bit more solid in that
time. A breathalyser reading, perhaps; a blood test result maybe. But anyway...
So, there Mr McCullough is in the barracks, drunk – or so the Trevors
believe – and telling anyone who will listen that he knows something about the
murder of Danny McColgan. And so what’s the next move? Why, let him go, of
course – what else?
In their statement, the PSNI said that the team investigating the murder of
Danny McColgan was based at another station and that the UDA man had left the
barracks before the detectives arrived. What’s going on here? What exactly is
the procedure? Did McCullough stand up in his cell, knock on the door and say,
‘excuse me, I want to go home now’? Is that how it works? Did it occur to
anyone to ask McCullough to hang on for a second? Last time Squinter got
scooped he was walking down the Suffolk Road with a friend and ended up in a
little curtained cubicle in Springfield Road Barracks for four hours without a
word of explanation. If they can do that to someone like Squinter – who is, of
course, as white and pure as the driven snow – you’d think that somewhere in
the massive raft of emergency provisions and anti-terrorist legislation still
in place here there would be a line somewhere saying it’s okay to hold on for a
while to a drunk UDA bloke shouting his mouth off about a sectarian murder. But
apparently not. So, onwards and upwards and later that day, Mr McCullough is
found dead at the bottom of a cliff on Cavehill.
Squinter has it from reliable sources that Steven King wanted to write a short
story about this, but decided nobody would believe it.
Instead, Squinter can exclusively reveal that his next work is going to be a
less far-fetched delve into the realms of fantasy, The Case of the Big Book
With All the Info that Went Missing from Omagh Barracks.