The investigations established a link between the hayshed in which Tighe was killed, the killing of the three IRA men in the car and the earlier explosion at the Kinnego embankment. An informer had pinpointed the hayshed as an arms store and had also identified Toman, Burns and McCauley as having been involved in the killing of the three police officers in the Kinnego explosion. Stalker believed that the two incidents which followed the bombing might have been the result of an RUC plot to avenge the deaths of their three comrades.
It also emerged that the hayshed had been under technical surveillance. A Security Service technical officer had put special devices into the barn which would indicate if explosives stored there were moved and transmit any sounds from within the building. It was to the RUC’s and MI5’s great embarrassment that the explosives used to kill the three officers at Kinnego had been taken from the hayshed after the bugs had been installed, but that the devices had failed. The Chief Constable’s attempts to restrict the inquiry’s terms must have resulted at least in part from a desire to prevent his own officers finding out that such a terrible mistake had been made.
Stalker realized that the bugs in the hayshed which had failed had been replaced by new ones and that these might offer a vital clue as to whether the police officers who opened fire on Tighe and McCauley really had shouted a warning, as they claimed. So began an eighteen-month battle of wills between the Stalker team, the RUC and MI5 to establish whether the shooting was on tape and, if it was, whether the inquiry could have access to it.
Stalker’s investigations also linked the killings of Grew and Carroll to their earlier meeting in the Republic with the INLA terrorist Dominic McGlinchey. He had been responsible for an upsurge of INLA activity in the border area, particularly in Armagh. McGlinchey, who had bragged in an interview about his preference for killing people at close range, had driven the INLA into active and reasonably effective terrorism, thus making him one of the most wanted men in Ireland. It is possible that the police thought Grew and Carroll’s car contained McGlinchey and that, having been briefed to the effect that he was a dangerous killer who had evaded capture many times before, considered it their duty to open fire on the car without hesitation. Stalker discovered that SB surveillance men had followed Grew and Carroll to their meeting in the Republic.
The Manchester police officer came to the conclusion that the SB had become far too powerful within the RUC. He believed middle-ranking SB officers had organized the cover-up of the shootings and were engaged in trying to obstruct his inquiry. In his book Stalker wrote:
The Special Branch targeted the suspected terrorist, they briefed the officers, and after the shootings they removed the men, cars and guns for a private de-briefing before the CID officers were allowed access to these crucial matters. They provided the cover stories, and they decided at what point the CID were to be allowed to commence the official investigation of what occurred. The Special Branch interpreted the information and decided what was, or was not, evidence; they attached labels – whether a man was ‘wanted’ for an offence, for instance or whether he was an ‘on-the-run terrorist’. I have never experienced, nor had any of my team, such an influence over an entire police force by one small section.
According to Stalker, Assistant Chief Constable Trevor Forbes, Head of the Special Branch at the time of his inquiry, told him he would never be able to hear the tape of events in the hayshed. The existence of a tape of events in the hayshed emerged in November 1984, five months after Stalker’s inquiry began. Assistant Chief Constable Forbes was to become an important figure in Stalker’s inquiries. Not only was he head of the principal department under investigation, but he had also been the RUC’s Operational Commander Southern Region in Armagh – and therefore in authority over the area in and around Armagh – until shortly before the shootings.
Forbes was regarded by many at Knock as utterly loyal to the Chief Constable. Shortly after Jack Hermon took over, Assistant Chief Constable Mick Slevin, the man who had rebuilt the SB during the late 1970s, clashed with his new boss, say RUC officers. Slevin apparently refused to brief Hermon fully on an intelligence matter, telling him, ‘The need-to-know principle goes up as well as down, sir.’ Chief Constable Hermon resolved to displace his independent-minded HSB, and the lifelong plain-clothes man was moved to a job which Chief Constable Hermon considered better suited to his abilities – in charge of complaints and discipline. Slevin had by that stage contracted cancer and died after a short period in his new job.
Forbes was not a career detective, but had previously run the force’s traffic branch. He was promoted from the backwater of traffic to the difficult regional commander’s post in Armagh. He enjoyed a close relationship with Chief Constable Hermon out of hours as well – for some years the two men had run the RUC’s pipe and drum band.
As Stalker probed more deeply into the affair, Kevin Taylor, a Manchester businessman, came under police investigation. Taylor, who knew Stalker from various social functions, came under examination as a possible associate of a group of criminals in Manchester.
In May 1986 Stalker was removed from the Northern Ireland inquiry pending investigations of his relationship with Taylor. He had already delivered an interim report to Chief Constable Hermon which was strongly critical of his force. Stalker wrote that he
