When he went home, after his interview with the G.O.C., the natural assumption was that he had been giving information, and the Inner Circle determined that he should give no more. Whether they knew that he was to be arrested and deported at 4 A.M., and deliberately forestalled the arrest, or whether they merely knew that he was at headquarters, and were waiting to murder him on the first favourable opportunity, is not clear, and does not affect the question of the guilt of the murder.
XII.
A BRUTAL MURDER.
The childlike trust which so many Englishmen have in their institutions is a source of never-ending wonder to Irishmen, more especially the Englishman’s blind faith in the integrity of the Post Office in both countries. Long after Sinn Fein had made the Irish Post Office its chief source of information, the Government and public continued happily and blindly to confide their confidential correspondence to the tender mercies of the King’s enemies, and at the same time expressed their bewildered astonishment at the uncanny amount of information that the Sinn Fein Secret Service was able to obtain.
It is highly doubtful if Blake would ever have even thought of obtaining information from the mail bags, if a young subaltern, who commanded a platoon of the Blankshires temporarily stationed in the Ballybor Police Barracks, had not made the suggestion one night at dinner, and had even offered to carry out the operation himself if Blake had any official qualms. At first Blake refused, knowing that the authorities did not approve of tampering with the public’s private letters; but being desperately hard up for certain information he gave in, and it was arranged that Jones, the subaltern, should carry out the search.
A cross-country letter in the west of Ireland will often take nowadays any time from three to five days to arrive at a town only twenty miles away, and of the chief reasons of this delay one is that the mails often lie for twelve to twenty-four hours in a head post office before being sent out to rural sub-offices for distribution, or in a railway van at some junction awaiting a connection. This was well known to Blake, who had often to complain of delay in delivery of official letters, and also of letters from the “Castle” being frequently opened in the post.
Examining the mails in the Ballybor Post Office was out of the question, owing to the almost unbelievable fact that the staff, from the postmaster to the charwoman who washed out the tiled floors of the post office every morning, were Sinn Feiners, one and all, so that there only remained to search the mails in the train.
At this period the western railways were slowly dying from a creeping paralysis caused by the engine-drivers and guards refusing to carry the armed forces of the Crown, quite oblivious of the fact that it was only possible to pay the railway men’s enormous wages through the Government subsidy. For a time some lines shut down, but a goods train managed to reach Ballybor six days a week with mails and the bare necessities of life for the inhabitants—chiefly porter barrels. By good luck the guard on this train chanced to be a Loyalist—probably the only one on the line—and it was arranged with him that the mails should be searched by Jones while the mail van waited in a siding for several hours at a junction about sixteen miles from Ballybor.
Disguised as harvestmen, Jones and his servant were dropped at night from a Crossley close to the junction and admitted to the mail van by the guard; they at once set to work with electric torches, the batman opening the letters, whilst Jones read and made a note of any useful information, and when they had finished returned in the car to Ballybor Barracks.
On returning to the barracks, Blake and Jones went carefully through the information, and found that one letter addressed to a noted Sinn Feiner, Mr Pat Hegarty, who lived near a village called Lissamore, about eight miles away, gave sufficient evidence on which to hang Mr Hegarty. The writer stated that on the 3rd inst. Hegarty was to expect the arrival of an officer of the I.R.A. in uniform, who would come from the direction of Castleport on a bicycle about 10 P.M. Hegarty was to keep this officer in his house, place the new supply of American arms at his disposal for ambushes, and the officer would not leave the district until Blake had been either killed or kidnapped.
Some months previous to this Blake had been in the south on special duty, and during his absence, MacNot, the D.I. who relieved him temporarily, had called a truce with the Volunteers as long as all appeared well on paper, with the result that the Volunteers had been able to make full preparations for a second effort to wipe out the police in the district. Soon after his return to Ballybor Blake heard strong rumours of a second landing of American arms during his absence—this time, at night at Ballybor quay—and the letter confirmed the rumours.