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Cops Net the Wrong Fish

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I once knew a Special Branch man. I'll call him Seán, not so much to protect his identity, but because I can't for the life of me remember his name.

And to be totally honest, he was no longer a Special Branch man when I knew him. By the time our paths crossed, he had exchanged a policeman's lot for the more rewarding pastures of the private sector.

In fact, Seán had become head of security with the company for which I worked at the time. But no matter how lucrative his new position, I could see that Seán missed the excitement and adventure of Special Branch life far more than he cared to admit.

At any rate, he regularly held us enthralled through the morning coffee break with tales of robberies and high-speed chases, of stake-outs and dawn raids, of colourful villains and of lawmen who, at times, sounded every bit as dodgy as the criminals they pursued.

Whether or not his stories were the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, we were never really sure. Nor did we care, just so long as they kept us entertained. And, as is so often the case, the most entertaining yarns revolved around those occasions when the best laid of plans went horribly awry.

My favourite was a story Seán told about the attempted arrest of a particularly notorious criminal. The police had been seeking this character for quite some time and there was great excitement in the station house when an informant phoned late one evening with an address at which the wanted man was believed to be holed up.

In the normal course of events, the police would have waited until the early hours of the morning - the optimum time for making an arrest. But they were concerned that their quarry might slip away during the night, something he had managed to do on a previous occasion. Accordingly, they decided to waste no time and to make the arrest without further delay.

The way Seán described it, a whole battalion of heavily armed policemen was prowling the narrow street by the time the raid was launched. The house, which was little more than a cottage on a narrow side-street, showed no sign of life other than an outside light burning above the front door.

While their comrades-in-arms sealed off all possible escape routes, a group of Special Branch men, including Seán, crept up to the front of the house. To their surprise, the front door was unlocked and opened with a turn of the handle. Inside, the house was in darkness except for a strip of light glowing beneath a doorway at the far end of the entrance hall.