Free The Squad by T. Ryle Dwyer

the escaped prisoners hiding in Lodge’s house and made arrangements for them to be smuggled back to Dublin during the first week in November.

CHAPTER 5
‘I DO NOT DEFEND THE MURDER SIMPLY AS SUCH I MERELY APPLAUD IT’
    While some people believed that Collins moved about the city in disguise, highly armed and well protected, he in fact usually went alone, unarmed, on a bicycle, without any disguise. Some of the detectives knew him, but he had so terrorised the DMP that they were afraid to apprehend him lest the faceless people supposedly protecting him would come to his rescue, or take revenge on them. They knew only of his ruthless reputation, and he exploited it to the full.
    If he took a tram and he saw a detective who would recognise him, Collins would confidently sit by the detective and ask in a friendly way about the detective’s family. If one of the children had made their first communion or been confirmed he would mention this, and anything he might know about the wife. He would, for instance, asked how the wife was, using her name. It was all a very subtle way of saying that he knew so much about the man’s family that if the detective did not want anything to happen to them, he would not interfere with Collins. It would have been out of character for Collins to attack any member of a person’s family in this way, but the detectives did not know that. As Collins would get off the tram, he would tell the detective that it would be safe for him to get off at a subsequent stop.
    One day in the street Batt O’Connor became uneasy at the way two DMP looked at Collins. They seemed to recognise him, but he was unperturbed.
    ‘Even if they recognised me,’ Collins said, ‘they would be afraid to report they saw me.’ And even if they did report, it would take the DMP an hour to muster the necessary force to seize him. ‘And, of course,’ he added, ‘all the time I would wait here until they were ready to come along!’
    He never stayed in any one place very long. He always had something to do, somebody to see, or somewhere to go.
    Although he was always on the go, he never thought of himself as being ‘on the run’. Wanted men frequently developed a habit of venturing forth only with care. Before leaving a building they would sneak a furtive glance to make sure there were no police around, whereas Collins had contempt for such practices. He just bounded out a door in a carefree, self-confident manner without betraying the slightest indication he was trying to evade anybody.
    ‘I do not allow myself to feel I am on the run,’ he explained. ‘That is my safeguard. It prevents me from acting in a manner likely to arouse suspicion.’
    Following the raid on the Sinn Féin headquarters at 6 Har court Street in September, the headquarters were moved down the street to number 76 Harcourt Street. The police had captured so much material at Number 6 that Batt O’Connor suggested building some hiding place into the new headquarters. ‘It would be worth trying anyway.’
    He had already built this hiding place, into a wall, when the police raided the office on 8 November 1919. The staff had time to slip the books and papers under a sliding door before the police burst into the room. They searched the building but did not find the secret cupboard. Beaslaí had just arrived back in Dublin that day following his escape from Strangeways. He was at O’Connor’s house when Joe O’Reilly arrived with the news that 76 Harcourt Street was being raided and that Collins was in the building.
    One of the uniformed policemen involved in searching the building was Constable David Neligan, who was shortly to become another of Collins’ police spies. He had no intention of trying to find anything. ‘I went upstairs and counted the roses on the wallpaper until the raid was over,’ he explained.
    Collins headed for the skylight and escaped across the roof, climbing through the skylight of the nearby Standard hotel and