Don’s arrest and release made for some lurid headlines, fed to the press by the guards and fuelled by a crank call to a local radio station claiming that bank notes and been seen billowing from Don’s chimney, which then morphed into a story of unnamed neighbours claiming that there had been a fire in his garden and, according to a report in The Guardian, he had been caught by the guards ‘tossing more notes from the Northern Bank raid onto a bonfire’ – despite that Don had actually opened his front door for the guards; that only two scorched notes were ever found in someone else’s property; and two days of forensic examination failed to find any evidence of anything untoward being burnt in and around Don’s home. This line continued to be repeated by the media, including in a 2021 BBC documentary called Heist: The Northern Bank Robbery, mostly because it makes for a good story but it always struck me as lazy, rather than investigative, journalism that repeated lines without checking if it were even possible to burn even small amounts of money in a domestic setting without leaving a large amount of incriminating residue. However, the guards, the press and a film crew from Britain’s Channel Four that turned up in Passage West were not the only ones interested in Don – within days of his release he was told the IRA also had questions for him. Through the recently released George Hegarty he was told that a senior IRA man, who Don has asked me to call ‘Freddie Black’, wanted to talk with him. Don politely but firmly refused and said that George could pass on what he had to say:  which was precisely nothing. He also told George he did not have to know what had happened with him either; he knew nothing of what had gone on and he would rather it stayed that way. By Don’s reckoning it is easier not to say anything incriminating if you genuinely know nothing. A guard had let something slip during his attempts to get information which indicated to Don not everything about this investigation was how it was being presented to the media. It was a hunch that in the course of time would prove to be correct.