They Killed the Ice Cream Man: My Search for the Truth Behind My Brother John's Murder, Paperback

Descriere

My brother John Larmour was a police officer in the RUC. On 11 October 1988 he was off-duty and looking after my family-run ice cream parlour, Barnam s World of Ice Cream. I was on holiday in Spain with my wife and two young daughters at the time. John was shot dead that night by the IRA. A teenage couple were also in the parlour and the gunmen callously opened fire on them too. One of the guns they used had been taken from a murdered soldier. The other was a police-issue pistol that had been used in other killings. My brother s brutal murder has been gently immortalised in a poem, The Ice-Cream Man, by award winning poet, Michael Longley. His thoughtful words brought a degree of comfort to my Mum and Dad, who died of broken hearts. My brother, like all police officers, lived with constant danger. He knew that. But he couldn t have known the complexity of the story that would unfold after his death. My search for the truth behind John s murder started on that fateful night in October 1988. Wrangling with the police and the cold case Historical Enquiries Team raised suspicions, not lightly dispelled, of collusion. The more I learned the more I came to suspect that recruiting and protecting an agent, a Super Tout inside the upper echelons of the IRA, was more important to some of John s police colleagues than catching his killers. This is my story.