The blinds were pulled tight across the windows of the O'Hagan home on Tandragee Road in Lurgan yesterday. Visitors wearing suits came to pay their respects, some stopping briefly to look at a stark reminder of Friday night's tragedy. You could still see the chalk marks on the pavement near the house, indicating where the bullets had fallen after investigative journalist Martin O'Hagan was shot dead by paramilitaries as he walked home from the pub with his wife, Marie.
The couple had moved there with their three children a year ago on Friday. This part of Tandragee Road separates the Catholic Collingwood area from the loyalist Mourneview Estate near where the killers, thought to be members of the LVF, abandoned the car they used in the attack. Bits of glass and debris littered the ground a few minutes away in Glenavon Lane, where it was later dumped.
People on their way to church strolled through the estate where the perpetrators are believed to have hidden on the night of the murder. "Loyalists?" said one man of the killers. "They make me ashamed to call myself a Protestant. Those people are a cancer in the Mourneview Estate, a cancer that we can't get rid of".
Another well-dressed man, standing close to a mural which read "Mid-Ulster Rat Pack: Defiant Until Victory" also expressed his disgust. "There is shock and sadness across the Protestant and Catholic community", he said. "These things shouldn't happen".
Books of condolences were opened at St Peter's Church on North Street, as well as in the local Church of Ireland. The messages were simple and personal. "Martin was a fine upstanding hero who will never be forgotten"; "... he was always full of energy and enthusiasm, doing a job he loved". Those who queued up to sign after 11 o'clock Mass praised the bravery of the Sunday World journalist, whose commitment to exposing the criminal activities of paramilitaries on both sides eventually cost him his life; "He was another Veronica Guerin", said one. Others repeated what most of the town seemed to be thinking over the weekend: "I thought those days were behind us".
A statement concerning the murder was read out at churches of all denominations around the town. The killing was, it said, the kind of event that "we had hoped and prayed belonged to the past".
At the Carnegie Inn, where Martin and his wife had spent most of Friday night, the atmosphere was subdued. He was a regular at this quiet pub, with its polished wood, green leather upholstery and mixed clientele. A few men sipped Guinness and watched the Rangers v Celtic match. The owner, just returned from visiting the O'Hagan family, politely declined to comment and looked distraught as he stood behind the bar.
The couple had left the Carnegie, or Fa Joes, as it is known locally, at around 10.15 p.m. on Friday night, walking home together to the Tandragee Road. They were five doors from their house when a car drove slowly past. The reporter was shot twice in the back as he tried to protect his wife; the other shots hit some of the houses behind.
Journalists called to the scene late on Friday night stood on the rain-splattered road, behind police tape and blue flashing lights, as the RUC confirmed reports that the murdered man was a colleague. Locals peered over to where the journalist's body lay covered while forensics officers in white overalls searched for evidence. Two young girls who had ventured down from their homes in the Mourneview Estate stood shivering in the rain. "We heard the shots", said one. "We were watching a video and we heard it. At first we thought it was fireworks, but then we realised. There were six or seven shots."
The girl's mother arrived home shortly afterwards. "I had to calm them down", she said. "They were crying and they just kept asking why? I told them it was because he was a Catholic. It is terrible. I am a Protestant, but we don't have any problems with anyone else. This doesn't make any sense. You would think after America they would wise up."
Martin O'Hagan's body was taken away at about 1.30 on Saturday morning. There was a dry patch of ground in the rough shape of a man's body and a fresh pool of blood.
Before the removal of the body, some local Protestant youths began to challenge the RUC, shouting obscenities, while behind the blinds, Marie O'Hagan, who is from a Protestant background and has a close relative in the Mourneview Estate, sat consumed by shock and grief.
When someone objected quietly to their shouts, urging the youths to have respect for the O'Hagan family, they were ignored. "You don't understand what life's like around here", one teenager grinned.