Some time in the coming weeks Eamon Collins would have received compensation for injuries received when he was knocked down by a car whose driver was apparently trying to kill him. Collins was also due an insurance award for the arson attack which destroyed his family farmhouse on the Camlough Road outside Newry last September.
With the money, he had decided to leave Newry and start a new life for himself, his wife and four children. He was considering applying for a position with social services in Scotland. In the first years of his exile from Newry, he had worked voluntarily with Father Peter McVerry at his boys' home in Ballymun. Collins found this period the most rewarding in his life and sought to recreate it. He could never fully explain why he went back to Newry. Asked recently, he said simply he felt he would be a hypocrite if he did not live in the town among the people he wrote about. He was unique among former IRA informers who have written about their pasts in not staying safely away from home.
Privately people who knew him said that, despite his repeated denials, he had a death wish. If he had, it was fulfilled on Wednesday when he went for his usual early morning walk in the hills overlooking Newry. He was waylaid, beaten, probably with an iron bar, stabbed repeatedly and then, as he lay prone on the roadside, a car was driven over his body.
Police on both sides of the Border say he was almost certainly killed by a confederacy of his old associates in the Provisional IRA, some of whom may now be among the dissident republicans in the Border area.
Republicans in south Armagh, from the Provisional IRA's chief of staff down, all had reason to want Collins dead. His death rids them of one of their most insightful critics, someone who knew the IRA from the inside and who would not, despite threats, stop writing about and condemning the organisation he blamed for his own descent into murderous amorality.
Collins joined the Customs and Excise service and the Provisional IRA at the same time in December 1978. He began spying on his Protestant colleagues to see which of them also served as part-timers in the security forces. He chose as his first victim Mr Ivan Toombs, a part-time officer in the Ulster Defence Regiment.
Mr Toombs had survived a previous attempt on his life by the IRA and paid close attention to his personal security. But he had one chink in his armour, a weekly act of kindness to his Customs colleagues in Warrenpoint.
After two years of closely observing his colleague, Collins finally identified Mr Toombs's vulnerability and arranged for the IRA to come and kill him.
His detailed account of the murder of Mr Toombs in his book, Killing Rage, reveals Collins as a calculating killer. He tells how he befriended his colleague even travelling with him to Belfast for a union meeting - all in an effort to discover a way to have him murdered.
Collins writers: "He was a man of simple tastes who behaved decently towards all, the sort of man who would have rebuked anyone who made an anti-Catholic comment. I liked him and I felt that in other circumstances we might have been friends."
"Every Friday he had got into the generous habit of giving his staff a little treat . . . he would buy them sausage rolls and make them tea and coffee, always around the same time in the morning. At last I had tied him down to one place, only momentarily, but long enough for gunmen to get in, kill him, and get out again."
Ivan Toombs, who was 42, was shot dead exactly in the way Collins planned, on January 16th, 1981. Three days later he joined the mourners as Mr Toombs was buried.
His description of this act and, in particular a reference to seeing Mr Toombs's daughter on a train years afterwards, has caused great distress to the Toombs family and only a week before Collins was himself killed they issued a statement saying Collins was making capital out of the murders he had committed.
Collins admitted that for the first four or five years in the IRA he revelled in his action but that he eventually reached the stage where he had begun to foresee his own death, writing: "There was no respite. Yet I lived life with a weird intensity. I felt myself to be part of a large family whose members had powerful emotional links to each other. The idea of turning my back on the IRA had become as repugnant to me as turning my back on my own children.
"I had become addicted to the struggle: operations became my fix. But I often asked myself: when will my final fix arrive? The one that will kill me, put me in prison or break me."
He describes in particular detail in the book the stalking and murder of Fred Morton, a 59-year-old part-time policeman who was shot dead on March 15th, 1983, as he drove his bread van to work. It was at about this time he reflected that he had begun to realise what he had turned himself into.
He wrote "Looking back now, I can see that Morton's death was in fact a sort of turning-point. Although as a planner of death I continued to became more ruthless and efficient over the next two years - almost until my final arrest - psychologically I was at the peak of my resilience and conviction as an IRA man, in the sense that I had still no doubt that what I was doing was right. I thought coldly about Morton's killing: when I reflected on it at all, it was only in terms of a successful operation.
"As Morton was buried, I congratulated myself on my hardness: I had embraced the logic of revolutionary necessity and had, so I thought, allowed it to supplant the old values that would have made me question the means I was using to pursue what I regarded as the IRA's justifiable ends. "I realise now that in fact the psychological tension had not disappeared, only become more acute and inaccessible, and those doubts had only retreated into a little bunker in my mind. Over the next two years those doubts slowly began to re-emerge, fighting, although first I had to descend into the darkest pit of ruthless amorality."
Collins's book sold well and he became a regular newspaper contributor, making enough money to start restoring his family's farmhouse in Camlough just outside Newry. He had intended to move out of the town, where he faced regular intimidation, to the house in Camlough, but it was burned by republicans in September.
This act, following a number of attempts to kill him, had led him to decide to leave Newry. He spoke of returning to social work. In the past two weeks he had told a number of people about this decision. It may emerge that his enemies, too, had learned of his intentions and killed him while they still had the opportunity.