Denis Donaldson left few traces in Donegal, writes Dan Keenan, Northern News Editor.
"I never met the wee man myself," said Leo McCloone as he pushed a yellow J-cloth across the top of his bar. He paused and added: "Thank God".
Leo's Bar in Glenties was the watering hole reputed by some to have been favoured by the former Sinn Féin boss turned British agent.
If it was true, no-one there knew it.
Not that denial or cover-up is the natural response by the warm and open people from these parts.
Despite hosting the story of the moment, Glenties patiently put up with the media invasion. Not even the clutter of satellite vans and outside broadcast units outside the neatly painted Garda station managed to furrow a local brow.
There was no Crossmaglen-style hush in response to reporters' questions. No Border-lands suspicion of the outsider with the accent.
Sure, that man must have come here to do his messages and have a drink, they said. But nobody, genuinely, really recalled seeing him.
This reporter got more than a dozen versions of the same answer in response to the same question.
"Maybe he took the glasses off," mused one proprietor. "And when you let the beard grow a bit, that changes a man."
Denis Donaldson's violent end was a mystery. But it seemed many were content to let others figure it out.
A few miles out the lumpy Derryloughan road and amid magnificent wilderness, two gardaí stood by a single stretch of crime-scene tape.
This is as far as anyone gets to the white three-roomed house on the left of the little road known locally as The Line.
The same people that never saw Denis Donaldson named the families that were reared in that house in the townland of Classey - the O'Donnells and the Anthonys.
A description of the type of range in the kitchen was offered. But there was little to be told of the small, balding man with glasses who helped bring down a government.
Chief Supt Terry McGinn told us of the passer-by who noticed the broken window and the forced door and how the suspicions led to the arrival of the 24-hour news networks.
It is not that often that news reports are superimposed with the banner "Live from Glenties". But that made little difference to the chief superintendent, who calmly eyed the horde of cameras and thanked us all for our questions.
She vowed that everything possible would be done in pursuit of the killers and of justice. Within seconds Sky proclaimed to most of Europe that the Garda would leave "no stone unturned", as if the phrase had never been uttered before.
A thousand miles away in Belfast and Dublin, politicians and former IRA men argued over who did it and why. In west Donegal, they got on with life.
It is hard, after all, to sustain any real sense of crisis when there is a sweet hint of turf smoke in the air.