WAS she frightened? There is no consensus, even among her closest friends. One noticed a "slight change of attitude in recent months, a tiredness" that was uncharacteristic. And she confided to another in these past few weeks that she was "very worried".
The incident last September when she was "beaten black and blue", surmised this friend, seemed to have shaken her a lot more than the shot in the leg she sustained nine months before.
Weigh this, however, against the view of another long term friend, who believes she was acutely aware of the danger: "But she almost believed she was invincible. She had an aura about her that made you think she could walk on water." And another man who has known her well for close on 30 years says simply and with certainty: "No, she wasn't getting frightened."
This is the conundrum of Veronica Guerin. It could well be that she put on a different face for different friends and colleagues. It could also be that she was frightened and fascinated in equal measure, addicted to the adrenalin that surges from sitting in an empty car park at 2 a.m. awaiting Deep Throats from the underworld. But of one thing we may be sure: it would have made sense for her to be frightened.
It is 2 1/2 years now since someone fired a shot through the window of a room in which she had just been playing with her small son, Cathal. It occurred to her then to back off from her crime work.
Her husband clearly felt threatened at the time: "He had said: `Hang on a second, if this is the type of shit that we're going to be faced with. . .'," she said afterwards. "But I thought, what was the point in giving in to them? Then they'll think that they can just continue doing it to everybody else. So I carried on."
And carry on she did. "She was a great woman to argue or convince you of her point of view, says a friend, but so did the other side. Eighteen months ago, they upped the stakes.
A man "barged" into her house when she was alone and first raised a handgun to her head, then to her thigh. The shot should I have shattered her leg. The surgeon's report used the word "miraculous" four times.
What happened, says Garda Cathal Cryan, a family friend, was that the bullet flattened on her femur, and where it should have exited it stopped dead. "Because it stopped where it did, it only required a small incision in the back of her leg."
It was a remarkable piece of luck. But this time, far from seizing it with both hands and choosing discretion for a while, she opted to deliver a message in person to her attackers. Still on crutches, she was driven by her husband to the haunts and homes of the leading figures in Dublin's underworld. "I went to them all, just to let them know I wasn't intimidated. I just would not give in to them."
Then one day last September, in a classic piece of Guerin door stepping, she called to a house at 9 a.m. She wanted to ask the owner how someone just out of prison could have accrued the vast sums of money he had just declared in tax returns. She was, says a friend, "beaten black and blue".
When contacted by another journalist, the suspect was up front about his intentions: he threatened to "find out who the . . . you are and kill you, too".
But for all the elaborate £25,000 security system installed by her newspaper after the second attack, and the 24 hour police escort after the third (which she dispensed with after a few months), her modus operandi left her very alone and exposed. Some part of her, at least, was aware of this.
Friends who argued with her about the risks she was taking and urged more precautions were stymied by responses which suggested a kind of resignation to her fate: "If I wore a bulletproof vest, I'd still have to take it off at night. If I had bulletproof glass in the car, I'd still have to get out of the car.
The most obvious piece of advice - that no story is worth dying for, or risking the lives of loved ones for - was simply not entertained: "She just didn't feel her family were in danger. She simply didn't believe the criminals would go that far," says a friend from childhood.
This was in spite of the count less death threats delivered by phone, laced with unsubtle references to "the grand child" she had, and what lovely coloured hair he had.
Her friend Paddy Prendiville, another journalist, recalls an incident that gives some indication of the strange, uneasy, lonely world in which she moved.
En route to Spain for a soccer match, they arrived on the plane to take their seats, only to discover they were already occupied, by the brother of a notorious underworld figure and his sidekick.
This pair clearly knew their targets (addressing Prendiville and Guerin by their first names) and persistently tried to engage them in conversation when they were moved by stewardesses to their correct seats, which happened to be in the row behind. The overtures continued in the Spanish hotel.
Twenty four hours later, when Prendiville and Guerin arrived back in Dublin and were driving back toward the Guerin home, they spotted a car in a laneway close by. The driver flashed his lights at them, accelerated out of the laneway, overtook their car, did a U turn and came back at them, at high speed. Veronica Guerin had no doubt that it was an attempt to intimidate her.
WHAT was the driving force behind her persistence? What drove such a broad-ranging journalist - one who had made her name on her grasp of complex detail leading to several financial scoops, as well as the type of tenacity that led to her Eamonn Casey interviews in South America - repeatedly back into an area of such personal risk?
At the beginning, it seems, there was a passionate need to prove herself as a journalist. She had begun training as a certified accountant after school with the intention of joining the family accountancy firm, but after the death of her father in 1983 she embarked on a different route.
Through her membership of the board of the NIHE (now DCU), she got in by "the back door" to a postgraduate course in Marketing and Communications. From there, she set up a public relations company where she committed herself wholeheartedly to clients such as Abbey Life and Club Air. Meanwhile, she worked as an aide to Charles Haughey during the New Ireland. Forum and subsequently moved on to do research for Fianna Fail.
But in recent years, it became evident to friends and interviewers that the PR years were ones she preferred to gloss over. "If you reminded her of her PR days," says one old friend, "you'd be doing it to slag her. She would have despised press officers and PR people."
FOR Veronica Guerin, the adrenalin provided by investigative journalism was unmatched by anything else. She admitted recently that, initially, she was motivated by the "buzz", by the thrill of the chase, but said that from 1994 onwards (the year she joined the Sunday Independent), with the growth of a drug cent red culture, her motives altered: "Now I feel those bastards have to be exposed because they're just making so much money. They are destroying lives and they are practically untouchable."
In the few days since her murder, a quiet debate has been taking place in media circles about the nature of such journalism. In yesterday's Irish Times, Vincent Browne wrote that "it is arguable that the investigation of crime is ancillary to the essential role of the press", that journalism is essentially about holding the institutions of the State accountable for how they cope with the crime bosses and the crime phenomenon.
He argued this point recently with Veronica Guerin, he said but "unfortunately, she did not agree". Friends believe she would have given up journalism altogether rather than forsake the crime beat. Her editor, Aengus Fanning, has written that if she didn't have the freedom (from police protection) to move freely and quickly in her job, he, too is certain she would have given up journalism.
In some notoriously crime infested countries throughout the world, newspaper editors and journalists have been forced to weigh up the risks of such work.
In certain parts of Europe, editors make a policy of appointing people to such jobs for limited periods of, say, a year. Others prefer their journalists to work in teams. Veronica Guerin stood alone. Next Friday should have been her 37th birthday.
