A child's birthday party was being held yesterday afternoon in the house next door to where Derek Dunne lived for two years with his partner and two young daughters. The local children, no older than five, arrived in their Sunday best, oblivious to the carnage visited upon the door-step that weekend.
The final traces of bloodstains on the concrete where the heroin dealer died after a shoot-out in the early hours of Saturday morning had been washed away by heavy rains. A bouquet of flowers at the front door of No 81 had begun to wither in the summer sunshine. The Dunne children may have been invited to the party but they hadn't come. Inside the town house, blood from the Dutch man shot by Dunne and found seriously injured in the small hallway had been cleaned by the neighbour who left the bouquet. Newspaper screened the cracked glass panel on the door, but inside no personal artefacts were visible and the child's buggy previously seen had been removed.
People told of the shouts they heard from the second wounded man, who had walked along the street with his hands bound behind his back before finally collapsing across the street outside No 98. He had cried out that it was over a sum of money and that he had put the Dunne family in danger, according to one man. But well before the horrific events of the weekend many of the people living adjacent or across from the Irish family had been suspicious of the comings and goings around the house. "A lot of people, a lot of cars, a lot of things - we're not blind," said one man. "If you can afford to buy the cars he had you don't live in this area," said another man. His children played with the six-year-old daughter of Derek Dunne, whose second child with his current partner is thought to be almost two. "I have a nice car but I don't have a different one every month," he added.
The homes in the area are largely owner-occupied, although Dunne is understood to have rented. Residential areas close by were once plagued by rioting youths, but Singerstraat is a quiet neighbourhood built less than three years ago. Some locals noted that Dunne did often find it necessary to leave his town house to work for a living and he was seen in his garden on the phone or regularly using a local phone booth. Neighbours spoke of the sound of a motorcycle engine being revved frequently coming from the rear of his house. Farther up the street, one bemused dweller said she only found out from the television news what had occurred as she had been away that night. "The police asked me if I had any information but I didn't know what they were talking about and they didn't tell me."
One of the officers leading the inquiry, Insp Herbert Dekker, based at police headquarters in the centre of Amsterdam, was adamant there was "nothing new" to report on the case yesterday and referred all inquiries to the press office.
A police spokesman said Dunne and the two injured men, now in custody, were unknown to the force. He confirmed that at least six shots were fired at the scene and a revolver was recovered, although no drugs were found. He ruled out a link between the incident and the killing of three Irishmen in a suburb of The Hague four weeks ago by a drugs gang. It was not believed that any other Irish people were involved, added the spokesman. He would not disclose the nationality of the two or three men who escaped.
That Derek Dunne was killed by a European drugs gang over money remains the prominent theory. Having closely tracked Dunne while he operated in Dublin in the mid-1990s and clashed violently with other gangs, one garda was not surprised this weekend at the death of the former League of Ireland soccer player. "Derek, as he has shown in the past, wasn't slow to use a bit of force." he said. "But when there are guns it doesn't matter how strong you are, it's the capacity of your weapon that counts."