Galway Confidential

28

Raftery watched Jack Taylor walking a dog.

A dog?

When did that happen?

And to Raftery’s amusement, it seemed like it was a Shits Su. He figured that was how you’d pronounce the dog’s breed. He would have thought Taylor would have a Rottweiler at the very least.

Go figure.

Raftery knew he’d have to kill Taylor, but he was in no hurry. Truth was, he liked the guy. Seemed like aeons ago when he’d been crossing the Wolfe Tone Bridge and witnessed a guy plunging a knife repeatedly into Taylor’s body.

Without much reflection, he’d picked the attacker up and flipped him over the bridge. The guy didn’t drown but you can’t win ’em all. He’d begun visiting Taylor in the hospital because it amused him that he’d saved the dude’s life.

It was round the time he’d begun attacking nuns.

Were the two events connected?

He didn’t know or care a whole lot. Raftery had only ever loved one person, his sister, Jenny. As children, they’d been orphaned at a young age and Jenny had been banished to one of the few remaining infamous Magdalene laundries.

Jenny had run away many times, and on her third attempt, she’d killed herself. Raftery, in a comfortable foster home, had gone berserk, and in truth, a few years were literally lost to him as he endured mental hospitals, jails, various beatings, and the one figure who stalked each nightmare, real and imagined, was the figure of a nun.

The nun who’d told him of Jenny’s suicide.

Raftery knew that attacking a nun, despite the anticlerical mood of the country, was still going to be a shocker. Attack a whole series of them and you have a whole feature of shock.

But Sheila Winston was a special case, he felt true hate for her. She resented Raftery’s friendship with Jack Taylor and was forever interfering in their narrative. She had questioned his claim of being Jack’s brother, and to make matters worse, she ensured Taylor was hired to investigate the nun attacks.

The black rosary beads.

He remembered the day she showed him the beads. She’d said,

“This is for Jack when he solves the attacks.”

There and then, he’d nearly snatched them from her, shouted,

“Guess what, you just solved it.”

But wait.

He could do waiting; it sweetened the deed if there’d been a time of anticipation. When the time came, he simply asked her if he might examine the beads and she just handed them over.

No fuss, he’d wrapped them round her neck, put his boot in her back, and pulled like a bastard.