Galway Girl

Jericho accompanied Scott when they shot the fourth Guard, a new recruit on traffic duty.

Jericho left a note.

Said to Scott,

“That’s it for leaving notes, they’re like so lame.”

In the past decade there have been some horrific scandals that rocked the land:

The Magdalen laundries,

The Tuam babies,

The bankers.

But even these horrors were paling against the cervical cancer cover-up.

It blew open when a young woman who’d insisted she was not happy about her smear tests took a High Court action that revealed the HSE had known she was fatally ill for three years and hid it.

Fucking hid it.

When the woman discovered that she had only months to live, it emerged that the tests had been outsourced to a U.S. company and guess who had shares in said company?

The head of the HSE.

An arrogant bollix who, when confronted about possibly hundreds of other women who were fatally ill and had not been told, stonewalled and then announced he was soon to resign with a huge pension, but—

And here’s the but—

He would devote the remainder of his time to investigating how this could have happened.

Then he went on leave, piled-up days that he was due already.

The leader of the government insisted he had full confidence in him, then returned to urging the country to vote yes and legalize abortion.

You tried to digest this utter... disgrace... and wondered

Not why we drank but why we weren’t drinking lights out.

Amy Fadden, whose daughter was murdered and who tried to frame me for the killing of her daughter’s killer, was enjoying cocktails in the Radisson when I caught up with her.

The Radisson was a popular venue on Fridays when they had a special cocktail hour; ladies of a certain hue, i.e., money and fuck all else to do, attended regularly. The barman looked like an escapee from Chippendales,

Hired less for his skill than his ability to fill a near see-through shirt with finesse.

I spotted Amy in, dare I say, high spirits with a table of women who looked like money was not of any pressing concern. I approached the guy, asked for a pint.

He frowned, making his chiseled looks a shade empty, and said in that new mid-Atlantic drawl,

“Perhaps Sir might be more comfortable in a more traditional setting.”

I enjoyed that.

I asked,

“Are you familiar with the traditional puck?”

No.

He asked,

“Is it a cocktail?”

I said,

“It’s a fairly fast heavy wallop to the face.”

He poured the pint, said,

“Twelve euros.”

Like fuck.

I said,

“See Mrs. Fadden?”

“Indeed, a valued addition to our little soirees.”

I said,

“Stick it on her tab.”

I strolled over to the table where the ladies were deep in drink, the table a riot of color, every conceivable brand of cocktail, tiny umbrellas, fruit wedges.

Lurking from every glass, it looked like a Dalí piss-up.

Into the middle of this Technicolor mess I plonked my ugly black pint. It appeared like a shout.

One of the ladies, her eyes a tad the worse for wear, barked,

“Excuse me!”

I nodded at Amy, said,

“How’s it going, Amy?”

The others stared at her but she had nothing, so I said,

“Amy hired me to find who killed her daughter.”

That threw a somber note.

A lady to my left touched my arm, asked,

“And did you?”

I leaned over, took my pint, drank noisily, belched, said,

“Amy decided to frame me for it.”

Now there was utter silence.

All eyes on the bould Amy.

She rallied, said,

“It was all a terrible misunderstanding. Grief had me not knowing what was going on.”

There was a slight shift in orientation as two ladies moved a tiny distance from her. I said,

“But hey, all water under the bridge,

Like the mayor’s dead son.

But the good news, like a fine cocktail, is at the bottom.

You want to tell them, Amy, or will I? We found the killer of her daughter and guess what.”

Long pause, then,

“Amy killed him.”

Murmurings.

The lady to my left asked,

“Killed him?”

I looked at Amy, who seemed to have gone into a kind of toxic shock or else it was just the booze hitting hard.

I said, very clearly,

“Amy killed the boy.”

They all turned to Amy who was still as a prayer lost in translation.

I stood up, said,

“I’ll leave you ladies to your cocktails.”

I’d reached the bar and the bar guy glared at me. I asked him,

“You heard about the barman who was shot?”

He had decided to somehow find his balls while I’d been chatting with the ladies, snarled,

“So?”

Not a whole lot of sympathy there.

I added,

“By all accounts he was a nice guy.”

He shrugged, dismissing me, so I asked,

“Imagine what would happen to an asshole behind a bar?”