Galway Girl

There is a term in psychology,

A chilling one.

“The theater of murder.”

Jericho loved this.

She didn’t need it explained.

She knew how to murder with the maximum of drama.

There is a tinker woman named Brid I meet at odd times. She is supposed to have the bronntanas, the gift of seeing.

Certainly, there have been times when she foretold events in my life that proved to be all too tragically true.

Do I believe it?

Phew-oh. When you have been raised a guilt-ridden Catholic, with a native tongue awash in curses, prophecies, banshees, the odd leprechaun, you tend to keep, if not an open mind, then certainly options open.

After I left Scott, with the damning recording in my jacket, I met her in Buttermilk Lane, our version of the Yellow Brick Road.

She wore the handwoven Connemara shawl, a riot of rings and bangles, and she could have been anything from fifty to seventy, with a ton of hair, long, jet-black, and always immaculately washed, with a scent of roses.

Her eyes, a washed-out nigh white with flecks of what ofttimes seemed to shine gold that I told myself was a trick of the light.

“Young Taylor,”

She said.

Insofar as I could gauge, she had a certain fondness for me, thanks to some assistance I had rendered to her people. I instinctively knew that was the smart place to be with her. Once, I had seen her wrath when a group of young trainee thugs had called her names.

She had unleashed a torrent of curses that seemed to frighten the shite out of them and they cowered away, like beaten dogs.

I put in her hand a mess of notes, which she quickly hid in her shawl, then she took my hand and closed her eyes.

She swayed from side to side, my hand held tight, then muttered,

“Och ocon.”

This is not good.

Means,

“Woe is me.”

And a whole slew of other shite too, none if it good.

She said,

“Bhi curamach leis an cailin Gaillimh.”

“Beware the Galway girl.”

Added,

“An deargar ag teacht.”

“The bloodletting is coming.”

Then she reached beneath her shawl, took out a tied piece of leather with a small stone cross, put it around my neck, said,

“Bheannacht leat.”

“Bless you.”

Then she was gone and, like the narrator of the poem by Padraig Pearse,

I was left wondering.

Some months later, I was walking through the Galway market. A guy from Lithuania was selling a whole row of exactly the same item.

I asked, hoping that maybe Brid had a small cottage industry going, where he got them. He said,

“We import them from China.”

Scott, after I left, looked out the window, saw two suited men approaching his door, ran to the roof and, in utter silence, threw himself off.

The men were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Amy Fadden, mother of the girl who had been murdered, waited patiently for the bus that normally took her daughter to school. As it accelerated to turn from the roundabout, she stepped in front of it.

Her estranged husband, drinking a combo of brandy and cheap wine, suffocated on his own vomit.

Did the above qualify as the bloodletting?

I had given the recording of Scott to Owen Daglish, expecting

1. Stapes would be released.

2. Jericho would be arrested.

Despite my years of experience to the contrary I thought justice would prevail.

Bollocks.

Here’s what happened:

Stapes was charged with aggravated burglary and as a coconspirator in the Guards killings.

Jericho would not be charged. Hearsay from the recording of a dead man was not evidence.

Daglish quipped,

“See, a burglar in the nick is worth two in the wind.”

I said to Daglish,

“This is such bullshit.”

He smiled, said,

“No, simply Galway.”