a few good men

This happened ten years ago while I worked for a now defunct provincial newspaper.
I was sitting on the press bench in Athy District Court.
The Judge was cleaning out her ears or something and the courtroom was momentarily quiet.
A lawyer approached me.
It was Raymond Baines.
"Ahem, James, ahem," he said clearing his throat awkwardly, "if you, ahem, report that last case, ahem, the man involved will, ahem, lose his job."
I looked up from my notebook and favoured him with a level stare.
It's the sort of stare I use when I don't want people to know I've just been snoozing.
"I won't even talk to you about it Raymond," I said coolly.
"He'll lose his job," persisted the lawyer.
"I won't even talk to you about it," I said again, word for word, syllable for syllable, tone for tone.
Heelers the uncorruptible to the last.
The lawyer shook his head sadly and walked away.
The moral dilemma would be simple enough for me.
Since I'd been napping through the whole thing, there could be no question of reporting the case.
I never report them unless I can stand over every word.
Ethics, I call it.
Ethics and snoozing.
But Raymond Baines didn't need to know that.
I looked at my watch.
Close to midday.
The criminals of Athy had delighted me long enough.
I wandered outside to catch a spot of lunch at Bradbury's cafe.
I was also hoping to catch sight of Jill Bradbury the RADA actress whose family owned the cafe.
Ah, she's a honey I tells ee.
As I exited the courtroom, I had to squeeze past a few defendants waiting to be called.
One of them tried to grab my arm.
He missed.
"Don't put me in the paper right," he hissed with all the antique courtesy of his class.
I kept moving.
Across the road in the cafe I ensconced myself in a corner.
I was not keen to catch the eye of any of the other diners in case some might have been defendants in the morning's shenanigans.
A waitress brought me a fry.
While I munched I reached into the pocket of my coat for my notebook.
I wanted to review the morning's work.
The notebook was gone.
Well, well, well.
That was a lot of moral dilemmas shelved at a stroke.
But who had taken it?
I risked a glance around the room.
Three rough hewn defendant types mulling over coffee at an adjoining table seemed awfully amused about something.
You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.
There was little doubt they had stolen my notebook.
They were giggling like schoolgirls.
Macho dangerous tatooed psycho schoolgirls.
But schoolgirls nonetheless.
Only an intimate unlicensed guided tour of James Healy's reporter's notebook would be likely to have that sort of mirth making effect on the hoodlums of Athy.
They're so out of their minds on drugs, there's little else makes em laugh anymore.
I returned to my fry.
Rum thoughts were circling through my mind.
There were not many case notes in that there reporter's notebook.
If I remember rightly there was nearly nothing.
Below is an exact replica of what the notebook had been filled with cover to cover, over the course of the morning.

What the hoodlums saw...

Judge Mary Martin, portraits from life...

Pages and pages filled with doodles of Judge Mary Martin, showing her with an outsize beak for a nose.
This was a reference to the British practice of referring to Judges collectively as The Beak.
I was ever the witty one.

Hilarious, no.
There were two immediately observable effects on my life arising from the theft of my notebook.
Firstly the criminal classes of Athy never so much as raised a finger to me again. No more threats, elbows, nudges, shoulder jostles or dire warnings not to put their names in the paper. After seeing my work for themselves it was as though they no longer thought of me as the enemy. They no longer feared me. In fact they probably thought of me as one of their own.
Secondly, the lawyer Raymond Baines remained convinced for years, ten years to be precise, in fact right up until he sees this edition of The Heelers Diaries, the Venerable Baines remained absolutely certain that I had spiked the story to save his client's job. He never mentioned the case to me again, but I knew what he thought. It became a frequent occurrence when I was dining out in Athy, for restaurateurs to tell me at the end of the night: "That's alright James. There will be no charge. Mr Baines took care of it."