the search

 

Browsing in a shop.

I see that Rupert Murdock's super soaraway Sun newspaper has a cover article on a renewed search at woodland near where I live for the bodies of several missing girls.

The search is being downplayed on television but everyone in this part of the country is aware of it.

Apparently the police delayed the search for a year because of the Flu virus panic.

Well bold readers, a year.

That sort of police frivolity regarding the search for missing girls makes the little vein on my forehead throb.

The cops took a year off after getting the supposed tip which they supposedly believed might be genuine.

And did nothing.

And their excuse for doing nothing is the Covid 19 flu virus shenanigans.

And now they've revealed they had received the same supposed tip years ago.

And they did nothing then too.

The search for the girls' bodies is a story that interests me.

I really want to buy the Sun.

But I can't.

It's... it's...

It's the Sun.

Instead I buy a takeaway cup of tea.

At the counter I tell the cashier how close I came to buying the Sun and why.

"Do you think they'll find the bodies?" asks the girl.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Well there's some reason to suspect that sympathetic hoodlums are running pass defence for the murderer by wasting police time with nonsense tip offs. There was a guy in jail a few years ago falsely confessing to the murders in order to try and create space for the real killer."

"Oh."

"The Irish police have not done well on this one. For twenty years up to 2018 they refused to even categorise the investigations as murder enquiries. A fellow who rang up trying to mislead the police shortly after one girl was taken, was let off without charge. The cop in charge of the investigation for decades, Alan Bailey was just culpably worse than useless in ways that the libel laws prevent me from specifying. The new guy, the Kildare based Inspector John Fitzgerald is entitled to a chance and at least looks like he's making some sort of an effot. But the year long delay of the present search due to the Flu panic is not to his credit. If the bodies were ever there, they've been moved long ago."

"So what should they be doing?"

"They should just arrest Larry Murphy and make him tell them where he put the girls. And they should reveal the identities of the two people in my town of Kilcullen who each separately gave a lift to Jo Jo Dollard on the night she went missing."