Shay Fanahan in another graveyard!

Fanahan yearned for the old days: the days when a policeman had a house and two derelict properties, bought cheap, being “done up”, renovated, to sell or lease out. Nowadays he was struggling to live on his salary. He hadn't been on a real call out job for a long time. He needed a stay away from base, living on subsidised meals and collecting mileage, for visiting suspects in his own car. When he rang Tyrell for a discussion, trying to pick his brain, on Georgie: he almost asked him if there was a job in the offing.

He had moved from his city apartment to a place in the country: a dream some people had, a nice bungalow, a few acres of land, a few outhouses and in the phrase of the old days ...room for a pony. Instead he was living in a one horse village, in a so called new house, bought at the top of the market, and now, like a lot of others in The Village, it was pyrite cracked and he was fighting with the developer to try and get it remedied. Bloody pyrite no one ever heard of it until recently when it was discovered in filling under foundations. It apparently caused the footings: sub walls, under the wall bricks, to move, maybe even crack. The results was that the door frames, and window sides, went on vacation from the places they had been fixed into.

The kip, hadn't even got a decent pub. It had two: family owned, one at the bottom of the main street was called the Bottom Shop, and the one at the other end of the street was called the Top Shop. A group of visitors on a pub crawl recently remarked that the local patrons resembled each other, and followed that with a derogatory remark about their origins. But there was some truth in his observations because for generations farmer's sons, married farmer's daughters. This ploy kept farms, and land, in family ownership for centuries.

The clientele also had men on the scratch, the local name for welfare, who always seemed to be drunk and making a nuisance of themselves. Shay suspected that some subsidies were being paid outside of the tax system.

He went for drink early in the evening, apart from the welfare pay day the place was relatively quiet. Since no one knew his profession, his day job, he sometimes overheard so called confessions about this folding money, payment for working on farms for cash. He kept this information for a rainy day, when he might have to assist Revenue in one of those dawn raids: with a press release later that read "Illegals arrested", working without work permits. A raid that only yielded welfare spongers would not be news.

One night, feeling shattered, after a dressing down about the lack of progress in the hunt for Georgie, he stayed drinking most of the day and into the weekend lock-in. He fell over on the way to the cigarette machine. Someone suggested they pick him up, call for a taxi, and send him on his way. They searched his pockets for his address, found his warrant card, with his name and rank. He woke up later: where he had been thrown, on a flat gravestone, above a crypt, in the nearby graveyard.