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they stuck,’ Joanne begs.
    ‘No, they were dropped soon after and he left the island. He dossed around Belgium for a while after, but I couldn’t dig anything up on him there. One problem is that a doctor can amass a malpractice record in one country, but pack up and move to another, get licensed and begin again with a clean slate. Malpractice in one place doesn’t appear on the new licensing record. Our doctor has moved around more than your average parish priest. A story about this guy is a story about the whole mess of a system. It’s big. After Belgium he went to England where his latest troubles went down, and now he’s back home, running a trial for the same company just off Dublin Two.’
    ‘So what do we have here?’ Joanne is trying to bunch the details into a presentable bouquet. ‘Oodles of allegations that didn’t stick, laws that don’t work, and a sinister man who wriggled his way wherever he liked because of it.’ She tap-taps her finger on the table, examining the model-like features of the projected man. ‘A face for the failed system. More a tagline than a headline isn’t it?’
    ‘There’s no grammar mistakes,’ Ava smirks. ‘Who got this together for you, Barry?’
    ‘One of the interns found it on the community pages. It’s not big yet. If a couple more people come out of the woodwork to press charges against him it could be a hit though. We have his face, but none for the victims since they’ve all settled. If a pretty girl comes out with something, a struggling mother maybe – we need to get on this before somebody else breaks it.’
    ‘Nobody will break it.’
    ‘Look at him Ava!’ Joanna waves at the screen.
    ‘Who’s representing him?’
    ‘Tracy and Co.’ Barry smiles sourly, as though the fact is a lemon he’s bitten into.
    ‘Tracy and Co.’ Ava repeats, the sound of triumph clear in her voice.
    ‘I am tired of only publishing what their PR give us. What did we lead with yesterday? Some scandalised minister defending taxi drivers rights to nap on the job?’
    ‘You want something interesting, this is it.’
    ‘I’m parched for a drink and you’ve just teased me with water before spilling it down the drain.’
    Sensing her editor’s headache, Ava throws a bottle of painkillers that she keeps on hand, watches Joanne dry swallow one, and catches them as they’re thrown back. ‘There’s an electric fence around this guy. Anything you say about him that isn’t good publicity is libel. That’s why nobody else has picked it up. The best we can hope for is for it to go viral, let the community break it and report on the reporting.’
    ‘Ah, just have some balls for once, Joanne,’ Barry says, petulant. ‘We’re supposed to be journalists.’
    The editor buries her head in her arms, lamenting, ‘He was so beautiful.’
    ‘Give me the homepage,’ Ava grins.
    ‘Honey, your flash riot is barely a story.’
    Replacing the image of the doctor, Ava flicks a photo from her phone to the screen. It’s a picture of a featureless young girl standing under a pillar of smoke which billows from a destroyed car.
    ‘Picture of the year?’
    Barry squints an eye, ‘It’s alright.’
    ‘Give me the homepage and I will write a story so steeped in personal experience that it will wake everybody up to the fact that flash riots aren’t going away until we deal with them. That it’s our responsibility to do as much.’
    ‘Why’d this riot spark up anyway? You’re a bit short on details.’
    ‘Why?’ Ava grins and types on the table panel so the words appear over the photo. ‘Why did this happen? A little girl’s question to you.’
    Joanne is tonguing the side of her cheek. ‘That could work. Do we know who she is?’ Neither Barry or Ava fill the gap she leaves at the end of this question. ‘Do we need to find out?’
    ‘Don’t be silly, that’s not our job. Worst comes to worst, people will lose interest in two weeks and the cop’s rep will be tarnished for