2

‘So, what do you think?’ Sean asked.

It was tenuous, at very best, is what I thought. Sean had a broken heart and was searching for answers: the ‘emergency’ was no more than a poignant attempt to atone for not being able to save his daughter. I had seen it before, relatives replaying the incomprehensible so often that insignificant occurrences garnered meanings invisible to outsiders. And, after a while, two and two no longer added up to four. I knew that what Sean was suggesting could have happened. Anything was possible. But, with a deceased complainant, and no evidence whatsoever, this allegation looked like a non-starter in every way.

And now wasn’t the time to tell Sean any of that. His only daughter was dead by suicide. He had to wake up to that knowledge, and to her absence, every single day. I couldn’t reject him straight away, not after the effort he’d made to find me, though I knew that there was little or nothing I could do.

But I could respect him, and respecting him meant giving what he had told me the time and the consideration it deserved. I would send him home to his wife and, later, when he was rested, I’d let him down gently. There would be no need to mention the probability that Jeremy Gill was completely innocent. I reckoned that, deep down, Sean knew that already.

‘I’ll need to do a bit of thinking about this,’ I said. ‘Give me your home and mobile numbers and I’ll give you a ring to arrange a meeting as soon as I know more. One thing I forgot to ask, does your wife – Ann is it? Does she know you’re here?’

‘She does, but she thinks that there’s nothing you can do. She thinks I’m only upsetting myself more. She says that whatever I do, I can’t bring her back.’

Sean paused.

‘I know that too,’ he said.

I couldn’t think what to say in response, so I asked him for his phone number again. Then I shepherded him out the door, checking how he was getting home, and was he all right. Goodbyes take a long time in Cork.

I walked up the hill and into the gale, though at least the rain had lightened. A few minutes later I turned off the wind tunnel street into a sheltered lane lined with with tiny cottages. At the end of the lane stood a high stone wall with a dark grey door. My door. Inside, there was a yard with a narrow path to a second door, and inside that, a winding staircase that emerged in an open loft with an oak floor and views on all sides. Whenever I hear myself complaining, I remember this place, a contemporary tower house, midway between Elizabeth Fort and Cat Fort. I had bought the small vacant site and gone through the exhausting design, planning and building process, having seen the potential of the old stone wall and the privacy it afforded. Almost landlocked, with pedestrian access only, even at the height of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland’s doomed property bubble, the site had had had limited appeal. Nevertheless, on my income, I couldn’t have afforded the purchase and build except for the questionable banking practices of the Tiger times, where the normal salary multiplier was a tiresome detail, easily overcome by obligingly inventive bankers and brokers. So it had been, and so it was no longer. Now, my mortgage was a stretch, but doable, and I still had my safe place, even after the carnage of the crash. I was grateful for it every day.

And ‘Rapunzel’ always was my favourite fairy story.

I hung my coat on the bannister to dry, and kicked off my shoes. I unzipped my damp skirt and hung it beside the coat, but my tights were beyond saving. I rolled them down over my thighs and calves, packed them into a soggy ball, and threw them down the stairs. They landed on the stone floor below, close enough to the door to remind me to bin them the next day. I propped my shoes at each side of the top step, letting them take their chances. Another night, I might have stuffed them with paper and massaged them back to health.

I crossed the room slowly, using only the yellow glow of the city to light my way. I took down Pieces of the Sky, moved the needle to track 4, and lay down on the sofa, pulling my burnt orange and buttermilk Foxford wool blanket over me.

When ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ finished, I let the album play on, Emmylou’s voice pure and clear like a cooling balm.

After a time, I stood, and switched on a lamp. I took out the photo that Sean Carney had given me, laid it on the kitchen worktop and glanced at it, quickly at first. Deirdre had dark hair and brows, pale skin, red lips and lively, mischievous eyes. Sean had said that we looked alike. I could see what he meant: her colouring, her hair, her blue eyes were the same general area as me, except Deirdre was stunning.

And now she was dead. And that was a tragedy. And there was nothing I, or her parents, or anyone else could do about it.

Though there was food in the fridge, my appetite had disappeared around the time Sean Carney had mentioned his daughter’s body washing up in Blackrock. But as I filled the kettle, and willed myself to nibble at a snack of cheese and oatcakes, I kept coming back to look at the photo, wondering how long it would take before I went downstairs, to where I knew there was a stack of old Film Festival catalogues.

Ten minutes later, I was crawling on the floor of my study, trying to find 1998. And there it was. I ran my finger through the index and turned to here: Another Bad Day at the Office, a twenty-four-minute short film by Jeremy Gill. Also produced by Jeremy Gill and a production company called Gill/Direct Productions. Seemed like a one-man show.

I got up off the floor, rolled my chair into position, flicked on my desktop and did an online company search on Gill/Direct Productions. The company status was normal, which meant that he’d kept filing accounts and making annual returns on it all these years. The directors were listed as Jeremy Gill, and a trust company called ProGill Trust, which showed up, along with Gill, as director of a raft of other companies. I forced myself to stop after clicking through to the twentieth company. Searches like these are addictive but they eat time, and to no end, in this case. It was of zero consequence that Gill had a web of investment vehicles. That was how the film business worked. Applying for government incentives and taking advantage of tax avoidance schemes meant that there was usually at least one company for each project, and often more. The only slightly odd thing was there were no women listed anywhere on any of the documents. I googled details of his agent, lawyer and business managers: all male. And in the ‘About Us’ section of jeremygillproductions.com, there were no women listed either. Maybe Jeremy didn’t like working with women. Or maybe women didn’t like working with Jeremy. There was nothing much to any of it, but I opened a Sean Carney file on my desktop anyway and saved the results of the search into it.

Next, I did a search of the Irish Examiner archive for Cork Film Festival 1998. I found a large colour shot of Jeremy, holding his three trophies. He was smiling, dark hair tied in a ponytail, brown eyes. I had forgotten about the teeth, the slightly crooked, slightly off-white Irish teeth, that he’d subsequently had fixed to Hollywood dayglo perfection. I reckoned they’d looked better before he’d shelled out for the replacements, but I was probably in a minority. I saved the photo and the accompanying article into the Carney file.

Then, I read the Wikipedia entry on Gill. There was a piece about his education at UCD in the late 1970s, how he had been a classmate of the writer Christopher Dalton, who had scripted two of Gill’s early features, though they hadn’t worked together after that. Dalton had gone on to be a successful literary novelist. I had a quick read of his Wikipedia page. It looked like he hadn’t allowed any of his later works to be adapted as films. He might have had his fill: some liked the collaborative process of film-making, some didn’t.

There were various references to Gill’s stellar career in advertising, working for Thomson AdGroup, and footnotes on a few of the campaigns he’d been involved in.

But, in relation to his personal life, there was remarkably little. He had never married. A legendary workaholic bachelor, Gill was famous for taking his mammy to premieres. In fact, now that I thought about it, I had always assumed he was gay. I copied the Wikipedia entry into my file and googled ‘Jeremy Gill gay’ but nothing of significance came up, except that, as with a lot of people in show business, there were unsubstantiated rumours about his sexuality. If anything, there seemed to be less about Gill than others. Maybe it didn’t matter as much if you were a gay director, maybe people were less interested. I googled ‘Jeremy Gill love life’. There were thousands of photos of him with myriad different actresses, and articles where they both protested that they were ‘just good friends’. Yet the ‘friendships’ seemed to last only as long as the films they were promoting and, even from a distance of 8,000 miles, or however far LA was from Cork, they looked like fake dates. And all of this information was utterly irrelevant to Deirdre Carney and her unfortunate life and death.

Nevertheless, I went into IMDb and scrolled through Gill’s entry, refreshing my memory on his film-making history. He had made a lot of good films, across various genres, since his time in Cork in 1998, and I had seen all of them, mostly on the big screen.

Though I hadn’t seen the prize-winning short film for years. I checked the credits and cast list on IMDb – no names I recognised, apart from Jeremy Gill. He had played the male lead himself, as well as directing, and had used various other unknown actors, I guessed, for budget reasons. They were probably people he worked with or friends of his. There was a teenage girl in it, too. According to IMDb, her name was Rhona Macbride. She was talented, from what I remembered, and I would’ve put money on her having a career as an actress but she hadn’t, or at least I hadn’t heard of her. She didn’t have a profile on IMDb, and showed up as a cast member on just that one film. I googled her. There were a few Rhona and Rona McBrides, and several Rhonda Macbrides, but no Rhona with that spelling of Macbride. She’d be over thirty by now. Maybe she’d married and taken her husband’s name.

I found the short film on YouTube. Another Bad Day at the Office told the story of a world-weary, overworked businessman, with a failing career, who develops a platonic friendship with a fifteen-year-old girl he meets in a park while she’s on her school holidays. The joke of the film, and probably what appealed so much to young viewers like Deirdre Carney, is that the girl, played by Rhona Macbride, is much more mature than the Gill character. She becomes his counsellor and business adviser and, as a result, he turns around his flagging career and becomes hugely successful. Until the girl goes back to school after the holidays, when he starts to flounder again and has ‘another bad day at the office’. The film was brilliantly made, with a light touch and extraordinary comic timing.

And, with the benefit of hindsight, was the storyline just a little creepy? Maybe. Though nobody had thought so at the time. Even if it was, it wasn’t evidence of anything. Still, I would talk to the Film Festival about their Child Protection arrangements. I wouldn’t mention Jeremy Gill by name but I’d remind them that the festival could, and should, take appropriate precautions, as the law required. It had policies in place, I knew, but it might be a comfort to Sean Carney to hear that I had double-checked.

It was time for bed, long since. I logged out and picked up the 1998 catalogue again, intending to put it back in the pile on the floor. Before I did, I turned to the Schools section of the catalogue to see the selection of films Deirdre and her schoolmates would have seen, though I knew already that one of them was Gill’s film.

But, underneath the Schools listing for Another Bad Day at the Office was a photograph of Deirdre Carney and a piece of text which read:

Another Bad Day at the Office was championed by youth jury member Deirdre Carney from Transition Year at St Finbarr’s Catholic University School.

If Deirdre had been on the youth jury, there was a chance that Gill had met her during the festival, especially as she had ‘championed’ his film. At the very least, he would have received a copy of the catalogue. And, if he had the catalogue, it was inconceivable that he wouldn’t have checked every mention of himself in it.

Even if they hadn’t met during the festival, Gill would’ve had to have known Deirdre’s face and name.

And where she went to school.