I sat in front of my computer, welded to my chair. I planned to stay there until I found something, anything, that might chip away at Gill’s alibi. I was starting from the premise that Gill had murdered Rhona Macbride. In other words, that what Gill was saying was a lie. And that what his mother was saying was a lie. Two lies. And big lies are often made up of a collection of little lies, of all different kinds of lies. Lies of commission and lies of omission. Things said and things unsaid. And the most successful lies of all were the ones that blended seamlessly with the truth. To isolate and identify what was false, I needed to test the truth of every element of the Gills’ story. The same as if I was cross-examining them in the witness box, I would have to go through what they were saying and take down the wall they had constructed, brick by brick.
What did I know already? His house. Everyone in the country knew that, when in Dublin, he lived with his mother Esther in a Georgian house in Clontarf. I googled ‘Jeremy Gill Georgian house Clontarf’ and found an article from a three-year-old property supplement describing painstaking restoration of the house at Clontarf Crescent using best conservation practice, his membership of the Irish Georgian Society, how he was a proud northsider born in the Rotunda and would never move to the southside. Same old, same old.
But what did I know about the mother? Not so much. I checked Gill’s Wikipedia entry and followed links to press articles on Esther Gill. Esther had grown up dirt poor in the flats off Dorset Street, near the Convent of the Blessed Eucharist. She had had Jeremy when she was eighteen, and in everything I had read before, and in what I was reading now, there had never been a mention of Gill’s father. Esther was a single parent, never married. Based on my calculations she was sixty-six or sixty-seven now, and Jeremy was forty-eight. She lived in the Clontarf house, but that was as far as entries on Esther Gill went: a life of total devotion to Jeremy, serving her only child in every possible way. I went into Google Images and studied photograph after photograph of Esther Gill. No lavender-scented silver-haired little old lady, she was wiry and glamorous in a hard, cheap, fake tan, fake nails kind of way. Esther looked tough. And she had the same eyes as her son. Was she capable of lying to protect him? My gut said yes.
Next, I checked the Property Registration Authority website on the house where Gill lived. Did he own it or was it held in his mother’s name? Nothing turned on it, probably, but my search confirmed Gill’s ownership. I kept the PRA window open and went into the Ordnance Survey to compare the PRA and OSI images. The sites looked identical, but it was easier to read the Ordnance Survey maps. I wanted to check the back gardens. If he didn’t go out the front, he must have gone out the back.
Sadie was right. There was no rear exit. The OSI map showed that to get access to the road, Gill would have had to cross through the next-door neighbour’s garden. Though, as the house next door to his was at the end of the terrace and had a boundary that abutted the public road, in theory, Gill could have scaled his fence, crossed through the next-door garden and climbed their side boundary to reach the road. Google Street View didn’t help much as to whether it was a wall or fence. Whichever it was, having Gill climb two obstacles to reach the road seemed too risky.
Unless Gill knew for sure that the house next door was unoccupied? I clicked back into the PRA window. Gill’s neighbour’s house was owned by a company called ProProperty Limited. Some kind of property development company? Strange. All the houses on Clontarf Crescent were listed buildings so there wouldn’t be much scope for redevelopment. Unless it was an executive lettings agency? I ran a Companies Registration Office search but the CRO link was down. Yet something about the name seemed familiar. I’d come back to it.
I decided to accept for now that Gill had got out somehow on to the public road without being seen. If he had, he’d have needed transport to take him to Rhona’s house. So I started thinking about Gill’s cars. And that there had been no mention of Esther’s car. Maybe she used his? But her son’s success had come relatively late in her life. Ten, twelve years ago, she would have been in her mid-fifties. That was late for a woman born and brought up in dire poverty to get used to driving a Range Rover or an SLK. I brought up pictures of the cars from Google Images. I am a confident driver but I would be terrified of scratching them. No. I reckoned Esther had a runabout, something manageable, if she drove at all. If Gill had got out the back, unobserved, and if Esther had her own car, parked on the road, he could have borrowed hers. For now, I had no way of checking if Esther even had a car. But DI Lenihan could. I’d talk to him in the morning. And if Esther didn’t have a car, maybe Gill had hired or borrowed one?
I liked that theory less. It complicated things, and that didn’t ring true. He had kept it simple. I had said it to Lenihan, and I was even surer now. I needed to strip away everything extraneous. The truth was bare and unadorned. It had to be.
It was heading on for 9 p.m. and I needed to pee. Just one last thing? The CRO window was still open. I might as well complete the search on ProProperty Limited, if the CRO link was back. It was.
As I read the results, I sat back in my chair and smiled.
Upstairs, confident for the first time in days, I flicked on the kettle. I remembered that I needed to call Marie Wade but my phone rang before I could. It was a blocked number.
‘Finn, sorry for calling so late, but there’s been a development in your case.’
‘Who is this, please?’
‘Jesus, sorry, did I not say? It’s Garda Ruth Joyce. About your car?’
‘Great,’ I said. ‘I can meet you tomorrow if you want.’
‘Well, actually I could see you now, if it was convenient,’ she said. ‘It’s just that I’m on nights at the moment and I came in early to view the CCTV footage and I think I’ve found something.’
If it shows Pawel Zdziarski burning my car, that’s the beginning of the end for Gill.
‘I’ll come straight to the Bridewell.’
‘Em, I’m actually on Barrack Street. I downloaded the footage to my laptop so as I could come to see you, but you’ll have to tell me exactly where your house is.’
I buzzed her in and met her at the inside door on the ground floor.
‘We can go to my study, which is a mess, or the living room, which is two floors up. Your choice,’ I said.
‘This is an amazing house,’ Ruth Joyce said. ‘I’d love to see the living room.’
‘Come on,’ I said.
I ran ahead of her, flicking on the lights as I went. I like rambling around in the dark but I didn’t want Garda Joyce to have an accident.
‘Wow,’ she said on reaching the top of the stairs. She blushed.
‘Em, well, em, as you know, I’m here about the CCTV.’
She removed a laptop from the messenger bag she had hanging from her right shoulder and put it on the table. She sat in front of it, tapped a few keys, and asked me to sit beside her. When I was in place, she clicked play.
The suspect walked down Gilabbey Street past the Abbey Tavern in the direction of Fort Street and out of coverage. Six minutes later he walked back, moving faster but not running, going out of view again as he headed in the direction of College Road. The timing dovetailed with the burning of my car. And the figure was male and bulky. It looked like Pawel Zdziarski, but because he kept his hood up and head down, it was hard to tell.
I played and replayed the video and tried to tune out Ruth’s running commentary in my left ear. There was one section where it was almost possible to see the suspect’s face but only for a microsecond. Every time I went back over it I missed it. I slid the laptop across to Ruth and asked her to try. She went back and forth repeatedly, grimacing, until she got a freeze-frame on the face. Then she passed the laptop back to me.
‘Holy shit,’ I said.
‘Do you know him? Do you?’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘Who is he? What’s his name?’
‘He’s on your system. He has previous. He works in his dad’s garage on the Kinsale Road. His name is … it’s Joey O’Connor.’