I didn’t bother making an appointment this time. I walked through the main hall, up the stairs and past his astonished secretary, and into his office.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Eoghan MacGiolla shouted.
He leapt out of his chair and made for the door but I blocked his path.
‘You lied,’ I said. ‘And I want to know why.’
‘I’m going to call the guards.’
‘Please do. Or you could tell me the real story about you and Deirdre Carney.’
I kicked the door shut behind me, walked around MacGiolla, and sat in his chair.
‘Take a seat,’ I said. ‘And start talking.’
The truth, when it came, was pedestrian and contemptible.
‘Yes,’ MacGiolla said. ‘I knew Deirdre from the area where I grew up. Sad what became of her. But suicide is bad news, for many reasons. Morale. Staff and students. Not to mention the publicity. She was a past pupil and … Well, give a dog a bad name, etc. etc. I was thinking of the institution. I thought it best to keep my distance, minimise any connection between the school and the, em, event. We sent two teachers to the funeral, but that was as far as we went.’
‘You go on about your students. But, unless they perform how they’re supposed to, you don’t care. I’ve been in that rotten little room. Do you even have a school counsellor?’
‘The role has been vacant for some time. Other funding priorities seemed––’
‘Deirdre was in trouble when she was here and this place did nothing to help her.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true. Anyway, I wasn’t working here at the time.’
‘You wouldn’t have made any difference,’ I said.
As I walked west along the Mardyke towards Fitzgerald’s Park, my anger receded. MacGiolla was a despicable creature, and his attitude stank, but he hadn’t hurt Deirdre. Which didn’t mean that I knew who had. The questions raised in my mind in the last twenty-four hours about Joey O’Connor and what he might have done to Deirdre, and about Gill’s culpability, or innocence, in Rhona’s death, had served to let one truth float clear of the wreckage: that Deirdre had killed herself without knowing that our mother had done the same thing. Had the rape been responsible for Deirdre’s mental illness? Or had she inherited it?
The park was empty apart from a few well-swaddled children and their minders. I sat on a bench facing away from the river, but I felt its great power and the pull that had been inescapable for my mother and my sister.
Back home, the chair Gill had sat on was gone from the side of the street, which cheered me, but only for a moment. I went to my study and tried to work, rereading my notes, seeking patterns or details I might have missed. The words swam on the screen in front of me. I remembered that I had intended to call Marie Wade the previous night, just before Garda Ruth Joyce had called around with the CCTV. Just before the bottom had fallen out of my case. I hadn’t the energy to call her now. I couldn’t even remember why the former education officer Daniel O’Brien had seemed important.
I went up to the living room. With the remote in my hand, I skipped through my music library, playing snatches of different songs I liked. But I couldn’t settle, not even when I got a text from Sadie to say that Joey had been detained for questioning, not even for Merle’s ‘Mama Tried’. I paced the room like a prison cell until, at last, a lock opened in my mind.
I grabbed my phone and rang Sadie.
‘Good news about Joey O’Connor, right? And are you feeling better?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, good. I’m fine. No, I’m agitated. This morning’s been bothering me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Sadie said. ‘Like I said, it was––’
‘That’s not what I meant. I need to check what time Gill came to the station to make the complaint about me. You were up here about half elevenish, right?’
‘Yeah. He called in about 9.15, was gone a little after 10.20. I went up to you as soon as I could, after we’d done the paperwork and talked it through with the boss.’
‘Okay. He was gone from here by seven, no later. That means there are two hours unaccounted for. Sadie, he couldn’t have known in advance that I’d be putting out the bins at 6 a.m. or that he’d be able to gain access to my house so easily. It was pure chance.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘What if he only called by here for a look and took the opportunity, when it presented, to come into my house? But what if it wasn’t me he came to Cork to see? And what was he doing during those missing two hours?’