Bottle green is the uniform of St Aloysius’s Secondary School, but that was as much as I knew about it, though I live not ten minutes from the place. I’m a northsider. While I was at St Angela’s, we had little or no contact with St Al’s. I didn’t know any of the teachers or any of the current pupils, apart from Carmel, the blonde girl from Gill’s film workshop, and I didn’t even know her last name. Other than loitering around on the street outside the school, or across the road outside St Maries of the Isle Primary, I had no fast way of making contact with her. The headmistress wasn’t going to allow me to chat to ‘Carmel X from Transition Year’. Sadie could have gone into the school and said she was investigating something or other, but she wasn’t going to, not unless I came up with something more than a hunch. I could tell she wasn’t taking what I’d said seriously. Or that she didn’t want to. Being my friend couldn’t have been easy for her this last while.
‘The delay between leaving your place and going to Coughlan’s Quay isn’t conclusive of anything. Gill had been up all night, remember? He might have had a kip in the car. Or gone for breakfast – a fry-up in Tony’s Bistro? He delayed going to the Garda station. It doesn’t follow that he was having an assignation with a schoolgirl, surely?’
‘He phoned someone as he was leaving my house, Sadie,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear who it was. I assumed initially that it was his security guard, or his assistant; possibly his solicitor. But what if it was Carmel he was talking to? Maybe he was arranging to meet her.’
‘I think your first impression was the right one, Finn, that it was probably his security guard or his assistant,’ Sadie said. ‘There was definitely someone with him in Cork this morning.’
‘How can you be sure? Did you see who it was?’
‘No, I didn’t see anyone, but whoever it was must have been the one doing the driving. When Gill was leaving, he rang and arranged to be collected outside the door.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Gill could still have met Carmel, though.’
‘With a witness in tow? I doubt it,’ Sadie said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
That was the truth. I didn’t know, not for sure, though I felt it in the way my head pounded. I couldn’t let the day go by without seeing Carmel and checking that she was safe. Lunchtime was past already. Was there a way of seeing her after school? I’d have to try to meet her at the gate. There was nothing else for it. But what if I missed her in the crowd? It was wet out – they’d be wearing hats or hoods and one girl looks much like another in the rain. Or what if she wasn’t there? What if she was with him?
And then I remembered that I had a way of contacting her, after all.
It was five days since I’d checked Twitter, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. There weren’t as many tweets as I’d feared. Social media had moved on and refocused their outrage several times over. I searched under #lawyerbitch. Within a minute I’d found Carmel: Carmel McMonagle, @CarmelaMcMocha, whose twin missions in life, according to her profile, were to locate and consume the ultimate mocha (#idreamofmocha) and to win an acting Oscar by the age of twenty-five (#onlytenyearstogo). She was so young.
And so dumb. Apart from the #lawyerbitch tweets, she didn’t do much on Twitter but there were some cross-posts from her Instagram account. I clicked through. Her profile was public and had an impressive 2,347 followers. It looked like her mocha comments were popular. Or maybe the recent controversy had boosted her numbers? Carmel’s profile revealed a trail of movements in a quest for coffee and chocolate beverage perfection over the previous eight months. There were almost daily posts and photographs, and a link to a blog (Carmela McMocha’s House of Mocha, 923 subscribers) where she provided tasting notes and star ratings for anywhere she’d been, on holidays and school trips as well as locally.
There weren’t that many places in Cork. Some of them she never returned to after scathing one or no star reviews. Others were more frequent haunts. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and a notebook and wrote down the names of the cafes she had visited more than once that were in walking distance of St Al’s. The rain was spilling down now. If she was going to go somewhere after school today, it would have to be close. I narrowed down the options to two places, pulled on my rain-jacket and ran out the door.
I had no luck at the first cafe, Tiramisu on Proby’s Quay, in the shadow of the cathedral. I headed down Sharman Crawford Street, past the Art College and St Al’s School, and crossed the bridge on to Lancaster Quay. By the time I got to Cafe Depeche, my leggings were stuck to my knees and shins, and the band of sweatshirt that hung below my jacket was flapping against my thighs like a wet flag. I had a black knitted cap on under my hood, and the front of it was soaked, but at least most of my hair was dry. I entered the cafe, peeled off the beanie, wiped my face and hands with it, and surveyed the room as best I could, head bent, from beneath my hood.
I heard them before I saw them, the unmistakable high-pitched squeal of a group of female teenagers. I looked up. There were a few tables of Pres boys but, at the far end of the counter, three girls coiled themselves on high stools. The middle one was Carmel. She looked well. She looked like nothing bad had happened to her. Not yet.
And she hadn’t noticed me yet either. Moving quickly to retain the element of surprise, I went up behind her and rapped her on the left shoulder.
‘You,’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’
I walked backwards and stood by a table, arms folded.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Now.’
I watched Carmel register who I was. For a moment, she looked scared. But her expression changed fast.
‘Fuck off, you weirdo,’ she said. ‘She’s the one I was telling you about, girls, the woman at the workshop who––’
‘I’ll fuck off in a minute. Gladly. But I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say directly from me. And I’d hate to have to go through your parents or the school or, how can I put this, other more official channels.’
Carmel’s top teeth closed over her bottom lip.
‘I suppose I can spare a minute,’ she said, after a pause.
She climbed off her stool, sulked her way over to me, and sat down.
‘What do you want?’
‘To talk to you,’ I said. ‘About you know who.’
‘I don’t, actually,’ she said. ‘This is getting weirder and weirder,’ she said then, more loudly, looking back in the direction of her friends.
I leant across the table.
‘Do you want me to say his name? Because I will, you know. And I won’t just say it to you, I’ll––’
‘Okay, okay,’ Carmel said. ‘I know who you’re talking about. The man we met at the workshop.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Are you, like, obsessed with him or something?’
‘In a way I am,’ I said. ‘But not for the reasons you might think. And not for the same reasons you might be.’
I waited for a denial or a retort, but none came, and that was the moment I knew for sure that Gill had been communicating with her, that he had been grooming her. I was less certain if he had met her. He might have. But he hadn’t touched her. I was sure of it.
‘He’s forty-eight years of age, Carmel,’ I said. ‘And you’re fifteen.’
‘And your point?’ she asked, but she spoke quietly. ‘You do have a point?’
‘My point is that, like I said at the workshop, any private communication between a forty-eight-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl should only be with parental consent. And I’m not a parent, and I don’t know yours, but I can’t imagine any circumstances where they would give consent.’
She made no reply but something like doubt crept into her face. I should have said nothing, let her talk next. Instead, overconfident, I asked a question that alerted her to just how little hard information I had. I knew it was a mistake the second it left my mouth.
‘Has he been contacting you?’
She tilted her chin upwards, and smiled slowly.
‘Of course he hasn’t been contacting me, you pervert,’ she said. ‘That would be illegal. You know, you’re the sick one, not him. You’re the one with the dirty mind. Oh my God you’re so fucking pathetic, do you know that?’
She stood and pushed back her chair. Without looking at them, she called to her friends at the counter.
‘Girls, we’re so out of here. Get my bag and coat and I’ll meet ye outside. The air quality in this place has deteriorated all of a sudden.’
They left in a flurry of schoolbags and indignation. I was left alone, staring at the slammed door, kicking myself.