There has been a house of correction at the Bridewell since 1731. The old wall of the city stands to the rear of the station and the river flows past the front door. But if Joey O’Connor felt hemmed in by the landscape or the weight of history, he was showing no sign of it.
‘This is snug,’ he said. ‘And we’re in out of the rain, I suppose.’
I gave Joey’s solicitor, Mark Henchy, an ‘is this guy for real?’ look.
‘Joey, Ms Fitzpatrick is here at your request. She’s a busy person. Maybe you could tell her why you asked for her. It’s something I’m curious about myself, I must say.’
We were in a small interview room, the three of us. Ruth Joyce was outside. All she had said was that Joey’s solicitor had promised his client’s full co-operation with her investigation – provided he had a chance to talk to me first. She didn’t know what it was about. Neither, it seemed, did the solicitor.
‘You don’t have to meet Joey,’ Ruth had said. ‘There’s no obligation whatsoever. But, if you like, I could get someone from Victim Support to talk to you to help you decide?’
‘I’ll be grand.’
Joey was smirking to himself and glancing back and forth between his solicitor and me. Mark Henchy didn’t do much criminal defence work. Quietly spoken and unfailingly polite, he was probably the O’Connor family solicitor, possibly even a friend of Joey’s parents.
‘Joey,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Joey looked at me.
‘I want a deal,’ he said.
‘That isn’t the sort of thing you …’ Mark Henchy said.
‘What kind of deal?’ I asked simultaneously.
Mark looked at me in surprise.
‘I want you to drop the charge against me,’ Joey said.
‘I’m sure what Joey means is that a sum of compensation will be available,’ Mark said.
I kept my eyes on his client.
‘Doesn’t sound like much of a deal,’ I said. ‘My car was worth about five euros.’
‘True,’ Joey said. ‘I did you a favour by burning that piece of shit.’
Mark Henchy put his head in his hands. I waited for Joey to talk. The mistake I’d made with Carmel, asking the wrong question at the wrong time, I wasn’t going to make again.
‘You’re looking for info,’ Joey said. ‘If the charge disappears, I’ll tell you what I know.’
‘Talk first,’ I said. ‘If the information is of use to me, I’ll certainly consider it.’
‘Write it down,’ Joey said, addressing his solicitor. ‘If my info is good, she says I’m out the gap.’
He turned back to me.
‘It’s good,’ he said.
I nodded. My heart was racing. Maybe Joey had seen Deirdre with Jeremy Gill? If so, he could provide the corroboration the case so badly needed. Like I had told Davy, the Visitors’ Book entry with Gill’s signature was circumstantial evidence at best. More facts were needed to make the Muskerry piece of the jigsaw truly valuable.
‘You know how Deirdre told me there was someone else,’ Joey said. ‘I told you that already.’
‘I remember,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, I didn’t tell you the full story.’
‘Joey, where is this going?’ Mark Henchy asked.
‘It’s going exactly where I want it to go, with me walking out that door over there. If I took your advice, I’d end up in Cork Prison. Now let me talk, for fuck sake.’
He paused.
‘Where was I? Oh yeah. I said I don’t know who she was with. That was a small bit true. I didn’t know his name. But I saw him. I was, ah, I happened to be, em, passing her house. Oh fuck it, I may as well come clean …’
He laughed bitterly.
‘I passed by there a fair bit. A lot.’
He paused again. He had been stalking her, I realised. That was why he hadn’t said anything about it before. He stared at me, daring me to make a comment. But I didn’t and, after a time, he started talking.
‘I cycled by, any chance I got. Before school. After school. During school, sometimes. Going to and from rugby training. And at the weekends. All the time hoping to see her, praying that if I bumped into her, if she saw me, she might change her mind. Anyway, one of the days, I saw her getting dropped off.’
‘Dropped off?’
‘Yeah. From a car.’
Rhona had said that Gill drove a Toyota.
‘Do you remember the make?’ I asked.
‘Course. A yellow Fiat Cinquecento. 96C. I don’t remember the rest of the reg.’
Not a Toyota. And there was no way in hell a card-carrying Dubliner like Gill would drive a Cork-registered car.
‘It was a girl’s car,’ Joey continued. ‘But it was a guy driving it.’
‘Did you recognise him?’
‘I didn’t, but he did seem kinda familiar.’
‘Can you remember what he looked like?’
‘Fat fucker. Brown, light brown hair. Harry Potter glasses.’
I took my phone out of my bag.
‘What the fuck she was doing with a loser like him was beyond me,’ Joey said. ‘I couldn’t believe I got dumped for that. I told no one. Seriously, it’s even hard talking about it now. Only for where I am, I’d have been happy to leave that particular memory buried.’
‘Will you take a look at this photo and tell me if this is the man you saw?’
He took the phone and replied immediately, ‘Yeah, that’s him. But where’d you get the photo?’
I expanded it and handed him the phone again.
‘You’re in it too,’ I said. ‘That man is the former education officer of Cork Film Festival. His name is Daniel O’Brien. Do you remember meeting him?’
‘No. Maybe. I was so bored at that fucking workshop thing, I remember very little. Hey, he was a good bit older than us, though, like eight or ten years? Maybe he wasn’t the new guy after all. Maybe she was with someone better.’
She was with someone far worse.
‘Was it soon after the festival you saw the drop-off, Joey? Could it have been something to do with Deirdre’s work on the festival, her stuff with the youth jury?’
‘Coulda been soon after, coulda been later on, coulda been any day of the week,’ Joey said. ‘It was definitely him, though. So is that enough for me to walk?’
‘It’s enough for me,’ I said.
What Joey had told me did little for my case against Jeremy Gill, but it was new information nonetheless, evidence of a closer bond between Deirdre and Daniel O’Brien than anyone seemed to have realised. I would definitely have to talk to him and find out what he knew. My only link with him was Marie Wade. I needed to shake that tree again.
But first I needed to tell Garda Ruth Joyce that I wasn’t proceeding with my complaint against Joey O’Connor. And I wasn’t looking forward to the conversation.
As I left the Bridewell, the sky was clear. I decided to walk to the Opera House to see if I could catch Marie Wade after work. On the way there, I passed the steps where Deirdre had walked to her death, but I didn’t stop, and I tried not to think about how she must have felt.
I should have paused to pay my respects. Marie had left by the time I arrived.
‘Sure, accounts always closes at five,’ the box office assistant said in a way that suggested this was a well-known fact.
‘I’ll know the next time,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I’ll give her a ring.’
But when I stepped back out on to Emmett Place, the rain had started again. I nabbed a taxi on the quay, got in the back as quickly as I could, and sent Marie a text asking her to call me as soon as possible.
Back home, I checked my email. There was a message from Gabriel McGrath requiring me to attend a meeting the following day at the office with him and Dermot Lyons, the partner designated to deal with ‘issues arising’ from what Gabriel referred to as ‘recent unhappy events’. My bad relationship with Dermot was well known. The fact that the rest of partners had chosen him to investigate implied they were against me.
The message invited me to bring a fellow employee to the meeting. An ‘investigatory meeting’, the message said. It would have been more accurate to call it a preliminary step in a disciplinary process that could end in my dismissal. I leant against the kitchen worktop. Now that it had come, I was surprised by how unafraid I felt.
‘Let them try,’ I said aloud.
I would go alone to the meeting. I would make an excuse about not being able to get anyone at the last minute or, even better, wanting to keep things confidential. But with me there alone, Dermot would be forced to make an effort to be polite and maintain a veneer of fairness. Otherwise I might be forced to walk out in protest. Or start crying, and then walk.
There was another email. From Alice Chambers. I hoped that it might be a response to the olive branch I had sent. But there was no personal message. Alice was forwarding a letter from the festival chairperson, asking me to a meeting to explain my behaviour during the recent Film Festival and, in particular, my interest in the festival’s ‘honoured guest’. It was never a good idea to fight a war on two fronts. I composed a two-line letter of resignation from the board and emailed it to the chairperson, cc’ing Alice. I sent a second email to Alice saying I hoped that, in time, we would be able to meet to talk about what had happened. I wouldn’t push it. I would wait for her to contact me.
Next, I sent a text to Tina: ‘any news on med recs?’ and found the number of Setanta Labs. I was about to phone them when Tina’s reply came through.
‘Got FOI acknowledgement, asked them to expedite. But!!! Lab say DNA tests ready! They’re doing report. Heart in mouth here waiting for email. Will forward when thru. ETA 4pm.’
All I had to do was wait an hour. One twenty-fourth of a day. Sixty minutes. Three thousand six hundred seconds.
I ran downstairs to the bathroom and tried to distract myself by brushing my teeth. When that failed, I took the Cif from under the sink and started to scrub the bath. Only fifteen minutes gone. I got an old toothbrush from under the sink, doused it with Flash liquid and started to work my way along the grout around the tiles in the shower. By the time I had finished rinsing off the tiles, shower head in hand, I had almost convinced myself that I could live with a negative result. That a negative result was, in any case, inevitable. And that I had been foolish to think otherwise.
I took off my clothes and stepped into the shower. I remembered that the DNA results would show, too, if Deirdre and I were full or half-sisters, though it didn’t much matter any more what the answer was. No more than a spectre at the start, the case had made her real to me. As the water washed my body clean, it came over me what we had missed, what we had lost, by never knowing each other.
I felt a whole new kind of lonely.