Darkest Truth

With high tide due at 18.42, I needed to move fast. I saved the document I was working on, logged out and felt around with my feet under my paper-strewn desk. Nothing. I’d forgotten my wellies. Which meant I had to move really fast. The city is built on a bog, and when the tide is high enough, and the rain is heavy enough, and the wind is blowing in the right direction, Cork can do floods better than anywhere else in the country. The streets that once were rivers revert to watery highways, and there’s an eerie beauty to it all, if you don’t have to mop out a flooded shop or dump a sodden carpet. And if you have the right footwear.

I hate having wet feet, and my way too expensive leather-soled work shoes were going to die in the rain.

They would have to do. Shrugging on my charcoal raincoat, I tied back my hair with an elastic band grabbed from my desk. Not ideal, but better than having a thick dark curtain blowing over my eyes and blocking my view as I walked. I pulled on black leather gloves as I ran down the four flights of stairs to the street door, the one we use at night when the main entrance is closed.

The echoing silence told me I was alone. Mostly, I like this place better when it’s empty and dark and cold. But I was feeling shaky that night. A flood warning will do that to you, will fool you into thinking there might be safety in numbers.

I keyed in the alarm code, hauled the flood barrier out of the ground floor cupboard and wedged it into the steel grooves on the door frame. The council had made a sandbag delivery. I heaved three in front of the door. Lastly, I hit the button on the shutter remote control, pulled up my hood and walked away, towards Barrack Street and higher ground. It was too late to take the low footbridge from the Grand Parade, so I made for the South Gate, built high enough from the water to withstand the tidal surge. It was only ten past six. I had enough time. If the wind didn’t blow me away first.

Glancing back to check on the shutter’s progress, I saw a short, portly figure in a flat cap and an old-man rain jacket standing in front of the office, staring up at the unlit windows. Just then, he looked in my direction. He shouted something I couldn’t hear, and rushed towards me, and grabbed my hand like he wasn’t planning on letting go.

‘Miss Fitzpatrick, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I need to talk to you. It’s an emergency.’

Mid-sixties or older, the man’s accent was local, but he was a stranger. If he knew who I was, it was thanks to the firm’s website. I’ve been a solicitor long enough to know that new clients who come to the office without an appointment late on a Friday, any Friday, and especially wet Fridays in November, are to be avoided at all costs. Normally, I give them a business card, suggest a meeting the following week and, usually, the so-called urgent business evaporates over the weekend.

‘Sorry. Not now,’ I said. ‘I’m finished for the day. And it’ll be high tide in less than half an hour. Come back Monday?’

I tried to pull away, but his grip on my hand tightened. At the same time, his other hand grabbed my forearm. I looked around in panic. The street was deserted. Not good. Not good at all. I’m five foot eight, and fairly strong. The old man was smaller than me, but he was solid and stocky. Though I tried pulling away again, he held me still. I thought about pushing him, which might have had no effect. Or, worse, might have toppled him like a skittle. I looked down again. After a moment, I realised that the man was weeping.

‘I have to show you something. I-I-I’ll explain everything but there isn’t much time,’ he said. ‘It’s about my daughter.’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘But we have to cross the river now or we’ll be in trouble.’

We trudged through the darkness and the driving rain, heads down, battling the gusts. As we crossed the bridge, the black water slapped violently against the quay wall.

I pushed open the door and we fell into the warm gloom. The storm meant that the pub was quiet for a Friday, but Forde’s is never raucous, it’s a place for respectable drinking. The table nearest the door was free and I made for it, peeling off my sopping raincoat. The old man went straight to the bar and I joined him after a moment.

I returned to the table and sat, back to the wall, with a view of the room. After a few minutes, the man came and sat opposite me. He had taken off his cap. He was bald with a semicircle of tufty grey hair.

‘We can’t do much tonight, not here,’ I said. ‘But I can take a few preliminary notes and give you an appointment to come into the office next week.’

I was thinking about the whiskey, wondering if it was his first of the day. Whether it was or not, I wasn’t going to be acting immediately on any instructions he gave me. My professional indemnity insurance doesn’t stretch that far. I poked in my handbag and dug out a small black notebook, a business card and a biro.

‘Now,’ I said. ‘Let’s start with your name, address and contact details, and here are mine.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know you’re nervous, but you’re the one who said it was an emergency. And you said it was important, something about your daughter?’

He was looking past me, his eyes half closed, and saying nothing. Finally, he took a slug of his whiskey, and started to talk.

‘My name is Sean Carney and I live at 54 Lee Valley Rise, Turners Cross. I can’t remember my mobile number off the top of my head. But it’s in the phone.’

But, simultaneously, I was calculating and weighing what the emergency might be, half hating myself for doing it. This is the job. This is how it is. People tell me their secret stories and their deepest fears, and I box and package and strategise and, somehow, try to hold on to the humanity in all of it. I knew it couldn’t be an inquest he was talking about, not on a Friday. And, if foul play was suspected, that would be a matter for a Garda investigation. Or was his daughter’s death recent? Something he wanted to get off his chest? Something he needed to tell to someone who couldn’t tell anyone else? The hairs on my arms stood up, and I braced myself for the worst. I was expecting a confession.

‘Deirdre died by her own hand, ten months ago now. You might have heard – or maybe not. There’s been a fair few suicides in Cork the last couple of years. They pulled her.’

‘Her body, I mean, from the water down near Blackrock on the 31st of January. Two nights she was in the river. Our Deirdre. She came to us on the 1st of December 1982, the happiest day of our lives. She was just gone thirty when …’

He cleared his throat, and I looked away, giving him a chance to compose himself. It gave me a chance to do the same. Stories like the one Sean was starting to tell were the last thing I wanted to hear. But after a time, I felt the silence change to something else. I looked back and found him watching me, and it struck me that there was something altered in his expression, something unexpected, though I couldn’t have named it. And then it was gone, whatever it was, and Sean was talking again.

‘My daughter had been troubled for a long time,’ he said. ‘Depressed. Hurting herself. It’s unbelievable what happened to her, how she went downhill that way. Barely finished school. Couldn’t go to university. Never did much with her life.’

‘Talking about all of this must be awful,’ I said ‘We could leave it to another …’

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘You remind me of her, of how she used to be. The black hair, and fair complexion. And the way you …

‘What I’m saying,’ he went on, ‘is that our Deirdre was confident, like you are, she used to be. At one stage, I had it in mind that she might go for law as a career. I thought we’d be going to her graduation up in the college one day. But there was nothing like that. Not that we put any pressure on her about school, or anything. There was never any need. We were only delighted to have her, and whatever she wanted to do was fine with us. She was a good girl, a great girl. All we wanted was that she’d be happy, you know. She worked in Marco’s, the chipper down the road from us, on and off. That’s when she was able to work.’

‘A lot of the time she was in her room or going into the hospital for treatment, psychiatric treatment. When I think of what she must have suffered … Until she was fifteen, she was sailing through life. A grades – six of them – in her Junior Cert, no bother to her. She loved art and English especially, and music, of course. She loved life – and she had such promise. Was in the school plays – always the best – and in the musical society. I know I’m biased, like, but everyone said it. She was tall for her age, beautiful, and she had a great voice. She got the part of Liesl in The Sound of Music, at the Everyman Theatre, even though she was a bit young for it at the time. Look, here’s a photo of her in it. You can keep it. The reviewer from the Examiner said she was “one to watch”. But it was films she was really interested in.’

I took the photo, and placed it between the pages of my notebook. I didn’t want to look. Couldn’t. Not yet.

‘We’re ordinary people, us. I’m a lorry driver – was – and my wife used to work as a shop assistant in Roches Stores before we got married. But Deirdre was special – extra special because she was our only child. Deirdre was our first and last, the way it went. But she was enough, more than enough.’

‘Then, she turned fifteen, was in Transition Year and doing that film project. I can see it now. That’s where it all went wrong. And that’s why she’s dead today. I blame myself for not seeing the danger.’

‘I heard a fair bit about you from my neighbour Tom Broderick,’ Sean continued. ‘You helped him out getting access to his kids when he was away from his wife. That’s right, isn’t it? Though they’re back together now that he’s off the drink. And aren’t you involved some way with the Film Festival, as well as being a solicitor?’

‘I saw in the Evening Echo this afternoon that the festival, that it’s starting tomorrow, so there isn’t much time.’

I remembered Tom Broderick. I was surprised that he knew anything about my work with the Film Festival. And then again, I wasn’t. Cork is small, with all kinds of hidden connections. Information is currency here, and news seeps through the cracks in the broken-down pavements. But I still had no idea what Sean wanted.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand. Somehow doing a film project was bad for Deirdre and you’re here to see me because of something to do with this year’s festival?’

‘It was the man she met because of it. A man who hurt her. Abused her. Destroyed her. And he got away with it and became so famous he thinks he’s untouchable. Deirdre didn’t make a complaint to the Gardaí. She couldn’t, she said she hadn’t a chance of being believed. Wouldn’t even tell us who he was. But I know his name now and I’ve told the guards but they say they can’t take it further.’

‘It’s the law,’ Sean said. ‘It’s too late. Go home, they say. Rest. Take it easy. Tell me, how can I ever take it easy while that man walks free?’

‘Legally, because Deirdre is dead, there’s nobody to make a statement or go witness against him.’

‘And the Child Protection social workers say I can’t do anything either,’ Sean went on. ‘They say I have no records, no proof, not even a name. Anyway, they think I’m imagining it, they think I’ve gone mad. But I haven’t gone mad. I know who he is.’

He sucked in a breath. Then he took something out of his shirt pocket and laid it on the table. He unfolded it. Inside a clear plastic bag was a sheet of white paper. He turned it over without a word and passed it to me. I left it in the plastic and read:

Mam and Dad

He’s too strong now. But the academy wouldn’t like him so much if they knew.

Sorry I wasn’t brave enough. Sorry for everything.

Love

Deirdre xx

I didn’t, but said nothing. The way he was, he mightn’t have heard me anyway.

‘The nominations in January must have been the final straw for her,’ he continued. ‘It was the day following the announcement, on the 29th of January, that she left that note in her room and went to the river. Though at least she wasn’t around to see him winning, and the press coverage. All that glory, after what he did to my daughter. After what he did to my girl. I didn’t know what the note meant until he won, when I heard his acceptance speech. He was everywhere on the telly and radio for weeks and the clip from the speech was played over and over again and eventually I realised what Deirdre meant by the academy. If he hadn’t won, I might never have copped on.’

I had an inkling now who Sean was talking about, but it was so unimaginable, so unspeakable, that I needed to hear it from him.

‘Can you say his name, Sean? Can you say the name of the man you think it is?’

Biting my lip, I laid my pen on the table and sat back in my seat. Jeremy Gill, the most successful film-maker Ireland had ever produced, was an icon, a national hero. There were a few critically acclaimed Irish film directors, and one or two Oscars here and there, but he was in a different league, a Spielberg kind of league. Gill’s films made hundreds of millions of dollars. And they weren’t just popular, they were good. Last March, Seeing Things had won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture. After all that, and the viral BBC chat show appearance, and the hour-long stateside television special, and the round of homecoming radio and TV interviews, and the front page newspaper and magazine photos, everyone in Ireland knew who he was. The pool of A-list celebrities is small in Ireland, and Gill was that rare thing: an enormous talent, and a massive international commercial success, who retained an appetite for frequent appearances on Irish TV and radio. People liked that he hadn’t forgotten where he came from. People liked Gill. I liked him.

I had been holding my breath. I sat forward again and wrote ‘J Gill?’ in my notebook, though it wasn’t a name I was likely to forget, and drew a box around it. Then I asked if I could photograph the suicide note with my phone. Sean blanched, but agreed. When I had finished, I gave back the note and fixed my eyes on him.

‘Shhh, keep your voice down, we’re in a public place and we have to be careful. Only for the weather, we wouldn’t be having this conversation here at all. I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I don’t know enough to say anything at this stage. But I need you to explain why you believe it’s him, and what the emergency is.’

‘Well, her note, for one thing. Deirdre wrote about the academy, and all he was doing after he got the Oscars was thanking the academy, in his acceptance speech and on every chat show after. The academy this and the academy that.’

‘You think she was talking about the Academy of Motion Pictures. But, from what you tell me, Deirdre was dead a couple of months before he won.’

‘Yes. But, like I said, she knew about the nominations – it was the day after they were announced that she left us.’

‘Right. And you’re convinced it was the Academy Deirdre was talking about. Not a school of some kind, even a stage school?’ I said.

‘No? Okay, I get that, But, Sean, you’ve told me nothing about how she might have met him, let alone anything else.’

‘I know, I know. I haven’t that much to go on. But it all goes back to the film stuff she did. You know how in Transition Year they’re encouraged to branch out and choose projects to work on that they’re interested in as a future career, before they start working for the Leaving Cert and all that. Deirdre chose films, film studies, that sort of thing, and got into the Film Festival doing work experience. The festival was held in October back then. I know she was involved in helping them to choose short films for something to do with the schools’ part of the festival – she was coming home with stacks of videos to watch. And she was raving about a short film by a fella from Dublin called, well, it was him, Gill …’

He picked up his whiskey glass, but didn’t drink from it, and put it back down.

‘She kept talking about him, about how he was definitely going to win a prize. And he did – he won three. It meant nothing to me, but our Deirdre was over the moon about it. She said it was the first time someone had won the audience award, the best Irish and the best International short film. And, if you remember, he was nominated for the best short film in the Oscars after – he didn’t win, but it got him noticed.’

I remembered. Fifteen years ago I was twenty-two, working as a trainee solicitor by day. What Sean didn’t know was that I was also working for the festival as a volunteer, evenings and at the weekend, in return for a season ticket. I didn’t meet Jeremy Gill, though. Never even saw him, except on stage. And Sean seemed to have no evidence that Deirdre had met him either. The probability was that she hadn’t. Even in 1998, Cork Film Festival was careful to ensure that schoolkids in on work experience or attending the education programme screenings were well chaperoned, by their own teachers usually, and that they’d gone home long before the late nights in the Festival Club at Cork Opera House.

‘Sean, along with thousands of others, Deirdre and Jeremy Gill were both at the same film festival. But, in all likelihood, they never even met.’

‘They met, they had to have met. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He was a man of the world by then, working in Dublin, and the short films were a sideline for him.’

‘He was in advertising, very successfully, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘But …’

‘He was about thirty or more when he made the short film that got him on the road to where he is now. I can’t remember the name of it.’

‘Another Bad Day at the Office,’ I said. ‘And you think they met because …?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sean said. ‘I don’t know how they met, all right? I just know that my wife Ann took Deirdre and her friend, Jessica Murphy from her class at school, to the closing night at the Opera House, the prize-giving and the closing film.’

He pointed at my notebook. I wrote down Jessica’s name and other scant details. Cork Film Festival. 1998. Short films. School/education prog. Oscar noms. January. Deirdre Carney. 29th Jan 2013. Suicide.

‘She must have met Gill during the festival or in the Opera House, maybe even on the stairs, or something,’ Sean said. ‘Ann remembers that she went to the toilet at one stage on her own. Ann didn’t think to go with her, thought she was safe. You’d think at fifteen, in a public place like that …’

‘No, no, I don’t think so. But some time during the festival, either that night or some other time, he saw her, targeted her. He was way too clever to do anything then – but he met her afterwards. Trust me. She changed after the festival, got more distant from us, and from her school pals. Was growing up, we thought … And then we knew that something serious had happened. Ann first. And the blood … on the sheets … and the bruises. That was the 12th of December 1998, nearly two months after the festival, a few weeks after her sixteenth birthday. A Saturday night, Sunday, it was, when Ann … But we never knew who it was.’

‘It’s what I read in the Echo today. That he’s coming back to Cork, next week. For the Film Festival,’ Sean said. ‘I want to make sure the bastard doesn’t do it again.’