Clarity came with the dawn. Whatever progress I’d made, I was a long way from proving anything. And the Film Festival was starting this evening. As I gulped back my Morning Growler, I began to scribble my priorities on a sheet of paper. Top of the list was to talk to Jessica Murphy today, if possible. I needed to find out what she knew about what had happened to Deirdre – and if she knew anything about Jeremy Gill. Though I wouldn’t lead with him. I didn’t want to put words in her mouth. I had to keep open the possibility that Gill wasn’t the one, had to look for evidence of his innocence as well as his guilt. But I’d bring along my iPad with the photographs of the workshop on it and the pictures of the items that I had found in Deirdre’s room and see what Jessica had to say. She’d recognise Jeremy Gill, anybody would, so that was a way in for me. Ringing someone before ten on a Sunday morning was a no-no, even a mother of young kids who was most likely up since before seven. I had to wait. And waiting has never agreed with me.
I moved to the next item on my list: Muskerry Castle, but here I was a lot vaguer about my aims. I had been there twice, once for the wedding of a college friend, and again for the Law Society annual conference in 2010, but I had never stayed over, or seen it during its normal working day as a hotel. Afternoon tea was a good excuse, and bringing Davy along was good cover. Nobody goes for afternoon tea on their own, and the hotel was too far from town, and too exclusive, to permit cheapskate solo coffee-drinkers.
What I hoped to find out, I didn’t know, other than to check the coasters they used and compare them with the one I’d found in Deirdre’s room. If they had changed them at some stage, maybe I’d be able to date the one I’d found, though I hadn’t much hope of it. But Gill liked the hotel and he’d been there before, so it was worth a look.
I checked my phone. It was 9.15 and I had a text from Ann, saying that she had phoned Jessica and told her to expect to hear from me. Next, I rang Muskerry Castle and made a reservation for afternoon tea at 3.30 p.m. I texted Davy to let him know the time. No reply. He was probably out running or doing something equally torturous.
My phone pinged. It was a message from Sadie O’Riordan asking if I wanted to go to a film. Any other Sunday, I would have. We often met up to go to the cinema while her husband Jack Lehane went to a match (hurling in summer, rugby in winter, the Premiership on telly, if he was stuck). Sadie was a detective in the Garda Síochána, based at Detective HQ in Coughlan’s Quay. She had been in my law class at UCC. Our closeness was situationally inevitable: she and I sat in the back row at every lecture. By the end of week one, we were friends for life.
After college, Sadie had opted for Garda training in Templemore instead of going into legal practice. It was a decision I hadn’t understood at the time. I had always seen the law from a defence rather than a prosecution standpoint. But, based on my behaviour over the last few days, I was beginning to understand that we were more alike than I’d realised. I would have liked to have shown the evidence I had to her to see what she thought. As I was bound by client confidentiality, I couldn’t do that unless the clients permitted the disclosure. Though why wouldn’t they? I’d check it with them. I texted Sadie to say I couldn’t meet today but that I’d call her during the week to arrange something else.
Along with the messages from Sadie and Ann, I had a voicemail from my mam, Doreen, wondering how I was, as she hadn’t heard from me for days and didn’t know was I alive or dead, let alone if I was coming around for the dinner and should she put on spuds for me or not and would I please phone soon or my father was going to have to drive over and see what was wrong. I groaned as I listened. Then I rang her.
‘Finn! At last. Thank God. We were worried,’ Mam said.
‘Sure wasn’t I only talking to you Friday afternoon? Anyway, how are things?’
My mother went into an animated recital of local news, weather, sick relatives, dead neighbours, funerals attended and upcoming medical appointments, ending with ‘So we’ll see you later on?’
‘Not for dinner, Mam, but I might be able to call in – or during the week. I’ve been busy, sorry, working all weekend as it happens so …’
‘I knew that’s why we didn’t hear from you. Your father wants to talk to you.’
I heard muffled voices as my mother summoned Jim, my dad, to the phone. He’s not a phone person and would have been a lot happier saying whatever he had to say when he saw me next. But if Doreen wanted him to talk to me now, he would. Otherwise he had no hope of a quiet read of the Sunday papers.
‘Ah, Finn, how are you at all?’
‘I’m grand. How are you, Dad?’
‘Grand altogether. Listen, don’t be working too hard now, sure you won’t?’
I laughed.
‘No, Dad, don’t worry, I won’t,’ I said.
‘Grand altogether. Sure we’ll see you soon so, will we?’
‘Yes, Dad. Listen, I have to go, I’ll talk to you. Say goodbye to Mam for me.’
It was 10 a.m. I rang Jessica Murphy. She told me that she’d sent the kids out with their dad, and that it would suit her best if I called over right away.
Jessica’s house was a twenty-five minute walk from my house. On the way, I went back over the phone conversation with my parents. Overprotective was putting it mildly when it came to how Mam was with me. Though she never said it, I knew that she watched for signs of the damage done to me in my early years, the harm that she and Dad had done their best to repair.
After I had found out about my birth mother’s suicide, I abandoned whatever interest I had had in my roots. I had never even seen my original birth certificate. I knew as much as I needed to know. My legal parents were Doreen and Jim Fitzpatrick. My legal name was Finola Fitzpatrick. My previous identity no longer existed unless I allowed it to. I locked all of it away.
But, no matter how hard I tried, at times the pictures and sounds and feelings of that other life took control. It wasn’t something I could predict, though usually I tried to avoid – and at the same time was drawn to – anything that might trigger me. Things like this case. Whatever I did, occasionally it was like a switch flicked inside me. I had learnt how to handle myself, had a whole toolbox I used to put myself back together: music, meditation, yoga. Often I was tired of the effort.
Before yesterday, what had I known about my past? There had been a lot of alcohol, I knew that. And depression. I knew that too. Assumed it, given my birth mother’s suicide. And there had been chaos and neglect and terror. I felt that, a shadow barely glimpsed at the edge of me, a darkness, unknowable, at the core of me. I had faint memories, like scenes from an old TV show. The rest was burnt into my brain like melted plastic, the true shape of what happened long gone. I had read up on the theory, and putting a label on it helped a little. I had been exposed to relational trauma, certainly. And ‘Big T’ trauma, probably. Though there had been love, too, some warmth, some care. And now I’d found out that there had been a secret sister. What effect would this new information about my background have on me? Were there other secrets? And, if there were, did I want to know?
Jessica lived near the church in Ballyphehane, one of the necklace of churches built around Cork during the 1950s, at the height of the Catholic Church’s institutional power. At the time, some of the women in the surrounding area had donated their engagement rings to fund the enormous and, these days, mostly empty church. But the hierarchy’s influence on Ireland had declined over the intervening decades, precipitously so after the revelations of recent times: the Mother and Baby homes, the priests and Christian Brothers convicted of serious sexual offences, and how Church institutions had colluded in serial cover-ups. I wondered what those women would think of their sacrifice now.
By 10.35, I was knocking on the door of an ex-City Council end of terrace, an ordinary home that was becoming more extraordinary with every passing year. Most of the houses in the area had been built when the State was young and poor and had had many faults but had, at least, cared enough to house those of its citizens who hadn’t been forced to emigrate. But for a long time now, government policy had decreed that large schemes like this one were a source of social problems, and publicly funded house-building had more or less ceased. The resulting homelessness crisis, a spectacularly serious social problem in itself, hadn’t yet led to an effective change in policy.
I rang the doorbell, and stood down off the front step again. I saw that the house had been renovated and extended. The work looked less than ten years old and, with a ramp and handrail, there was a granny flat with a separate entrance built on to the side.
‘Coming,’ a voice said from above.
Feet clip-clopped down uncarpeted steps and a scrawny woman, with fine dyed blonde hair pulled into a thin ponytail, opened the door. She looked a lot older than thirty or thirty-one, which was all she could have been if she was in Deirdre’s class. Her pale skin had a matt dullness to it, and a deep cleft had developed between her over-plucked brows.
‘Sorry,’ the woman said. ‘I was upstairs doing a few bits while I’ve peace.’
I introduced myself, and handed her my business card.
‘You’re Jessica?’
‘God yeah, sorry, that’s me, I should’ve said.’
She smiled, and put her hand to her forehead.
‘Come in out of the cold, for God’s sake.’
She showed me into the front room, which had been turned into a play area. The floor was almost entirely covered with a jigsaw-style rubber play mat, littered with plastic toys and picture books in varying states of repair. The Very Hungry Caterpillar had survived best, but I feared for The Gruffalo: the front cover had come loose and was holding on by a hangnail. I thanked Jessica for seeing me at such short notice, and sat on the sofa.
‘Did Ann say anything about why I wanted to see you?’
‘Nothing, only that it was about poor Deirdre’s death and that you were looking into the background. That’s about it. C’mere, I never asked if you wanted a cuppa?’
‘I’m grand, thanks, Jessica, I’m only after it. You knew Deirdre well, I hear?’
‘When we were kids, we were best friends, in the same class all the way up. But I didn’t see much of her after we left school. And when we were there, she was out sick a lot, scraped through the Leaving, nervous breakdown, but you know that, I suppose. I tried to keep in touch, called in occasionally. Believe it or not I hadn’t even seen her for a few years before she died. But strange as it sounds, you know, I think we would’ve grown apart no matter what, even if she hadn’t got sick. We were on different roads. She was heading to university from nearly the day we started primary. I was only dying to finish school myself. I went to the College of Comm after, did a book-keeping and secretarial course, and never looked back. Met Paul, had the smallies and, sure you know yourself, moved on, like.’
She frowned.
‘Between work and the kids and Paul, I hadn’t a minute. Still haven’t.’
She paused again.
‘With everything, I had no time left for Deirdre.’
‘I never forgot about her, though,’ Jessica added, willing me to believe her. I didn’t. I reckoned that plenty of time had gone by when Deirdre was alive that she never crossed Jessica’s mind. And that she thought about Deirdre a whole lot more these days.
‘When she died, it brought it all back, you know, how close we’d been,’ Jessica said. ‘I was so sad. But I suppose life’s like that, and it’s nobody’s fault and that’s it.’
She looked at me, waited for me to agree. I couldn’t. Somebody was at fault, I just didn’t know who, not for sure, not yet. But maybe Jessica did.
‘Was there a trigger for the breakdown, the change in Deirdre, do you think?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ Jessica said. ‘Some people are more susceptible to that kind of thing, aren’t they? Around the time of the Film Festival, she broke up with her boyfriend and––’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘Yeah, Joey O’Connor, mind you when I say boyfriend it was all very innocent. She was only fifteen and we were all in the same class at St Finbarr’s. Joey was a rich boy, from the Blackrock Road. Gorgeous, in his day. A bit like Colin Farrell, but tall as well. Played rugby, too.’
She laughed.
‘He couldn’t believe it when he got dumped.’
‘Deirdre broke it off? Why?’
‘I don’t know what happened. I wasn’t surprised she got tired of him. He thought he was God’s gift. He was crazy about Deirdre, though.’
‘Any idea where he is now?’
‘As far as I know he’s working in the family business, they have that big car sales place on the Kinsale Road.’
‘Ann Carney never mentioned a boyfriend,’ I said. ‘Do you think she knew?’
‘No way. Deirdre didn’t tell her. No point. And the dad would have had a canary.’
‘I see. It’s interesting that the break-up with Joey happened around the time of the Film Festival. The Carneys trace the change in Deirdre to then.’
Jessica put her head on one side and looked at the ceiling. I followed her gaze upwards, towards a paper globe with a map of the earth pattern on it, and a small hole where Buenos Aires should have been. I looked at her afresh, and at the furrow between her brows. I wondered what had put it there. She started talking again.
‘That’s right. Now that you mention it, she was never the same after the festival.’
‘You went to the closing ceremony with Ann Carney and Deirdre, is that right?’
‘It was a long time ago. All I remember is being in the Opera House, and it was boring, at the beginning anyway, loads of speeches and giving out prizes, and all that.’
‘Jeremy Gill won that year, didn’t he?’ I said.
‘God, yeah he did. Cork really put him on the map.’
As far as the local population was concerned, whatever about his talent, Gill’s later success was entirely due to the fact that Cork had discovered him. ‘He’d be nowhere only for us,’ taxi drivers said, too often for my liking, even before I’d heard about Deirdre.
‘I was volunteering that year. I did it for a few years back then. I didn’t meet Jeremy myself, unfortunately. Did you?’
‘I did of course,’ Jessica said. ‘We did the workshop with him.’
‘Oh yes, the workshop. I have some photos of it. Didn’t know you were at it.’
‘Well, to be honest, it wasn’t really my thing. But Deirdre was doing it and at that stage we were joined at the hip. And it was a day off school, of course.’
I took out my iPad and got up the scanned photos, the group shot first. Jessica squealed.
‘Oh my God, look at me, I was so fat,’ she said.
She pointed to a round mousey-haired girl, and looked at me expectantly.
‘I wouldn’t say fat exactly,’ I said. ‘But you look a lot different, that’s for sure.’
‘I took up running down by the Lough to get out on my own for half an hour a couple of times a week. And the weight fell off me. Mind you, it’s a struggle to keep it off. I nearly have shares in Special K. But look at Deirdre, God help us, may she rest in peace. She was so pretty, such a star. No wonder Jeremy Gill was mad about her.’
‘Really? How do you mean?’
‘Just asking her opinion and things,’ Jessica said. ‘And if he had to demonstrate anything, he got her to help him, all that. Teacher’s pet. But we were used to that with Deirdre. Everyone loved her. Mr O’Donnell the art teacher adored her. Even after she got sick and gave up art in school and dropped down to doing all pass subjects, he kept asking about her all the time. We used to say that he was in love with her.’
‘Was he?’
‘Dunno. Doubt if it was love, really. But it happens, doesn’t it?’
I’d need to talk to Mr O’Donnell, find out more.
‘I suppose. But tell me, do you recognise anyone else in these photos, Jessica?’
‘Well there’s Joey,’ she said.
She pointed to a thick-necked, surly youth in the second row.
‘And Aifric Sheehan, she was Deirdre’s friend more than mine. Aifric’s still around. I bump into her occasionally. She went on and did teaching. Works in our old school, would you believe? I don’t think I’d send our two there, though I don’t know, they’re still young. But from what I hear, the school’s changed a lot since our day. Less mixed, more exclusive.’
I had to get her back to the case.
‘I don’t have kids myself so it’s not really on my radar. Em, the two boys in the other photo? Any idea who they are?’ I asked.
‘They were on the youth jury with her, as far as I know,’ Jessica said. ‘But don’t ask me their names. I only met them that one day, at the workshop.’
‘What about the other guy, the adult who isn’t Jeremy Gill?’
‘Oh he worked for the festival, what was his name again? He was really nice to me, I should remember him. I felt out of place, didn’t know much about films, the rest of them were way cooler than I was, but he looked out for me. Hang on, was it Donal or something like that?’
‘Could it have been Daniel? According to the programme, the education officer was called Daniel O’Brien.’
‘Yeah, it could have been,’ Jessica said. ‘He was something to do with education, I’m nearly sure. Yeah, it could have been Daniel.’
‘That’s good to know, Jessica, thanks,’ I said. ‘And do you remember the badges you were all wearing? Anything about them?’
‘I don’t even remember seeing one, let alone wearing one.’
‘Okay. And, one more time, any joy on the two jury boys’ names?’
‘Not a hope,’ she said. ‘Not even a glimmer.’
It didn’t matter. If they were on the youth jury, as Jessica had said, their names would be in the catalogue. And she had confirmed my suspicion that the other adult male in the photo was probably Daniel O’Brien, the education officer.
But I hadn’t bargained on having two new suspects in the mix: a jilted boyfriend and a besotted teacher. I had intended being open-minded about Gill’s culpability but this new development was, most definitely, not part of the script.