Sandymount was popular with writers, perhaps because the suburb lies next to the beach where Stephen Dedalus had strolled. But it was popular with lawyers too and it hadn’t been hard for me to find out exactly where Christopher Dalton lived. I had seen him, and his house, in a Sunday newspaper magazine feature, and knew it was somewhere in Sandymount. Before leaving Cork, I had phoned Ronan Teehan, a gossipy senior counsel that I’d briefed a few times, who lived facing the strand. It was close to five on a Friday. Which meant, I calculated, that he had been for a late lunch and a bottle or two of very expensive red wine, and that he might be receptive to questions. He was. At the end of twelve minutes, I knew not only where Dalton lived, I knew the time he walked his dog and the breed. That was another thing about Sandymount. It was really popular with dog-owners.
I reached the seafront as Christopher Dalton was turning for home. He looked preoccupied, and I wasn’t surprised. By now, he would have heard about Rhona Macbride. He had to have known her. He had been friends with Gill back then, had worked on his short film too, co-wrote the script, and acted as ‘Best Boy’, according to the credits, whatever that meant. Another one of Gill’s little jokes, I assumed.
I fell into step beside Dalton.
‘You’ve a gorgeous dog,’ I said.
‘Thanks,’ he said.
‘A long-haired German shepherd, isn’t he?’
‘Yeah. It’s a she, though.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Brünhilde.’
‘Great name. What’s her temperament like? I’ve heard they’re aggressive.’
‘Not at all. A real family pet. I think they’ve bred out those traits.’
‘Good to know.’
‘I’m crossing here, so, em, nice talking to you,’ Dalton said.
‘I’m crossing too.’
‘You are?’
‘Yes, Mr Dalton, I’m sorry for bothering you. But it’s urgent.’
‘Excuse me, do I know you?’ Dalton asked.
‘No, you don’t. But I’m hoping you’ll talk to me about Jeremy Gill.’
Dalton took a step back.
‘I’m not talking about Gill to anyone, least of all you, whoever you are. That’s in the past. I’ve never spoken about it before and I’m not going to start now. What newspaper are you with? I’ll complain to your editor. This is completely out of order.’
‘No, Mr Dalton, you’ve got it wrong. I’m not a journalist. I’m a solicitor.’
‘Oh.’
I held out my business card. He bent his head to read it, but didn’t take it.
‘I know that name from somewhere.’
‘If you’re on Twitter, you probably know me as hashtag lawyerbitch.’
‘That’s it. You got into some spat with Jeremy down in Cork. I couldn’t quite get what it was about.’
‘It makes sense only if you know the truth about Jeremy Gill. That’s why I’d really like to talk to you. I think you know the truth.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘I think you know exactly what I mean.’
‘What are you trying to do, subpoena me for something?’
‘If you talk to me now, maybe I won’t have to subpoena you.’
‘Talk on or off the record?’
‘Off the record, until you say otherwise.’
‘I don’t know,’ Dalton said.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘For Rhona’s sake.’
At the mention of her name, Dalton winced and shut his eyes. When he opened his eyes again, he nodded.
We crossed the road together in silence.
Christopher Dalton’s house was an estate agent’s dream: a recently decorated double-fronted, double-bay period house in mint condition with a sea view and off-street parking. I hadn’t had any idea that writing paid quite this well.
‘Fabulous house,’ I said.
‘I have Jeremy to thank for it, actually,’ Dalton said. ‘He gave me a percentage of the back-end of his second movie, the one that really broke him into the big time.’
‘59 Seconds.’
‘Yeah, that one. I bought the house with the payout. I’m still making money out of it, in fact. And meanwhile, the writing’s gone all right as well. So we’re doing okay.’
We were sitting in Dalton’s study, a downstairs room that opened into the left front bay window. Muffled noise was barely audible from the rest of the house and I wondered if the room had been soundproofed.
Dalton handed me a coffee from a Nespresso that he kept on a marble-topped antique side table, within reach of his writing desk.
‘Black okay?’
‘Perfect.’
I didn’t want to give him an excuse to leave in search of milk.
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘Lovely place to work.’
‘Why are you here and what do you want to know? Saturday is family time, the kids off school and all.’
I knew that Christopher Dalton and Jeremy Gill had been contemporaries at UCD, that they’d collaborated artistically for a while, but had had an oft-reported, though mysterious, falling-out and had never worked together again. Dalton was rich and, by the look of his house, he enjoyed a lifestyle out of reach to most. But it didn’t sit well with him. He had a pot belly, and despite daily dog-walking, he didn’t look fit. His hair was thin, in need of a wash and he was sickly-looking, pale except for a few red patches of psoriasis on his face and another few on his arms that he scratched every so often. For all his wealth, he looked like a man under severe stress.
‘I’m instructed in a civil case by the parents of Deirdre Carney,’ I said. ‘She met Jeremy Gill at Cork Film Festival when she attended a workshop given by him. I have come into evidence that leads me to suspect that Deirdre was raped by Gill some weeks after the festival.’
‘You’re instructed by this girl’s parents?’
‘Yes. You see Deirdre had a severe nervous breakdown and never identified Jeremy Gill publicly as her assailant during her lifetime. But in her suicide note …’
‘She’s dead?’
‘Yes. And so is Rhona Macbride, as you know. I spoke to her the night before she was murdered and she confirmed my suspicions about Jeremy Gill. Told me that Gill had raped her, savagely beaten her, too. She was too frightened of him to speak out. Now, as you know, she’ll never be able to.’
I watched Dalton take in the implications of what I had said.
‘I’m here about the Deirdre Carney case,’ I continued. ‘But from what I know about Gill’s behaviour with Deirdre and Rhona, I suspect that they’re not Gill’s only victims. I think you know that too.’
‘I don’t know anything about Deirdre Carney. I wasn’t even in Cork for the festival that year.’
‘What do you know, Mr Dalton?’
‘I read in the Irish Times that the Gardaí are treating Rhona’s death as a random, drug-related crime.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s not what I think, but you’re right, it’s what they think.’
He stayed quiet, but he was tearing at the rash on his arm again.
‘Christopher, two women are dead,’ I said. ‘Rhona told me she’d been expecting someone like me to call for years. For ever, she said. It’s the same for you, isn’t it?’
I waited for Dalton to fill the space.
‘You said that Rhona Macbride told you that Jeremy had raped her.’
He paused, then continued.
‘I didn’t know it was rape, but I knew that he’d met her, some time after the film wrapped. That they’d been intimate, sexually intimate.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Because he told me.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He boasted that she’d forced herself on him, that he hadn’t been able to keep her off him, that eventually he’d had to submit to her advances and that they had had sex.’
‘Is that how he described it, that they’d “had sex”?’
‘Not exactly. He told me he’d fucked her hard, taught her a lesson. Said that that’s what these girls needed, except he called her a slut. He said she’d fooled him for a long time but she was the same as all the rest of them.’
‘What do you think he meant by that, “all the rest of them”?’
‘Females in general. Jeremy doesn’t like women. He has some in his films, depending on the script, but not many. And he doesn’t employ women in any responsible roles. It’s one of the reasons he never uses a casting director, it’s a female-dominated profession. But there are other reasons he doesn’t use a casting director.’
‘The casting couch?’
‘Yes. He’s old-fashioned that way. He always had a Neanderthal approach. Whoever was available. Anybody would do. When we were in college, he was a legend. Any night out, Jeremy always scored. He boasted about his method. He’d spend time doing a recce of the party, or the pub or club, until he found the drunkest woman in the place. He used to say it was an art: to be able to find the girl while she was still mobile and transportable. In other words, before she collapsed or started vomiting. He was much the same when he was working in advertising, as far as I know, though I wasn’t out much with him then. I was trying to write, on the dole, didn’t have the money to go to Lillie’s or wherever he was hanging out back then. Once he started making films, starting with Another Bad Day at the Office, he got back in touch with me. I was thrilled. Jeremy’s always been great to work with. He’s a gifted film-maker, truly gifted. But when he gave up the day job, he didn’t need to target drunk women any more. He held auditions and private callbacks. Once shooting started, he could have any woman on set. Droit de seigneur. Actresses. Extras. Catering staff. Make-up artists. Costume department. You get the picture. No repeats, though. For him it was always one night only. There was something mechanical about it.’
‘You’re talking about adult women in all this?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not always.’
‘No.’
He took a deep breath.
‘His real passion was for schoolgirls. He liked them young. Not too young, either. He was quite specific about it. After puberty, but before they got to seventeen. Sweet sixteen, even sweeter fifteen, he used to say.’
‘Oh.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
But I was remembering how he’d used that word with Carmel, the girl in the green uniform, at the workshop in Cork on Wednesday. When she’d confirmed her age, he had said ‘sweet’. He had said it a second time. I felt sick at the thought of what might have happened if I hadn’t intervened, but I had to continue.
‘Please go on,’ I said. ‘About his specific interest.’
‘Well, yeah. He had a real thing, a detailed fantasy. He said that all women were bitches but that if he could get a girl at the right age, the right kind of girl, if she showed potential and if she measured up, she would be a fitting mate for him. He actually used that word. Mate.’
‘Apart from Rhona, were you aware of other underage girls?’
‘Not aware, as such, but I had my suspicions. I don’t want to give a name. It wouldn’t be fair on them, to tag them as a victim or whatever when they may not want that.’
‘Gill told you about Rhona, not about anyone else?’
‘No. I didn’t know anything about that girl from Cork you mentioned. I think he knew from my reaction to what he told me about Rhona that I wasn’t that comfortable with it.’
‘You were okay about all the adult women, just not the younger ones?’
‘Kind of that, yes. Though, I was starting to get uncomfortable about the women as well. Maybe I’d always been uncomfortable about it. I think I was beginning to see that maybe there was undue influence, maybe not quite full consent.’
‘You think?’
‘I do. It probably sounds odd to you, that I was only starting to realise it then?’
‘A bit odd, I suppose, all right.’
Bile rose from my belly and my throat burned.
‘Yes,’ Dalton said. ‘But Gill has this power over people. I don’t know if you noticed. He brings people with him, like a boat with shoals of fish and dolphins following. Everyone’s too busy watching Jeremy, trying to see if they’re in or out of favour with him, to notice what he’s doing, to have the distance to make a judgement call on it.’
Reluctantly, I had to admit to myself that I knew what Dalton meant. I recalled my meeting with Gill in the Opera House, and how I had felt when he’d moved on from me. And the audience. How they had been mesmerised. It was easy to condemn Dalton for his inaction, and condemn him I did, but with Gill, everything was complicated and ambiguous.
‘I have some idea what you mean,’ I said. ‘But you said that you had suspicions?’
‘I did say that, didn’t I? Yes, you could say I had suspicions. I don’t know where to begin. Another Bad Day at the Office opened a lot of doors. We both went to the Oscar ceremony. Jeremy was totally focused on that. Win or lose, it was about where it could get him next. The nomination wasn’t an end in itself, like it would be for some people. He kept saying to me that it was small potatoes, it was about what it could lead to. He had his eye on the future, not the past, he said. Used the trip to Hollywood to set up meetings, make contacts, sell himself, and his next project. Which just happened to be a feature that I’d co-written with him, so I got brought along to all the studio meetings and played my part. But I was kind of along for the ride. Jeremy was the engine of it all. So – he got money to make his first feature Giveaway, a small caper movie. Smart, pacy, funny. It was a good script – but it was the direction that lifted it above the ordinary. I wasn’t under any illusions. You’ve seen it, right? Giveaway did well – made its money back, and then some. Won lots of critical acclaim and the audience prize at Toronto. New is good in Hollywood. They’re always looking for the next big thing. Jeremy got a lot of money for his second feature, 59 Seconds. Another co-write credit for me, though I wrote most of it, in fact. Actually, I’d intended it to be a novel but Jeremy persuaded me to make a script of it instead. So, em, shooting started …’
‘And your suspicions?’
‘Yes. This is where it gets more awkward because it involves an individual I don’t want to name.’
‘A young girl?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s no young girl in the film, though.’
‘No. But 59 Seconds was a full production, not low budget. Not the highest budget either, but there was studio backing, plenty of money. So, of course, Jeremy had a Winnebago. I suspected that he used it for … no, it was more than a suspicion. I knew that he took women there for sex. We were on location, multiple locations. The story had been set in Ireland originally, but we adapted it for the States. It was better, actually. More convincing. We filmed in and around Boston, New England, upstate New York. Wherever we went, Jeremy used to make a big deal of going to visit the local diner. And the school. Wanting to give back, he said. I knew there was probably more to it but I didn’t … well, I didn’t do anything about it.’
‘But you had your suspicions, you said.’
‘Well, we were in a small town called Winterville, in upstate New York. Near the Adirondacks. It was the town in the movie where the first bank robbery happened so we were there a while. Yeah, we were there too long. Jeremy was doing his ambassadorial stuff, talking to the mayor, visiting the high school, all that. But then he started bringing this one girl on set. She was fifteen, sixteen at most. I didn’t get involved. He was training her in as his assistant, he said. Giving her an opportunity. He met her parents, took them to dinner and … well, what I’m saying is that he wasn’t hiding anything. And, of course, he was busy, making a film, and we were going to be moving on. I didn’t think too much of it. Until, well, our last night in town I was in my room at the hotel, doing rewrites and I went for a walk and …’
‘You saw something?’
‘Yeah, I saw the light on in Jeremy’s trailer. We were having an early start the following day, some dawn shots in the town and then moving out, heading to the next location, so when I saw the light I was surprised but I thought it was typical workaholic Jeremy stuff. I went over to the trailer and just walked straight in, to say hello. Or, I don’t know, maybe I knew, maybe some part of me knew.’
At this, Dalton paused, sighed, rubbed his hands over his face in a scrubbing motion, then clasped them together in front of his chest, like a schoolboy preparing for first confession.
‘Christopher, what did you see?’
‘I saw Jeremy having sex with someone. I couldn’t see her face. He was on top of her. He was being rough, yeah I think anyone would say that. But she wasn’t making a sound. He didn’t hear me, not then. I saw, I saw a half-empty bottle of vodka. And a Tropicana carton. And I saw a bag. It was the same bag the girl used to carry around all the time.’
‘The schoolgirl, his assistant?’
‘Yeah. It was a patchwork kind of thing, looked home-made. I recognised it.’
‘And you think it was her.’
‘I do. But I didn’t stay long enough to find out for sure. And I thought there was a chance she had left it there earlier, that it hadn’t been her he was with when I saw …’
‘But you suspected?’
‘Yes, I suspected it was her. I said as much to him the next day, when we were finished shooting. He asked me to drive with him to the next location. I agreed so that I would have the chance to talk to him about it.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said he knew there had been somebody, that he’d heard the door closing, that he’d wondered if it was me. And he said it was voluntary, that she’d wanted it.’
‘But at her age, she couldn’t have consented. It would have been statutory rape, whatever her wishes. And if she was drunk, if he got her drunk, that’s even worse.’
‘I know that. I said that to him.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said that I was all righteous now but that I’d done nothing about it when I could have. And that if he was having sex with an underage girl, that my behaviour made me an accessory. And he said that, if I said anything, she would deny it. And that he would too. He said she was the one who came on to him, she had suggested it, had come to his trailer after everyone else had gone. And if I said anything, that an allegation like that would ruin her reputation, even if it was shown to be false. And it would be. They’d both make sure of it. And it’s always the girl who suffers most in these kinds of situations. Mud sticks, he said. He said that, if I spoke out, I would destroy her life. He said a lot more than that, too. And I thought about it, and in the end I decided to keep my mouth shut.’
‘He gave you a percentage of the film’s takings, didn’t he?’
‘I never asked for it. I know what you think. But I didn’t ask for it. He gave it to me. You think it was hush money, but it wasn’t. I had already decided not to talk before he gave it to me. So I don’t see it that way. It wasn’t related. But I knew I couldn’t work with him again. There was no way I could. From that moment, it was over between us.’
But you kept taking the money.
I waited until I could speak calmly. There was more information to come, and I didn’t want to mess up my chances of getting it.
‘Thanks for telling me,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it can’t have been easy to revisit after all this time. But what I can’t understand is, you’ve described a pattern of exploitative and criminal behaviour that Gill engaged in consistently over many years. With so many girls and women involved, how did he keep it a secret all this time?’
‘He didn’t. Everyone knew, everyone in the film business, they all knew what he was like. It was common knowledge. It is common knowledge,’ Christopher Dalton said. ‘Don’t you get it? The biggest secrets are the ones everyone knows.’