Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catherine Kirwan grew up on a farm in the parish of Fews, County Waterford. She studied law at UCC and lives in Cork where she works as a solicitor. Darkest Truth is her first novel.

  For Michael and Breda Kirwan

  PROLOGUE

  She hears the bus, the hiss and chug of it, behind her. The 203 from Lehenaghmore. Two minutes early. An omen, she thinks. She sticks out her right hand, shoulder high, one half of a crucifix. The other she plunges into her anorak pocket. She left her phone and purse at home, but her bus pass is where it always is. Palming it at the driver as she boards, she keeps her head low. No chat. No reply to his ‘how’s it going?’ No acknowledgement of his ‘suit yourself, love’.

  The bus is almost empty. You don’t go into the city centre on a damp Tuesday night in January unless you have to. She chooses a seat in the middle, equidistant from the other two passengers. They take off after a minute’s dawdle, and the lights are in their favour for the first couple of junctions. Another omen, she thinks. But at the end of Summerhill South, the light is red. Doesn’t matter, she thinks, nothing does.

  In town, at the last stop, she waits. The other two passengers say ‘thanks’ to the driver as they get off. She wants to say it too, this final courtesy, but silence is safer, and the driver is busy anyway, filling in a form. He hardly notices her, she thinks. She doesn’t see him watch her cross the street to the river. She doesn’t see him shrug and tap his breast pocket and step off the bus and light up a cigarette. She doesn’t know that he’ll remember that smoke. She doesn’t know that he’ll regret it.

  She reaches Patrick’s Bridge. At the pedestrian light, she almost looks north, towards MacCurtain Street and the Everyman Theatre. She looks east instead, towards her destination. As soon as the road is clear, she makes for the other side. One more crossing, she thinks, and I’m there. She speeds up, then slows again, recalling that she’ll have to pass the Opera House. Don’t think, she says aloud. As the glassy bulk of it looms into view, she registers that the place is dark tonight. For a second, she’s glad.

  At the Christy Ring Bridge, she pauses, barely, then crosses, weaving her way through the cars. Nobody bothers to hoot. Everyone jaywalks in Cork. At the Half Moon Street opening from Lavitts Quay, she stalls and looks south. She pushes down her hood. Around now, her parents will be watching the nine o’clock news on RTE. They won’t have noticed yet that she’s not in her room. She shuts her eyes and swallows hard. This is it, she thinks, this is the only way.

  Walking on, the mist is cool on her face. She breathes through her nose and something like a smile rests briefly on her lips. She snaps open the fasteners of her anorak, methodically, deliberately, one by one. She touches her right hand to the quay wall. The stone feels rough against her skin.

  Near the footbridge, she stands and bows her head, breathing as slowly as she can. She hears the blood pulsing in her ears. Then, quickly, she slides her coat off her shoulders. Checking that her bus pass is still in the pocket, she folds the coat carefully and places it on the wall. She takes off her trainers and socks and puts them on top of the anorak. She pulls her sweatshirt over her head and drapes it across the pile.

  Barefoot, in black leggings and a thin black T-shirt, she’s ready. She steps on to the stone staircase and descends three steps. On the fourth step, her left foot breaks water. She flinches, but takes another step. There’s something hard and sharp under her feet. She gasps, though what she’s feeling now doesn’t seem like pain.

  With the next step, she’s in up to her knees. She has to cling on to the wall to steady herself. But it’s slimy. She takes her hand away for a moment, then grips the side again. When she’s up to her waist, she feels the sway of the river, the size of it. She hears shouts from above. She has been seen. She lets go.

  And the current takes her.

  1

  November 2013

  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.

  ‘Shitfuckbollocks,’ I said.

  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.

  ‘Everyone gone?’ I shouted.

  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 busine
ss 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?’

  ‘It has to be now, Miss Fitzpatrick,’ the man said. ‘Finola. Please.’

  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.

  ‘We’ll go into Forde’s,’ I said, shouting over the roar of the river.

  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.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a pot of tea, no milk or sugar, please,’ I said.

  ‘I’m after ordering a hot whiskey,’ said the man.

  ‘Barry’s Tea will do me grand,’ I said.

  Get this over with fast is what I thought.

  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.’

  I slid my card across the table.

  ‘Though obviously you know how to find me.’

  The man stayed silent.

  ‘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.’

  I wrote down the name and address.

  ‘Deirdre. That was her name. She was my beautiful baby. And she’s dead.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Sean,’ I said, and I meant it.

  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.

  And I was wrong.

  ‘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.’

  He paused.

  ‘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.’

  He shifted in his seat.

  ‘It’s strange being here with you,’ he said.

  ‘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.’

  His voice was weaker now, but he kept talking.

  ‘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.

  ‘She was like an angel from heaven,’ Sean said.

  He smiled. He looked like he was out of practice.

  ‘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 blame myself for not seeing the danger. I blame myself.

  ‘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?’

  He didn’t wait for my reply.

  ‘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?’

  ‘Not the project,’ he said.

  He thumped the underside of his closed fist on the table.

  ‘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.’

  ‘Unfortunately, they’re right,’ I said. ‘It’s––’

  ‘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?’

  ‘I understand your frustration but legally––’

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

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘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: