Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  I was at 17–19 MacSwiney Street two minutes later. The flood barrier was still in place on the lower door, but there were lights on in the reception area. I walked up the front steps to the main entrance. At this hour on a Saturday, it could only be one person, Gabriel McGrath, founder and managing partner of the mainly commercial law firm of McGrath Lynch Cleary. Housed in a trio of converted eighteenth-century town houses, MLC had seven partners and fourteen associate solicitors, including me. I had worked there since being recruited by Gabriel as a trainee in the late nineties. I would always be grateful to him for taking a risk on me. I didn’t fit at MLC, I knew it and he knew it. But I was adaptable and discreet, useful for doing the messy but necessary work the other solicitors didn’t want to do. The partner’s daughter caught with twenty-seven Ecstasy tablets. The valued secretary’s brother fallen from improperly guarded scaffolding after drinking three cans of cider at lunchtime. The corporate client with marital problems on account of his inability to keep his hands off any woman under eighty. None of my workload conformed to the glossy image MLC tried to project, which didn’t bother me one little bit. The job pays the bills and some days are better than others.

  I met Gabriel as I was going up the stairs.

  ‘You’re in bright and early,’ I said.

  Gabriel was always in bright and early. Late fifties, and permanently anxious, he worked a lot harder than he needed to at this stage of his career.

  ‘No earlier than usual, Finola, as well you know. I’ve been in since half seven, wanted to get a bit of a head start on next week and to check on the flood situation, but it’s all grand, thanks be to God.’

  That was another thing about Gabriel. He was always thanking God for things that, as far as I could see, wouldn’t have been a problem if God had been a bit more thoughtful in the first place. But I didn’t say that, or that I didn’t believe in God; not Gabriel’s traditional Irish Catholic version anyway.

  ‘What brings you in on a Saturday?’

  ‘New client late yesterday evening, after everyone else had gone home,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘Hand-holding. Advice. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Hmmm. Right,’ Gabriel said. ‘Don’t waste too much time on it now. You know that you’re a valued employee and that you play an, em, important role for us but, of course, your fee income is, em, a concern, all the same, and, er, well, you know yourself.’

  ‘I know, Gabriel, I do,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m all over it,’ I added, knowing that nothing would really change, that I’d keep getting the time-consuming, low-paying, miscellaneous work I always got and that Gabriel knew that too. But at the next partners’ meeting he’d be able to say that he’d had a word, and I would go back to the bottom of the agenda for another while. Hopefully. I knew that I wasn’t popular with some of the other partners, Dermot Lyons in particular. I made a point of avoiding him, though I kept a low profile at work generally.

  ‘Good girl,’ Gabriel said.

  I had stopped cringing at the ‘good girl’ comments from Gabriel a long time ago. He didn’t mean to patronise, and wouldn’t have understood if I’d complained. Did that make me a bad feminist? The short answer was yes. But some day I’d crack and sit him down and give him a comprehensive education in gender politics.

  Gabriel waved goodbye, and took off at speed. I didn’t need to ask where he was going. His migraine-inducing yellow golf jumper gave me all the information I needed. I watched him go, short legs working at the double to keep up his pace. Half man, half whippet, he never walked when he could run.

  I had family law district court on Monday, so there was no chance of putting that off. But by noon I had phoned my clients with Tuesday and Wednesday appointments and rescheduled them for later in the week. Next, I reviewed the information I’d gathered last night, did a short note of my meeting with Sean Carney, and rang and arranged to call out to their house to see him and Ann at half past one.

  I had time to spare so I worked through my inbox and did some prep on my Monday caseload. I glanced out the window at the blue-grey slate of the rooftops. It isn’t Cork’s best view. It might even be one of the worst. The city centre is in a hollow. You have to climb the streeted heights on either side to get the views, go northside for the full panorama. My office would be claustrophobic if it weren’t for the light. It might have something to do with the proximity of water, the double river, the enormous harbour beyond, but no two hours look, or feel, the same. I’ve thought about leaving this town, thought about it often. And then I walk around a corner, and see something I see every day made new against the sky, and the notion of living anywhere else loses purchase.

  Turning back to my desk, I did a last run through my pending work, and dictated instructions for Tina Daly, my secretary of six years. Twenty-eight, whip smart and totally reliable, but quirky enough to want to stay working for me rather than one of the other solicitors, she had been bored rigid during the short time she had spent in the Commercial Department. Like me, Tina liked variety.

  There was just enough time for me to have lunch before going to the Carney house. I thought about picking up a salad and coffee from the Rocket Man, but I needed time to think, and the trouble with Cork was that I’d be bound to bump into someone I knew, either there or on the walk over. I decided to go home and reheat the remains of the butternut squash soup I’d made during the week. As I trekked up the hill, every step I took told me that I had no space in my head, or my life, for the Carneys and their tragic story, and that I should cancel the appointment, say what I had to say on the phone, and not go to see them at all.

  I went anyway. I told myself it was courtesy. Truthfully, though, I wanted to know more. About Jeremy Gill? Sure. But mostly I wanted to know about Deirdre, about how she had come to decide that dying was better than living.

  The house in Turners Cross was a modest semi-detached two-storey, sixty or seventy years old, with a Ford Focus parked outside. I rang the bell. Within seconds, Sean Carney opened the door.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Miss Fitzpatrick, Finola, thanks a million. You don’t know how much it means.’

  ‘Call me Finn, Sean,’ I said, ‘Only my boss calls me Finola.’

  The front room was spotless, though it was less of a living space and more of a shrine, with photographs of Deirdre on every wall and surface. There she was, making her communion, being presented with a medal for some kind of sporting event, baby and toddler photos, but none of her as an adult, nothing that showed her beyond mid-teens.

  They wanted to remember the good times.

  ‘I don’t know where herself has got to, give me a minute,’ Sean said.

  As he was getting up to look, the door opened and a stern, grey-faced woman came in, carrying a tray. She wore a chunky brown fisherman’s-rib wool jumper tucked inside a sludgy tweed skirt. The clothes looked ten, or twenty, years old, and the skirt gaped at the waist. She hadn’t always been this thin.

  ‘I thought you might like a cup of tea,’ Ann Carney said.

  She laid the tray on a small coffee table that Sean had magicked out of some corner without having to be told. I was impressed by the double act, the telepathy of a long marriage. And the Carneys would have had to rely on one another even more than normal, each propping up the other through the agony of watching their only daughter wither and die.

  Ann poured tea for the three of us and, with something approaching a glare, offered me a biscuit, which I took, thinking it would be unwise to refuse, despite a lifelong loathing of custard creams. I sipped my tea and waited for Ann to sit. Instead, she walked over to the fireplace and turned around to face me. She scanned me and our eyes met fleetingly. For a second I thought I detected a softness in hers, but it didn’t last.

  ‘I didn’t want Sean to go and see you,’ Ann said. ‘I can’t see what good will come of us raking through this. Our lovely girl is gone, and there’s nothing any of us can do to change it. Sean came up
with a notion that that man is the one to blame and that he wanted to warn people about him. But he got short shrift from the guards and the social workers. And he got a warning about defaming a public figure from our family solicitor, Frank Mannix, I’m sure you know him, and Frank is no fool. But that wasn’t enough for Sean so he went to you, thinking you could do something. But you can’t. I know you can’t so there’s no point letting on you can.’

  She stopped, raised her hand, bones and blue ropy veins protruding from the sparse flesh. She put her palm to her cheek and let out a hollow breath.

  ‘I suppose you’re here now,’ she said. ‘You may as well say your piece.’

  She lowered herself slowly into one of the armchairs in front of the fireplace. I had the impression that she was conserving her energy, preparing for round two.

  ‘I think you’re right, Ann,’ I said. ‘I think there’s probably very little I can do. But I’ve double-checked on the Film Festival’s child protection policies, in case Sean was right about Gill, and I’ll keep a watch on him, insofar as I can, while he’s around. It’s a short visit, mostly public engagements. As far as I can see, the danger to anyone is minimal.’

  I had held back on telling them that Gill had sought out an opportunity for contact with teenagers during the festival, and that my preliminary researches had thrown up more questions than answers. I’m not sure why I did that, though I told myself that I wanted to avoid stoking their fears. The other reason that came to me, that I was trying to keep control of the situation, made no sense unless some part of me knew that I needed to.

  ‘So that’s more or less it,’ the sensible side of me said, acting as my cue to leave.

  But seeing Deirdre’s early life chronicled in the room’s many photographs had only made me more curious about her.

  ‘There’s something else. If I could, I’d like to look through Deirdre’s things, her room, if possible, to see if there’s anything there that might help. Maybe, I don’t know, some kind of evidence …’

  It sounded lame, I knew, and ghoulish. They were bound to say no. Mentally, I was out the door and nearly home. But Sean darted a glance at Ann, then at me, then back at Ann again. To my surprise, she nodded.

  ‘Come with me,’ she said.

  At the top of the stairs, she pointed at a door but didn’t open it. Instead, she turned and descended towards her husband at the foot of the stairs, his hands gripping the bannisters like they were prison bars.

  If the sitting room was a shrine, the bedroom was a time capsule, a perfectly preserved late 1990s teenage museum. I flicked through a rack of CDs: Robbie Williams, Oasis and the Fugees. Cuddly toys stacked on the bed, stickers on the furniture; there was even a Furby. Though she’d lived another fifteen years, it was as if Deirdre’s life had stopped in 1998.

  I batted away the questions that came to me, about why I was spending my Saturday afternoon playing Poirot in a dead woman’s room when I could have been doing anything else with my weekend, and sat on the bed. Being a solicitor contains elements of detective work – figuring out what your client isn’t telling you, and why, or divining what the opposition is planning to do – but this was different. I was trying to feel my way into who Deirdre had been – and where she might have hidden something that she didn’t want her parents to see. She had spent much of her time on earth in this room. She must have left traces of herself, and of the monstrous attack that had marked her short life.

  I got up and began to work my way through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, both of which were emptier than I had expected. Though the surfaces of the room displayed the trappings of a teenage girl, the interiors held drab and shapeless adult clothes, the shrouds of the woman Deirdre had become.

  But there was nothing that signified her interest in film and theatre, and nothing hidden under the bed, around the back of the wardrobe, or taped underneath the drawers. I got down on my knees and moved along the wall, feeling the edges of the skirting board and carpet as I went, checking for a loose section or corner, but there was none. Deirdre had stripped her physical surroundings of every item that might have reminded her of Jeremy Gill. Was that significant? According to her father, at one stage she had been his number one fan. Or was that just Sean’s version? Maybe Gill was a lot less important in Deirdre’s life than Sean imagined. Yet she had left a coded message apparently identifying him in her suicide note. If that’s what the note meant, she had to have done it deliberately. And, if it had been deliberate, there was a chance that she had left something here too.

  I sat on the floor, in the corner at the end of the bed. In front of the window, there was a cheap wood veneer desk, where Deirdre had probably done her schoolwork. The desk had two drawers that I’d already checked: empty, both inside and underneath. I got up again. I slid out the top drawer and laid it on the desk. I did the same with the second drawer, and got down on my knees and felt around at the back of the opening. There was something wedged there. I shone my iPhone torch into the aperture. It looked like a mechanical instruments box. I took the ruler out of the drawer and used one hand to prise out the box with the ruler and the other to pull the box from its hiding place. Finally, it came free.

  I laid the box on the desk. It was battered, dented and scratched with the initials ‘DC’ but, more than anything else that I had seen of her so far, it was the box that brought Deirdre to life for me. I could almost hear her laughing in school corridors, almost see her passing notes in class.

  From my handbag, I took a roll of small plastic bags that I had brought from home. I tore off two and put a bag on each hand, improvising gloves, not wanting to contaminate or damage whatever I might find.

  I opened the box.

  5

  I had been hoping for something written, a diary or a letter, and not this collection of meaningless detritus. But I told myself that what was inside the box had to have been important to Deirdre, things she had wanted, or needed, to hide away and keep; and that I owed it to her to give the objects my full attention.

  There was a blue circular metal badge, about an inch across, with a cartoon-style picture of a white, round-edged boxy desktop computer, broken into two pieces, down the middle, with jagged black-outlined edges along the break. The badge looked old, but it was probably no older than the rest of the objects in the room. Maybe it had been publicity material for some nineties band that Deirdre had liked. But which one? And why keep the badge? What significance did it have for her?

  The second object was a name tag, the temporary kind, with a safety pin on the back, given out at seminars. The name ‘Deirdre’ was handwritten in marker, with a smiley face over the ‘i’ instead of a dot. It should be easy enough to check if it was in Deirdre’s handwriting but, apart from the signature, the name tag was blank.

  The final object was a drinks coaster with scalloped edges, bearing the name and logo for Muskerry Castle. Originally white, age had turned it yellow, and the absorbent top was coming away from the plastic underneath. There was a dark ring stain that looked like cola but could have been red wine. Muskerry Castle. My thoughts leapt to what Alice Chambers had said: that Jeremy Gill would be staying there during the festival. And that he’d been there before. Which might be a coincidence. I’d have to ask Deirdre’s parents if they had had any family visits to the hotel, and if there was a reason Deirdre might have kept the coaster, a special occasion of some kind.

  I heard voices, and what sounded like the front door closing. I checked my watch. I had been in the room for almost an hour. I put each object into its own plastic bag, and the box into a fourth. Then I put all of the bags into one and put it, along with my phone, in my handbag and went downstairs.

  The fire had been lit, and Ann Carney was sitting in the armchair to the left of the hearth. She was alone but, in the crook of her left arm, she cradled a framed photograph. There was a gap on the mantelpiece. She had taken the picture from there: the communion one. With her right hand, Ann gestured towards the other fireside
chair. I sat and she began to talk.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you on my own. I wanted to know why you’re here.’

  I shouldn’t have come.

  ‘Because you asked me,’ I said. ‘I mean, your husband did.’

  But he hadn’t. Visiting the house had been my idea.

  ‘You’re here in my front room on a Saturday afternoon,’ Ann said. ‘You’ve said nothing since you arrived that you couldn’t have said in a text message. So you’ve checked the festival’s child protection arrangements? So what. You hardly came here for a clap on the back. You came to see my daughter’s bedroom. Why?’

  I rubbed a piece of my dress between my thumb and forefinger, avoided her eyes.

  ‘Talk, for God’s sake. Talk or go,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think you want to go.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Right,’ Ann said. ‘We’ll start again. Why are you here?’

  I had to be careful. She was an intelligent woman, wouldn’t be fobbed off easily. I let go of my dress, pressed both my hands into my lap, felt the muscles in my thighs, drew strength from them. Tried to.

  ‘It’s got to do with something …’

  My coat was next to me on the arm of the sofa. I could get up and walk out and never look back. Instead, I found myself telling the story I had never wanted to know.

  ‘My mother died.’

  My voice sounded strange to me, had the hiss and crackle of an old record.

  ‘My birth mother. I’m adopted,’ I added.

  ‘How? How did she die?’

  ‘The river. Like your Deirdre.’

  After a silence I continued.

  ‘When I was sixteen my adopted mother told me what had happened.’

  ‘And you came here because?’

  ‘I’m not really sure,’ I said.