Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  At that, Ann smiled ruefully and shook her head.

  ‘Try living with that, Finn. You see, at the time Sean was away a lot, driving the lorry, doing as much overtime as he could get away with. We were still thinking of university for Deirdre at that stage. He had a run to Dublin, would collect up there again and would head for Letterkenny after that so he could be away three or four days on the trot and when he came home Deirdre was always on her best behaviour, no cheek for Dad.’

  She smiled again.

  ‘Deirdre could wrap him around her little finger. And me too, if I’m honest. She was so precious …’

  I would have to press harder if I was to get any useful information.

  ‘Was there a time before the attack when you noticed anything different, maybe something that made you uneasy?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Ann said. ‘It was gradual, a kind of a moving away from me, from us. I noticed after the Film Festival that she was keeping a secret. She’d got one of those Ready To Go pre-pay phones for her Junior Cert results that September. She hardly used it at the beginning because very few of her friends had mobiles then, they were only just coming in, but Deirdre was an only child, we spoilt her, gave her what she wanted. Anyway, after the festival she was getting a lot of calls or she’d get a call on her mobile and would run out to the hall and take a call on the landline and talk for ages on that. Ringing mobiles was very expensive at that time so she used the landline for longer calls. Sean didn’t know the full extent of it, still doesn’t, no point. I gave her privacy, though of course I regret that now. But thinking back it could have been Gill, maybe. I answered it one time when she had left it out of her hand, gone to the toilet or something, and it was a male voice but she came back in and grabbed it from me before I had a chance to … And you asked about something that made me uneasy. I don’t suppose it means much but I remember that before and during the festival she was all talk about Jeremy Gill and his short film, and then after it she stopped talking about him. I did think it was strange, even at the time, that she suddenly didn’t want to know, said nothing about him ever again. I thought he was a reminder of how she had been before. But I see it differently now, that Sean might be right, that it could be him she was trying to forget.’

  ‘Tell me about the 12th of December 1998.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ann said. ‘The day it happened. It was a Saturday. I should have twigged there was something fishy going on. In retrospect I see that. As far as I was concerned she was going on a sleepover to Jessica’s, there were going to be a few other girls there, all normal but she was extra-excited that day, that week. I did notice it, I’m not imagining it. Anyway, there was no sleepover, she never went to Jessica’s. She arrived back here the following morning early and went straight to bed. I didn’t even see her going up the stairs. I was in the kitchen. But later on I heard her bawling and I went in to her. And she told me to get out and I did at first but I couldn’t stay out and I went back in. She was all curled up in the bed. So I sat down beside her and talked to her and eventually I persuaded her to tell me what was wrong but all she would say was that something bad had happened to her, and that it was her fault. And that was all she ever said, really, down all the years until her … until we lost her. That someone had hurt her and it was her fault. And I asked her, of course I did, if we would call the doctor, and the guards, and she said to call nobody, and that come hell or high water she wasn’t going to ever call the guards or let us ever tell anyone and that if I did tell anyone she would never talk to me again and she’d leave and run away and all sorts like that. And by then Sean had come in, he’d heard the commotion and he said it too at first, that she should report it, but then he went along with her, that we would keep it to ourselves what had happened. I wasn’t happy but I went along with it too, thinking, I suppose we both did, that we could talk her around later and that she would tell us, tell someone, who had hurt her. But she never did. If it was now, well, I would do everything differently. We know all about trauma and counselling and DNA now. But that was new then, new to us anyway. So I washed and cleaned her, I had to be careful not to hurt her any more than she was already …’

  ‘She was physically injured?’ I asked.

  ‘Bruised mainly, like she’d been held down. Her upper arms, her shoulders. All over her legs, thighs, belly. She’d been battered, my baby girl, everywhere except her beautiful face. But that was changed too. Pale as a corpse she was. It was like she’d been dosed with a lethal poison. Her eyes were dead, even though she was breathing.’

  ‘Ann, I know she didn’t tell you who hurt her, but did she say any more about what had actually happened?’

  ‘She didn’t have to say the word for me to know that she had been raped. She was torn, and bleeding from inside her, bleeding too much for it to be normal …’

  ‘And you didn’t call a doctor?’ I said.

  ‘I wanted to, but I didn’t. She said that she’d die of shame if anyone knew. I understood what she meant, though it makes no sense to me now, but back then, and with herself and Sean against me, well, I was weak. It was a mistake, the biggest one I ever made. I was her mother. I should have done better by her. I failed her when she needed me most.

  ‘And I threw out the bloody sheets and the stained clothes that she’d been wearing and I dressed her in her pyjamas like she was my baby again. That means there’s no evidence, doesn’t it? Nothing. The mobile phone she was using is long gone. Sometime after, she put it in the sink and covered it in water to destroy it. I threw it away. Thought it was useless. If I’d kept any of the stuff there might be some hope of tracing him from phone records or DNA, I’m sure, even now, wouldn’t there?’

  ‘Hard to say,’ I said. ‘And what’s done is done. We need to work with what we have. Any idea where she went that night?’

  ‘Not a clue. And the way it was, that we couldn’t tell anyone, I couldn’t ask Jessica or I was afraid … I don’t know … Maybe the truth is that for a while I might have thought it was Deirdre’s fault too. And that’s the worst thing, that I thought badly of her.’

  ‘Her attacker groomed her,’ I said. ‘Whether it was Gill or someone else, Deirdre was led into a situation that turned into something she didn’t want.’

  ‘I know. But I wish I had seen it at the time, or even that I could help in some way now,’ Ann said.

  ‘You might be able to help me with these things,’ I said. ‘I found them in at the back of the desk drawers in her room. Did you know there was something hidden there?’

  Ann shook her head. I took the bagged box and contents out of my handbag and handed them to Ann, one at a time. First the coaster from Muskerry Castle.

  ‘Do you have any idea why Deirdre would have this?’

  ‘No,’ Ann said. ‘You’d need to be half a millionaire to go to a place like that. I’m sure Deirdre was never there.’

  The next item was the badge. Ann shook her head again.

  ‘I’ve never seen this before,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea what it is.’

  The final item was the identity tag.

  ‘It’s Deirdre’s handwriting all right, but as to what it was for, I don’t know. I don’t remember her ever being at a conference. She was a schoolgirl, and after she left school she didn’t have any education worth talking about. Unless she did a course when she was in St Michael’s having treatment? But I think I would have heard about that …’

  ‘Think, Ann,’ I said. ‘Did she ever go to anything where she might have needed a name tag like that, a seminar or a school debate, maybe?’

  ‘There was nothing like that,’ Ann said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  8

  It was almost eight o’clock when I left the Carney house. I walked past the football ground, home of Cork City FC, shuttered and silent now. The streets were empty, and the night air was murky, and the footpaths were damp and slippery underfoot. Around the corner, on Evergreen Road, the giant concrete slants of Christ the King Church menaced.

>   I pressed on, picking my way through the mist. Ann had said that Deirdre’s school friend Jessica Murphy was married with a couple of kids, so there was no hope of a meeting at this time on a Saturday evening. I would ring her in the morning. By then, too, Ann would have phoned Jessica and told her to expect my call, which might make for an easier first contact. There was no legitimate excuse for going back to the Film Festival office twice in one day and, though I was even more convinced now that I needed to examine the 1998 archive, there was nothing else to be done tonight. I would go home, absorb and process all that had happened. That was the appropriate thing to do.

  And I couldn’t do it. I hurried down the narrow steep incline of Nicholas Street, and around past the Red Abbey, and across the river on to the city’s central island.

  The festival office was quieter than it had been that morning. There was no sign of Alice, but there were a few junior staff members and, as I had hoped, Sarah-Jane Dooley. In her late twenties, Sarah-Jane had a carefully curated look that changed with every hairdo. Recently, she’d gone for a pixie crop that made her look like Jean Seberg in Breathless, though she was too chatty and smiley to pull off the required ennui. Sarah-Jane handled the in-house publicity for the festival and in planning this year’s campaign she’d be bound to have dug out the festival archive of Gill’s previous visit.

  ‘Hey, Sarah-Jane, how is it going?’ I said.

  Sarah-Jane raised her eyes towards the ceiling, its paint flaking and grimy: arts funding cutbacks left no room for a decoration budget.

  ‘I’m demented, Finn, trying to get on to someone in TV3, they’re supposed to be running an item in tomorrow evening’s news and I’m organising the meeting time and about a hundred other things simultaneously – sure you know, yourself. If you’re looking for Alice, she’s gone – she was in since half five this morning and she was dead on her feet.’

  ‘I kinda was looking for her,’ I lied. ‘But maybe you could give me a hand if you have a minute? It’s just that I’m supposed to be meeting Jeremy Gill on Wednesday for the workshop as board representative, I was in this morning talking to Alice about it, and I realised afterwards that I really needed to look at the records of his 1998 visit to the festival so that I’d be fully up to speed. I was wondering if you had the archive handy?’

  ‘Em, sure, yeah,’ Sarah-Jane said, staring at her computer screen. ‘I’m a bit busy right now, I …’

  ‘Just point me in the right direction and I’ll take it from there,’ I said.

  My conscience itched with the knowledge that I was using my position on the board and my friendship with Alice to worm my way in. But, as I cleared a corner for myself and sat with the five box files that comprised the 1998 archive, I pushed all squeamishness aside. It would be worth it if I found something.

  The first three boxes yielded nothing of interest: posters, flyers, guest attendances, audience records, copies of the catalogue and publicity materials. The fourth one was all Jeremy Gill. Somebody had realised early on that Gill was going places and had preserved everything they could about his time at the 1998 festival, including his original handwritten entry form for the short film competition, the original videotape that he’d submitted, a thank-you card that he’d sent afterwards, numerous press clippings, many of which I had seen online, as well as a note of the prizes he’d won and the judges’ comments. There was a bundle of photos, too, mostly duplicates or alternate versions of the prize-giving ones that had appeared in the Examiner.

  But wrapped separately in a white page were two other photographs. The top photo showed Gill standing in a posed shot with a group of teenagers in various school uniforms. I took a closer look. The teenagers were wearing white name tags. I would need an enlargement to confirm that the tags were exactly the same as the one I had found at the Carney house, but they looked similar.

  I recognised Deirdre immediately from Sean’s photo. As well as Gill, there was another adult male in the photograph. I’d need to find out who he was. The second photograph was another posed shot, this time a foursome: Deirdre, Gill and two other teenagers, both boys, wearing different uniforms which meant that they were from different schools. I didn’t recognise the uniforms but, as they had name tags, I could find out who they were and talk to them.

  In the four-person photo, Deirdre was standing beside Gill with the boys on either side of them. Deirdre and Gill were standing close to each other. They looked happy, and the boys looked happy. It seemed like everyone was having a great time. I took both photographs, the large group and the foursome. I would write a note on the page that had wrapped them confirming that I’d borrowed the two of them to get them copied. But I stopped before I wrote anything. The page wasn’t blank. Created on a computer and not specially printed, it was an A3 promotional poster publicising a schools workshop which read:

  FREE SHORT FILM WORKSHOP FOR SCHOOLS

  ‘GETTING IT MADE: IDEA TO REALITY – AND HOW TO AVOID THE PITFALLS’

  (CASE STUDY WITH FILM-MAKER AND Q + A)

  THURSDAY 10AM–1PM

  TEACHERS ONLY PLEASE CONTACT EDUCATION OFFICER

  LIMITED NUMBERS – BOOKING ESSENTIAL

  The poster didn’t mention Jeremy Gill but, given that the page was filed with the rest of the Gill memorabilia, he could have been the one giving the extra schools-only workshop. The education officer of the time – whoever that was I didn’t know but I’d find out – would be able to say how it had come about. I photocopied the poster and slipped the copy and the two original photographs into my bag. I was fairly sure nobody in the office had noticed.

  As I placed my note in the file I told myself that that was nearly the same as getting permission. And that I’d return them on Monday. Then I put everything back and had a quick look through the fifth box. But there was nothing more: all the Gill material was in the file I’d checked already. I re-stacked the boxes on the shelf where I’d found them, said goodbye to Sarah-Jane, and left. I had a photo of Gill and Deirdre Carney together. That was better than I could have hoped for, though I still had nothing directly on him and I knew it.

  As I walked home, I repeated to myself that I had to keep an open mind, that Jeremy Gill might not be the one who had attacked Deirdre, and that there must be other suspects. There was no need to remind myself of what else I’d learnt that day, but it was hard to take in, all the same: a surprise sister found and lost.

  I barely remembered my birth mother, though I had lived with her full-time until I was four and started school, until the teachers had noticed me and made a report of neglect to the Southern Health Board. The assessments had started, then, though I didn’t learn the lingo until later when I started going to court for my job: the temporary care orders, the supervised access, the foster placement with the Fitzpatricks that had become permanent when I was nine, old enough to be told that my birth mother had gone to heaven, old enough to go to the funeral; not old enough to be told everything.

  That came later, when I turned sixteen and started asking about my history, and talking about looking for my father. Except that there wasn’t a father to look for: that section on the original birth certificate had been left blank, my adopted mother Doreen had said. She had told me about my birth mother’s suicide at the same time. And one other thing: that my birth mother had been drunk when she threw herself in the river.

  It would have been more of a surprise if she had been sober. She had been on and off the drink numerous times by then. I wouldn’t see her for ages, and then she’d reappear, back from holiday or hospital or whatever her euphemism for rehab was at the time. It must have been when she was away on one of those extended absences that she had had Deirdre and given her up for adoption.

  On my way up Barrack Street, through wooden blind slats and net curtains and clear glass, I glimpsed other people’s lives, like a succession of short films. In one of them, a group of friends sat easily together on a sofa. A TV was on and they were half watching it, half talking to each other, checking the
ir phones, too, but sharing the same space. In another, two men in sportswear stood in a kitchen, drinking bottles of beer, trading stories, laughing.

  I was starving and exhausted but kept walking, past the turn-off for my house, as far as La Tana. When it comes to emotional eating, sometimes only pizza will do.

  Back home, I went straight to my ground floor study and sat at my desk. The room was small and cramped, piled high with books and the prints and posters I’d bothered to get framed but hadn’t bothered to hang up yet. Somewhere underneath everything there was a futon I’d used for guests, before I’d been able to afford a bed for the spare room, also on the ground floor, along with a laundry and storage space and a small shower room. I’m a ‘keep it just in case’ person; not so severe that I’m going to end up on a TV show, but a hoarder nonetheless.

  Between bites of pizza, I turned on my computer and began logging my progress into the file I’d opened the previous night. I checked through my notes of the meeting with the Carneys and did a file memo. I set up an exhibits file, saved my photographs there and listed the items I’d found. Then, I recorded my attendance at the Film Festival office, did a note of Gill’s itinerary while in Cork, and saved copies of the photos retrieved from the Film Festival box file and a scan of the workshop poster.

  Next, I opened a new document and called it ‘Connections’. For now, all I could do was list the connections, or possible connections, between Gill and Deirdre and see where they led next.

  There was the suicide note, referring to the academy, that I’d photographed and saved, and the time coincidence between Gill’s Oscar nomination and Deirdre’s suicide a day later. And that, according to the festival catalogue, Deirdre had championed his short film at the 1998 Cork Film Festival. I knew for sure now that Deirdre had met Gill: I had incontestable evidence of their meeting. I knew too that, in the aftermath of the festival, she had developed a telephone relationship with an unknown male. But there was little hope of getting phone records of any kind so many years later and I reckoned I’d waste too much time looking for them. I needed to concentrate on what I had.