Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart for being so generous with your time and your help – I can’t tell you how much Sean and Ann Carney will appreciate it. Do you know them yourself?’

  ‘Not at all, unfortunately, though I’m aware of them, of course. I wasn’t working here when Deirdre, God rest her, was a pupil, but the school sent a representative to her funeral. Two, actually, the two you’ve asked to see. Miss Sheehan and Mr O’Donnell.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s best if I see them so, rather than taking up too much more of your valuable time? And I’d like to see them individually, if that’s all right?’

  ‘Individually?’ MacGiolla asked. His smile was even more strained.

  ‘Essential,’ I said. ‘Everyone has their own recollections, and I know that Aifric, Miss Sheehan, knew her as a friend rather than as a teacher so it might be inappropriate to see them together.’

  ‘Well, of course, you’re right, yes, inappropriate, yes.’

  He stood and moved quickly towards the door.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘I have the Student Counselling Room set aside for you down the hall.’

  Broom cupboard might have been a better description. The tiny room held three mismatched lumpy armchairs, a box of Tesco Value tissues and a musty-smelling bunch of dried flowers on a Formica-topped coffee table. It looked like pupil mental health wasn’t top priority.

  ‘Mr O’Donnell, the art teacher, I presume,’ I said, and shook hands with the lean, handsome, shaven-headed man who came in a few minutes later. Dressed in black and well groomed, he looked like an architect.

  ‘For my sins,’ he said. ‘Colm’s the name. And you’re Finn, here to talk about Deirdre Carney.’

  ‘That’s right. Deirdre’s parents have asked me to look into what happened when she was a pupil here. They trace her mental breakdown to her Transition Year at St Finbarr’s. You knew her well, I believe?’

  ‘Yes,’ Colm said. ‘Though she gave up art for the Leaving Cert, so I saw less of her in fifth and sixth year. And she was absent a lot too, of course.’

  ‘You had a fair bit to do with her around the time of the Film Festival when she was in Transition Year?’

  ‘The Film Festival?’ Colm asked. ‘Well, yes, I suppose I did.’

  ‘You seem surprised at the mention of the festival,’

  ‘I am. I’m surprised you’re here at all. It’s kind of out of the blue, isn’t it?’

  I ignored the question.

  ‘Could you tell me about the lead-up to the Film Festival, how Deirdre came to be on the youth jury?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I put her in for it, nominated her. She had to write an essay about why she wanted to do it and, needless to say, she was selected. She was my first really excellent student. I was fairly new to teaching when she started in First Year, and it was great to see her progress. I had high hopes for her, wanted to do what I could to help her on her way.’

  ‘Sounds like she was a favourite.’

  ‘Favourite? Oh yes, you could say that. We’re not supposed to have them but we all do. It was easy to love Deirdre Carney.’

  ‘Love? Isn’t that an odd choice of word?’

  ‘It is if you want it to be,’ Colm said.

  He paused.

  ‘Or it could be the most normal thing in the world.’

  Jesus Christ. Was he confessing to a relationship with Deirdre?

  ‘I spoke to Jessica Murphy, Deirdre’s old school friend too. Do you remember her? She said that they all thought you were in love with Deirdre,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘Hardly. I’ve never been in love with a girl, or a woman, in my life. I’m gay. Not that I’d be broadcasting it in this place, mind you. It’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” around here, as you can imagine, though I’m sure that everyone knows by now. No, Deirdre was like a younger sister, or a daughter, to me. And she was a student of mine. It would be unthinkable to cross that boundary with her, or with any of my students, male or female.’

  I believed him. I liked him too, had done from the moment he’d walked in the door. Maybe I could be more direct with him than I had been with Jessica Murphy.

  ‘Tell me anything you know about Deirdre and Jeremy Gill,’ I said.

  After a pause, he spoke.

  ‘Confidentially?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  The time might come when I would have to ask him to drop the confidentiality. But for now, yes, anything he told me was confidential.

  ‘There’s something not quite right about that guy Gill,’ Colm said. ‘He’s flavour of the month and super-successful and all that, but from what I saw of him during Film Festival ’98, he’s a complete shit and a fucking pervert too.’

  I hadn’t expected anything this explosive from him. It took me a moment to respond.

  ‘That’s a damning verdict,’ I said. ‘Did you see him do something?’

  ‘No, I’m just going on how he was with me. He didn’t know I was gay so he was talking to me about the girls in the workshop group, while they were doing whatever task he’d set. To be fair to him, the workshop was excellent. But he was going on to me about how there was nothing like a school uniform and how did I keep my hands off them, all that – you can imagine. And he didn’t hold back on the graphic language either. He gravitated towards me; all the other teachers were women. They might as well not have existed, and some of them were good-looking too. I thought he was a sleazy oddball who’d end up going nowhere, to be honest. I mean his short film was great but even that had a schoolgirl in it, for God’s sake. Shows what I know. I can’t say I saw him doing anything wrong. I didn’t. If I had, I’d have done something about it. I saw that he took a shine to Deirdre, sure, but there was no risk. I was there all the time, and there were plenty of other adults to supervise. He was all about her, though, charm itself, really. It kinda made me gag, knowing what he was really thinking, after what he’d said. Yeah. I made sure to get her and my other students out of there hotfoot as soon as the workshop was over. So …’

  ‘It’s stayed very fresh in your mind, for something where nothing happened.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think something did happen,’ I said, leading him.

  Colm leant forward.

  ‘She had a mental breakdown,’ he said. ‘That’s what the parents told us. I know they submitted sick notes from the GP. I know that she spent time, a lot of time, later in St Michael’s, with severe depression. I called round to the house, asked after her, tried to get her to talk to me. She wouldn’t. But I suppose I knew there was more to it, or thought I did, than depression. It descended so suddenly on her. I arranged a meeting between the school counsellor and Ann Carney, to talk about her, see if we could do anything to help. But nothing came of that. I wondered if there was something odd about the family; her parents were older than most, and I knew that Deirdre had been adopted. But there was no real sign of anything wrong there. And bear in mind this was a long time ago. I think if it happened now, that sudden change, I’d make a call to the social worker helpline. There would almost certainly be an investigation. But times were different then. And she was sixteen, not six …’

  He trailed off, then looked hard at me.

  ‘Is this about Gill? An investigation?’

  ‘It’s about Deirdre,’ I said. ‘Do you think it should be about Gill?’

  ‘Something happened. Something sudden and catastrophic. All I know is that she was never the same after the Film Festival in 1998. And I know she met Gill there. So if you’re investigating Deirdre, you have to look at Gill. I only wish I’d looked more closely.’

  I felt buoyed by Colm O’Donnell’s hatchet job. Before he left, I took his contact details, asked him to say nothing of what we’d spoken of to anyone, and to phone me if he thought of anything else. But as I waited for Aifric Sheehan to come into the room, my critical faculties kicked back in. If O’Donnell had been trying to distract me from looking at him, he couldn’t have d
one a better job. I had lapped up his attack on Jeremy Gill. It was called confirmation bias, wasn’t it – hearing something that accorded with your personal prejudices and giving it extra weight, as a result? It wouldn’t have taken a genius to figure out that I was after Gill. I’d as much as said it. Colm O’Donnell had given me what I’d wanted, without saying very much at all. And I had believed him. Still did. But if he had reason to question Gill’s behaviour, to link him to Deirdre’s breakdown, why hadn’t he said anything at the time? He had had well-formed suspicions. Maybe he didn’t want to draw attention to himself – or was there was some other reason? I’d have to keep an open mind about Mr O’Donnell. And I’d be more circumspect with Ms Sheehan.

  ‘Call me Aifric.’

  Blonde, she was dressed all in pink, with dazzling laser-whitened teeth. But, to my disappointment, she remembered little about the Film Festival.

  ‘It was more Deirdre’s thing than mine, to be honest, though at that age I’d have done anything for a few days off, anything for a laugh! And the irony of ending up as a geography teacher and I never even liked geography!’

  She said that she had lost touch with Deirdre completely after she got sick.

  ‘Like, you know, we all tried to keep up the old friendship for a while but she wanted to be left alone, that’s what she kept saying, and if you keep saying it often enough, people take you at your word.’

  There was a callousness to Aifric Sheehan, for all her Rose of Tralee looks. But I played along, thanking her at length for all her help and commenting on how upsetting it must have been for her to see Deirdre so unwell.

  Aifric nodded.

  ‘You’ve no idea, Finn, you’ve absolutely no idea.’

  ‘You all met Jeremy Gill, didn’t you, at the Film Festival – what was he like?’

  ‘Octopus,’ Aifric said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘All hands.’

  ‘Jessica Murphy never said that.’

  ‘Ah now, in all fairness,’ Aifric said, ‘poor Jessica wasn’t the prettiest so he’d hardly have bothered with her, would he?’

  I didn’t think attractiveness had much to do with the behaviour Aifric was describing, but I smiled anyway.

  ‘Do tell me more,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing to tell. Coming in a little too close to check on the work I was doing, hand on the shoulder, hand on the back, drifting down a bit too far, brushing up against me as I passed. You know yourself, you can’t say anything because it’s not visible to anyone watching, might even be accidental, though you know in your heart and soul it isn’t. Dirty article. Probably fits right in in Hollywood. But, yeah, actually, that’s the funny thing, I remember now. I said it to Deirdre at some stage, maybe on the way home, something about Gill being, I don’t know, a creep or something, but she was having none of it. Maybe he hadn’t done any of it to her. Though he gave her a lot of attention, all right. I remember that. I forgot about him. Next creep came along, I suppose.’

  ‘But you didn’t forget.’

  A shadow passed across her face.

  ‘No,’ Aifric said. ‘We don’t, do we?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Did you ever see Gill again?’ I asked after a moment.

  Other than in the media, she hadn’t. He had made no attempt to contact her and she wasn’t aware of any contact with Deirdre either.

  After, I replayed what Aifric Sheehan and Colm O’Donnell had told me. Both of them had portrayed Gill as vulgar, obvious and intrusive, grist to the part of me that wanted him guilty.

  But Jessica Murphy hadn’t seen any of that. And when Aifric had said to Deirdre that Gill was a creep, she had disagreed vehemently. I had to admit that Jessica’s story and Deirdre’s reaction evidenced a very different narrative, one I liked a lot less.

  A pitched battle was going on inside me, I realised, between a reasonable rational lawyer and an Old Testament avenger.

  And that thought scared me a lot more than Jeremy Gill did.

  13

  After several tries, I had finally managed to get my hands on the most valuable document in Cork – the City Council Residents’ Parking Permit sticker. The proofs needed made getting a passport look easy but meant that, for a tenner a year, I could park for unlimited periods on the streets near my home. I walked most places so, most of the time, my black Golf stayed parked. But I needed it now for the trip to the O’Connor motor dealership on the Kinsale Road.

  I got into the car. Checking my phone, I found a message from Tina. She had been googling. It turned out that Joey O’Connor had form. She had emailed me a link to an Evening Echo article and photo: ‘Rugby star in Roid Rage Rampage.’ Eight years ago, Joey had been convicted of dealing in anabolic steroids and of seriously assaulting two of the guards who had come to arrest him. The photo showed an expensively suited, baby-faced athletic-looking Joey, in his early twenties by then. The article recited the plea given by his barrister (injury, temptation, bad mistake, inexcusable, deep regret, out of character, new leaf, working in the family business, promising rugby career derailed, charity work) which had resulted in a suspended sentence. It was a middle-class tragedy that might have ended a lot differently if he had been from somewhere less leafy. Well done, Tina, I thought but texted back only ‘Ta’, focused already on what I’d say to Joey.

  He was outside the door smoking a cigarette as I pulled into the front of the gleaming glass and steel showroom. He wasn’t on steroids any more, that was clear. Somewhere along the way, Joey’s life had taken a wrong turn and instead he’d gained a permanent frown, an air of bitterness, and about sixty pounds. He didn’t look like he sold many cars, but then nobody had sold many cars in Ireland in the last five years and, as the boss’s son, he would have been insulated from the risk of redundancy.

  Joey greeted me with a nasal, ‘How’s it going?’

  I introduced myself and gave him my card but, before I could say why I was there, he was in with the patter.

  ‘What had you in mind, Finn? We’ve a great range here, both new and quality used. You look like you’re ready for a change anyway,’ he said.

  He gave my battered ten-year-old Golf a pitying glance, turned back to me, and smiled. The smile stopped at his mouth.

  ‘Keep her outside, do you?’

  ‘Yeah, but I––’

  ‘I suppose the rust is a bit of a giveaway. On the street?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No danger of anyone stealing her, anyway. What area of the city do you live in?’

  ‘Off Barrack Street. But actually I’m not here about a car, Joey.’

  I handed him my card.

  ‘I’m here about a case, nothing to do with you, specifically. I represent Deirdre Carney’s parents. They’ve asked me to look into her death. They think something happened to her when she was in Transition Year’

  ‘What the fuck?’ Joey said. ‘What’s this about?’

  He backed away, shaking his head. I didn’t know if he was mad or sad. Maybe both. But at least he was backing away. He was huge.

  ‘I’m sorry, Joey,’ I said. ‘This must be upsetting. I know you and Deirdre––’

  ‘Fucking right. She killed herself. I think you might call that upsetting.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Joey. I apologise if this brings up bad memories. I––’

  ‘What exactly are you trying to suggest?’

  This time there was no confusion. He was angry and he was walking towards me. I stood my ground. Whatever he felt like doing, I had to hope that he wouldn’t do it here, in full view of his workmates, and probably on CCTV, too.

  ‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ I said. ‘I’m just here to ask you about Deirdre. I’ve already spoken to Jessica Murphy, and she told me you were close to Deirdre. And that sometime after the Film Festival in 1998, she changed, and was never the same after. And that’s it. I’m just here to see if you know anything about why she changed.’

  ‘What are you saying? Why should I know
anything about that?’

  Anguished-looking, he took in a couple of deep breaths. His voice was quieter when he started talking again.

  ‘She … she got sick. Did what she did. I don’t know any more. I tried to get back with her, even after she was in and out of the mental … I mean St Michael’s. She never answered my calls, never came out with me when I asked her. I even tried to visit her in hospital. But she wouldn’t see me. She was like a stranger. When she broke it off with me after the festival, she said there was another guy so …’

  ‘I’ve seen a photo of you all back then, a group shot, at a workshop with Jeremy Gill. And then a shot of Deirdre with two other students and Jeremy. She looked happy.’

  ‘Yeah, I thought she was. It was later …’

  He paused.

  ‘Later …?’ I asked. ‘You mean that it was after the Film Festival she ended it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, after another pause.

  ‘Do you know the name of the other guy?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I never found out who he was, the fucking bastard. All I know is, he didn’t last. There was no one calling to see her. I’d have known if there was.’

  ‘What was Gill like, do you remember?’

  ‘Oily fucker,’ Joey said. ‘Deirdre was impressed. I wasn’t.’

  ‘Did that make you jealous?’

  ‘Jealous? Are you joking me or what? He was ancient and I was bored stupid. I was only there ’cause of Deirdre. Films weren’t my thing. I was into rugby, and I was into her. Now, please go, would you? I don’t like talking about her. Brings it all back.’

  I knew I’d get no more out of Joey today. And I couldn’t think of a way to ask about his convictions, though I was keen to see his reaction. I tried one last question.

  ‘Thanks for your help, Joey. Will you call me if you remember anything else about Deirdre after the Film Festival, anything that might help?’

  ‘I told you to leave,’ he shouted, hands by his side, fists clenched.

  Shaking, I drove off. Joey had a vicious temper and a history of violence. And he’d cared about Deirdre. Loved her, probably. What might he have done as a teenager, his desires thwarted? Deirdre had kept saying it was her fault.