Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  ‘Deirdre?’

  ‘Deirdre Carney, that was her name.’

  Rhona sat at the table again and dropped her head, and I couldn’t see her face.

  ‘Anything you say to me would be between us, Rhona. Off the record. I promise that I won’t tell anyone else, not without your authority.’

  She looked at me then.

  ‘Off the record? Bullshit,’ she said. ‘You want me to talk to the Gardaí, I know you do, and I can’t do it. I won’t.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You going to the Gardaí is not what this is about. I’m telling the truth. An off the record conversation with you would be extremely valuable to the work I’m doing for Deirdre’s parents. You could tell me about Gill, about how he operates. You might be able to point me in the direction of new evidence for Deirdre’s case.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you want to think about it? I could go away and come back?’

  It was my last try. I wasn’t going to hound the woman any more than I had already. Unless Rhona agreed to talk, I would let her be. She took a long time before she spoke again.

  ‘All right. I’ll tell you my story. Off the record. But no more questions. And no recording. I talk, you listen, and then you go. Take it or leave it.’

  ‘I’m grateful for anything you say, any way you want to say it,’ I said.

  24

  ‘I remember the first day he came to the school, he was like nothing we’d ever seen,’ Rhona said. ‘He was funny and loud and the teachers were running around after him, giving him whatever he wanted. He was so cool. We thought he was fantastic. And I remember the audition. After I finished mine, an Emily Dickinson poem “Because I could not stop for death”, he came over to me and put his hand on my head and said “I’ve found my girl,” and I thought my heart was going to burst with pride. And this feeling I had. That was the main thing. He made me feel special – no, more, it was like he treasured me. I was fifteen. I’d never felt like that before. Or since.

  ‘The filming was, well, it was brilliant. Learning my lines, the different takes and set-ups. I’d thought about acting, but by the end of the film I was sure that it was what I wanted to do. And he, well, he encouraged me, talked about my potential, said he’d help me. And I believed him. We became friends, or so I thought. We had private chats and he told me how he found me so easy to talk to and how sincere and genuine, how unspoilt I was, how women were usually a pain in the neck, how they always wanted something from him, and how our friendship was pure and good, and how he was so glad he’d found me. That kind of thing. He gave me gifts. Small things he must have got through his job. Advertising stuff. A couple of pens. A T-shirt. Nothing much. I see that now. At the time though … Anyway, he said we’d keep in touch after filming ended, that I needn’t worry about that, and he’d arrange a special treat, and I was to tell nobody, because by rights he should be doing something for the school, for the whole school, and Sister Bernadette, because only for her he wouldn’t have been able to bring in the film on budget. He used all those kinds of movie terms like “on budget” and “rough cut”, and I felt like I was learning at the feet of a master. And that everyone else was a waste of my time. My family. My school friends.’

  ‘Did anyone apart from you know what was going on?’

  ‘No. They knew I was in the film, and that he had chosen me, but beyond that it was our secret. He was careful. He told me that nobody else could know, that they wouldn’t understand, that if they did our friendship would have to end. And all this time he was a perfect gentleman, he never touched me. But I was dying for him. To kiss me, that’s what I was thinking about. Him holding my hand. Us being together. He made me fall in love with him. I know now that it’s called grooming, but you have no idea how I felt at the time. As far as I was concerned, it was love.

  ‘Then, the filming ended and he was gone, back to his day job and I was devastated. Bereaved, even. But he came back, seven weeks later, to show us the final cut of the film, the whole school in the Assembly Hall, and I was thrilled and he made time for a quiet word with me and said: “Private treat?”

  ‘And I remember nodding, and my mouth was dry, and I was exhausted from loving him, so the thought of being able to see him again, to have him to myself was, it was intoxicating.

  ‘“Tell your parents you’re going on a sleepover but I’ll meet you instead. We’ll have dinner at a hotel and I’ll book you a room. You’re going to be a famous actress. This is the start of the rest of your life.”

  ‘That was more or less it. And I agreed, was delighted to agree.

  ‘He gave me the arrangements – where to stand so that he could pick me up in his car, what to bring, and I obeyed. Went willingly, lamb to the slaughter.’

  Rhona got up, went to the sink, and got a glass of water. Then she went back, got a second one, and put it in front of me. She took her time before she spoke again.

  ‘The hotel was spectacular. The Gustav. It closed for a while, went bust during the recession, I was never so happy about anything. But a Chinese consortium, some chain or other, bought it a few years ago and relaunched it under a new name. Anyway, that was where we went. He picked me up in an ordinary car, a Toyota something. In my imagination I’d been expecting an open-topped sports car or a limousine, but he wasn’t super-rich back then. And I realised later that he only had the suite at the hotel because he’d used it on an advertising shoot, and had the keys till the following day. We didn’t have to go through reception – we went straight from the car park in the lift, he had some kind of card or passcode that got us upstairs.

  ‘The suite, yeah. There were two bedrooms and he made a big deal of showing me mine, my own bathroom. And he said I could pick what I wanted off the room service menu and he told me to go and have a bath, there was a jacuzzi bath, and a rainwater shower, and when I came back out, dinner had arrived. Of course now I see that he didn’t want the staff to know who he had in the room.

  ‘So we had dinner and I ate, and he ate, and he got me a drink. Coke, at first. And then, he was having a rum and Coke, a Cuba Libre, he said, and where was the harm in me having one, and he wouldn’t tell if I didn’t, and why would I? So I had one, and then a second one, a third. He had a bottle of rum with him, and a big bottle of Coke. He wasn’t paying for drinks from the minibar. He was too cheap. I didn’t think of that till later, and it shouldn’t bother me, considering what happened, but it does … So, yeah, we were sitting there drinking and laughing and picking things to watch on the movie menu and that’s the last I remember until I woke up.

  ‘To this day, I don’t know if he drugged me, or if it was the alcohol or a combination of the two. But I knew something had happened. I knew straight away that he … he’d had sex with me. He didn’t deny it. Told me I loved it, that I was the one who wanted it, that I’d forced myself on him, and that he was a man, and what could he do? And that I was a bitch for doing it, and that I was the same as all the rest of the bitches, and that he should have seen I would be, and that we were finished, and that I had myself to thank, and that I needn’t think about telling anybody because if I did he’d kill me and, just to make sure I understood that, he hit me. Not on the face, on the belly, all around there, the back, and then he threw me on to the floor and raped me again and kept telling me that I was a bitch and fit for nothing. He dropped me home then, to the end of the street. The last thing he said to me as I got out of the car was that he’d kill me if I told. I believed him. I still do.’

  She paused, picked up her glass with both hands, took a sip, and slowly replaced it on the table.

  ‘I knew that he had used a condom, at least when I was awake, and I’m fairly sure that he used one while I was passed out as well. But when my period was late I thought … So I bought a pregnancy test. Negative. I bought two more. Negative again. But I didn’t believe the results. I had myself convinced I was pregnant. I couldn’t go to the family GP, or I felt I couldn’t, so I made an appointment with the Well Woman Centre
. Mitched off school. Gave a false name and address and pretended I was over eighteen. I was already stressing about how I’d get the money to get the boat to Liverpool or the plane to London and how I’d find my way to an abortion clinic …

  ‘Anyway, it turned out I wasn’t pregnant. But while I was in the clinic I broke down. I didn’t say what had happened. But the woman, she was a nurse, I think, she knew it was something bad. She was very nice. She told me that, whatever had happened, counselling would help. I had a follow-up appointment with her, but I never went back. I couldn’t face it.

  ‘I changed schools. Changed my ambitions. I didn’t want to act any more, I wanted to hide, to be safe. But I wanted to be healed too, I wanted the pain gone. And I kept remembering what the nurse at the Well Woman had said. So eventually I went to the Rape Crisis Centre, and they got me a counselling appointment, and I went, and kept going. But I never named him, never once all these years. I got on with things, worked hard. I’ve been promoted a couple of times. And I work even harder at being normal, at just being. I live quietly, but this is my own house. I bought it, I pay the bills, the mortgage. I have a life. To spite that evil fucker Gill. He couldn’t take that away from me, no matter what he did.’

  ‘Your family must have known there was something seriously wrong?’

  ‘My mother knew something had happened. She kept pushing for information but the more she pushed, the more I pulled away from her … So that’s it. The End. There’s no more to be said. Now you go, like you agreed.’

  ‘I will, I promise,’ I said. ‘I just need a minute.’

  I took a long drink of water.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Don’t say anything,’ Rhona said. ‘That’s not part of the deal. I’ve told you my story. Off the record, just as you asked. Please leave. Please let me be.’

  ‘I will. But your story has … well, it’s made an impact on me. A lot of the details fit with what I already know about Gill. But to hear you describe it, that’s something else.’

  I was trying to use neutral language, trying as hard as I could to stay separate from the horror of Rhona’s story. And it was her story, she owned it, she told it powerfully. But it was Deirdre’s story too. And it was a story that needed to be told. Gill was a dangerous sex offender who had to be stopped. What Rhona had said, about Gill putting his hand on her head at the audition, had sent a chill through me – if I hadn’t spoken up, might Carmel from St Al’s school in Cork have been his next victim? It didn’t bear thinking about. But I remembered that Rhona had said that the more her mother had pushed for information, the more Rhona had withdrawn.

  I got up from my chair. I took a page from my bag with my private email and phone number on it, and left it on the table.

  ‘I want to thank you for telling me. I’ll go now, like I promised. But that’s my email address, my private email, and my mobile number. If you ever change your mind, some day, some year, just email me. And you have my business card. Any time, just send me a message. About anything. If you want me to go to the Gardaí, help you with a statement, arrange an appointment. They’d come here, I’m sure, you wouldn’t have to go to the station, not at the beginning anyway. And there are experts who could help you before you even talk to the Gardaí. Please feel free to contact me, even to talk about what you might or might not do. And I want to remind you that everything you’ve said to me is confidential.’

  ‘The answer is still no,’ Rhona said. ‘But I’ll think about what you said about Deirdre. And the others. There are others?’

  ‘There are. I don’t know who or where, but there are others. I’m sure of that.’

  25

  I sat in my car for as long as it took to make a detailed handwritten note of what Rhona had said. Then I signed and dated it, read it into my phone and saved it to my iCloud account: my legal training had taught me the importance of a contemporaneous note and this was as close as I was going to get. There was one other procedural matter to be dealt with. As Rhona was a potential witness, I had had the Carneys’ implied consent to disclose their confidential client information to her. Still, I’d call to see them when I was back in Cork to obtain their explicit consent and I would do a back-up note for the file. All I could say for now was that I had interviewed a potentially useful witness, and that it had been necessary for me to reveal some information to her. I couldn’t yet disclose Rhona’s identity, or the details, to them.

  As I was writing up my notes, the missing information, the questions I would have liked to ask, the corroboration that would be needed if Rhona’s case went to trial, came into sharp relief. Dates and times. Where he had collected her. The Toyota car he had used to collect and drop her back, could she recall the model or any part of the registration? Or the room number? How had she known it was an advertising shoot, had he told her or had she found out some other way? And more. I noted down anything I could think of that I needed to ask the next time we met. If we ever did. There mightn’t be a second meeting, though I didn’t want to think about that possibility. Either way, there was no point in staying up in Dublin now. I pulled out. If I got going, I’d be back in Cork before midnight.

  I crossed the Liffey and was on the motorway in twenty-five minutes. I travelled in silence. No wittering radio presenter. No music. What happened to Rhona had happened to my sister, too. But Rhona had been stronger than Deirdre. People had different levels of resilience; it was a lottery, it seemed, who got enough to survive, and who came up short. It was like the way some alcoholics went into treatment and recovered, and some didn’t. The way Davy did. The way my birth mother didn’t. And what about me? Had I enough strength to cope with all of this? Or was I as weak as I felt in that moment?

  I tried to focus on exposing Gill. For my own protection, I couldn’t get sucked into the foul vortex that he had created. And I had a sense that something in the pattern of behaviour Rhona had described might help with Deirdre’s case, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

  After Naas, I couldn’t see much else either. A thick fog descended and traffic slowed to a crawl. Hunched over the steering wheel, I gave all my attention to staying on the road but, by the time I got to Cashel, I had to stop for a break. The driver behind me had the same idea, I saw, as he or she exited the motorway behind me and followed me along the unnecessarily complicated system of loops that led finally into the motorway service station. I filled up with petrol, paid, got a large coffee, and went upstairs. There was a nasty seating area with a couple of black fake leather sofas. Uncomfortable, as it turned out. I had intended to rest for a while. But that feeling I had had all day, that I was missing something, wouldn’t leave me. After no more than five minutes, I gulped back my coffee, went to the loo, and drove on.

  It was almost 12.30 when I got home, jittery from the tension of the drive and the strain of the last few days. With no work to go to in the morning, and no hope of sleep, I flicked on the television and surfed half-heartedly through the TV channels. I perked up. Night of the Hunter, one of my favourite films, was just starting on Film4. I watched to the end, then switched off, and sat for a while in the dark, ‘Leaning’ and Robert Mitchum’s voice, going round and round in my head. For the first time in years, I had missed most of the Film Festival and wouldn’t see the rest of it either. All because of Jeremy Gill. Which I might call ironic, if I wasn’t so dog-tired.

  I woke from a half-sleep at seven and went down to my study, where I typed up a to-do list for the day, scanned my note of the night before, and updated my connections file. Assuming I got back to work some time, it would be easy to download it to the firm’s system later. Then, I pinged an email to Tina, asking her up to my house for lunch, and to bring the exhibit box from my desk (she had my spare desk key but not the key for the box).

  At 8.15, I checked my Gmail and found a message from Rhona, sent at 8.01.

  Hi Finn,

  I have been thinking about what you said all night, about Deirdre and the others. I am not maki
ng any promises but I will think some more and talk to my counsellor. Do not put any more pressure on me or ask anything else of me at the moment. Please. I was very upset after you left last night and I need time to recover. I will contact you when I am ready, if I ever am.

  Rhona

  This was progress, the progress I had hoped for. I should have been happy. But there was no timescale, and there was an express prohibition on further contact from me. Should I reply, or would that be a breach of Rhona’s terms? It seemed rude not to reply at all. In the end, I sent back a short neutral email:

  Thanks Rhona, I will wait to hear from you, Regards F.

  Then, overcome with a wave of exhaustion that felt a lot like dread, I went back to bed and fell into a deep sleep.

  Awake again before ten, and feeling more energetic, I rang Ann and Sean Carney and arranged to call out to see them at 11.30. I needed to update them on what had been happening, and get their retrospective consent to my disclosures to Rhona. And I needed to obtain a sample of Deirdre’s DNA for the case I was trying to make. It had occurred to me overnight too that, if I asked the lab to test my own DNA simultaneously, I would be able to find out if Deirdre and I shared a father as well as a mother, although I wasn’t yet sure if I wanted an answer to that question.

  I made a few more calls. Tomas de Barra was the one who picked up. A barrister, he specialised in criminal defence work: he was sure to know of a private forensic lab where I could get DNA and chemical constituent tests done, along with a report that would stand up in court. I had used a brilliant London-based scientist as a DNA expert in the past and, usually, if I had to do a paternity test for a client, I would use one of the local labs and get a DNA kit sent to a GP. But, in this case, the DNA I hoped to find was on a drinks coaster. Something different was needed. Tomas gave me the name of a specialist lab and started up with the questions about had I seen Twitter and the Examiner, and how I’d even made the Irish Times, and what was going on with me anyway?