‘Scary thing to happen, all right,’ Sadie said as we walked back along the lane.
‘Yeah.’
‘But he’s gone, at least for now. Chances are, he won’t pursue that complaint against you. If he does, you have a cross-complaint against him for assault. If any marks show, make sure you photograph them and go to your GP to put it on the record.’
‘Don’t worry, I will. At the time I was sure he was going to kill me but I don’t think I’m going to bruise,’ I said. ‘I think he knew what he was doing. It’s what I was saying to you before, if anything happened to me, he’d be the number one suspect.’
‘I’m nearly more worried about Joey,’ Sadie said. ‘He’s local. And he’s highly dangerous.’
‘And I knew he was, from his record and the way he behaved when I met him.’
‘You barely mentioned him to me at the time, though.’
‘I know. He just didn’t fit with the story I’d constructed in my head about Gill.’
‘Rookie mistake,’ Sadie said. ‘Ignore the facts, stick with the theory.’
‘You’re all heart. Hopefully he’s on his way to being arrested for my car, at least.’
If he had raped Deirdre – and I still wasn’t convinced he had – he would never serve prison time for that. All the same, it would give me some satisfaction to see him put away. He’d probably argue that he was upset after I’d reminded him of Deirdre’s death, but hopefully the main influence on his sentence would be his previous convictions for violence.
‘I’m sure he is. I’ll check what’s happening when I’m back at base,’ Sadie said.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But Gill is still the one taking up most of the space my head.’
‘And it’s pretty crowded in there at the minute,’ I added.
‘Rhona, you mean?’
‘Rhona, and the girl from New York State, and all the others he’s hurt and damaged, and that he’s going to in the future. Rhona’s dead now, so she can’t give evidence against him. And all Gill’s other victims seem to have stayed schtum so far. In the end, what we have on him amounts to nothing that would get him prosecuted for anything. The trouble is, he’s so clever. If he walks away scot-free from this, I don’t know what I’ll do.’
After Sadie was gone, I emptied the washing machine and transferred the bed linen and towels into the dryer. Then I left the house.
I needed to check something before I could get my head clear on anything else.
37
I didn’t bother making an appointment this time. I walked through the main hall, up the stairs and past his astonished secretary, and into his office.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ Eoghan MacGiolla shouted.
He leapt out of his chair and made for the door but I blocked his path.
‘You lied,’ I said. ‘And I want to know why.’
‘I’m going to call the guards.’
‘Please do. Or you could tell me the real story about you and Deirdre Carney.’
I kicked the door shut behind me, walked around MacGiolla, and sat in his chair.
‘Take a seat,’ I said. ‘And start talking.’
The truth, when it came, was pedestrian and contemptible.
‘Yes,’ MacGiolla said. ‘I knew Deirdre from the area where I grew up. Sad what became of her. But suicide is bad news, for many reasons. Morale. Staff and students. Not to mention the publicity. She was a past pupil and … Well, give a dog a bad name, etc. etc. I was thinking of the institution. I thought it best to keep my distance, minimise any connection between the school and the, em, event. We sent two teachers to the funeral, but that was as far as we went.’
‘You go on about your students. But, unless they perform how they’re supposed to, you don’t care. I’ve been in that rotten little room. Do you even have a school counsellor?’
‘The role has been vacant for some time. Other funding priorities seemed––’
‘Deirdre was in trouble when she was here and this place did nothing to help her.’
‘I’m sure that’s not true. Anyway, I wasn’t working here at the time.’
‘You wouldn’t have made any difference,’ I said.
As I walked west along the Mardyke towards Fitzgerald’s Park, my anger receded. MacGiolla was a despicable creature, and his attitude stank, but he hadn’t hurt Deirdre. Which didn’t mean that I knew who had. The questions raised in my mind in the last twenty-four hours about Joey O’Connor and what he might have done to Deirdre, and about Gill’s culpability, or innocence, in Rhona’s death, had served to let one truth float clear of the wreckage: that Deirdre had killed herself without knowing that our mother had done the same thing. Had the rape been responsible for Deirdre’s mental illness? Or had she inherited it?
The park was empty apart from a few well-swaddled children and their minders. I sat on a bench facing away from the river, but I felt its great power and the pull that had been inescapable for my mother and my sister.
Back home, the chair Gill had sat on was gone from the side of the street, which cheered me, but only for a moment. I went to my study and tried to work, rereading my notes, seeking patterns or details I might have missed. The words swam on the screen in front of me. I remembered that I had intended to call Marie Wade the previous night, just before Garda Ruth Joyce had called around with the CCTV. Just before the bottom had fallen out of my case. I hadn’t the energy to call her now. I couldn’t even remember why the former education officer Daniel O’Brien had seemed important.
I went up to the living room. With the remote in my hand, I skipped through my music library, playing snatches of different songs I liked. But I couldn’t settle, not even when I got a text from Sadie to say that Joey had been detained for questioning, not even for Merle’s ‘Mama Tried’. I paced the room like a prison cell until, at last, a lock opened in my mind.
I grabbed my phone and rang Sadie.
‘Good news about Joey O’Connor, right? And are you feeling better?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, good. I’m fine. No, I’m agitated. This morning’s been bothering me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ Sadie said. ‘Like I said, it was––’
‘That’s not what I meant. I need to check what time Gill came to the station to make the complaint about me. You were up here about half elevenish, right?’
‘Yeah. He called in about 9.15, was gone a little after 10.20. I went up to you as soon as I could, after we’d done the paperwork and talked it through with the boss.’
‘Okay. He was gone from here by seven, no later. That means there are two hours unaccounted for. Sadie, he couldn’t have known in advance that I’d be putting out the bins at 6 a.m. or that he’d be able to gain access to my house so easily. It was pure chance.’
‘So what are you saying?’
‘What if he only called by here for a look and took the opportunity, when it presented, to come into my house? But what if it wasn’t me he came to Cork to see? And what was he doing during those missing two hours?’
38
Bottle green is the uniform of St Aloysius’s Secondary School, but that was as much as I knew about it, though I live not ten minutes from the place. I’m a northsider. While I was at St Angela’s, we had little or no contact with St Al’s. I didn’t know any of the teachers or any of the current pupils, apart from Carmel, the blonde girl from Gill’s film workshop, and I didn’t even know her last name. Other than loitering around on the street outside the school, or across the road outside St Maries of the Isle Primary, I had no fast way of making contact with her. The headmistress wasn’t going to allow me to chat to ‘Carmel X from Transition Year’. Sadie could have gone into the school and said she was investigating something or other, but she wasn’t going to, not unless I came up with something more than a hunch. I could tell she wasn’t taking what I’d said seriously. Or that she didn’t want to. Being my friend couldn’t have been easy for her this last while.
‘The delay between leavin
g your place and going to Coughlan’s Quay isn’t conclusive of anything. Gill had been up all night, remember? He might have had a kip in the car. Or gone for breakfast – a fry-up in Tony’s Bistro? He delayed going to the Garda station. It doesn’t follow that he was having an assignation with a schoolgirl, surely?’
‘He phoned someone as he was leaving my house, Sadie,’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear who it was. I assumed initially that it was his security guard, or his assistant; possibly his solicitor. But what if it was Carmel he was talking to? Maybe he was arranging to meet her.’
‘I think your first impression was the right one, Finn, that it was probably his security guard or his assistant,’ Sadie said. ‘There was definitely someone with him in Cork this morning.’
‘How can you be sure? Did you see who it was?’
‘No, I didn’t see anyone, but whoever it was must have been the one doing the driving. When Gill was leaving, he rang and arranged to be collected outside the door.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Gill could still have met Carmel, though.’
‘With a witness in tow? I doubt it,’ Sadie said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
That was the truth. I didn’t know, not for sure, though I felt it in the way my head pounded. I couldn’t let the day go by without seeing Carmel and checking that she was safe. Lunchtime was past already. Was there a way of seeing her after school? I’d have to try to meet her at the gate. There was nothing else for it. But what if I missed her in the crowd? It was wet out – they’d be wearing hats or hoods and one girl looks much like another in the rain. Or what if she wasn’t there? What if she was with him?
And then I remembered that I had a way of contacting her, after all.
It was five days since I’d checked Twitter, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. There weren’t as many tweets as I’d feared. Social media had moved on and refocused their outrage several times over. I searched under #lawyerbitch. Within a minute I’d found Carmel: Carmel McMonagle, @CarmelaMcMocha, whose twin missions in life, according to her profile, were to locate and consume the ultimate mocha (#idreamofmocha) and to win an acting Oscar by the age of twenty-five (#onlytenyearstogo). She was so young.
And so dumb. Apart from the #lawyerbitch tweets, she didn’t do much on Twitter but there were some cross-posts from her Instagram account. I clicked through. Her profile was public and had an impressive 2,347 followers. It looked like her mocha comments were popular. Or maybe the recent controversy had boosted her numbers? Carmel’s profile revealed a trail of movements in a quest for coffee and chocolate beverage perfection over the previous eight months. There were almost daily posts and photographs, and a link to a blog (Carmela McMocha’s House of Mocha, 923 subscribers) where she provided tasting notes and star ratings for anywhere she’d been, on holidays and school trips as well as locally.
There weren’t that many places in Cork. Some of them she never returned to after scathing one or no star reviews. Others were more frequent haunts. I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and a notebook and wrote down the names of the cafes she had visited more than once that were in walking distance of St Al’s. The rain was spilling down now. If she was going to go somewhere after school today, it would have to be close. I narrowed down the options to two places, pulled on my rain-jacket and ran out the door.
I had no luck at the first cafe, Tiramisu on Proby’s Quay, in the shadow of the cathedral. I headed down Sharman Crawford Street, past the Art College and St Al’s School, and crossed the bridge on to Lancaster Quay. By the time I got to Cafe Depeche, my leggings were stuck to my knees and shins, and the band of sweatshirt that hung below my jacket was flapping against my thighs like a wet flag. I had a black knitted cap on under my hood, and the front of it was soaked, but at least most of my hair was dry. I entered the cafe, peeled off the beanie, wiped my face and hands with it, and surveyed the room as best I could, head bent, from beneath my hood.
I heard them before I saw them, the unmistakable high-pitched squeal of a group of female teenagers. I looked up. There were a few tables of Pres boys but, at the far end of the counter, three girls coiled themselves on high stools. The middle one was Carmel. She looked well. She looked like nothing bad had happened to her. Not yet.
And she hadn’t noticed me yet either. Moving quickly to retain the element of surprise, I went up behind her and rapped her on the left shoulder.
‘You,’ I said. ‘We need to talk.’
I walked backwards and stood by a table, arms folded.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Now.’
I watched Carmel register who I was. For a moment, she looked scared. But her expression changed fast.
‘Fuck off, you weirdo,’ she said. ‘She’s the one I was telling you about, girls, the woman at the workshop who––’
‘I’ll fuck off in a minute. Gladly. But I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say directly from me. And I’d hate to have to go through your parents or the school or, how can I put this, other more official channels.’
Carmel’s top teeth closed over her bottom lip.
‘I suppose I can spare a minute,’ she said, after a pause.
She climbed off her stool, sulked her way over to me, and sat down.
‘What do you want?’
‘To talk to you,’ I said. ‘About you know who.’
‘I don’t, actually,’ she said. ‘This is getting weirder and weirder,’ she said then, more loudly, looking back in the direction of her friends.
I leant across the table.
‘Do you want me to say his name? Because I will, you know. And I won’t just say it to you, I’ll––’
‘Okay, okay,’ Carmel said. ‘I know who you’re talking about. The man we met at the workshop.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Are you, like, obsessed with him or something?’
‘In a way I am,’ I said. ‘But not for the reasons you might think. And not for the same reasons you might be.’
I waited for a denial or a retort, but none came, and that was the moment I knew for sure that Gill had been communicating with her, that he had been grooming her. I was less certain if he had met her. He might have. But he hadn’t touched her. I was sure of it.
‘He’s forty-eight years of age, Carmel,’ I said. ‘And you’re fifteen.’
‘And your point?’ she asked, but she spoke quietly. ‘You do have a point?’
‘My point is that, like I said at the workshop, any private communication between a forty-eight-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl should only be with parental consent. And I’m not a parent, and I don’t know yours, but I can’t imagine any circumstances where they would give consent.’
She made no reply but something like doubt crept into her face. I should have said nothing, let her talk next. Instead, overconfident, I asked a question that alerted her to just how little hard information I had. I knew it was a mistake the second it left my mouth.
‘Has he been contacting you?’
She tilted her chin upwards, and smiled slowly.
‘Of course he hasn’t been contacting me, you pervert,’ she said. ‘That would be illegal. You know, you’re the sick one, not him. You’re the one with the dirty mind. Oh my God you’re so fucking pathetic, do you know that?’
She stood and pushed back her chair. Without looking at them, she called to her friends at the counter.
‘Girls, we’re so out of here. Get my bag and coat and I’ll meet ye outside. The air quality in this place has deteriorated all of a sudden.’
They left in a flurry of schoolbags and indignation. I was left alone, staring at the slammed door, kicking myself.
39
If I had said less, Carmel might have opened up and admitted that Gill had been in touch with her. I could have persuaded her to talk to Sadie, or I could have helped her make a Child Protection report to a social worker, and the mandatory investigation would have started; I could have seen to it that Gill was arrested and
charged. And now I could do none of that. Forewarned, probably in touch with Gill again already, Carmel would deny everything.
I left the cafe and headed in the direction of the university, taking the long way home, facing into the rain, the drops like whips on my cheeks, and night falling as fast as a stone in a lake. Back at the house, I tore off my clothes in the hallway, wrapped myself in a towel and sat on the stairs. How had I let it happen? How had I thrown away the chance to catch Gill in the act of committing a crime that would have got him locked up and unable to hurt anyone else?
But, after a time, the hot rage I felt at myself and at my own stupidity turned cold. Carmel was going to be Gill’s next victim. There was nothing surer. The only way of preventing it was to put him away for Rhona’s murder. I needed to get back to the investigation.
And yet, I didn’t trust myself as much as before. I had been wrong about Joey. I had completely mishandled my meeting with Carmel. What if I made another mistake, a bigger one this time? Exhaustion coursed through me, spread out from my belly, up my neck to my head, and down my legs, and all the way to my fingertips.
I leant my head against the bannister, and closed my eyes.
The doorbell woke me.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said.
I took Davy’s hand and led him upstairs.
‘Come on,’ I said, and threw the towel over the bannister.
He laughed.
‘Shit,’ I said, at my bedroom door. ‘No sheets.’
‘No matter,’ Davy said, and pushed me on to the bed.
‘So I’ve a little surprise for you,’ Davy said.
‘I don’t like surprises. I hate them, in fact.’
‘You’ll like this one. I’ve booked Paradiso for dinner.’
Darkest Truth Page 25
