Darkest Truth

by Catherine Kirwan

  ‘Too right,’ Sadie said.

  ‘So I offered to take a week off with pay and they jumped at it. Turns out Gabriel had got a call from one of his golfing buddies, who just happens to be the festival board chairman, saying he wanted to meet Gabriel, to talk about me. Then two minutes later, he got a call from a journalist asking for a statement and how he felt about me trending on Twitter. The journo had to explain to Gabriel what that meant. He lost the plot. Started ranting, gave me a complete carpeting. I was in bits, but held it together till I got out of there. I got Tina to cancel my client appointments and gave her work to do while I’m gone. But it felt like moving deckchairs on the Titanic, Sadie.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If they want me out, I’ve given them enough ammo. I’ve been acting way outside my job description, taking on a case without authority, a case that by any standards is unwinnable. Been behaving more like a detective than a lawyer. They’ll get the procedures right next time, and if – when – they do, I’ll be out on my ear. And unemployable. Nobody’s going to give a job to hashtag lawyerbitch, the woman who disrespected Ireland’s uncrowned king. I could lose everything I’ve worked for, Sadie. No job, no mortgage payments. I can only barely afford my house as it is.’

  ‘Any chance of suing for … anything?’

  ‘Not yet, not that I can see. There’s been a heck of a lot of vulgar abuse, but nothing defamatory so far. Gill has said nothing publicly, and neither has the Film Festival, it’s just been the disappointed, angry kids, upset because I deprived them of contact with their hero. They don’t know why, or what my suspicions are, and I can’t tell them. I’m only able to tell you because I got the Carneys’ authority.’

  I paused.

  ‘I still can’t understand why they didn’t do something about it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Carneys. They knew Deirdre had been raped and they told no one, not even a doctor. For fuck sake, she was their daughter.’

  ‘Finn, you know that the vast majority of sex crimes – between two-thirds and four-fifths, possibly even more than that – are never reported. And of those cases that are reported, most aren’t prosecuted and even fewer reach a successful conviction. There could be any number of reasons they didn’t pursue it at the time.’

  ‘I know, I know, but it’s so wrong.’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘All of it. I keep thinking about Deirdre. How awful it must have been for her … if only she’d been able to do something. I’m not blaming her for not, not at all, I just wish that she could have. For her, for herself. For nobody else.’

  ‘None of us knows how we’d react in similar circumstances. All the system can do is make it as easy as possible for victims to make complaints and, when they do, ensure that adequate supports are in place.’

  ‘Are there adequate supports?’

  ‘No – but there’s a greater understanding of the issues than there was back then.’

  ‘It was 1998, Sadie, it wasn’t a hundred years ago.’

  ‘The last Magdalene Laundry, where so-called fallen women were more or less imprisoned for the crime of being sexually active, closed in 1996. The Supreme Court case, where the Attorney General of this state took action to try to prevent a pregnant suicidal fourteen-year-old from leaving the country for an abortion, was in 1992. The nineties in Ireland might as well have been a hundred years ago. Why are you surprised the poor girl didn’t report it?’

  Sadie was right. In law and politics, gynaecology was ever-present.

  ‘I’m not remotely surprised,’ I said. ‘I’m sad for Deirdre, that’s all.’

  ‘You’re 100 per cent convinced that it was Gill who raped her?’

  ‘More like 99 per cent. Or 90. I shouldn’t be as sure as I am. I don’t actually know.’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Sadie said.

  ‘I think I’m right, though, or I feel I am a lot of the time. But Gill’s like an eel. Every time I have a hold of something, or of him, he slips from my grasp. Even what happened today at the workshop, it seemed so clear at the time that he was targeting that girl Carmel from St Al’s. But she’s one of the loudest voices on Twitter, she seems to have started the lawyerbitch hashtag. I just don’t know. I don’t know who he is. Or what I’m doing. Maybe I’ve gone a bit mad over the last few days. And now I’m going to be mad and jobless and homeless too. It’s too awful for words.’

  ‘Could you issue a statement? Defend yourself?’

  ‘I want to – but issuing a statement only fuels the fire and gets me nowhere. I said that to the partners’ meeting at work. The best thing is to let it die down and, if asked, say something like “not in a position to comment at present”. I’m expecting some press interest, I know it’s already made breakingnews.ie and I’m fairly sure it will hit the papers. But if they’re not fed, the press will tire of the story. And Twitter will move on. That seems to be the approach being taken by the festival too. But there’s an added complication for me, something dire altogether.’

  ‘What could be worse?’

  ‘I got a letter by fax, and an email, this afternoon from Gill’s solicitors. Elliott Phillips, the biggest and baddest in Dublin, offices worldwide.’

  ‘What does it say? Just tell me.’

  ‘It tells me to cease and desist my campaign of harassment and intimidation of their client, one Jeremy Gill, in default of which the appropriate further action shall be taken against me without further recourse to correspondence, which said action shall include, without being limited to, civil proceedings for defamation, including all and any damage to their client’s impeccable reputation, and/or complaint to the Law Society of Ireland seeking to strike me off the roll of solicitors for misconduct and/or complaint to an Garda Síochána in respect of their client’s fears and concerns for his personal safety, and the letter taxes me with the costs of all and any proceedings.’

  ‘Ouch,’ Sadie said.

  ‘It looks bad, really bad, and if they were to carry out even a tenth of it, I’d be ruined for ever. A lot of it is bullshit – completely unsustainable, the criminal complaint in particular. He might, at a push, a big push, be able to argue innuendo in a civil case though I’m sure I said nothing defamatory. But, with his money, he could issue proceedings anyway, for the sheer hell of it, and whether the proceedings were sustainable or unsustainable, it wouldn’t matter. The fact that they existed would be damaging enough. Or he might take the economical option and decide to report me to the Law Society for unprofessional behaviour, or conduct unbecoming, or some crap like that. And, if he does, they have to investigate and that can go on for months – years, even. Meanwhile, I’m in professional limbo and fired for sure. Worst case scenario, he sues me, gets me struck off and pauperises me. Best case, it’s an idle threat, calculated to terrify me with shock and awe tactics that he’d never carry through on.’

  ‘All you were doing was taking standard precautions for child safety, surely?’

  ‘That’s true. But I went for a public confrontation when I should have approached Alice privately afterwards, even Gill himself. Instead I set myself up as his public enemy, and made a complete show of myself and the festival – and dragged the firm into the mess. And there’s the fact that I took the photos out of the archive in advance of Gill’s arrival. It looks like I had an agenda.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I did.’

  I paused.

  ‘My gut says Gill is guilty. If he takes any kind of action against me, I have an opportunity to defend myself in some forum or other, and he won’t want that. What I have on him amounts to diddly squat – but Gill doesn’t know that. That’s what I hope – that it stops here, because otherwise his own reputation would suffer too much. And, if you think about it, this is a total over-reaction to something minor. I mean, I’m a complete nobody in his world. The fact that it is such an extreme reaction means, I think, I hope, kind of, almost, that I’ve struck a nerve. That he’s rattled. Maybe he did
n’t know about Deirdre’s death until I told him. Maybe he thinks she told me, or someone else, about him.’

  I paused again.

  ‘But I’m shit scared, Sadie, about my job, about my life. If his intention was to frighten me, it’s working. And even if he doesn’t sue my arse off, what else might he do?’

  ‘Maybe if you apologised,’ Sadie said. ‘Threw yourself on Gabriel’s mercy, got a doctor’s cert, blamed stress or something, promised to drop the case? Would you do that?’

  I grimaced, closed my eyes, put my head in my hands. I remembered Ann’s words: ‘If there was to be a case it would have to be about justice.’ Deirdre, my sister, deserved justice. I looked at Sadie again and shook my head.

  ‘I got Tina to send a letter to Jeremy’s lawyer saying that I’m out of the office on leave and that she will pass the letter to me on my return. I don’t know if that will pause the juggernaut. But throwing myself on Gabriel’s mercy, stopping the investigation?’

  I stopped, thought about telling Sadie who Deirdre really was, then didn’t.

  ‘If I’m right about Gill, then I’m sure there are more girls out there that he’s hurt, and that there will be more in the future. I don’t know what I can do. I have doubts, Sadie. Every single minute I have doubts about what I’m doing. But I have to go on.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m worried for you, really worried. And you’re going to have to be careful. But I’m glad you’re not walking away, Finn.’

  She paused.

  ‘The way you described Gill, the narcissism, the bullying, the being whoever he needs to be to suit any situation, the volcanic temper when he senses he’s been found out. And, at the same time, how he’s elusive, manipulative, impossible to pin down, and that thing you said about how it feels confusing when you’re around him. There’s a name for all that.’

  Sadie sank the last of her beer and leant across the table.

  ‘How you’re describing Gill? You’re describing a psychopath.’

  22

  This time last week I hadn’t known that I’d had a sister, and I hadn’t met Jeremy Gill. Now, I was parked on the north side of Dublin’s inner city, across the street from the twelve-foot-high red sandstone wall that surrounded the Convent of the Blessed Eucharist: Rhona Macbride’s old school, and the place Jeremy Gill had made his first short film.

  I had parted from Sadie at around ten o’clock the night before and had finally replied to Davy’s texts when I got home, to say that I’d had a bad day, couldn’t talk, and was turning off my phone. Later, when I was on my yoga mat, unsuccessfully trying to bring my attention to the breath, the doorbell went.

  ‘I didn’t want to let things rest the way they were this morning,’ Davy had said, over the intercom. ‘I thought we should at least try to talk about what happened.’

  I buzzed him in and met him halfway down the stairs on the landing. We stood facing each other in silence. Then I undid his shirt and led him into my bedroom.

  But as we were both leaving the house this morning I said, ‘This can’t happen again.’

  ‘It can,’ he said. ‘Though I think you’re right. It probably shouldn’t.’

  He kissed me on the cheek and ran out the door into the black winter morning and he didn’t look back so he probably didn’t notice I’d stopped breathing.

  By 7 a.m., I was driving up the M8. I had intended to hit Dublin around 10.00, just after the morning rush hour, but the traffic had been rainy day bad and it was well after eleven by the time I arrived at the convent.

  I’d have to conceal my reasons for being there but the dishonesty wasn’t going to come as easy as it had of late. Lying to a graduate on work experience was one thing, but lying to a nun? After finishing primary school, I went to St Angela’s Convent Secondary on Patrick’s Hill. Most of the classes were taught by lay teachers, but not all. I found out fast that nuns are human lie detectors, Sister Attracta, the history teacher, especially. I had been studious, mostly, but on any occasion I hadn’t done my homework, unfailingly she had called on me to read my answer to the class. Still, it had been good training. I had learnt that, when lying, it was best to tell as much of the truth as possible.

  I crossed the road and pressed the doorbell, my breath misting the brass plate on the door. It could do with a shine, I thought. But there were few nuns now, and most of those were geriatric, well beyond such duties. Many convents had closed, and there was a real risk that Sister Bernadette was dead, or had moved to a retirement home. I was about to press the bell again when the door was opened by a small, chubby, orange-tanned woman in a neon green velour leisure-suit. Times had changed, though surely not this much? But the woman was much too young to be a nun, I realised.

  ‘Good morning, I’m here to visit Sister Bernadette, if she’s available,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll check,’ the woman said.

  She sounded like a local.

  ‘What’s your name, love?’

  ‘Nola Fitzpatrick.’

  Almost nobody calls me ‘Nola’ – I don’t encourage it – and Sister Bernadette was unlikely to be on Twitter, but you never knew. I wasn’t prepared to give a false name. That was a step too far, but a rarely used diminutive might provide some cover. At least the nun was still around – if it was the same woman. It was a common name, after all. I was regretting that I hadn’t asked Tiernan more about Sister Bernadette.

  The woman showed me into a narrow passageway and directed me to a row of plastic chairs placed against the left-hand wall. Then, without a word, she disappeared through a second larger door, and locked it behind her. The passageway looked like a recent addition. A weather protector? Or a security measure? More likely the latter, I reckoned. Their centuries-old raison d’être meant that the nuns couldn’t close their doors to callers – but they could be sensible. These were tough streets, had been since the Act of Union had abolished the Irish parliament and led the moneyed classes to London. Their great houses had become slum tenements, entering a cycle of dereliction, demolition and replacement with council flats, the poverty of the local residents the only constant. Convents in areas like this had been socially radical, educating the children of the poor. But these were less respectful times and it looked like the nuns had had to beef up their security as a result.

  I checked my watch. I had been waiting more than forty-five minutes, which might mean that I’d been forgotten. Then I heard the Angelus bell toll. Presumably the nuns had prayers around now. If that was the case, I’d be waiting another while. Any other time, I’d be scrolling through Facebook and Twitter to pass the time. But I’d vowed to keep off the internet for a few days, hoping that the Gill furore would have died down by the time I returned. I did a breathing exercise and rehearsed my story in my head.

  The smell here was the same as it had been in St Angela’s convent, a mixture of furniture polish, cooking and mothballs. Comforting, in an odd way. By the time I got to secondary school, I had been adopted and my name had been changed to Fitzpatrick. It had been Whelan for most of primary school, until my birth mother had died. That had been a scary time, but Mam and Dad had said that they would fight to keep me if they had to. As it turned out, they didn’t have to fight very hard. All of my birth mother’s relatives, country people, had said no-thank-you-very-much to the social worker’s suggestion that one of them might want to take me in. After a couple of months, or years, it had seemed like a long time, but it might not have been, everything was settled.

  In St Angela’s, a lot of my classmates didn’t know that I was adopted, and most of those who knew assumed it had happened just after I was born. There were a few from Gardiner’s Hill School who knew my original name and my whole story, but I eased them out of my life as fast as I could. They hadn’t been nice to me in primary. I might as well have had a label around my neck, or a bell to ring. The kids hadn’t known the difference at first. Their mothers were the ones who wouldn’t let me come for sleepovers, who told their own children about how, when m
y birth mother brought me to school, I had had scabies and lice and a nose that never stopped running, and how they had had to complain to the teachers about it, and how I was often left hanging around on the side of the road, and if my mother showed up to collect me, which half the time she didn’t, she was drunk, if that’s all she was. And hadn’t any shame about any of it, which was the worst thing nearly, and how in the end the school had had no choice but to call in the Health Board, and wasn’t that the lucky day for the poor misfortunate because weren’t the Fitzpatricks only after applying to become foster parents because they weren’t able to have children themselves, sure God help us.

  The stories followed me right through primary, and whenever lice came into the school, the mothers and the children stared at me. Secondary with the nuns at St Angela’s had been my great escape from all that, from the knowing looks of outsiders, even if I was never able to silence the voices in my head.

  Just after 12.20, I heard the jangle of a bunch of keys behind the great door and, instinctively, sat straighter in my chair. I might be about to tell a pack of lies, but the ‘no slouching, girls’ rule was harder to break. The door opened, a crack at first, then wider. I stood as a rail-thin, silver-haired woman in a calf-length grey wool skirt and what looked like a hand-knitted grey round-necked jumper, with a starched white round cotton collar inside it, came into the passageway. She wasn’t wearing a veil. She didn’t have to. She had nun written all over her. I caught a flash of neon green. The other woman was there too, watching from the inside hall. The nun looked to be in her late sixties, but nuns often looked a decade or more younger than their age. This one might be pushing eighty.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me, Sister Bernadette,’ I said, taking a chance with the name.

  ‘Well, yes, I haven’t agreed to anything yet,’ the nun said. ‘Yvonne told me you looked as if you wouldn’t eat me so I thought I should come and check. But we don’t know each other, do we?’