I remembered. Fifteen years ago I was twenty-two, working as a trainee solicitor by day. What Sean didn’t know was that I was also working for the festival as a volunteer, evenings and at the weekend, in return for a season ticket. I didn’t meet Jeremy Gill, though. Never even saw him, except on stage. And Sean seemed to have no evidence that Deirdre had met him either. The probability was that she hadn’t. Even in 1998, Cork Film Festival was careful to ensure that schoolkids in on work experience or attending the education programme screenings were well chaperoned, by their own teachers usually, and that they’d gone home long before the late nights in the Festival Club at Cork Opera House.

‘Sean, along with thousands of others, Deirdre and Jeremy Gill were both at the same film festival. But, in all likelihood, they never even met.’

‘They met, they had to have met. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He was a man of the world by then, working in Dublin, and the short films were a sideline for him.’

‘He was in advertising, very successfully, as far as I know,’ I said. ‘But …’

‘He was about thirty or more when he made the short film that got him on the road to where he is now. I can’t remember the name of it.’

‘Another Bad Day at the Office,’ I said. ‘And you think they met because …?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sean said. ‘I don’t know how they met, all right? I just know that my wife Ann took Deirdre and her friend, Jessica Murphy from her class at school, to the closing night at the Opera House, the prize-giving and the closing film.’

He pointed at my notebook. I wrote down Jessica’s name and other scant details. Cork Film Festival. 1998. Short films. School/education prog. Oscar noms. January. Deirdre Carney. 29th Jan 2013. Suicide.

‘She must have met Gill during the festival or in the Opera House, maybe even on the stairs, or something,’ Sean said. ‘Ann remembers that she went to the toilet at one stage on her own. Ann didn’t think to go with her, thought she was safe. You’d think at fifteen, in a public place like that …’

‘So are you saying that something happened that night?’ I asked.