I refused to be one of the enablers. I had regrets about the consequences for Alice, and for our friendship. And I was concerned about the festival, about the bad reputation it might develop if Gill started mouthing off about it to other people in the film business. But I had to keep going. The way I saw it, I had no choice.

Just then, there was a knock at my office door. It was Tina.

‘Em, sorry, Finn, I just thought … em … I should tell you … what I mean to say is … em … like, sorry, but do you know you’re trending on Twitter?’

I could hardly bear to look, but I logged into my Twitter account on my desktop. It looked like every one of the students at the workshop had tweeted their disapproval of @Finnfitz and @corkfilmfest, #WTF, #lawyerbitch. And their approval of @JeremyGill, #weluvujezza. Which @JeremyGill had retweeted, #couldntpossiblycomment. Along with 483 of his three million followers. Not a huge number. But enough to get me trending.

I was appalled.

And things were about to get worse.

My desk phone rang.

‘Boardroom. Now,’ Gabriel McGrath said.

21

Pale and skinny, with bobbed brown hair pulled back in a messy half-up, half-down ponytail, and wearing black jeans and a baggy black T-shirt under an ancient GAP hoodie, Sadie O’Riordan didn’t look much like a detective Garda. But she had a brain as sharp as a drawer full of knives. And she had a way of looking a different kind of nondescript every day, though some things were a constant; the disposable work clothes, for one. She never wore anything that couldn’t be torn, or dirtied, or dumped. And she never wore scarves, or jewellery, or anything that could be dragged from her, a tiny silver scar in her left earlobe testament to an elementary error she wouldn’t make again.

After some queuing, we’d managed to snag the booth. The remainder of the place had long tables and benches and the kind of retro/industrial/hipster look that had been unusual in Cork until recently. Located in what used to be a no man’s land for restaurants, between the city centre and suburbia, Ramen had been full out the door since the day it opened, and had spawned a multitude of imitators, some more successful than others. For a while, every greasy Chinese in the city was rebranding itself as Asian street food, even though Chicken Maryland was still on the menu in a couple of them. I knew. I made a point of checking. And I have no idea what that says about me.