After a time, I stood, and switched on a lamp. I took out the photo that Sean Carney had given me, laid it on the kitchen worktop and glanced at it, quickly at first. Deirdre had dark hair and brows, pale skin, red lips and lively, mischievous eyes. Sean had said that we looked alike. I could see what he meant: her colouring, her hair, her blue eyes were the same general area as me, except Deirdre was stunning.

And now she was dead. And that was a tragedy. And there was nothing I, or her parents, or anyone else could do about it.

Though there was food in the fridge, my appetite had disappeared around the time Sean Carney had mentioned his daughter’s body washing up in Blackrock. But as I filled the kettle, and willed myself to nibble at a snack of cheese and oatcakes, I kept coming back to look at the photo, wondering how long it would take before I went downstairs, to where I knew there was a stack of old Film Festival catalogues.

Ten minutes later, I was crawling on the floor of my study, trying to find 1998. And there it was. I ran my finger through the index and turned to here: Another Bad Day at the Office, a twenty-four-minute short film by Jeremy Gill. Also produced by Jeremy Gill and a production company called Gill/Direct Productions. Seemed like a one-man show.

I got up off the floor, rolled my chair into position, flicked on my desktop and did an online company search on Gill/Direct Productions. The company status was normal, which meant that he’d kept filing accounts and making annual returns on it all these years. The directors were listed as Jeremy Gill, and a trust company called ProGill Trust, which showed up, along with Gill, as director of a raft of other companies. I forced myself to stop after clicking through to the twentieth company. Searches like these are addictive but they eat time, and to no end, in this case. It was of zero consequence that Gill had a web of investment vehicles. That was how the film business worked. Applying for government incentives and taking advantage of tax avoidance schemes meant that there was usually at least one company for each project, and often more. The only slightly odd thing was there were no women listed anywhere on any of the documents. I googled details of his agent, lawyer and business managers: all male. And in the ‘About Us’ section of jeremygillproductions.com, there were no women listed either. Maybe Jeremy didn’t like working with women. Or maybe women didn’t like working with Jeremy. There was nothing much to any of it, but I opened a Sean Carney file on my desktop anyway and saved the results of the search into it.