I sat in my car for as long as it took to make a detailed handwritten note of what Rhona had said. Then I signed and dated it, read it into my phone and saved it to my iCloud account: my legal training had taught me the importance of a contemporaneous note and this was as close as I was going to get. There was one other procedural matter to be dealt with. As Rhona was a potential witness, I had had the Carneys’ implied consent to disclose their confidential client information to her. Still, I’d call to see them when I was back in Cork to obtain their explicit consent and I would do a back-up note for the file. All I could say for now was that I had interviewed a potentially useful witness, and that it had been necessary for me to reveal some information to her. I couldn’t yet disclose Rhona’s identity, or the details, to them.

As I was writing up my notes, the missing information, the questions I would have liked to ask, the corroboration that would be needed if Rhona’s case went to trial, came into sharp relief. Dates and times. Where he had collected her. The Toyota car he had used to collect and drop her back, could she recall the model or any part of the registration? Or the room number? How had she known it was an advertising shoot, had he told her or had she found out some other way? And more. I noted down anything I could think of that I needed to ask the next time we met. If we ever did. There mightn’t be a second meeting, though I didn’t want to think about that possibility. Either way, there was no point in staying up in Dublin now. I pulled out. If I got going, I’d be back in Cork before midnight.

I crossed the Liffey and was on the motorway in twenty-five minutes. I travelled in silence. No wittering radio presenter. No music. What happened to Rhona had happened to my sister, too. But Rhona had been stronger than Deirdre. People had different levels of resilience; it was a lottery, it seemed, who got enough to survive, and who came up short. It was like the way some alcoholics went into treatment and recovered, and some didn’t. The way Davy did. The way my birth mother didn’t. And what about me? Had I enough strength to cope with all of this? Or was I as weak as I felt in that moment?

I tried to focus on exposing Gill. For my own protection, I couldn’t get sucked into the foul vortex that he had created. And I had a sense that something in the pattern of behaviour Rhona had described might help with Deirdre’s case, even if I couldn’t see it yet.