Next, I did a search of the Irish Examiner archive for Cork Film Festival 1998. I found a large colour shot of Jeremy, holding his three trophies. He was smiling, dark hair tied in a ponytail, brown eyes. I had forgotten about the teeth, the slightly crooked, slightly off-white Irish teeth, that he’d subsequently had fixed to Hollywood dayglo perfection. I reckoned they’d looked better before he’d shelled out for the replacements, but I was probably in a minority. I saved the photo and the accompanying article into the Carney file.

Then, I read the Wikipedia entry on Gill. There was a piece about his education at UCD in the late 1970s, how he had been a classmate of the writer Christopher Dalton, who had scripted two of Gill’s early features, though they hadn’t worked together after that. Dalton had gone on to be a successful literary novelist. I had a quick read of his Wikipedia page. It looked like he hadn’t allowed any of his later works to be adapted as films. He might have had his fill: some liked the collaborative process of film-making, some didn’t.

There were various references to Gill’s stellar career in advertising, working for Thomson AdGroup, and footnotes on a few of the campaigns he’d been involved in.

But, in relation to his personal life, there was remarkably little. He had never married. A legendary workaholic bachelor, Gill was famous for taking his mammy to premieres. In fact, now that I thought about it, I had always assumed he was gay. I copied the Wikipedia entry into my file and googled ‘Jeremy Gill gay’ but nothing of significance came up, except that, as with a lot of people in show business, there were unsubstantiated rumours about his sexuality. If anything, there seemed to be less about Gill than others. Maybe it didn’t matter as much if you were a gay director, maybe people were less interested. I googled ‘Jeremy Gill love life’. There were thousands of photos of him with myriad different actresses, and articles where they both protested that they were ‘just good friends’. Yet the ‘friendships’ seemed to last only as long as the films they were promoting and, even from a distance of 8,000 miles, or however far LA was from Cork, they looked like fake dates. And all of this information was utterly irrelevant to Deirdre Carney and her unfortunate life and death.

Nevertheless, I went into IMDb and scrolled through Gill’s entry, refreshing my memory on his film-making history. He had made a lot of good films, across various genres, since his time in Cork in 1998, and I had seen all of them, mostly on the big screen.