‘I’m instructed in a civil case by the parents of Deirdre Carney,’ I said. ‘She met Jeremy Gill at Cork Film Festival when she attended a workshop given by him. I have come into evidence that leads me to suspect that Deirdre was raped by Gill some weeks after the festival.’

‘You’re instructed by this girl’s parents?’

‘Yes. You see Deirdre had a severe nervous breakdown and never identified Jeremy Gill publicly as her assailant during her lifetime. But in her suicide note …’

‘She’s dead?’

‘Yes. And so is Rhona Macbride, as you know. I spoke to her the night before she was murdered and she confirmed my suspicions about Jeremy Gill. Told me that Gill had raped her, savagely beaten her, too. She was too frightened of him to speak out. Now, as you know, she’ll never be able to.’

I watched Dalton take in the implications of what I had said.

‘I’m here about the Deirdre Carney case,’ I continued. ‘But from what I know about Gill’s behaviour with Deirdre and Rhona, I suspect that they’re not Gill’s only victims. I think you know that too.’

‘I don’t know anything about Deirdre Carney. I wasn’t even in Cork for the festival that year.’

‘What do you know, Mr Dalton?’

‘I read in the Irish Times that the Gardaí are treating Rhona’s death as a random, drug-related crime.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘It’s not what I think, but you’re right, it’s what they think.’

He stayed quiet, but he was tearing at the rash on his arm again.

‘Christopher, two women are dead,’ I said. ‘Rhona told me she’d been expecting someone like me to call for years. For ever, she said. It’s the same for you, isn’t it?’

I waited for Dalton to fill the space.

‘You said that Rhona Macbride told you that Jeremy had raped her.’

He paused, then continued.

‘I didn’t know it was rape, but I knew that he’d met her, some time after the film wrapped. That they’d been intimate, sexually intimate.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Because he told me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He boasted that she’d forced herself on him, that he hadn’t been able to keep her off him, that eventually he’d had to submit to her advances and that they had had sex.’

‘Is that how he described it, that they’d “had sex”?’

‘Not exactly. He told me he’d fucked her hard, taught her a lesson. Said that that’s what these girls needed, except he called her a slut. He said she’d fooled him for a long time but she was the same as all the rest of them.’

‘What do you think he meant by that, “all the rest of them”?’