I threw my phone on the sofa and reviewed the conversation. Ultimately what it amounted to was that Esther had no car registered in her name. I thought it through again and again and came up with an alternative possibility. I reckoned that whatever income Gill was paying his mother had to be through one of his companies. By calling her an employee, his Dublin PA, say, he’d get a tax write-off. And the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that his mother’s car, if she had one, was owned and registered the same way. I emailed my thoughts and a list of Gill’s companies and directorships to Lenihan, saying I had more important information on Gill’s movements and that I needed to talk to him. Then I texted him and tried phoning him again. I gave up after the fourth go.

I went to my bedroom, took off what I was wearing, and the sheets on my bed, and the towels from the en suite, and threw everything down the stairs. I went to the storage and laundry room on the ground floor and dumped the towels and linen in the washing machine. There was no knowing what he had touched. My skin crawled from the memory of him. I smelled my underarm. I stank. I ran the shower in my en-suite as hot as I could bear, scrubbed myself nearly raw and shampooed twice. Then I dried off and threw on leggings and a giant black sweatshirt. I had just started to comb through my hair when I heard the doorbell ringing.

‘Who is it?’

‘Me,’ Sadie O’Riordan said.

I buzzed her in the gate and, combing my hair, ran down to open the house door.

Sadie’s face was white.

‘What did you do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We’ve had a complaint about you,’ Sadie said. ‘From Jeremy fucking Gill.’

‘What? Oh my God.’

‘Oh my God goes nowhere near how I felt when I heard it.’

She stomped upstairs, followed by me. Then, leaning against the table, she took out her notebook, flicked through it, and started talking, intoning, like she was giving evidence at a trial.

‘Complainant states that he was upset after being released from custody, that he decided to try to talk things through with you, that he left his solicitor’s office via the basement car park, where a hired vehicle had been left for him.’

She looked up from the notebook.

‘We’d been watching the front door, didn’t see him exit,’ she said, in her normal voice, then looked down at the notebook again.

‘Complainant states that he had planned to go home, but on impulse he came down to Cork to see if he could talk some sense into you.’

‘Sadie, how is this complaint even being tolerated, let alone investigated? Isn’t he intimidating a witness by coming anywhere near me?’