‘Take a seat,’ I said. ‘And start talking.’

The truth, when it came, was pedestrian and contemptible.

‘Yes,’ MacGiolla said. ‘I knew Deirdre from the area where I grew up. Sad what became of her. But suicide is bad news, for many reasons. Morale. Staff and students. Not to mention the publicity. She was a past pupil and … Well, give a dog a bad name, etc. etc. I was thinking of the institution. I thought it best to keep my distance, minimise any connection between the school and the, em, event. We sent two teachers to the funeral, but that was as far as we went.’

‘You go on about your students. But, unless they perform how they’re supposed to, you don’t care. I’ve been in that rotten little room. Do you even have a school counsellor?’

‘The role has been vacant for some time. Other funding priorities seemed––’

‘Deirdre was in trouble when she was here and this place did nothing to help her.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true. Anyway, I wasn’t working here at the time.’

‘You wouldn’t have made any difference,’ I said.

As I walked west along the Mardyke towards Fitzgerald’s Park, my anger receded. MacGiolla was a despicable creature, and his attitude stank, but he hadn’t hurt Deirdre. Which didn’t mean that I knew who had. The questions raised in my mind in the last twenty-four hours about Joey O’Connor and what he might have done to Deirdre, and about Gill’s culpability, or innocence, in Rhona’s death, had served to let one truth float clear of the wreckage: that Deirdre had killed herself without knowing that our mother had done the same thing. Had the rape been responsible for Deirdre’s mental illness? Or had she inherited it?

The park was empty apart from a few well-swaddled children and their minders. I sat on a bench facing away from the river, but I felt its great power and the pull that had been inescapable for my mother and my sister.

Back home, the chair Gill had sat on was gone from the side of the street, which cheered me, but only for a moment. I went to my study and tried to work, rereading my notes, seeking patterns or details I might have missed. The words swam on the screen in front of me. I remembered that I had intended to call Marie Wade the previous night, just before Garda Ruth Joyce had called around with the CCTV. Just before the bottom had fallen out of my case. I hadn’t the energy to call her now. I couldn’t even remember why the former education officer Daniel O’Brien had seemed important.