‘Yes. I was on the periphery by then, but I recall seeing him at a cast and crew celebration when Jeremy got back from Hollywood, some time, maybe around the end of March? I wasn’t talking to Donnie, but I couldn’t help seeing him. He acted like he was Jeremy’s devoted puppy. He looked a lot different back then, though. He was fatter, wore those Harry Potter glasses, and his hair––’

‘How did Donnie and Jeremy know each other?’

‘They were both working in Thomson AdGroup. At least, I assume that’s how they got to know each other. Maybe they were friends before that. Then Jeremy got super-successful, needed an assistant and Donnie got lucky. He and Jeremy are extremely close. Donnie’s a minder as much as an assistant. If Jeremy goes a little too far, like he did with me in the interview at the Opera House in Cork, good old Donnie swoops in to sort things out.’

‘Sort things out?’

‘He’s diplomatic, gets on with everyone. Jeremy rubs someone up the wrong way, Donnie makes everything okay again. It’s a job I wouldn’t want no matter how big the pay cheque was. But Donnie likes it, I presume, or he’d have left a long time ago.’

‘And he knows all about Jeremy for the last ten, twelve years, maybe longer?’

Tiernan gave a hollow laugh.

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Donnie knows where the bodies are buried.’

I tried to process what I’d discovered. The former Film Festival education officer Daniel O’Brien was now calling himself ‘Donnie’ and had been working for Jeremy Gill for a decade plus. They might or might not have met for the first time in Cork, but somehow Donnie ended up working in the same ad company as Gill six months after the 1998 Film Festival. Maybe Gill got Donnie the job, or maybe he applied for it himself? And Daniel/Donnie had no presence on LinkedIn or any other social media because he didn’t need the profile, and there was probably a strict privacy condition under his contract of employment. But none of that mattered.

What did matter was that, according to Tiernan, Donnie cleaned up Gill’s messes.

And that Gill and his mother were saying that Donnie had forced Esther Gill to drive him to Rhona’s house where he had murdered her.