‘Thanks be to God,’ I said. ‘Poke your head in the door of the interview room, Sadie – I can’t do it, Donnie would recognise me – and tell Lenihan I’ve got something and that I need to talk to him now.’

‘What have you got?’ Sadie asked.

‘Proof that Daniel “Donnie” O’Brien stayed in Muskerry Castle with Thomson AdGroup in 1998. He signed the guest book. I have a photograph of his signature. The 12th of December 1998. The same night Jeremy Gill raped Deirdre Carney. Joey O’Connor saw Donnie – Daniel O’Brien, as he was then – dropping Deirdre Carney home in his Cinquecento. Joey can’t say when he saw it happening, but Donnie doesn’t know that. And I know in my heart and soul it was the morning after the rape. That fucker Donnie, he’s not just protecting Gill now, he’s been protecting him, enabling him, all along. For years. Donnie’s the organiser, the manager. He must want to tell that story.’

It took a little longer than I’d hoped to convince Lenihan, and it took even longer than that for Donnie to start talking. Sadie and I were watching the interview on-screen in Lenihan’s office and for a while we were losing hope.

‘I know you’ve explained before,’ Lenihan said. ‘But I still can’t figure out what your job was.’

‘Assistant, like I’ve told you about fifty times.’

‘Like some kind of a secretary?’

‘No. I was Jeremy’s personal assistant.’

‘Picking up his dry-cleaning kind of assistant?’

‘That was not my job. I had no domestic duties.’

‘O-kay,’ Lenihan said. ‘Putting petrol in the car, maybe?’

‘No.’

‘I don’t get it. Not a secretary. No domestic duties. No general duties. Nothing that sounds like anything. Oh, hang on, am I missing something here, was it some kind of a Rock Hudson scenario?’

Donnie sighed.

‘I might have expected you’d be homophobic as well as stupid,’ he said. ‘For the record, Jeremy Gill is not gay and neither am I.’

‘For the record could you tell me what the fuck you were getting paid for, so?’

‘We had a strictly professional relationship.’

‘Professionally doing sweet fuck all by the sound of it.’

‘No no no,’ Donnie said. ‘I worked hard. Nothing happened without me.’

‘You mean you were like a producer or something?’

‘It’s a simplistic analogy but you could put it like that, I suppose.’

‘Have you a better way of putting it?’

‘Maybe first assistant director is a better analogy.’

‘Sounds menial.’

‘Only someone who knows nothing about the film business would think that. A first A-D runs the set, the logistics, the whole fucking thing, you fucking dope.’

‘And that’s what you did?’

‘Yes.’

‘But for Gill personally.’

‘Yes.’

Lenihan sat back in his chair and scratched his head.

‘I still don’t understand it,’ he said. ‘But it sounds like some cushy number.’