The final item was the identity tag.

‘It’s Deirdre’s handwriting all right, but as to what it was for, I don’t know. I don’t remember her ever being at a conference. She was a schoolgirl, and after she left school she didn’t have any education worth talking about. Unless she did a course when she was in St Michael’s having treatment? But I think I would have heard about that …’

‘Think, Ann,’ I said. ‘Did she ever go to anything where she might have needed a name tag like that, a seminar or a school debate, maybe?’

‘There was nothing like that,’ Ann said. ‘Nothing at all.’

8

It was almost eight o’clock when I left the Carney house. I walked past the football ground, home of Cork City FC, shuttered and silent now. The streets were empty, and the night air was murky, and the footpaths were damp and slippery underfoot. Around the corner, on Evergreen Road, the giant concrete slants of Christ the King Church menaced.

I pressed on, picking my way through the mist. Ann had said that Deirdre’s school friend Jessica Murphy was married with a couple of kids, so there was no hope of a meeting at this time on a Saturday evening. I would ring her in the morning. By then, too, Ann would have phoned Jessica and told her to expect my call, which might make for an easier first contact. There was no legitimate excuse for going back to the Film Festival office twice in one day and, though I was even more convinced now that I needed to examine the 1998 archive, there was nothing else to be done tonight. I would go home, absorb and process all that had happened. That was the appropriate thing to do.

And I couldn’t do it. I hurried down the narrow steep incline of Nicholas Street, and around past the Red Abbey, and across the river on to the city’s central island.

The festival office was quieter than it had been that morning. There was no sign of Alice, but there were a few junior staff members and, as I had hoped, Sarah-Jane Dooley. In her late twenties, Sarah-Jane had a carefully curated look that changed with every hairdo. Recently, she’d gone for a pixie crop that made her look like Jean Seberg in Breathless, though she was too chatty and smiley to pull off the required ennui. Sarah-Jane handled the in-house publicity for the festival and in planning this year’s campaign she’d be bound to have dug out the festival archive of Gill’s previous visit.

‘Hey, Sarah-Jane, how is it going?’ I said.

Sarah-Jane raised her eyes towards the ceiling, its paint flaking and grimy: arts funding cutbacks left no room for a decoration budget.