Between bites of pizza, I turned on my computer and began logging my progress into the file I’d opened the previous night. I checked through my notes of the meeting with the Carneys and did a file memo. I set up an exhibits file, saved my photographs there and listed the items I’d found. Then, I recorded my attendance at the Film Festival office, did a note of Gill’s itinerary while in Cork, and saved copies of the photos retrieved from the Film Festival box file and a scan of the workshop poster.

Next, I opened a new document and called it ‘Connections’. For now, all I could do was list the connections, or possible connections, between Gill and Deirdre and see where they led next.

There was the suicide note, referring to the academy, that I’d photographed and saved, and the time coincidence between Gill’s Oscar nomination and Deirdre’s suicide a day later. And that, according to the festival catalogue, Deirdre had championed his short film at the 1998 Cork Film Festival. I knew for sure now that Deirdre had met Gill: I had incontestable evidence of their meeting. I knew too that, in the aftermath of the festival, she had developed a telephone relationship with an unknown male. But there was little hope of getting phone records of any kind so many years later and I reckoned I’d waste too much time looking for them. I needed to concentrate on what I had.

I clicked on the scanned photo and expanded the PDF as high as it would go. But the resolution was poor and it was hard to see anything. I’d need professional help with it. Though if I expanded the original …? I rifled my desk drawers. There was a magnifying glass somewhere that I could use to examine the photographs more closely, to see if the name tag I’d found earlier was the same as the one Deirdre was wearing at the workshop.

I found the magnifying glass in a drawer that also contained two ancient Nokia mobiles, which I should have taken to recycling, along with the old Hoover and broken toaster that clogged up the bottom of the wardrobe in the spare room.

With the benefit of the magnifying glass, I saw that the name tag in the photo and the one I’d found in Deirdre’s room looked the same. They were, I was sure of it. I’d have to get the hard copy photo enlarged properly and the name tag analysed by an expert, if I was going to be able to use it as evidence. It had to be significant that Deirdre had saved and hidden it all these years since the time she’d met Jeremy Gill. I would need to talk to the others in the photos. Maybe they had seen or heard something.