He was looking past me, his eyes half closed, and saying nothing. Finally, he took a slug of his whiskey, and started to talk.

‘My name is Sean Carney and I live at 54 Lee Valley Rise, Turners Cross. I can’t remember my mobile number off the top of my head. But it’s in the phone.’

I wrote down the name and address.

‘Deirdre. That was her name. She was my beautiful baby. And she’s dead.’

‘I’m so sorry, Sean,’ I said, and I meant it.

But, simultaneously, I was calculating and weighing what the emergency might be, half hating myself for doing it. This is the job. This is how it is. People tell me their secret stories and their deepest fears, and I box and package and strategise and, somehow, try to hold on to the humanity in all of it. I knew it couldn’t be an inquest he was talking about, not on a Friday. And, if foul play was suspected, that would be a matter for a Garda investigation. Or was his daughter’s death recent? Something he wanted to get off his chest? Something he needed to tell to someone who couldn’t tell anyone else? The hairs on my arms stood up, and I braced myself for the worst. I was expecting a confession.

And I was wrong.

‘Deirdre died by her own hand, ten months ago now. You might have heard – or maybe not. There’s been a fair few suicides in Cork the last couple of years. They pulled her.’

He paused.

‘Her body, I mean, from the water down near Blackrock on the 31st of January. Two nights she was in the river. Our Deirdre. She came to us on the 1st of December 1982, the happiest day of our lives. She was just gone thirty when …’

He cleared his throat, and I looked away, giving him a chance to compose himself. It gave me a chance to do the same. Stories like the one Sean was starting to tell were the last thing I wanted to hear. But after a time, I felt the silence change to something else. I looked back and found him watching me, and it struck me that there was something altered in his expression, something unexpected, though I couldn’t have named it. And then it was gone, whatever it was, and Sean was talking again.

‘My daughter had been troubled for a long time,’ he said. ‘Depressed. Hurting herself. It’s unbelievable what happened to her, how she went downhill that way. Barely finished school. Couldn’t go to university. Never did much with her life.’

He shifted in his seat.

‘It’s strange being here with you,’ he said.

‘Talking about all of this must be awful,’ I said ‘We could leave it to another …’