‘No, I’m just going on how he was with me. He didn’t know I was gay so he was talking to me about the girls in the workshop group, while they were doing whatever task he’d set. To be fair to him, the workshop was excellent. But he was going on to me about how there was nothing like a school uniform and how did I keep my hands off them, all that – you can imagine. And he didn’t hold back on the graphic language either. He gravitated towards me; all the other teachers were women. They might as well not have existed, and some of them were good-looking too. I thought he was a sleazy oddball who’d end up going nowhere, to be honest. I mean his short film was great but even that had a schoolgirl in it, for God’s sake. Shows what I know. I can’t say I saw him doing anything wrong. I didn’t. If I had, I’d have done something about it. I saw that he took a shine to Deirdre, sure, but there was no risk. I was there all the time, and there were plenty of other adults to supervise. He was all about her, though, charm itself, really. It kinda made me gag, knowing what he was really thinking, after what he’d said. Yeah. I made sure to get her and my other students out of there hotfoot as soon as the workshop was over. So …’

‘It’s stayed very fresh in your mind, for something where nothing happened.’

‘Yes.’

‘You think something did happen,’ I said, leading him.

Colm leant forward.

‘She had a mental breakdown,’ he said. ‘That’s what the parents told us. I know they submitted sick notes from the GP. I know that she spent time, a lot of time, later in St Michael’s, with severe depression. I called round to the house, asked after her, tried to get her to talk to me. She wouldn’t. But I suppose I knew there was more to it, or thought I did, than depression. It descended so suddenly on her. I arranged a meeting between the school counsellor and Ann Carney, to talk about her, see if we could do anything to help. But nothing came of that. I wondered if there was something odd about the family; her parents were older than most, and I knew that Deirdre had been adopted. But there was no real sign of anything wrong there. And bear in mind this was a long time ago. I think if it happened now, that sudden change, I’d make a call to the social worker helpline. There would almost certainly be an investigation. But times were different then. And she was sixteen, not six …’

He trailed off, then looked hard at me.

‘Is this about Gill? An investigation?’

‘It’s about Deirdre,’ I said. ‘Do you think it should be about Gill?’