‘I don’t know if we have it but I can have a look. I’ll check under contacts first.’

‘Oh that’s a good idea, Dylan,’ I said. ‘And you know, as you’ve the system open there you couldn’t get me Daniel O’Brien’s number as well, could you? He’s an old mate of mine from his days working here and I seem to have lost his contact details. If you knew the number of times I meant to ask Alice or Sarah-Jane. That’s D-A-N-I-E-L, Dylan.’

‘Gotcha,’ Dylan said. ‘Em, no phone number for Daniel, but there’s an email, if it’s the same guy. Though the address might not be current. But we definitely have Tiernan’s mobile number and email. Will I print the two of them for you?’

‘That’d be great.’

Subterfuge was getting easier, and lying was bothering me less.

As I walked in the front door of the Opera House, I saw Tiernan McDevitt standing by the box office in conversation with another man. I took a table by the window with my back to the river and watched. The man with Tiernan was slim, blond, tanned, possibly fake-tanned, and dressed in light grey trousers, a fine-knit pink cardigan and a collared T-shirt. He was slightly too old for the boyband look, but he had it down. While I was waiting, I sent an email to Daniel O’Brien. Dylan in the festival office had been right: nobody used ‘@ireland.com’ any more. Predictably, the email bounced back. Meanwhile, Boyband man appeared to have left. I waved to catch Tiernan’s attention, and he came and sat opposite me.

‘Thanks for this,’ he said. ‘I’m on the 3.20 train so it suits perfectly.’

‘The least the board of Cork Film Festival can do is buy you lunch,’ I said. ‘Who was that you were chatting to, by the way?’

‘Oh that’s Jeremy’s assistant. He was trying to console me, telling me how well the interview had gone. Which was a big fat lie, obviously.’

The waiter came along then and I ordered the mushrooms on toast, Tiernan the omelette and a glass of Rioja.

‘You didn’t go for lunch with Jeremy?’ I said.

‘Ah, no, no, I didn’t,’ Tiernan said.

‘I don’t blame you, to be honest. I wouldn’t have gone either,’ I said.

‘It’s not that. He was meeting people from the film studies department in UCC, so I wasn’t ever supposed to be eating with him. Alice said she’d organise someone to take me to lunch, but I had the intention of going down early to the station and doing a bit of work there so I said no and then you called and I changed my mind.’

‘I wasn’t impressed with Gill, I must say.’

‘No?’

‘With the way he treated you, I mean.’