‘Mark…I…’
And perhaps she never did.
‘It’s all right,’ Mark says, turning away again, unable to face her. ‘I was just -’
‘We always meant, your uncle Des and I, we…’
She trails off here, and Mark is relieved. The person he should probably be talking to, in any case, isn’t in the room. He’s been dead for six months.
Standing in the doorway, Mark looks at the TV and sees that a news bulletin is starting up. He lowers his head and closes his eyes.
But if Uncle Des were still alive, he wonders, and here in the room today, what questions would he put to him?
Uncle Des… what really happened that night? Do you remember? Do you know? Were you told? Did you believe what you were told? Did it make sense to you? Did you ask questions? Did you get answers? Were you bullied? Were you coerced into silence? Did that silence last the rest of your life?
He opens his eyes again.
Was my father wrongly accused? Was he made into a scapegoat to protect someone else’s reputation?
Uncle Des may be gone, Mark realises, but someone still needs to answer these questions.
He raises his head. He looks at the TV.
A man is sitting hunched forward at a table in front of some microphones.
It takes Mark a second or two to recognise who it is.
He goes over and grabs the remote from the arm of the sofa. He fumbles for the button and raises the volume.
But all he catches are the final few words.
‘… the job I was first elected to do as an ambitious young man more than twenty-five years ago…’
5
After she leaves the café, Gina walks around for a while, aimlessly – down Grafton Street, along Wicklow Street. On the phone earlier Mark Griffin had asked if she was a journalist and she’d said no, of course not. But now she feels like one, feels like the worst tabloid hack – someone who thinks nothing of exploiting someone else’s grief for a story.
She turns left onto Drury Street and then right at Claudio’s Wines. She walks through the old South City Markets and comes out onto George’s Street.
She should have left him alone. It was unfair of her to plant a doubt in his mind like that and then have nothing to back it up. It was irresponsible and selfish.
She has a knot in her stomach now, and a headache.
She walks on a bit and stops at a corner. But when she looks across the street, the knot in her stomach tightens.
Because the building directly opposite is where Noel used to work. It’s where BCM has its offices.
She looks around her for a moment, and then back across the street. Gina has passed this building many times but has never been inside. On the rare occasions that Noel took her out to lunch, they met nearby, in the Long Hall or in Grogan’s.
So what is she doing here now? It’s not as if she came this way deliberately. It wasn’t anything conscious.
Seeing as how she is here, though…
She crosses the street.
Inside the building, the lobby is all granite and tinted glass, with leather banquettes and discreetly placed artworks. BCM is on the fourth floor.
She goes up in the elevator.
The receptionist, when she realises who Gina is, gets quite emotional, and Gina has to struggle to maintain her own composure. After a few moments, she asks to see a particular colleague of Noel’s, a Leo Spillane, someone she met at the funeral.
‘Oh my dear,’ the receptionist says, making it sound as if this might be the last straw for Gina, ‘I’m afraid he’s out sick today.’
‘That’s OK,’ Gina says. Then, not really knowing why she’s here but still feeling a need to explain herself, she adds, ‘I just wanted to talk to someone. You know. Someone who worked with Noel.’
The receptionist nods her head vigorously and says, ‘I understand, I understand. I know there’s a meeting going on, but look, take a seat and I’ll check who’s back there.’
Two or three minutes later a pale young man about Gina’s age, or maybe a bit older, emerges from a corridor to the right of the reception desk. He’s quite thin and is wearing a suit that looks at least a size too big for him. He approaches Gina with his hand extended.
‘Er, hello,’ he says. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m… I’m Dermot Flynn.’
He’s floating through this – and through everything these days really – as though in a dream, and of course this could be a dream, because it’s got all the elements of a dream: anxiety, tranquillity, perplexity, guilt, more anxiety, and now, bizarrely, Noel Rafferty’s kid sister…
He sits down beside her in reception. He offers his condolences.
‘So tell me,’ she then says, ‘you worked with my brother, is that right?’
The tranquillity part – due to the medication his doctor prescribed him last week – is already feeling a little diluted.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I worked under him. I was, am, a member of the team.’
As he describes his job and his place in the company, Dermot Flynn looks closely at Gina. He sees the resemblance all right – Noel’s angular, drawn features reflected in this younger, fresher, more attractive face.
Up to now he hasn’t allowed himself to think about Noel – and for good reason. Clearly the man was put under the same kind of pressure as Dermot himself was, but whether he skidded off that road by accident or did it deliberately is immaterial – in the end that wasn’t what killed him.
‘On that last day,’ Gina says, ‘the Monday, did he seem particularly tense for any reason?’
‘No, I don’t think so. I’m not even sure I saw him that day.’
He didn’t, in fact – but he’s still lying. He looks around reception. He’s not happy being interrogated like this.
‘Do you want to go outside,’ he says, ‘get a coffee somewhere?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
It’s only when they’re in the elevator on the way down that it occurs to him.
I can’t be seen talking to this woman.
But it’s too late.
Out on the street, he feels exposed, and horribly self-conscious. He tries to hurry things along. They go to a small café around the corner and Dermot sits with his back to the window.
‘So how is Richmond Plaza coming along?’ she asks.
‘Fine,’ he says, ‘yeah, fine.’ He feels like adding, Why?
‘I was up there last week,’ she says, ‘with Paddy Norton. He showed me around.’
Dermot swallows. What’s he supposed to say to that? It’s like she’s teasing him.
‘Yeah… it’s nearly finished, couple of months to go,’ he says, and clears his throat. He can’t bring himself to say anything more on the subject.
She then asks him a few questions about what Noel was like to work with. It’s neutral enough territory and he answers as best he can. He actually talks for quite a while – though at one point he finds himself in the middle of a long sentence and realises he has no idea how he got there. He also has a headache. He starts massaging his temples.
After a few moments of this, Gina says, ‘Dermot, are you OK?’
He looks up. ‘Yes.’ He puts his hands down on the table. ‘I’m fine.’
But the truth is he isn’t. He hasn’t been sleeping lately, or eating, and he’s lost a lot of weight. He’s also been bickering constantly with Claire, something they never used to do, and he isn’t able to look either of his girls in the eye anymore without having his own eyes well up with tears.