Cecelia Ahern: One Hundred Names

‘Apart from him. He was completely innocent.’

‘Okay! Apart from him,’ she said, frustrated. ‘All the other stuff I covered was perfectly accurate! Nobody ever says anything about that!’

‘Because that’s your job, to be accurate. You shouldn’t be congratulated for it.’

‘Any other journalist in that room would have done the same thing, but the letter came to me.’

‘It went to you for a reason. Those women set you up and they used you to set him up. You were covering bullshit stories so they knew you’d want to jump on this straight away, have your moment of glory.’

‘It wasn’t about me having my moment of glory.’

‘Wasn’t it? All I know is I’ve never seen you as excited as the day you got the job on the show. And you were doing a story about tea , Kitty. If Constance asked you to do a story about tea, you’d tell her to go and jump. Television made you excited.’

She tried to pretend it wasn’t true but she couldn’t. He was right. Thirty Minutes was made up of one large investigative story – the big one, the story everybody wanted to work on – and the remainder of the show was padded with smaller, local, not so ground-breaking pieces. Her first story had been to look into why consumers chose the brand of tea they bought. Numerous trips to tea factories, sweeping shots of supermarket tea aisles, and visits to morning community tea events led her to find that people simply followed the same brand their parents drank. It was a generational thing. It had been four minutes and fifty seconds long and Kitty believed she had a cutting-edge piece of art on her hands. Four months along in the job, when she received the letter, addressed to her, from the two women making claims against Colin Maguire, she had instantly, vehemently believed them, and she had worked with them and helped build a case against him. She had got lost in the drama, the excitement, the atmosphere of the TV studio offices, her opportunity to move from sweet harmless stories to the big time, and in her search for the truth had told a lie, a dangerous lie, and had ruined a man’s life.

Steve was looking around the flat.

‘What now?’ she asked, completely drained.

‘Where’s Glen?’

‘At work.’

‘Does he usually take his coffee machine to work?’

She turned round to look at the counter, confused, but her phone interrupted them.

‘My mum. Shit.’

‘Have you spoken to them lately?’

Kitty swallowed and shook her head.

‘Answer it,’ he said, refusing to leave until she had answered.

‘ Hello? ’ She exaggerated the word for effect and then Steve was gone.

‘Katherine, is that you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, Katherine …’ Her mother broke down in tears. ‘Katherine, you’ve no idea …’ She could barely get the words out.

‘Mum, what’s wrong?’ Kitty sat up, panicked. ‘Is it Dad? Is everyone okay?’

‘Oh, Katherine,’ Mrs Logan sobbed. ‘I can’t take it any more. We are just so embarrassed down here. How could you do it? How could you do that to that poor man?’

Kitty sat back and prepared for the onslaught. It was then she noticed Glen’s plasma TV had disappeared too and, on further inspection, so had the clothes in his wardrobe.

CHAPTER THREE

A week later, after what felt like the longest seven days of her life, Kitty awoke in a sweat from a nightmare. She lay with the bedcovers in a tangled mess around her, and her heart beating wildly. She was afraid to look around the room, but as the nightmare faded from her memory she gained courage and sat up. She couldn’t breathe. She pushed open her bedroom window and drank in deep breaths of air, but the steam pouring from the vents of the twenty-four-hour dry-cleaners was inhaled directly into her lungs. She coughed, slammed the window shut and made her way to the fridge where she stood naked before the open door in an effort to cool down. She was not ready for tomorrow. She was nowhere near equipped for tomorrow at all.

‘Colin Maguire suffered irreparable damage to his reputation, his life was utterly altered and he was removed from his home and community as a result of the January tenth episode of Thirty Minutes . Katherine Logan confronted Mr Maguire outside his place of work and accused him of sexually abusing two teenage girls and fathering one child. Despite his repeated denials and an offer to take a paternity test, the programme was broadcast. Katherine Logan, Donal Smith and Paul Montgomery’s careless actions and unprofessional behaviour had a devastating impact on Mr Maguire’s life.’

Kitty sat in court alongside Thirty Minutes producer, Paul, and editor, Donal, as they listened to the lengthy terms of the four hundred thousand euro settlement for compensatory damage and aggravated damage. It took exactly seventeen minutes to read. With each word, each accusation, Kitty hated herself a little more. Near her, Colin Maguire and his family – his wife, his parents, his brothers and sisters – and everyone in his community who had come out to support him were staring at her, their eyes searing into her back. She felt their hatred, she felt their anger, but more than anything she felt Colin’s hurt. He would barely lift his head, his eyes cast downward, his chin firmly lodged on his chest. He looked like he hadn’t slept in a year.

The Thirty Minutes team and their legal advisors left the courthouse, swiftly pushing through the mill of photographers and cameras, some from their own network, which were shoved in Kitty’s face as though she were one of the criminals she regularly saw leaving this very building on the news. The men walked so quickly she could barely keep up but she didn’t want to run. Her sanity depended on surviving that moment. She did not want to put a foot wrong now after making so many mistakes to get them there. She kept her head down and then, thinking it made her look guilty, she lifted it again. Chin up, take your punishment, and walk , she repeated to herself, trying to keep her tears at bay. The flash bulbs dizzied her and she was forced to look down at the pavement again. The act of walking suddenly felt unnatural, like a mechanical movement that took great effort. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, trying to swing her left arm with her right foot and not the other way around. She focused on not smiling, but didn’t want to look upset. She knew these photos would be around for ever, she knew this footage would be played over and over, then would sit in the archives for reporters to root through. She knew because she did it every day. She didn’t want to look cold, but she didn’t want people to think immediately that she was guilty. People didn’t always listen to the narrative, they just looked at the pictures. She wanted to look innocent but sorry. That was it, contrite. She tried to maintain her pride and dignity when inside she felt she had neither left, and all the while people were shouting at her. Mr Maguire’s supporters had quickly exited the courtroom and spilled onto the street to give interviews to the press, and to heckle the Thirty Minutes team. She could hear them behind her hurling abuse and insults, and the journalists who were looking for a comment were trying to raise their voices above the tirades. The cars going by on Inns Quay slowed to watch the commotion, to see who was being surrounded by the media, literally being pressed by the press. Squashed and squeezed, drained and demoralised, everything being taken out of her, Kitty reflected that this was what she had done to Colin Maguire, as the reporters bumped against her, trying to keep up with her pace. Kitty kept on walking, one foot in front of the other; it was all she could do. Chin up, don’t smile, don’t cry, don’t fall, walk .