It’s the sound that I can never get out of my mind. Any time of day, or sleepless night, I’m apt to hear it. Soul-crushing, reverberating, the sharp thwack of a human head against a pavement at a speed at which they were never meant to meet.
Outside a coffee shop, sipping a cappuccino, that sound will echo in my head setting off a chain of chemical terror that leaves me wanting to flee down the street.
At the movie theatre, beginning, middle, or end, a noise in the film will bring it cascading back to the front of my mind where it will play over and again until I have no choice but to leave the cinema.
In bed at night, I say my prayers in quiet desperation – in thrall to the repetitiveness of the words more than the god to whom I call. And still that sound breaks through. The dull crack. It echoes relentlessly, as if trapped in a cave, desperate to escape.
Half a Clonazepam washed down with a strong Belgian beer dulls it, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve tried meditation, cognitive behaviour therapy, acupuncture, psychotherapy, aromatherapy, and every other type of therapy ever invented. They all worked a little, until they didn’t; each remedy promising a path towards relief, all just a mirage.
Today is young Milly’s inquest, the day I have been dreading. It will be me the cameras are chasing – in a way I could never have imagined. I’m going to be the one under interrogation this time, instead of asking the questions.
All my life, I wanted to be an investigative journalist, in hot pursuit of the bad guys, asking them hard questions, exposing their misdeeds to the public.
I grew up on the Cook Report and World in Action, famous old TV programmes that most people scarcely recall. But I remember, and my awe for those reporters, who seemed to have conquered all fear, never wavered. They would take on anyone. They were just as much at home hunting a dictator or a dodgy salesman, a government minister or a narcissistic conman, as if there was any difference between them.
I remember the first day I got to do it as we followed a fake preacher from his ‘church’ in one of those rambling industrial estates just off the Naas Road on the outskirts of Dublin. He’d been embezzling church funds, a story as old as time. Spotting him, we began our chase as he walked towards his BMW. He almost tripped over his robes as he tried to make an escape.
“Mr Armstrong, you owe the public an explanation.”
“No comment,” he said, trying to cover his face with a folded newspaper.
“You’ve stolen more than €420,000.”
“No comment.”
“Where is the money gone?”
“No comment,” he said one final time as he knocked the microphone away and slammed the door of the car.
I turned to the audience as his car moved away, my little moment, a well-rehearsed line to further ingratiate myself with the viewers.
“That was Darren Armstrong – a man normally of many words, but very few today.”
There were rules for when we ‘door-stepped’ somebody, set down on paper by our employer and their ever-cautious solicitors. It had to be the option of last resort, after every other alternative box had been ticked. A phone call to arrange an interview. Check. An email with a list of questions. Check. A typed letter through the front door. Check. Blah. A letter to their legal advisers. Check. More Blah. Another phone call, this time with a voice recorder at the ready. Blah and more blah.
Let’s not pretend we really wanted any of the above to succeed. A sit-down face-to-face interview would be great, no doubt. But who would ever agree to that, except for the truly sociopathic? As for the other end of the spectrum, a long dull statement from their lawyers or a publicity firm – it was hard to think of anything worse. Nothing killed a documentary more than extracts of some public relations screed that went a circuitous way of saying absolutely nothing.
Now, this is the bit we aren’t supposed to say. We like the ‘doorsteps’ because they add drama, and drama is our bread and butter, even as we try not to say that publicly. If you were to ask us during a panel discussion what it’s all about – we would tell you all about our ‘calling’, our vocation, our crusade to speak truth to power. But is that always the reality? Maybe in the beginning, perhaps I used to do it for the right reasons.
Let me take you back, eighteen months ago now. We had spent four months investigating an old-fashioned Ponzi scheme, one of those that you love to think you would never fall for. We had all the victims we needed. Among them were an elderly couple who’d lost €40,000 from their retirement fund, a desperate father in arrears on his mortgage hoping for a payday, and a single mum who had lost every cent of her paltry savings.
Better again, we had a man on the inside – the principal of the Ponzi scheme and his book-keeper having fallen out. That gave us access to years of bank and credit card statements – cruises in the Bahamas, a trip aboard the Orient Express, Hugo Boss suits and Italian handmade shoes, a Jaguar E-Pace and a gaudy Hublot watch, a mock-Georgian house with an ersatz pillared entrance on a golf course in Dublin’s commuter belt, all the grotesquery of a parvenu.
Normally, the biggest enemies in these documentaries are your own lawyers, but the evidence in this case was so compelling that even that didn’t seem like much of a challenge. We even got special permission to skip the routine parts of our lengthy ‘doorstep’ checklist knowing we only had one chance. Because any advance notice, any inkling that we were looking into this huckster, and he would’ve been in the wind. He had enough money to scarper and some of his investors were already starting to get impatient.
We were following him discreetly, trying to figure out the best place to confront him. There’s an art to this; you need an open area to ensure things don’t get violent. There needs to be somewhere for your cameraman to make himself inconspicuous. You have your own hidden camera but it’s better to have a back-up plan. You need a window of opportunity, fifteen to twenty seconds before they get to a door or their car. You have to maximise the potential for drama.
Every Wednesday, he would go to a less than reputable massage parlour at 2pm on the Liffey side of Palmerstown, frequented almost exclusively by men. It was always the same fifty-minute appointment to loosen out his lying bones and indulge in whatever unadvertised services might have been made available. He always parked up around in the back lot; maybe he thought it made him less conspicuous.
It was a routine we had observed carefully for weeks. It was perfect for us; we could get him coming out the door of the premises. We’d have nearly half a minute of walking for our interrogation, enough time for three or four quickfire questions. Where’s the money? Why did you do it? Do you have any remorse? The same old blather, questions not designed to get an answer.
He would storm over to his car, slam the door, drive away, and I would turn to the camera, ready to deliver my one-liner. At least that’s what was supposed to happen - f**king best laid plans, f**king famous last words.
It was the middle of May and one of those Irish days that didn’t know what to do with itself. One minute, the sun was warm on your back, the next minute the type of drizzle that left you half-soaked. A day of changing skies and double rainbows.
We were in position in the car park at about midday. A newsroom colleague would track the fraudster from his office three miles away. Around half twelve or so, he went out to get a sandwich and a takeaway coffee from a nearby deli. Same as he always did. A little after half one, he came out, got in his car. Same as he always did. He turned left out onto the boulevard heading in our direction. Same as he always did.
People would ask me if I got nervous doing this work. What a dumb question. Of course you got nervous, that was the whole point. That tingling in your fingers, the elevated heart rate, the surge of adrenalin, that overwhelming sense of something big about to happen, the hyperrealism of those moments. Back then, I loved to feel nervous. I just hadn’t properly understood the question. I never knew bad nerves; thought they were just for broken people. Now I know better.
I haven’t been able to work in months now. The first few months I continued on as an investigative journalist; pretending nothing had changed, telling myself it wasn’t my fault. But it ground me down, and then it ground me down some more. The type of journalism I had been doing was a high wire and for years I’d managed it without ever having to look down. Suddenly, I couldn’t take my eyes off of the ground.
My bosses suggested I take a break. I could do some behind-the-scenes research until things settled down. But I couldn’t do that either. I’d get a week through a project and become consumed with the idea I had made a terrible mistake. And sometimes I had, and sometimes I hadn’t. The simplest thing could set off the panic, a misspelt word, a mis-coded formula in Excel, an error in transcription, everything a catastrophe. I began to sense my colleagues looking at me differently, with eyes full of an unedifying pity that crushed whatever soul I had left. I knew my old career was finished when my editor called me to an office. “Maybe head off to a beach for four or five weeks,” he said, his awkwardness palpable, “get your head back together.”
Eventually, they found me a job in archives, retrieving old footage for use by other better-calibrated reporters. The first day, I remember thinking. “Maybe this will work.” The quietness, the dim lights, the rows of tapes gathering dust, it seemed almost soothing like a quiet history museum. About the worst mistake you could make was pulling out the wrong item; it might cost somebody a half an hour of their time. It would, in ordinary times, be about the most stress-free job you could imagine. But anxiety always finds a way.
Even now, I find it hard to put those moments from the car park into words but maybe it’s my only route from this madness. About ten minutes before 2pm, the fraudster’s Jaguar rolled up. He parked in the same spot he always did; the ability of people to form quick habits is extraordinary. He let down the window of the car, you could hear the faintest hum of country and western music. He sat there, the sun beating down now. Our car was hot, smelled exactly like two men had been sitting in it for the last few hours.
With a couple of minutes to go, we saw the window go up on his Jag. Out he came, round the corner, into the massage parlour. We had exactly fifty minutes to work with. Me and the cameraman joked like schoolboys about what he was doing in there. In another TV station, we might have tried to expose that too. But we took ourselves seriously, we were sober, earnest broadcasters. The sex angle just didn’t feel like it would add anything to the story; might make it a little tawdry for the more refined tastes of our viewers.
Did the fifty minutes pass slowly, or did it pass quick? I can’t say for sure, which makes me think it must have been fast. At about 2.40pm, we got ready for action. We’d checked my hidden camera; and everything else that needed to be checked. Batteries, tapes, microphones, whether my clothes and hair looked all right.
The conman saw me almost immediately as he came out of the massage parlour. He nodded to me as if I might be an acquaintance, a familiar face that he could not quite place out of context. He wasn’t embarrassed, or anything like that. He didn’t know what embarrassment was.
“Mr Callaghan,” I said, my voice carefully inflected for the microphone. “My name is Mark Egan and I work with Tele4; I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions.”
He took it in his stride, purposefully ignoring me, marching onwards to his car.
“Mr Callaghan, we are investigating your gold mining investment vehicle and the very significant losses of some of your clients.”
He said nothing, not even a ‘no comment’.
“Mr Callaghan, have you anything to say to your clients? We’ve spoken to several with some having lost up to €40,000 of their retirement fund or life savings.”
Still not a word.
By now, we were at his car, he jumped inside, got it running. He reversed out of his space, forcing my cameraman to hop out of the way. I made a half-effort to approach the car again, wary of getting my foot run over.
“Mr Callaghan, Mr Callaghan.”
He accelerated so quickly that the tyres of his car squealed. I didn’t even get to say, “Watch out,” before a seven-year-old girl stepped out of a gap between two parked cars.
And then, the sharp thwack, a sound no one should ever hear. The fragility of Milly’s head meeting the unyielding concrete. Hard. Hard enough to send that child to hospital with a fractured skull. Hard enough to cause an irreparable bleed on her brain. Hard enough to see her end up in the Angel’s Cemetery in Glasnevin. That excruciating sound. Always reverberating. It never stops.
I’m on way to the old Coroner’s Court on Store Street. In days long gone, I was here to report, but never to be reported upon. Cameras flash as photographers jockey for position. A cameraman films me for that evening’s TV bulletin. My solicitor has given me a long script of prepared answers to give – a careful balance of trying not to play the victim while stressing the importance of the work I was doing and the profound impact the accident had upon me.
I wonder how I will get through the day, hoping the Clonazepam I took will numb me just enough, but not too much. Can I be trusted to stick to the scripted answers my lawyer has given me? Will this gnawing urge to run away simply overwhelm me? The photographers continue to jostle one another as I walk along Amiens Street.
The path ahead narrows, half of it taken up by empty beer kegs. I step out onto the road to avoid them. Cars are passing quickly. I hesitate before stepping back up onto the pavement. One more step. In the next moment, I am airborne. Then comes that sound, one last time, the haunting crack of fragility meeting infragility. Then. No sound. Mercifully. No sound at all.
09/13/2024
10:20:15 AM