he said the word.
I watched as the camera panned up to the top window. An older man in a white shirt stood with his back to the lens. Finbar walked into the room. The older man held him in his arms and they kissed. A few moments later, they moved out of shot.
Dom pressed the soft screen so hard where the older man had last been that the picture blurred. The film cut and zeroed in again on the large black door. It opened. Both of them stood just back from the threshold, talking. The older one had an overnight bag at his feet.
Dom's voice grated with sadness. 'Finbar had come out to us when he was seventeen. Then, after about a year, he was getting into drugs.'
He looked down. 'We tried to get him to rehab, but he just pushed us away. He took to disappearing for days on end. Eventually he told us he was moving in with a friend.'
My eyes hadn't left the screen. Whoever the older man was, Finbar was kissing him again.
'He wouldn't tell us who the friend was, even where he was living. Siobhan was out of her mind. She needed to know he wasn't killing himself.'
He was breathing heavily. 'We eventually found him.' He pressed the screen again. 'Here, in St Stephen's Green. We just wanted to keep contact, try and help him . . . Can you imagine how Siobhan felt? Seeing her son smacked up like that . . .'
He pulled at his blood-matted hair. 'Finbar finally said his friend was a businessman who came to the city a couple of times a month. Said he was in property development, a firm from London.' His eyes blazed. 'I wanted to see his face, this arsehole property developer from London who supplies young boys with drugs so he can . . . so he can . . .' He shook his head helplessly.
'You got Pete to film?'
'Yes. He said he was coming on Friday, for the weekend.'
'And who was it?'
'I don't know. That's the bizarre thing, Nick. I had his photograph, but even with all the resources at my disposal I couldn't get anyone to put a name to the face.'
He pressed pause. 'Nick, if I don't make it out of here, I want you at least to have seen his face. I don't know who he is, but I found out he's an immensely powerful man. Maybe you can trace him. I got started before, well, before . . .'
He bit at a scab on his lip. 'Siobhan's father made his fortune in the property boom. You saw our house? His wedding present to us. There's not much he doesn't know about Dublin property. As one line of enquiry, he got his guys to do some digging. The Land Registry showed the flat was owned by a legit UK company, but then there was all kinds of smoke and mirrors with offshore trusts and stuff in the Caymans, Panama, you name it. Everything was shielded behind nominees and God knows what else. They hit a brick wall.
'I had other irons in the fire. I talked to a contact at the Inland Revenue. He came back promptly and said a very strange thing. They said it was unwise to keep digging, it was a government matter. A government matter? What's the government got to do with offshore trusts and property companies?
'Then the wheels really started to come off. Moira sent us to Iraq, and I had to do everything by phone and email. We'd only been there a couple of days and I got word that the FCO had something for me. Remember when I thought they were going to give me an interview?
'I went to the compound. Basically, the shit hit the fan. I was told my enquiries in Dublin and Kabul had to stop. The whole drugs thing, off the agenda. Just like that. I told them they had no right to tell me what to do. Next thing I knew, those two Irish bastards were in the room. They told me to do as I was told or else.
'The following day I spoke to Siobhan and she said Finbar had gone walkabout again. She was contacting drug outreach programmes, hospitals. Nothing. He'd vanished into thin air.'
His voice trailed off. He was exhausted. It seemed to take everything he had just to hit play again.
I watched as Finbar and the property developer kissed once more, then the older man picked