One Hundred Names (Special Edition)

matter.’
    ‘No, please, please tell me what I am because I’ve only been hearing it on every single news station, reading it on internet sites and graffitied
on my own front door
for the last week, and I’d really like to know what my best friend thinks of me because that would just be the icing on the cake,’ she yelled.
    He sighed and looked away.
    There was a long silence.
    ‘How am I supposed to fix this, Steve?’ she finally asked. ‘What do I do to make you and the rest of the world not hate me?’
    ‘Have you spoken to the guy?’
    ‘Colin Maguire? No way. We’re about to begin a court case. If I go anywhere near him I’ll get into even more trouble. We made an apology to him at the start of
Thirty Minutes
, when it was discovered he wasn’t the father. We gave it priority to the show.’
    ‘Do you think that will make him feel better?’
    She shrugged.
    ‘Kitty, if you did to me what you did to him, I would do a lot worse than they’ve done to your door. I would want to kill you,’ he said sternly.
    Kitty’s eyes widened. ‘Steve, don’t scare me like that.’
    ‘This is what you’re not understanding, Kitty. This is not about your career. Or your good name. This is not about
you.
This is about
him
.’
    ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said, struggling. ‘Maybe if I can explain what happened … The two women were so credible, Steve. Their stories matched up, the dates, the times, everything was so … real. Believe me, I followed it up over and over. I didn’t just run with it straight off. It took me
six months
. The producer was behind me, the editor, I wasn’t the only person who did this. And it wasn’t just about him. Did you even see it? It was about the number of paedophiles and sex offenders in Ireland who occupy roles in schools and other jobs with direct contact to children who have been reported and who have been charged with the crime of abusing students in their care.’
    ‘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