THE YOUNG woman with the bottle of water sitting in the corner of Court 19 in the area designated for gardaí was a curiosity; no garda appears in professional make-up with long hair flowing over her shoulders.
The clothes – a white top under a black, belted, knee-length coat – were anonymous but there was no doubting her status. Led in through a back entrance and out the same way, shielded from prying cameras outside and well buttressed by a slew of officers inside, this was an unusually well-protected witness.
The buzz around the room was intense. As if in response to jungle drums, a queue of more than 60 onlookers had formed at the door before 10am. One spectator whose Spanish flight had been cancelled was sanguine; this was a better than fine alternative.
Court 19, officially said to hold 170 (realistically more like 120), is the biggest court in the new complex, but was hardly up to the task of its first major spectacle. Onlookers left standing in the heaving crowd stared towards the Garda corner and debated whether the court might finally be about to see, in the flesh, the beauty therapist who’d had trysts in a dark-windowed Mercedes Jeep – designated “ML” in one text from her to him – with a married man whose wife would meet a violent death.
Some argued she looked a bit relaxed to be Ms Jean Treacy. But when she was called, that air of calm composure accompanied by an inscrutable Mona Lisa smile, was sustained all the way through, up to and including the probing of defence counsel Brendan Grehan.
She had sufficient composure to look directly at her former lover a number of times, looks that were not reciprocated. On previous days, Eamonn Lillis began by removing his coat and donning his reading glasses to peruse the evidence. Yesterday, he kept his coat on and his glasses off, but still kept a pen in hand, occasionally rubbing his temples, working his jaw, eyes firmly down.
In a consistently soft, calm and confident tone, Jean Treacy answered cringe-making questions relating to a time few people would ever want to hear aired in public, the first moves towards a full-blown affair.
Ironically, it was Celine Cawley who had introduced her husband to Treacy, for back massage. So Treacy knew he was married. After a couple of years, the “rapport” between them changed after he asked her out to the Jeep to see dog pictures on his iPod (they shared a liking for dogs), and she noticed his “particularly nice” hands.
It moved up a notch when at his next massage appointment, his focus changed from his bad back to his sore shoulders, which required him to turn over. Most people close their eyes at that point, she said, but he just kept “staring” at her.
Head to one side and with a helpful smile, she agreed with Brendan Grehan that at the time, she had “plans” that she was “somewhat jittery about”. (The court heard last week that she was engaged to be married the following June). She was attracted to Eamonn Lillis, yes. Hadn’t she told a colleague around August, he asked, “that she was attracted to him in a particular way? You used an expression . . . I’m not going to repeat it . . .”
She agreed she had “developed feelings” for Lillis. Had they fallen in love? “At the time, I thought I’d fallen in love but I realised it was more of an infatuation . . .”
The news of Celine Cawley’s death was broken to her at 6.40pm on the evening of the murder, when her then boss phoned her. The texts between them resumed on the following day when he wrote he would probably need a massage the following Friday. By then, she had gone on leave and her workplace called to cancel the appointment.
Brendan Grehan took the narrative a little further. “You found yourself in what you described as a nightmare. You were no longer able to work in the [Howth beauty salon]. You went through some bad months last year yourself?” She nodded.
The “bad months” included a call she made to Lillis around the middle of February – when there had been no contact since early January? She nodded.
“I had a good few drinks on me and wanted to get a sense of what happened. I couldn’t understand how I’d made such a bad character judgment. How could I have got it so wrong?”
When he told her his version of events on the morning of the murder, she said she had asked him “Why didn’t you just hold your hand up? He said he panicked. I said, ‘Why didn’t you just tell the truth, you’d look better for it?’ He said his solicitor told him not to say anything.” There were three meetings in all after that drink-fuelled call in February.
By St Patrick's Day, she had moved on to a new job. On May 26th , he sent her a Tiffany pendant with a diamond and a three-page letter, in wrapping paper bearing the words of Beyonce's Halo, tied with a white ribbon. She handed them straight to a garda.