Humidity and procedures take a toll

Humidity, densely packed humanity, swathes of technical data and a parade of senior gardaí required to testify that the telephone records of Joe O'Reilly, Derek Quaerney, the man he claimed to have been with that morning in Broadstone, and Nikki Pelley, with whom he admitted to having an affair, were properly obtained, were taking their toll on courtroom number 2 yesterday.

Technical expert Oliver Farrell was back on the stand, explaining how height, tilt, topography and population can determine the reach of a transmitter. A bored sightseer wondered volubly how "the wigs can stand that heat" but failed to move from his prized patch of standing room.

"Is this all very high tech stuff?", asked defence counsel, Patrick Gageby, springing up to cross-examine. "What?" asked Mr Farrell. "The evidence you gave," said counsel. "It depends on the people taking in the information," said Mr Farrell evenly.

Karim Ben Abdullah, a technical consultant with O2 Ireland, was emphatic when asked if it was possible for someone in Broadstone to use a signal from cell zero on Murphy's Quarry. "It's impossible," he replied in French-accented English.

By now, even Joe O'Reilly, sharp and vigilant in his black suit and white shirt, still whipping off notes for his lawyer in a managerial way, was looking less than ebullient, black rings developing around his eyes.

The court became still and silent when Det Garda Joanne O'Sullivan began to detail the communications to and from Joe O'Reilly's mobile phone on the day his wife died, from his first call of the day at 5.25am to the last call referred to in court at 8.24pm that evening. "It was not the final communication of the day," she said but it was as much as the court was going to hear.

The calls and texts tell of a day split sharply in two.

From 5.45am to just after noon, the lines are dominated by communications to and from the phones of Nikki Pelley - including three calls totalling over 57 minutes, initiated between 5.45 and 8.12am - and to and from Derek Quaerney.

Up to one o'clock that day, Det O'Sullivan detailed nine communications between the phones of O'Reilly and Pelley, and five between the phones of O'Reilly and Quaerney.

In the afternoon, by contrast, with just a handful of short breaks, texts and calls to and from family - several received from Rose Callaly - and friends were relentless. Calls to Rachel's own mobile, to her best friend, her old workplace in Donnybrook, to her birth brother Thomas, to his own sister Ann, to and from a succession of friends, bear witness to a frenetic afternoon and evening.

By 20.24 that evening, the time of the last call detailed to the court - from Rose Callaly, unanswered - there had been 18 communications with phones belonging to Nikki Pelley and seven with the mobile phone of Derek Quaerney.