People had begun sending hate mail to the house in Sandycove. There had even been death threats, which made Richard angry. Didn’t these people understand? It had been an accident. Nobody had planned Conor’s death. It was just a stupid mistake.

Berlin, Helsinki, Moscow.

Richard watched a young couple with their two young children. The kids were sitting on a baggage trolley and their father was pushing them along. Richard wondered where they were going.

‘Mum!’ one of the boys kept shouting happily. ‘Mum!’

Richard looked up at the Departures board.

There was only the long drive back to the house. That was all there would ever be.

He went back outside to pay for his long-term parking.

50

On the first morning of their trial for manslaughter and violent disorder, the boys arrived early, wearing black suits that their parents had bought them for the occasion. ‘It’s like the opposite of a Debs,’ Stephen O’Brien said as they waited in the Four Courts vestibule with their legal team.

‘BAD DAY IN BLACKROCK’, said a headline on that first morning. Every front page proffered a brief recap: the kicks, the ambulance, the arrests, the schools.

The day was brightly cloudless and the early cold had receded from the glare of the sun. Across the cobblestones tight-lipped, sombre men hurried with dark leather briefcases.

Richard wondered why police stations and courts – buildings in which so many extreme and complicated emotions were endured – were always so unbeautiful, why they were so dirty, so wearily drab. But perhaps things were meant to be this way; perhaps our lowest feelings deserved no better than these empty rooms with their institutional paint and standard-issue furniture. Nothing, after all, is more boringly institutional, more cheaply standard-issue, than suffering.

They entered the court with their heads down. Cameras were forbidden inside the chamber proper, but as the boys passed over the threshold they provoked a seizure of clicks and flashes and whirrs.

In the gallery were four blonde girls with swept-back hair and tangerine make-up. They waved and called, ‘Hi, Richard!’ Richard didn’t recognize them. Once, girls had called his name from the sidelines of a rugby pitch. He had always known their names – through friends, through girlfriends, through collaborative school musicals. The girls on the sidelines had always been part of his world.

(These four girls had taken the morning off school and come to the first day of the trial to see Richard, because they thought he was ‘gorgeous’. That evening their parents forbade them from going to the trial again.)

The three boys sat at the front of the court, at the same table as Gerald Clinch and Peter Mason. Stephen O’Brien had heard that if you spent your days in court writing things down, then people would think you were actively working to prove your own innocence. So he spent the whole trial scribbling on a refill pad. Once, Richard managed to get a look at one of Stephen’s pages. It said Stephen O’Brien Stephen O’Brien Stephen O’Brien over and over again in the same blocky script.