Barry Fox took the proceedings personally, and often leaned across to ask Gerald Clinch or Peter Mason what was going to happen next. His heavy shoulders rose and fell with the tidal dramas of the trial.

Richard said nothing. He hardly moved. He sat and looked at the wall directly in front of him. This had the effect of making him seem deeply and unalterably alone.

The Harrises were in court every day. Every day they struggled through the throng of agitated newsmen and took their seats in the gallery – two padded school chairs in the front row, preserved every morning with squares of folded cardboard marked HARRIS. I never found out who put these markers there. But everyone respected them. Everyone in the gallery stood aside to let the Harrises wriggle by.

By this stage the Harrises had turned Conor’s room into a guest bedroom. But there were never any guests to stay in it. For some weeks their lives revolved around the trial. They were earnest publicists for their own bereavement. They gave interviews and made statements. They wanted to make sure that people knew how they felt.

Every morning and afternoon, Eileen and Brendan Harris shuffled past Peter and Katherine Culhane without speaking.

Outside the court, for almost every day of the trial, was a gaggle of protesters and onlookers, gawkers and well-wishers, the curious and the prurient. These were the people who appeared on television vox pops, who provided ‘colour’ for newspapers and radio reports. Among them, on several occasions, was Father Connelly, in clerical vesture. He was keen to stress that God loved all of His children equally, that Richard and Barry and Stephen were no less favoured by the Almighty than Conor Harris had been.

Some people found this point of view distinctly odd.

Jury selection for the Harry’s Niteclub trial had taken slightly longer than was usual, because of the perceived ‘high profile’ of the case. But twelve men and women had been agreed upon, selected for their objectivity, their poise. I scrutinized them as they squirmed and mumbled in their steep enclosure. According to the newspapers, only two of them were from Dublin. I applauded this. Other people did not. Other people felt that a certain amount of provincial incomprehension would be inevitable when these country folk were confronted with a case so deeply bound up with a Dublin way of life – with a southside way of life, a private-school philosophy, a ruling-class worldview. But there was nothing anyone could do about this now.

The trial judge was a different story. Mr Justice Brendan Harrington was a private-school boy, a former rugby hooker and King’s Inns graduate, a southside native and father of two exemplary St Anne’s girls, a man who owned a Rover and a jeep and who lived in a house with a wine cellar and a heated jacuzzi. He sat on the bench and regarded the courtroom with saturnine contempt. Although trial judges were discouraged from fraternizing with legal counsel under any circumstances, Brendan Harrington was familiar with the lives and bright careers of Peter Mason and Gerald Clinch. He had been to school with one of them, and he had been to university with both.