Yes, they lost their friends: and this was probably the thing they found hardest to take.

So Stephen had only his parents to visit him in prison.

Barry had only his father.

Eileen and Brendan Harris were doorstepped by a reporter and asked how they felt about Laura’s visits to Richard in prison. They said nothing. But I think it just confirmed what they had been feeling all along: that they would receive no sympathy from anyone who was there on the night Conor died. The event had by then become so irreducibly complex, so resistant to straightforward analysis, that anyone who had actually been there when it happened found themselves hopelessly mired in ambiguity whenever they tried to reconstruct the night.

Richard was in prison for eleven months – his sentence was shortened for ‘good behaviour’. For the first three weeks he was kept on suicide watch. His shoes had no shoelaces, his prison-issue trousers had no belt.

The Harry’s Niteclub boys were kept in the minimum security wing. Richard had been terrified at the prospect of winding up in a cell with a pockmarked, strung-out junkie from Tallaght or the Liberties. When he realized that he would be allowed to spend much of each day in the prison rec. room, far from the cells where they kept the hardcore element, he thanked God.

He shared a cell with a young man named Micko who had used an unloaded sawn-off shotgun to rob an off-licence. When Micko’s sentence was over Richard shared a cell with a drug dealer named Buzz. It turned out that Buzz had sold weed to several of Richard’s friends.

Whenever she went to the prison Laura would queue with all the other visitors – all the teenage mothers with their buggies and prams – until she was admitted to a large room full of cheap tin tables, at one of which sat Richard Culhane in his olive-drab prison jumpsuit.

Here was Laura Haines, Ailesbury College girl, wearing her £200-make-up, her Abercrombie shirt with the collar turned up, her American Eagle sweatpants with the logo across the ass; here was Laura Haines, with her silver earrings and her pendant silver crucifix, her car keys in one hand and her mobile phone in the other, stepping into a room full of the smell of unwashed bodies, picking her way through the squalling children and the tattooed men until she found her way to Richard’s table.

And Richard? Richard knew he was in the last of the important buildings. There would be no more importance, ever, not for him.

Every morning the hero of the Brookfield SCT shuffled into the rec. room in his poorly fitting jumpsuit and stared at the television until it was time for some perfunctory exercise. The first time Laura visited him she was staggered by his faceful of stubble; she had never seen Richard with a beard before. He let it grow. There was, he thought, no point in trying to look good. Who that mattered, after all, would be seeing him now?