Richard spent most of his time in prison trying not to think about things. He tried not to think about, for example, the fact that Peter Culhane had cried when Richard was accepted to study at UCD. He tried not to think about what his parents might be doing during his sentence – though he already knew: they were hiring ever more expensive lawyers to sift through the evidence, trying to find out if there was a way to get Richard off the hook that he was already so plainly impaled upon. He tried not to think about who Laura might be seeing, who she might be talking to.

(She was seeing me. She was talking to me.)

Laura sat opposite Richard at his cheap tin table. Their conversations always went the same way.

‘How’re you doing?’ Laura would ask.

‘Alright. People keep trying to sell me drugs. Not the hard stuff. Just, like, weed and shit.’ Richard looked around. ‘Like, 90 per cent of the people in this room are doing drug deals right now.’

‘I know.’

‘So, have you heard anything about Foxer and O’Brien? How’re they doing?’

‘Okay, I think.’

(The boys, I should explain, were in three different prisons. Of their nine-month sentences, Barry Fox and Stephen O’Brien served five months each.)

‘Yeah,’ Richard said. ‘I bet they’re fine.’

By now, Richard had hated Barry and Stephen for a long time. And they had grown to hate him, because they blamed him for being the one who delivered the fatal kick and made them murderers, instead of just kids in a fight.

52

A month before the second trial began and ended, Eileen and Brendan Harris took a holiday. Brendan drove them down to Kinsale, County Cork, where he had booked a room in a large hotel on the busy sea-front. He had got the room at an out-of-season rate.

They drove in silence, with the radio off.

Most of the rooms in the large hotel were empty. On the way to the restaurant for dinner on their first evening they passed a disused conference room with a view of the bay. Sheeted tables gleamed in the half-darkness. Chairs were stacked in the dusty corners. Through the shaded picture window Brendan saw a tanker leave the bay.

The restaurant was operating at a reduced capacity. A waiter in a threadbare tuxedo told them that they could have the beef or they could have the fish, but everything else was off because the summer chef had left. They ordered the fish.

‘This is disappointing,’ Eileen said, meaning the food.

‘It’s alright,’ Brendan said. Food all tasted the same to him now.

Photographs of the Harrises had been appearing (or reappearing) in the papers: photos of them at Conor’s funeral, photos of them at Michael Feather’s press conferences, photos of them on the street outside their house. On the way down from Dublin Brendan had stopped for petrol and glimpsed in the garage’s service station a row of tabloids trumpeting some fresh reports about Richard Culhane. They kept using the same picture of Richard, the blurred one from his student card.