Brendan and Eileen had stopped reading the newspapers.

After dinner they took a walk along the seafront. Brendan, who had been to Kinsale before, had expected the little marina to be full of yachts and sailboats. But the place was empty.

‘They’ve all left,’ he said to Eileen.

‘It’s freezing,’ Eileen said.

They went to bed. Eileen read a book – a paperback romance – while Brendan flicked through channels on the television. One channel piped in the soundless feed from a security camera stationed at the end of the marina. Brendan left this on and stared at it: the black water, the empty dock.

He lay awake beside Eileen, who was also lying awake, until the alarm went off and they could legitimately begin another day.

53

People still think a deal went down between Gerald Clinch and Brendan Harrington. ‘That’s the way this country works,’ people will tell you. ‘The old boys’ network. Clinch goes up to his old school pal and says, ‘Sure these lads are our kind of people, Mr Justice. They went to Brookfield. You know that boy’s death couldn’t have been their fault. We’ll do a deal. Let them off the hook and I’ll make your life a little bit easier.’

I think this is a naive interpretation.

Brookfield boys do not do ‘deals’. They don’t talk out loud about what they want, least of all to each other. They don’t promise each other favours in exchange for a good turn here or there. That isn’t how it happens. It happens in silence. It happens without conscious effort. It happens because that is how it has always happened. We’ll sort this out.

But the old boys’ network, if that’s what you want to call it, can only do so much. It cannot, for example, organize the forgiveness of the community. It cannot absolve you of your sins. It cannot give you back the life you’ve lost.

Barry Fox’s sentence was shortened on appeal. So was Stephen O’Brien’s. Richard served eleven months. And then there was the question of the manslaughter trial.

In the period that interposed itself between the convictions for violent disorder and the manslaughter trial, a new state pathologist took up his post. The Director of Public Prosecutions, for reasons that have never become entirely clear, asked him to provide a new report on the post-mortem data assembled after Conor’s death.

In this new report the state pathologist opined that Conor’s injuries were ‘relatively minor’, and that his death had probably occurred as a result of ‘injuries and alcohol’.

Richard’s manslaughter trial was stillborn. The criminal proceedings never made it into court. The DPP entered a nolle prosequi and the trial judge (a Gonzaga boy) formally declared the case abandoned.

This was the last time I saw the Culhanes, marooned on the steps of the Four Courts, their exit barred by the ranks of journalists and TV cameras. Richard had just been released from prison. It was a morning in early autumn: the sweep and crash of crisping leaves, the lingering filigree of fine frost on garden grass. Was Laura hanging around that day, I wonder? I didn’t see her there. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she had come out to watch Richard make his exit from the public sphere.