During the initial stages of the investigation, the guards were keen to establish whether any of the boys had taken drugs on the night of 31 August. Everyone knew that Stephen O’Brien had taken, in the previous few months, to smoking the occasional spliff – ‘You’d fucking have to, going out with Clodagh Finnegan,’ as Laura put it. But counsel for the prosecution established to the court’s satisfaction that none of the boys were stoned or stoked or mashed or high when they set out for Harry’s Niteclub. Of course, by the time they were arrested, it was too late to do bloodwork on Richard, Stephen or Barry. Several newspapers opined that it would be unusual if the boys – including Conor – had not been on cocaine or ecstasy when the fight broke out, the consumption of illegal narcotics being in the nature of the youth of today. But Richard and Barry and Stephen and Laura all swore that they hadn’t touched anything stronger than booze that night. I believe them. Richard and Laura were reflexively puritanical about drugs. That this didn’t stop them getting shitfaced on a weekly basis is just one more contradictory aspect of their characters, just one more thing I find I can’t explain.

At 6.10 pm Clodagh Finnegan arrived at Stephen O’Brien’s house, and she and Laura disappeared upstairs to get ready. The boys could hear squeals and giggles from the bathroom. At one point Laura came downstairs to the living room, wrapped in nothing but a purple towel, to find the charger for her mobile phone. When she left Barry Fox told Richard that he was a lucky bastard.

And Richard felt like a lucky bastard, on this last evening of his real, untroubled life. He experienced the kind of desultory composure that came with knowing that, whatever happened that evening, he would be somewhere near its heart, monitoring, recording, cajoling. Laura was part of this, too. She would be – of this Richard was scornfully certain – the most beautiful girl in the club, the girl that everyone wanted to fuck. This kind of pride is not a complicated feeling, but it is a profound one: the pride of sexual possession.

Between 6.00 pm and 7.30 pm (when the girls were ready to leave), Richard, Stephen and Barry drank five cans of cider each. Before they left, everyone necked a double-shot of Bailey’s, a bottle of which was at that time the sole occupant of the O’Briens’ living-room liquor cabinet.

Richard leaned into Laura’s ear and told her in a whisper that her dress was the hottest thing he’d ever seen her wear.

‘Hotter than my Debs dress?’ she asked.

‘Just a bit,’ Richard said.

Richard had been disappointed by Laura’s Debs dress. It had been a white gown tricked out in lacy frills. To Richard’s consternation (even though he and Laura had never even kissed when he took her to her Debs), the dress concealed Laura’s cleavage.

The gang prepared to leave the house.