The club was a crammed and sweaty miscellany of mobile flesh. You had to wait at the bar for twenty minutes before anyone would serve you drinks. People were buying their pints in batches of two or three so they wouldn’t have to queue. The music made impossible any conversation but the most straightforward. Conor and Lisa and Caroline were shouting at each other. Eventually Lisa gave up and dragged Conor on to the dance floor.

At 10.30 pm, following a rowdy DART journey, the Dalkey gang arrived outside Harry’s. The bouncers sized them up and started selecting.

Richard didn’t make the cut.

‘Sorry, mate,’ the bouncers said. ‘Too drunk. No way.’

‘What the fuck, man?’ Richard said. ‘Come on. Do me a favour.’

‘No chance.’

The bouncers told Stephen and Barry and Laura and Clodagh and Dave that they could go inside. Richard’s face was flushed and his heavy shoulders worked.

‘Give me a break,’ he said. ‘I’ve only had a couple of cans, like.’

‘Yeah, right,’ the bouncers said. ‘Sorry. No can do.’

‘Fuck,’ Richard said.

For a moment the people behind Richard in the queue thought that there was going to be a fight. But Richard swore loudly and stepped away from the entrance to the club.

His friends went in without him.

It was not uncommon, in those days, for Richard to bribe his way into a nightclub. He would slip the bouncers a fifty and his ingress would be allowed. So why didn’t he try this on the night of 31 August?

Another mystery.

Richard, feeling tensely beleagured, stepped over two trails of drying urine and went to sit on a wooden bench on the path opposite Harry’s. On the ground there were flattened cigarette packets with the health warnings in Polish. The lads had left him out here on his own. Laura had left him out here on his own. There was a hard clot of outrage in the centre of his chest. He kicked at one of the cigarette packets. He took out his mobile and rang Stephen O’Brien, who didn’t answer.

Inside Laura said, ‘Poor Richard. Someone should go out to him.’

Laura, too, was very drunk. But she was better at concealing it.

‘We’ll get a table first,’ Stephen O’Brien said. ‘Hang on.’

From the dance floor Conor Harris watched as Laura followed Steve across the bar.

Richard stewed on the bench outside for half an hour. His friends had betrayed him: of that much he was certain. He expected it from Foxer and O’Brien but what the fuck did Laura think she was doing? He would never have gone inside without her. A painful throbbing began in Richard’s left temple. His complacency had rudely deserted him. The most beautiful girl in the club was his, of course; but she had gone inside without him. Richard felt a pang of the purest jealousy. For all he knew Laura could already have her tongue stuck halfway down the throat of some cunt from Merrion Academy.