There had already been an incident of cardiac arrhythmia in the ambulance. The paramedics had shocked him with the paddles, and he had rallied. A shaky optimism prevailed, for a while. But. But. But.

It wasn’t Eileen Harris or Brendan Harris who identified Conor’s body. They found they weren’t able. Conor’s brother had to do it.

I had to do it.

They had him in a basement room, laid out on a trolley with the sidebars folded down. My baby brother, I thought. Because they never stop being babies, do they? Younger siblings, I mean. They’re babies to someone till the day they die. And that someone, in Conor’s case, was me. After our parents were gone, I would have still been around to look after him. I would still have been, in some sense or other, in loco parentis. But now it wasn’t going to work that way.

The room was cold, of course. They refrigerate the dead, to stop them rotting. There was the chilly, disinfected smell of hospitals, a seminal thickness in the settled air. I stood beside the trolley and said, ‘Yes, that’s him. That’s my brother.’

‘Conor?’ said the nurse with the clipboard, and made a note.

I nodded. I felt very capable, very cool. I looked at Conor’s head and seemed to see a small concavity, a bluish dent above the closed right eye. He looked handsome in the blank luminescence.

Then I went outside and told my parents that the boy on the trolley was Conor and that he was dead.

For several months I didn’t sleep. Instead there was a kind of waking coma, a visionary trance in which I saw repeated over and over the same silent drama: Conor, dying. I didn’t really talk to my parents, which I know caused them still greater anxiety and pain. I went to the funeral and I went to the trial and I told Father Connelly to fuck off when he called to our door, but during all of this I was a ghost, as much of a ghost as Richard seemed to be, mouthing the usual pleases and thank yous but absent, really, hopelessly involved in some prior trauma, so that everything I did seemed belated, superfluous, even cruel – cruel to Conor, I mean, who could no longer do even the simplest thing.

Eventually I came partway back, and told my parents to take the holiday in Kinsale. I thought it might do them good to get away from a house which had been so palpably diminished in scope and integrity by Conor’s loss. While they were gone I sat in Conor’s room – now a guestroom, and efficiently anonymous. I sat on Conor’s bed (the same bed, the bed he had slept in and masturbated in and perhaps even fucked Laura Haines in) and tried to understand what had happened.

I haven’t – it will have become clear – been entirely honest in preparing this account. I’ve left myself out, because I had to. But I was there all along, for a great deal of the incidental stuff. Where the inconsequential sections are concerned, I can vouch for the truth of what I say. I can vouch for what Laura Haines looked like as she ate an apple outside Simmonscourt Pavilion in May of 2003. I can vouch for what Pat Kilroy said at Conor’s funeral. I can vouch for what Conor looked like in the morgue.