I never heard anyone complain about this superior grin. Richard often smiled in just that way, usually when he thought no one was looking. People seemed to think that Richard Culhane deserved to feel superior. They seemed to think he was superior, in some forgivable way, in a way commensurate with his talents, his good looks, his popularity. His superiority made us love him all the more.

And Richard was good-looking. I never heard a girl say otherwise except in empty spite. The gel-spiked hair, the dense muscles in his chest, the lucid brown eyes. You saw him sitting in the café upstairs in the Quinn School of Business with one ankle propped on the opposite knee, wearing a blue-and-white striped Ben Sherman shirt with the collar turned up and a pair of grey O’Neills tracksuit bottoms, and you thought, That guy could fuck any girl in this room.

According to Barry Fox, who of the three Brookfield killers was the most inclined to gossip (before Conor’s death, at least), Richard would sometimes be thinking this too. I could fuck any girl in this room.

It was true, objectively true. None of the girls in the Quinn School café, none of the girls with their bouffant hair and silver iPods, none of the girls in their pink American Eagle hoodies and sheepskin Ugg boots, would have thought of turning Richard down if, by some miracle, the beam of his attention became focussed on them. He was the most beautiful boy they had ever seen.

In his presence they became girly and flicked their hair. They listened to what he said. They laughed at his jokes.

Men felt strange around him, too. Beauty like Richard’s leaves few people unmoved. In Brookfield he would be the object of the dreamy crushes of younger boys. Older men watched him closely when he was on the pitch.

It should have made him arrogant or obnoxious, but it didn’t. He was proud of his beauty, but he kept the pride at a kind of ironic distance, as though his beauty was something for which he wasn’t responsible. It gave him a sense of security, to know what kind of power he had and to decline the temptation to use it. Which is not to say that Richard didn’t have a lot of sex. He did. But he was choosy about girls. They needed to have a certain look, a certain mode of speech, a certain quality of aloofness or lack of interest, before Richard would begin to be attracted. He was drawn to girls who treated clothes and music and movies with the same astute and genial condescension that he did, who acted as though they were humouring their less-well-developed friends by sharing their enthusiasms. What Richard really looked for in a girl was depth. What he looked for was the urge to talk.

‘I like girls who talk, you know,’ he told me once at a party.

I was recognized in those days as an authority on feelings, especially when it came to girls. I doubt Richard would have made this remark to anyone else.