Richard was very drunk. ‘I like to know they take the whole relationship seriously, yeah?’ he said. ‘You have to talk about things. It’s fucking crucial.’ He leaned close to my face. ‘My old pair,’ he said in disgust. ‘My old pair never talk. And that’s the whole fucking problem. You know what I mean?’

Richard was always the centre of attention, wherever he went. But conversely, Richard seldom went anywhere that a good-looking schools rugby player wouldn’t be the centre of attention. He stuck around college, or Eddie Rocket’s in Donnybrook, or Brookfield, or the houses of his friends.

Richard’s world was small. He liked it that way.

Here he is in the fifth-year class photo, with an angry red pimple on his chin. He’s still the most handsome boy in his class of thirty. He’s standing at the centre of the group, holding the Leinster Senior Cup trophy in front of him like a proud father with his firstborn.

People were always surprised that Richard did well at school, but he did. He got straight As in chemistry and biology. ‘Richard was a pleasure to have in the class,’ Mr Fogarty, the fat biology teacher, said to one of the papers. ‘He was attentive, respectful and intelligent. I don’t understand how this terrible thing could have happened. I still don’t believe Richard could have had anything to do with it.’

Richard was a health freak. He worked hard in school. He made and drank a fruit smoothie with protein powder every morning and he always paid attention in class. Once some members of the sixth-year biology class, Barry Fox among them, stole a small quantity of ether from the school laboratory and tried to get high from the fumes in the wooded laneway that ran alongside the school. Richard was the one who found them. He smacked Barry Fox on the side of the head. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he shouted. ‘Would you cop the fuck on to yourselves, for fuck’s sake. This is no way to fucking behave.’

Barry said afterward, ‘He actually scared me, like. He had this intensity in his eyes, like he was having a major fit or something. He really cared, you know? That we’d, like, betrayed the ethos of the school, or whatever. He was always loyal like that, you know. There was a line you didn’t cross. It had something to do with respect. You respected the school, as far as Richard was concerned.’

We were all in love with Richard Culhane, I think. This is one of the things that made it so painful when we found out he’d helped to kill Conor.

8

The second thing that made the boys different from any other group of rich young men was that they were rich in a country that didn’t know what to do about wealth. We weren’t used to it, culturally speaking. And this causes problems. When you have a privileged class acting, as privileged classes will, as though their privilege were the most natural thing in the world, in a country where privilege still has the ring of the unnatural, of the undeserved, you have problems.