A whole world died with Conor. We just haven’t realized it yet.

Of course, the boys themselves weren’t rich. They had rich parents, which isn’t quite the same thing. The children of the rich, or so it seems, are free from anxieties about money. This seems to do something fundamental to their character.

Deep down, I think, the rich are uneasy about the deal they make with money. The deal is this: in exchange for good behaviour – in exchange for adhering without apparent effort to the codes and values of your class – you get to keep your money. Break the rules, and money is what you lose. It might be the last thing you lose, but it will always be the most important. This is why they go on, so many of them, amassing money. Why all their lives are spent amassing money.

We didn’t invent money. Money invented us.

Peter Culhane made his deal with money early on. Right out of college he became an accountant for a large multinational firm of auditors and consultants. He was doing a more prestigious and remunerative version of this job when his son killed Conor Harris in August of 2004.

There were other aspects to Peter’s deal. In 1976 he married Katherine Healy, his best friend’s sister. Katherine wanted a registry-office wedding, but Peter said no. They talked about Katherine keeping her maiden name. The compromise they settled on was that Katherine’s bank correspondence would be addressed to Katherine Healy-Culhane.

Peter was from what you call a lower-middle class background. His parents were primary school teachers who lived in Clonskeagh. This means that Peter Culhane wasn’t born rich. His parents, Peter perceived as an adolescent, had never made any kind of deal with money. Unlike his son, Peter did have anxieties about what he earned. It seemed to do something fundamental to his character.

He studied Accounting at UCD. In those days you didn’t do a Master’s. From university – with the help of a lecturer who had studied at Brookfield – Peter was hired by the first of three multinationals to do, first, tax work, and later, auditing. The house in Sandycove had been in Katherine’s family since the 1950s, and when Katherine’s mother died (her father had died of leukemia before she was born), Peter and Katherine left their flat in Ballsbridge and moved to Sandycove. Katherine, six months pregnant with Richard, supervised the removal men while Peter was at work.

Katherine’s family were richer than Peter’s. They had made their money selling fish and dry goods. Katherine’s brother Frank owned and operated a salmon-and-prawn processing plant on the north quays.

A month before Richard was born Peter drove up to Brookfield College in Blackrock and had a talk with the principal. Of course any old boy was welcome to visit. Of course Peter’s son was guaranteed a place. With a flourish the principal (who, by the time of the events of my story, had long since retired) added the unborn Richard Culhane’s name to the list of future entrants to the college. Peter came home and took his heavily pregnant wife into the bedroom and made love to her.