‘I think everything’s going to be alright,’ he said when they had finished.

‘Of course it will,’ Katherine said, blinking.

The Culhanes gave money to charity and they donated their old clothes to the Vincent de Paul. They had tea in the Westbury every Christmas Eve. They observed, in a limited way, the Lenten fast. They went to the theatre (usually the Gate, seldom the Abbey) once a month. They drank in moderation. They paid a Polish maid to clean the house once a week.

By the time he built the swimming pool in the back garden Peter was earning one hundred and eighty thousand a year. Richard’s school fees were eight thousand a year. Because he and Katherine had inherited their house, they never had to pay a mortgage.

Most marriages eventually look like a mistake. The Culhanes’ was no exception. By the time Richard was sixteen Peter and Katherine were sleeping in separate bedrooms. It was generally supposed that Peter was having an affair but I never saw any evidence of this. Peter played a lot of golf in places like Druid’s Glen and Mount Juliet and the K Club. His handicap was a nine, I believe. Two of the people he played golf with were Stephen O’Brien’s father and Conor Harris’s father. Before an important game – on Captain’s Day, for example – Peter would take one of Katherine’s prescription tranquillizers from their shelf in the bathroom cupboard. Before an important rugby match – if Brookfield were playing, or Ireland – Peter would swallow two capsules of St John’s Wort, to calm himself down.

When Richard filled out his CAO form in February 2002 the second course he listed was Arts at UCD. The plan was that if Richard’s Leaving Cert. results weren’t up to standard, he could take Economics and Maths as part of his Arts degree and go into a Master’s in Business from there. The first course he listed on his CAO form was Business Accounting. This was run by the UCD Commerce faculty, which was, and still is, based in the Quinn School of Business on the Belfield campus of UCD, in an enormous white-concrete-and-glass building that looks like a grounded ocean liner.

Richard got 540 points in his Leaving Cert. It was one of the highest results in the year. At the Brookfield graduation ceremony that year he was given a medal for outstanding acheivement in Chemistry. In September 2002 Richard enrolled at the Quinn School of Business.

Both Barry Fox and Stephen O’Brien also went to UCD. Barry Fox was in the Quinn School, doing Management. Stephen O’Brien did Economics and Maths as part of his Arts degree. Stephen’s minor subject was Psychology. ‘All the fit birds do psychology,’ he would observe as he sat in the Quinn School café. ‘Look at her, man. I’d lash it into her.’

In the summer after he left school Richard got a job as an office boy at the company offices of a large firm of software manufacturers. Stephen O’Brien’s father got him the interview, which was described as ‘just a formality’.