That was the last time I saw the Culhanes. But I often think of them out there in the west, safe in their big white house on Inishfall. How do they spend their days? What do they talk about? What does Richard say to his mother when he runs into her in the kitchen, late at night? Do they talk about injustice? Do they talk about money and power? Do they talk about death?

There is no way of knowing these things. We are, each of us, alone with our guesses. I’ve never heard anyone talk about this: about what life must be like for the Culhanes on Inishfall. Safer just to leave them be, we tell each other. Best to let them get on with their lives. What this means, of course, is that we want to be left alone, we want to get on with our lives, however ravaged and empty they may be. The Culhanes, and everything that happened to them, have taken up too much of our thoughts already. They have haunted us enough, these usurpers of our time, our love.

I’d like to pay a visit, some time soon, to Inishfall, not to talk to the Culhanes but simply to see the big white house first-hand, to listen to the sea and smell the rotting fish from the crab-traps and rockpools on the nearby beach. I think it might teach me something. I think it might offer me some answers to the questions I’ve been asking.

Our knowledge of events – even of those events that affect us most intimately – is partial. We content ourselves with guesswork. And that is what I have had to do, in composing this account: content myself with guesswork.

Although I knew most of the other people involved in the incident more or less well, I hardly knew Richard Culhane. We were at university together, but our classes were huge – over four hundred people – and until the events of this story, I knew him mostly by reputation. Richard seldom attended lectures but you could see him often, alone on the playing fields at evening, redfaced and stocky, practising his kicks. He seemed mysterious to me then and he seems mysterious to me now. During the trials he was the only one who kept silent, who sat with his back straight, facing the wall a few feet in front of him, and who never moved, never stood to offer an apology, never broke down and confessed. I think a visit to the big white house might teach me something about his stoicism, about his calm in the midst of collapse. Then again, I might learn nothing. I’ve become sanguine about the possibility of genuine knowledge. The world, when I consult it, returns only the hard glass of the mirror that is myself. I wonder if it is the same for Richard and his parents, if they ask the world for meaning only to be scorned, rebuffed; if they find themselves in the dark, as we do, still, now that everything is done.