By the end of the night they had kissed.

By the end of the week they were a couple.

This was in late April, 2003.

I have no idea what they talked about as they walked along that street in Donnybrook. I do know that Conor, in an impulsive moment, reached up and took the red plastic flower from Laura’s hair and put it in his own. He woke up the next morning, still wearing all his clothes, with the red plastic flower clutched in his left hand. In fact, he kept it, hiding it in his wardrobe and telling only one other person about the flower and what it meant to him.

Laura was the girl on Richard Culhane’s arm on the last night of summer, 2004.

She was wearing her gold ballet pumps and a black hoodie spangled with silver stars. She wore the hoodie because she was cold and she had worn only a short blue summer dress to the club that night.

(Laura had worn this dress only once before, to her Ailesbury College Pre-Debs, and anyone who had seen her wearing it tended to tell anyone who hadn’t that they had missed out, big time.)

So Laura was wearing the black star-spangled hoodie, and beneath it you could see the end of her dress and her bare legs and the gold ballet pumps.

And Conor Harris found Richard Culhane in the crowd.

When the punches started and Conor fell to the ground and six to ten people surrounded him and started kicking, Laura backed away until she fell against a parked car. Later she said she thought she was about ten feet away from the fight.

At the first trial she testified that she thought she’d been shouting throughout the attack, shouting at the boys to stop, shouting at Richard to come away, shouting at Barry and Stephen to leave Conor alone.

She said she wasn’t able to identify any of the other boys who were involved in the kicking.

She said she saw blood spattering across the concrete path.

She said she saw Conor fall. His head struck the ground with a terrible wet smack.

She shouted to the boys to stop.

They seemed to be a long way away.

When they had stopped – and all of this, remember, happened in less than a minute, took maybe thirty seconds, fifty at the most – and Richard staggered back with a glassy look in his eyes and Barry Fox, after a pause of unspecified duration, knelt and touched Conor’s head to see if he was breathing, Laura said she remembered saying, ‘This can’t be happening.’ She said she repeated it and realized she was crying.

This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening.

Blood on the concrete and on Conor’s clothes. Blood on Richard’s trainers and on the Ben Sherman shirt he wore. Everyone out of breath and exhilarated.

A lot of blood on Conor’s face.

It may have been at this point that Stephen O’Brien said, ‘We fucking showed that little cunt.’