Barry walked into the woods carrying the letter that purported to be from his mother and didn’t come back for an hour. By this time, the priory authorities had alerted the school authorities. Mr Fogarty, the fat biology teacher (who once interrupted a dissection class to point out the window and say in a fluty, high-pitched voice, ‘Look! There’s a little bird with a worm in its mouth!’), began to organize a search party.

The search party of Brookfield teachers and students was just setting out from the door of the priory when someone spotted Barry emerging from the woods. He no longer seemed to have the letter in his hand. He walked towards the group slowly, without looking up. Nearer the building, his school shoes crunched in the deep gravel.

When they asked him what he’d been doing, he said, ‘I just felt like taking a walk.’

What strikes me as odd about this story isn’t that no one apologized to Barry for writing a letter that was supposed to be from his dead mother. What strikes me as odd is that nobody in charge during the retreat seemed to know anything about what the letter contained.

Barry said he never asked his father about the letter. His father never mentioned it.

This suggests another possibility for the source of the letter.

It might have been written by another Brookfield boy.

Who else could know enough about Barry’s life to convincingly document his recent experiences? Very few other people could have known about the letters-from-parents in advance of the retreat.

But no one ever owned up to having written the letter, and the letter itself seems to have disappeared.

Other questions remain.

What did Barry do while he was alone in the forest for an hour? Did he destroy the letter? Did he think about killing himself, as some people have suggested? Did he simply walk around, wondering what had happened, and why?

I have no access to Barry Fox’s mind or memory. At the trial, his testimony was the most clipped, the most uninformative. But I’ve always seen in him a depth I don’t see in Stephen O’Brien or even in Richard Culhane.

Perhaps this is because I was standing by the door of the priory, with a small group of Merrion Academy boys, when Barry emerged from the woods. I saw him walk slowly back towards the building across the long stretch of darkening grass, his shoulders low and his hands in his pockets, a look of tense introspection on his pale and pudgy face.

Was this how he looked as he knelt beside Conor Harris and leaned in to see if the boy he’d attacked was still breathing?

Barry was the one who thought about things.

Or so I’ve found myself believing.

18

When it came to the Dublin girls’ schools, you knew that each of them would produce a slightly different kind of girl. Girls from different schools dressed differently, used different slang, went out with different kinds of boy. The differences were miniscule, of course, but if you were practised, you could guess which school a girl had gone to after five minutes of ordinary conversation. Ailesbury College girls were burnished and vain. They did things like ballet and lacrosse. St Anne’s girls – if they were blonde – were cutters, or – if they weren’t blonde – were fat and paranoid and smoked a lot. St Anne’s girls (it was generally and erroneously believed) would sleep with almost anyone. (Once I heard someone suggest that the school motto for St Anne’s College, Foxrock, should be, ‘I’m With the Band’.) St Brigid’s girls joined committees and, when they got to university, they ran for class president. Elm Park girls were a lot like Ailesbury College girls, but they had (it was whispered) more sex.