Of course the girls who went to these schools had many things in common. They watched the same American soaps and they listened to the same bands and they went to the same clubs. To ascertain the differences, you had to be on the inside. You had to be part of that world.

The boys’ schools weren’t so easily distinguishable. There wasn’t much difference, in other words, between a boy who’d gone to Brookfield and a boy who’d gone to Michael’s or a boy who’d gone to Blackrock or Merrion. If you’d gone to any of these schools you played rugby or soccer and you wore Gap chinos that you’d bought when you were in the States and Ben Sherman shirts and Jack Jones hoodies. You wore Nike trainers that cost two hundred euro. You probably had a car and you drank Stella or Dutch Gold or Bulmers and when you were drunk you sang either ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ or ‘My Way’ with your arms around your friends.

I once saw Richard Culhane sing ‘My Way’ with his arms around a circle of Brookfield boys. This was in the ballroom of the Shelbourne Hotel in the waning hours of a university black-tie ball. There were balloons and wilted streamers on the spotlit dance floor, and tired girls at empty tables. As the song ended the Brookfield boys started doing high kicks, like a chorus line. They were the last to leave.

19

What none of them knew – not even Richard, although he found out after his arrest – was that Laura was seeing a counsellor. Her parents sent her to ‘a woman they trusted’ in the aftermath of Laura’s grandmother’s death, when Laura ‘just didn’t seem to be getting back on track’; but in reality Laura had been wandering in and out of depressions for years. She had an eating disorder too, a mild form of anorexia that meant she would refuse to eat for days at a time. She would sit and smile at the family dinner table, swallow a few tiny mouthfuls, and artfully move the rest of her food around her plate to give the impression that she had eaten almost all of it. Then she would make sure to scrape it into the bin before her mother got a closer look.

Laura’s depressions had started in her early teens. When she was thirteen the family dog died of stomach cancer, and Laura, who had walked the dog every afternoon in the fields behind the house, was inconsolable. This was the summer holidays, and now she had nothing to do. She began to drift around the house in her pyjamas. Laura’s mother was seldom home, and when she was in the house she spent most of her time on the phone, helping to arrange her sister’s wedding.

One morning Laura wandered out into the garden. She looked at the three-foot fence her father had built around the kennel to give the dog some room to play in so he wouldn’t damage the flowerbeds.