‘Does Conor make you feel that way?’

‘Not really. Only sometimes. He’s got this way of looking at me, like when I tell him I don’t want to eat or something, like it’s all his fault, like he mustn’t be good enough for me if I don’t want to eat to keep him happy. But it’s not about him. I keep telling him that. It hasn’t got anything to do with him.’

‘Do you think he really feels that way?’

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t know how anyone feels.’

I heard Laura speak these words, I don’t know how anyone feels, at a party in Conor Harris’s house, a year before Richard was arrested. I think she was telling the truth. I think Laura’s chief failure, in all of this, has been a failure of empathy, a failure to intuit how other people felt – about her, about Richard, about Conor Harris and how he died.

At the end of every fourth session, Dr Reid would write Laura a prescription for a month’s supply of Lexapro. She had taken one of these pills – a popular antidepressant – the night Conor died. Coincidentally, Lexapro was the drug prescibed to Eileen Harris to help her deal with the difficulties of Richard’s cancelled manslaughter trial. But that was two years later, and by then everything had changed.

20

When she was thirteen years old Laura Haines asked her mother if she could get her ears pierced. All the girls in her Ailesbury College class were doing it, she said. Mary Haines brought Laura to the pharmacy in Blackrock, and Laura twitched and winced as the pharmacist jabbed at her earlobes. The pharmacist smelled like the sweet barley sticks Mary always bought for Laura after a visit to the doctor. The piercings swelled up almost immediately, and Laura complained until Mary, in desperation, bought two ice pops to cool the swelling, and Laura followed her mother home with the ice pops pressed to her temples, waiting till her ears turned numb.

I’ve heard Laura Haines described (usually by women, in confidential tones) as ‘superficial’. I’m not sure what this means, aside from connoting a general preoccupation with appearances, with the aesthetic surface of things. I believe it would be a mistake to think of Laura as obsessed with trivialities. But people were misled by the amount of attention she paid to how she looked and how she lived.

It’s worth recording the material aspects of Laura’s life. In this as in so many other things, she is almost representative – as representative as any individual, with all the usual peculiarities of selfhood, can ever be.

Every ten days or so Laura spent a hundred and ninety euro at a salon in Ranelagh called Sun Worship Tanning. Here she would lie for half an hour in a coffin-shaped plastic box, soaking up the artificial sunlight. Some girls did this naked, but Laura always wore the bottom half of a bikini, with the result (according to Conor) that her ass was always marked out with a pale trapezoid of untanned skin.