Steve would sit in stoic silence, nodding at the proper moments, listening to every word.

On the night Conor died Clodagh was in the taxi that Richard Culhane, Laura Haines, and Stephen O’Brien took home. Richard and Laura were silent for the whole journey. Stephen and Clodagh talked about the fight, all the way to Richard’s house.

The next afternoon their taxi driver called the guards. But the guards already knew Conor was dead. It would take them three more weeks to identify the four people who had taken that taxi home.

Conor Harris wasn’t at Barry’s Fox’s 2003 New Year’s Eve party. He was at a smaller party in Laura Haines’s parents’ house.

Barry threw the party in his grandfather’s summer house in Wexford. Thirty-five people drove down on New Year’s Eve. They weren’t particularly impressed by the house. The walls were mildewed and the bedrooms were cold. Propped in the shower was the lopsided shell of a plastic canoe. The house was by the shore, and a short tongue of lawn protruded as if to lap at the incoming sea. Barry’s grandfather had built the house in the late sixties and it hadn’t been renovated since.

‘Barry,’ Stephen O’Brien shouted as he toured the house, ‘is it alright if we trash the place, like?’

Barry got everybody together in the living room and said, ‘Alright, guys, it’s grand if you go a bit mental, like. There’s only one thing I’ll ask you to do, right? My father is coming down here next weekend, so keep the bedroom at the end of the hall clear for the night, ’cos that’s his room. Okay?’

Everyone said that was fine.

To make sure, Barry locked his father’s bedroom door.

The party rapidly got out of hand. Fergal Morrison set up a beer-bong in the kitchen doorway, and every few minutes someone would lie underneath it while someone else filled the funnel. Somebody started a small bonfire in the back garden. Dave Whelehan sat at the living-room coffee table and rolled spliffs. Everyone was dancing and drinking. A game of soggy biscuit developed in one of the bedrooms. People were playing poker on the bathroom floor. People were playing Kings or Truth or Dare. People were arm-wrestling at the kitchen table. Somebody threw up on a houseplant in the hall. The canoe was taken from the shower cubicle and set up in the front garden. By the end of the night the canoe was on top of Richard Culhane’s car.

Richard spent most of the night talking to a Mount Anville girl named Kate Kerrigan. He kept touching the back of his head with his left palm. Kate kept touching Richard’s nose and laughing.

Fergal Morrison threw up in the kitchen sink.

Once the countdown was over and it was officially 2004, the year in which Conor Harris would die, the party began to calm down.

Stephen O’Brien had spent the two hours leading up to the countdown kissing Clodagh Finnegan on the living-room couch. Clodagh said she wanted to be wherever the joints were being rolled. Stephen didn’t smoke hash, but he was happy to sit on the couch with Clodagh on his knee and his hand up her skirt. She was wearing a thong and it was easy for him to get a finger or two inside her pussy.