In the front row of Brookfield boys, Richard Culhane sat without speaking.

Eileen and Brendan Harris were barely conscious of the size and scale of Conor’s funeral. The two weeks between their discovery that Conor had been killed and the September morning when they were allowed to bury him seemed, to them, to have been whiled away in a torpid atmosphere of pervasive unreality. During this time they had appeared briefly on television. They had talked exhaustively to the guards about the last time they had spoken to Conor (on his mobile phone, a few minutes before he entered Harry’s Niteclub, when he had seemed completely normal, they insisted, completely calm). They had spoken in private to the parish priest. They had shuttled back and forth between their house in Donnybrook and St Vincent’s Hospital, waiting to hear when Conor’s body would be released. The state pathologist had been in Limerick, performing a post-mortem on the victim of a gangland shooting, and had been unable to get back to Dublin until four days after Conor had died. Even when he arrived and began to examine Conor’s body, it became clear that his investigation would take a long time. Conor had been quite badly beaten, he told the gardaí in confidence (this was later leaked to the papers). It would take time to ascertain the cause of death.

‘This can’t be happening,’ Eileen Harris kept saying. ‘This can’t be happening.’

I remember everyone saying that they expected Eileen Harris to go to pieces in the aftermath of Conor’s death. People kept saying this right through the arrests and the trial. But although she was superficially nervy, she was every bit as angry as her husband, and it seemed to give her the strength to go on.

Waiting for the pathologist’s report had made the Harrises angry. But this, of course, was just the beginning.

As it happened, the pathologist turned in his report on the morning of Conor’s funeral. This was the lead story on the six o’clock news, to which the story of the funeral appeared as an appendix.

What made the funeral worse was that nobody had yet come forward with information about Conor’s death.

Brendan and Eileen Harris sat at the front of the church without their son. I remember finding it odd that, instead of sitting between his parents, Conor was lying in a wooden box draped with a Brookfield jersey, a couple of feet in front of them.

I looked at the Harrises. I had never seen two people look so sundered, so fiercely apart.

They hadn’t cleaned out Conor’s room yet. They hadn’t even been able to go into it. Conor’s room, where he kept his Brookfield rugby kit and his surprisingly innocuous collection of pornography (just tits and asses, some girl-on-girl videos, the occasional shot of a splayed pussy), and where he kept the red plastic flower he had taken from Laura Haines’s hair on cup final day in 2003.

The service began.

The priest (what was his name? although I was there, I was in the church that day, I find I can’t remember) began by saying what a terrible loss Conor’s family had suffered. He said this loss would be felt keenly, too, by Conor’s school and college friends, by his teachers and teammates.