We all went to the same university. That’s how I gleaned what first-hand knowledge I have about these people and their lives.

There was also a girl. I’ll get to her soon.

The state pathologist (since retired) noted in his report on the incident that it was likely that, as well as suffering numerous blows to the face and neck, Conor Harris received three kicks to the head that were the probable cause of his death, two hours later, in the emergency room of St Vincent’s Hospital.

I’ll keep coming back to this pathologist’s report.

Three kicks. Bang. Bang. Bang. The bar is closed, the people tumbling out. A fight develops, somewhere on the fringes of the crowd, near the bus stop on the packed main road. Those three kicks, we can be sure, aren’t the only blows thrown. But they’re the ones that count. According to the pathologist’s report – the controversial one, the report on which so much would come to depend – the first and second kicks could have been fatal in themselves. So the third kick has seemed, to some, like a sort of gratuity, what in New Orleans they call a lagniappe: an added fillip, an extra bang for your buck. To people less concerned with the facts, however, or to people less inclined towards forgiveness, the third kick has to have been the fatal one.

These were rugby kicks: great semicircular sweeps from the hip, with the foot angled out to lift the ball, the arms extended to keep balance.

Bang. Bang. Bang. One, two, three. A tidy progression from injury to unconsciousness to death. People seem to have found it difficult to conceive of something so irrevocable happening so quickly. They find it difficult to imagine that, with the first kick, Conor Harris was already dead. So many people prefer to imagine that the third kick was the one that did the damage.

This is because the third kick was thrown by Richard Culhane, who up until that point, according to some of the eyewitness reports, had barely been involved in the fight at all.

As Harry’s Niteclub emptied and everyone staggered out into the street and began to wave for taxis, Conor Harris found Richard Culhane in the crowd. It was the last night of summer, the return to school and college was imminent, people had come back from their J1 visas (Conor Harris had spent the summer of the previous year in San Diego, Richard Culhane had been in Ocean City), so there must have been an air of tired, expectant festivity in the club and on the street. It was the end of the evening, people had paired off or been disappointed, couples were making out in shop doorways or clumsily fucking in alleys or laneways. You could hear the boom and shuffle of the ocean at night from beyond the ramparts of the seaside railway station.

And Conor Harris found Richard Culhane in the crowd. Although they had both been in the same small vicinity all evening, they hadn’t seen each other until now. Was Conor, at this point, looking for Richard Culhane? Was Richard looking for Conor? It’s possible. Any number of things are possible.