In January of 2004 Conor had stepped in to defend Laura’s honour when she was hassled by a Blackrock boy in a nightclub in Rathmines. Nobody threw any punches but Laura said the atmosphere was ‘pretty heavy’. She was smiling as she said it, but I don’t think she was aware of this smile, or of the way she played with her hair as she told the story.

I think the truth is that violence turned Laura on. I think she liked the sense of power and threat that people like Conor Harris and Richard Culhane were capable of giving off. She liked men who made her feel physically small. She liked men who were on her side.

It’s probable – though I have no evidence to prove it – that Laura cheated on Conor at least once. If you had put this theory to any of Laura’s friends at the time, they wouldn’t have been surprised. They wouldn’t even have asked who you thought Laura was being unfaithful with.

That part was obvious.

When Conor’s bender was over he went home to the house in Donnybrook. He arrived at dinner time, just as Eileen was serving chilli con carne with rice, but he said he wasn’t hungry and went upstairs to his room. He lay face down on his bed and did something he would only ever tell one other person about: he cried himself to sleep.

I’ve never doubted that Conor Harris was in love with Laura Haines, just as I’ve never doubted that Richard Culhane was in love with her, too; just as I’ve never doubted that Laura loved only Richard, and that she loves him still, even now that he has left for Inishfall and she is here, with the rest of us, alone, bereft.

27

The third thing that made the boys different from any other group of rich young men was that they were the sons of the men who ran the country.

Brookfield boys went on to become senior civil servants, investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, ministers, judges, accountants, property developers, entrepreneurs. When they had sons, they sent them to Brookfield.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) argued that hereditary monarchy was the best system of rule because it obviated the need for conflict. If you say, ‘Let the wisest man rule!’ you get a bloody civil war over who’s the wisest. If you say, ‘Let the king’s son rule!’ everyone points to the king’s son and says, ‘He is our king!’

Semper et Ubique Fidelis.

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I’ve never been to Inishfall but Conor Harris had. He went there the summer he turned eleven years old.

Richard Culhane and Conor Harris were in the same primary-school class. This was played up during media coverage of the case but no journalist, so far as I can tell, worked out what it meant.

What it meant was that Richard Culhane and the boy he killed were childhood friends.

Their friendship reached its peak when they were both in fifth class at the Mary Immaculate Primary School for Boys. Mary Immaculate occupies private grounds near Stillorgan. It was built in the early eighties and opened by the then-president of the Republic, Paddy Hilary. It is still the most expensive fee-paying primary school in Dublin, and naturally both the Harrises and the Culhanes were keen to send their children there. A few days after Peter Culhane signed his unborn son up for Brookfield, he signed him up for Mary Immaculate. The Harrises signed Conor up when he was five months old.