‘It’s about time,’ Laura said happily.

They sat under the tree until it got cold and they had to go home.

Despite Richard’s beauty and his facility in conversation (he could talk knowledgeably about any number of surprising subjects, from house prices to wine to French politics), he hadn’t gone out with very many girls. In fact, he would probably have described himself, a little wistfully, as a man still in search of his one true love. This was a part of his charm: people were reassured by the fact that even Richard, with his prodigal gifts as a student, a son, a friend, a lover, still pined for the one soul that would successfully complement his own.

Richard admired his own loneliness. This was something you could sense in him when you saw him practising on a field alone in the rain. I know a part of him feared that he would be compromised by love. But Laura seemed to override this fear.

When did they first meet? I haven’t been able to find this out. Richard and Laura seem always to have known one another. They seemed always to show up on the same nights out, to arrive at the same parties, to know the same people and to keep track of the same gossip. In their peculiar way, they were always faithful to one another, though they ignored one another, though they went out with various other people. People found the idea of them seductive. And they agreed with this, I think; they were aware of their own power, their own rosy, unaffected authority. Richard and Laura were, unquestionably, at the centre of things. They gave a veneer of authenticity to any event they attended. Even before they were together, their world – that small south Dublin world of private schools and parties and clubs – arranged itself centrifugally around Richard and Laura. Their relationship had long seemed inevitable, foretold, a fait accompli.

I saw them dance together once, at a party in Dave Whelehan’s house. It was the end of the night and a few last couples were dancing to slow music in the kitchen. Laura danced with her head on Richard’s chest. Richard kissed the top of Laura’s head as they shuffled across the terracotta flagstones. They both seemed sad, though they hadn’t fought. I watched them and felt sad, too. The image stayed with me. Even then, the moment seemed to mean something.

I don’t think Laura ever danced that way with Conor Harris.

32

‘Isn’t that one of your friends, Richard?’ Katherine Culhane said. She looked around her kitchen, unfairly calm in the morning light. She looked at her son. ‘Isn’t that awful?’

Perhaps oddly, perhaps not, I think the real moment of change in this story comes not with Conor’s death but with the boys’ discovery the next morning that they had killed him. This was the moment when the boys became murderers – to themselves, at least, if not in legal terms, if not in the minds of their parents and friends.