‘Okay,’ Richard said. ‘How many people saw the fight?’

‘Like, two dozen?’ Barry said. ‘It was in the middle of the fucking street, Richard. The guards are like, already on their way, dude.’

‘Don’t panic,’ Richard said. ‘On the news it said they didn’t have any suspects yet.’

They were all standing, Richard and Barry by the window, Steve with his backside propped against the sofa. Stephen and Barry were wearing their old red-and-white Brookfield jerseys. Richard had given his to Laura Haines. She slept in it, sometimes. She said it smelled like Richard.

‘Christ,’ Stephen O’Brien said. ‘Have you told Laura yet?’

‘For fuck’s SAKE, Steve, I’m trying to think about one fucking thing at a time here, alright?’

‘Alright, man, keep it together, like.’

For maybe a minute nobody spoke. It was quiet enough for Richard to hear the snicker and hiss of Stephen O’Brien’s cheap plastic lighter as he lit a cigarette by the open window. Then Barry Fox said, ‘What do we do?’

Richard looked at him. He knew what they had to do.

They didn’t talk to their parents. They didn’t talk to the guards. They didn’t talk to a lawyer. They didn’t even talk to each other, not really.

Richard drove them to Blackrock. He drove them to Brookfield and they talked to Pat Kilroy.

They had killed a boy the night before and that morning they talked to the man who had coached them when they played Senior Cup rugby.

34

To Richard, growing older had meant discovering more and more of the unknown in himself, as though he had been a mystery all along, and was only coming to realize it now that he was no longer a child. But as he drove to Brookfield on the morning of 1 September he was full of a strange excitement. He found himself no longer inexplicable. Later he would come to believe that this was because that morning he was confronting the first inarguable truth about himself: that he was capable of murder.

Although it was a Sunday, the boys knew Pat Kilroy would be at the school, training either the Senior or the Junior Cup team for an early-season match. As it happened neither of the teams was training that day, but Pat Kilroy was in his office, drawing up class timetables. Father Connelly was there, too, in the school chapel, writing references for past pupils.

Richard drove up to the courtyard of the school. The engine died. Faint ticks impinged on the sudden silence. The boys sat in the car without moving, Richard and Barry in the front, Stephen sitting alone in the back seat. As they drove the rain had stopped but now it started again, falling on the gravel of the courtyard and blurring the windscreen of Richard’s car.

‘Let’s do it,’ Richard said.

Afterwards Richard said that all through that Sunday morning and afternoon he had the feeling that he was in a film, that the occasion called for dramatic dialogue, pithy statement. He only said this in private, of course. He only said it to Laura Haines, who said she kind of understood.