Ah, lads.

‘Tell me what happened,’ Pat Kilroy said.

‘He started on us,’ Stephen O’Brien said.

Barry said tiredly, ‘He started on Richard.’

Richard nodded. ‘He used to go out with my girlfriend.’

‘Is that what this was about?’ Pat Kilroy asked.

There was a moment of silence.

This moment of silence in Pat Kilroy’s office in Brookfield could, I think now, have been the moment that obviated everything that followed, all the questions, all the misdirected blame. This moment was Richard’s chance to tell the truth, or at least to admit that the truth was more complicated than the question of who was fucking Laura Haines, that it was more complicated than a single incident outside a nightclub at three o’clock in the morning, that it was more complicated than a schoolyard betrayal or a drunken mistake. This could have been the moment when every question about motive was settled, when the boys admitted what has become increasingly clear as time goes by and we all achieve a little distance from Conor’s death: that nobody knew why Conor had to die, that there was no good reason for it, that it was simply in the nature of the way these people lived.

All we know is that he died. Anything else is a whistle in the dark.

Richard didn’t say anything. Then he said, ‘Yeah.’

Pat Kilroy looked at the three boys in turn. He was used to dealing with the painful transparency of young men, of course. He had become immune to it. But here was something else. The thought occurred to him: They might as well be infants screaming in their mothers’ arms.

And another thought: Their lives are over.

Richard looked at the man on the other side of the desk. He could see Pat Kilroy strenuously wish that he smoked a pipe or did the crossword, or had some other intricate masculine ritual in which he could bury his discomfort and fright. He sensed that Pat Kilroy was at a loss. He was aware of what this meant. It meant that the usual resources were already failing.

But Kilroy rallied. He stood and went to the office window, his hands behind his back.

‘Right,’ he said, and cleared his throat. ‘Now I know you’re probably a bit panicky about this. That’s understandable. But you know, of course, that we will do everything in our power to make sure that things work out for the best.’

He didn’t need to tell the boys who he meant by we.

(But if you had asked any of the four men in that room directly, ‘Who do you mean by we?’ they would not have been able to answer.)

Pat Kilroy said, ‘You were right to come to me, lads.’

The boys were perceptibly happy to hear this. They stretched minutely. Their shoulders sagged. Pat Kilroy experienced a sudden startling influx of nostalgia: for his own school days, for his two years on the SCT, for the period, now forever lost, before the three boys with their heavy treads had arrived at his office door to ask for help.