And that the boys had asked for help – though the words were never spoken – Pat Kilroy never seriously doubted. In addition, it never occurred to him to wonder why the boys had not gone first of all to their parents with their suffering. To Pat Kilroy it seemed just, even inevitable, that the boys had brought their burden to him first.

Other people have wondered, though – people, it hardly needs to be said, who did not receive a private education, who never attended a Jesuit school, who never played for a Senior Cup team. To understand why the boys went first to Pat Kilroy, you have to understand the centrality and significance in their lives of rugby, that game of snaps and tackles, of maulings and drubbings and three-yard runs. When the boys went out and got drunk, they talked about rugby: about Brian O’Driscoll and Ronan O’Gara and Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations. For all three boys, rugby was almost the only thing they had in common with their fathers. Most of the important emotions they experienced on a daily basis had to do with rugby; had to do with victory and sacrifice, profit and pain, all experienced within the confines of the sport – but no less valid or genuine for that. And Pat Kilroy had been the man who took them through it, who knew how to solve their problems, who knew how to resurrect their confidence, who knew how to succour them in their defeat.

‘What I want you to do,’ Pat Kilroy said, ‘is tell me everything that happened, as far as you can remember it.’

So they told him everything that happened, as far as they could remember it. They omitted certain details: the three kicks, for example, and the number of drinks they’d had. They left out We fucking showed that little cunt. They left out the sense of charged release they felt when they finally got to punch Conor Harris in the face.

When they had finished Pat Kilroy was sitting at his desk, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. During the narrative – Stephen O’Brien had taken charge of a great deal of the telling – Pat Kilroy had nodded, but made no comment. Now he leaned forward and rested his elbows on the creaking leather of his desk.

‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said. ‘That a young man could lose his life over something so small.’

The three boys looked at the floor. It had never occurred to them to see the incident in this light. The first thing they had thought of was their own complicity. Now they realized that a boy they knew had died: a realization simultaneously pathetic and annoying. Why did he have to fucking die? Barry Fox remembered thinking at this point.

Pat Kilroy sniffed and shook his head. ‘You were right to come to me,’ he said again. ‘What we need to do is get this down on paper. Just so we have a record of the truth. And,’ he shifted irritably, ‘so ye can clarify everything to yourselves. How would you feel if I asked Father Connelly up here to help us?’