36

What did they do, the boys, when they had left Pat Kilroy’s office, leaving behind those three signed statements?

Barry Fox caught a bus into town to meet his girlfriend for breakfast. His girlfriend hadn’t heard about Conor’s death, and Barry didn’t mention it. As they walked past the Trinity College cricket fields, Barry stopped suddenly and hooked himself over a railing, bending at the waist. His stomach jumped and gurgled and then coughed up a warm hoard of sputum and bile.

‘Hangover,’ he said to his girlfriend. ‘Last night was fairly rough.’

Stephen O’Brien got a lift home from Richard. He went upstairs and fell asleep. When his mother called him for dinner he came down and ate in silence. Then he went back upstairs and slept for thirteen hours.

Clodagh Finnegan learned about Conor’s death from the six o’clock news that night. She immediately rang Stephen, but he had switched his mobile phone off.

When he had dropped Stephen O’Brien at the entrance to his estate, Richard Culhane parked his car in a neighbouring cul-de-sac and let himself panic. He moved the driver’s seat back as far as it would go and put his head between his knees and breathed so deeply and so quickly that after several minutes he was afraid his lungs had been indelibly abraded. He calmed himself down by staring at the traffic that passed on the road in view of his windscreen.

Then he went to see Laura.

She was still in her pyjamas. Richard felt a vestigial thrill of desire: vestigial, because he assumed that their relationship had ended and that this would be the last time he would ever talk to Laura.

Laura kissed him and padded morosely into the kitchen. She knows, Richard thought. She already fucking knows.

He said, ‘Did you hear the news?’

‘What news? I’m only up,’ Laura said.

She made two cups of coffee with the cafetière. Dimly Richard perceived that she was angry with him for fighting the night before. He thought about saying sorry for this, but he knew that it would ring unbearably hollow in retrospect – once he had told her what she needed to know. He longed to be restored to a world in which a day of Laura’s disappointment was the hardest thing he would confront.

‘I think you’d better sit down,’ Richard said. Again he had the strange belief that he was acting in a film – performing, for the benefit of some unseen audience, the details of a story already long familiar.

Laura turned from the cups of coffee and looked at him, registering for the first time the unshaven face, the haggard eyes with their insomniac bloodwork.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Sit,’ Richard said.

Slowly Laura sat at the head of the cluttered kitchen table. Richard moved a chair so that he could be as close to her as possible. He found he couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked around the kitchen, with its stacked fridge and its glut of gleaming fixtures.