Richard Culhane drove home and went to bed.

37

The summer before he died, Conor Harris was working afternoon shifts as a mâitre d’ in one of his parents’ city centre restaurants. People found this odd. Conor had always seemed to lack precisely the qualities one associates with a host: he was, people agreed, almost quaintly rugged and wild; he was raw and unsubtle. The Conor I remember had the force and sly simplicity of the game he played so well. ‘Ah, I know Conor’s a bit rough around the edges,’ Eileen Harris said once, ‘but his heart’s in the right place, and that’s all that matters at the end of the day.’

Conor did have a great amount of charm at his disposal. Women liked his humour. He seemed childlike, though never innocent. He had a child’s frustration with inefficiency or waste. His social skills appeared to be narrow: he was awkward with adults and nervous around small children. These, I notice, are awkwardnesses we associate with adolescence. Conor, of course, was twenty-one years old when he died. Perhaps he was slower than Richard or Laura to abandon that most frustrating of adolescent qualities, that wariness of maturity coupled with a willed dismissal of its opposite.

But he was, it turned out, a very good mâitre d’. Every morning he put on a suit and tie and drove into town. He assumed his post by the bookings table and welcomed people to the restaurant with a deferential smile. He had chosen to work in one of the restaurants that Brendan Harris seldom visited. The family agreed that this was wise.

One afternoon that summer I went in to see Conor at work. He looked like a man I’d never met before. I liked him, then: he seemed to have made some subtle but definite progression, into adulthood perhaps, or into a firmer belief in his own self-worth.

They all had summer jobs that year, of course. The summers in America had been taken care of the year before. Richard Culhane did desultory office work for his father’s company of fund-accountants. Stephen O’Brien and Barry Fox were taken on by each other’s fathers’ firms. That was how it worked.

‘You’ll make valuable contacts in there, Richard,’ Peter Culhane told his son. And Richard did make contacts. He networked. He charmed his father’s bosses the way he charmed everyone else: with his looks, his aura of comfort and ease, the sense of ownership that he seemed to seal with a lazy blink as he looked around the office on his very first day, as if to say, ‘Yes, this life is mine already; all I have to do is walk into it when I’m ready.’

But the contacts disappeared, the life to which Richard laid such easy claim removed itself from his grasp – not gradually, but instantly: at the moment Conor Harris hit the ground.

38

On Friday, 2 August 2004, Conor Harris ran into Laura Haines outside the Quinn School in UCD. Conor was wearing a Leinster rugby jersey, chinos and sunglasses. Laura wore tracksuit bottoms, Ugg boots, and a Hollister sweatshirt. Because it wasn’t term time, neither of them had bothered to dress up: Laura wore no make-up, and Conor had no gel in his hair.