Richard and Conor said goodbye. Three weeks later Conor would be dead.

I understand, I think, why Laura wore the black hoodie to lunch with Richard the following afternoon. But the question I have to ask is this: Why did she wear it to Harry’s Niteclub on the evening of 31 August?

Laura wore the hoodie to lunch because Richard had pissed her off in Bondi the night before.

The Bondi Beach Club in Stillorgan was a themed nightspot. There were three tons of sand strewn around the dance floor, and beach umbrellas and sun loungers. On any given Friday night it would be full of Mounties in bikinis and Rock boys in Hawaiian shirts.

On the night that Laura and Richard were there, the girls who hadn’t come in beach attire began, as the night went on, taking off their tops and skirts and dancing in their underwear. Clodagh Finnegan bopped across the dance floor in a red lace bra and cotton briefs. A few minutes after midnight, Richard staggered up to Laura and yelled, ‘Get your kit off, babes! Fucking everyone else is doing it!’

Laura shook her head.

‘Come on, man!’ Richard shouted. Laura could see the capillaries on his nose. ‘It’s cool, you know? It’s just, like, the spirit of the night, like!’

Laura went to the bathroom. A few minutes later Richard apologized and took her home.

So Laura wore the star-spangled hoodie to lunch as a kind of silent retaliation.

In retrospect, all of this – the matter of the star-spangled hoodie – strikes me as both glibly improbable and mercilessly childish. This can’t have been why Conor died, surely.

No. Not this. Not this at all.

39

‘Have you seen how much weight I’ve put on?’ Laura Haines said to Richard Culhane. ‘My tits are getting bigger. I’m like, size 33C but I never had tits this big before.’

This was on 30 August, 2004. Another perfect summer’s day. The sky contained a broad tilled acre of fleecy cloud.

It was early afternoon and Laura’s parents were at work. Richard lay on Laura’s queen-sized bed in nothing but his boxers. Laura was using a GHD to straighten her ash-blonde hair. Richard regarded Laura with seigneurial complacency. He stroked the curve of her hip where it turned into her waist.

He was alert, by now, to what it meant when Laura started talking about her weight.

‘Did you have lunch?’ he said.

Laura was almost shrill. ‘I had a Nutri-Grain bar. Two Nutri-Grain bars. That’s like four hundred calories. You’re only supposed to have fifteen hundred calories a day if you’re a girl.’

‘You’re not fat.’

‘I have like a pot belly.’

‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do.’

Laura was wearing only a T-shirt. When she stood, Richard could see the inverted trapezoid of whiter skin left unmarked by her visits to the tanning booth. She was perched on the edge of the bed, attending to her hair with one hand and feeling her stomach with the other.