‘I wish I looked like Rachel Bilson,’ she said.

‘You are so much hotter than Rachel Bilson,’ Richard said. He sat up so that he could look seriously into Laura’s eyes.

This was what Richard enjoyed about relationships. He enjoyed shoring up a girl’s confidence about her looks. It was part of the chivalric ideal by which he lived. And he enjoyed hearing about Laura’s secret insecurities. Richard’s ideal of intimacy wasn’t a complicated ideal, but it was subtler than the kind of notions endorsed by people like Stephen O’Brien or Conor Harris.

During Laura’s sixth year at Ailesbury College, Richard knew, some of the girls had started to cut themselves. On half-day afternoons four or five of them would disappear into a field beyond the school with a make-up bag full of stolen razor blades and laboratory knives and take turns cutting small incisions into their arms and wrists. One morning Nicola Hennessy cut her wrist so deeply that she was taken away in an ambulance. The girls in their uniforms, grave and respectful, watched her go.

Eating disorders – anorexia and bulimia – were more popular. Girls competed to tell the most convincing lies about how much food they had eaten that day.

‘I had a whole Big Mac,’ Lisa Corrigan would exclaim as she shivered in a stuffy summer classroom.

‘I had a whole packet of digestive biscuits,’ someone would say. Or, ‘I had this fantastic steak last night, and we stopped for Abrakebabra on the way home from Bondi.’

The eating-disorder girls were the ones who vomited in toilet cubicles after lunch, the ones who had perfected methods of moving food around a plate to create the illusion of its having been eaten.

Laura was one of these girls.

The school, Laura told Richard, mailed to her parents a packet of documentation a year before she enrolled. A list of requirements for matriculation included dignity of comportment, a strong work ethic, a sensible approach to dress and behaviour, and an interest in religious matters beyond what is required by mere social convention. On the cover of the prospectus was a sepia-tinted photograph of the school. We believe strongly in inculcating our girls with the ethos of the school, said the letter from the headmaster on the first page.

Laura was a Catholic, too. Laura’s Catholicism was one of the things Richard liked about her. He had been proud to take her home to meet his parents.

Peter and Katherine loved Laura Haines. They had already decided that this was the girl Richard would marry. They had thrown a small dinner party for Richard and Laura in early June, and although the subject of religion was never broached directly, enough hints were dropped about Laura’s Catholicism to make Peter and Katherine feel secure in allowing Richard to continue seeing her.

I’m talking in this account about people who believed in transubstantiation, in the divinity and Resurrection of Christ, in the teachings of the Pope and in the moral authority of the local parish priest. I’m talking about people who shuddered and clammed up whenever the subject of child sexual abuse in the clergy was raised. I’m talking about people who blessed themselves whenever they passed a church.