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As a matter of routine, one of the nurses in the emergency room called the guards shortly after Conor was brought in. By the time the squad car arrived he was dead. It was the guards who woke the Harrises at 6 am to tell them that they’d lost their son.

‘Are you the father of Conor Harris?’ the guard said as he stood in the hall of the house in Donnybrook. Beyond the open door Brendan Harris could see dawn light and chalky shadows.

‘Yes,’ Brendan said. ‘What’s he done?’

But Brendan Harris already knew that Conor was dead.

Eileen was still in the bedroom, looking from the window at the emergency numbers on the side of the white-and-yellow Ford parked in her driveway.

An hour later the garda press office released a short statement about the incident. They confirmed that they were treating Conor’s death as suspicious. They appealed for witnesses to come forward. That this appeal was never answered – that no one was willing to speak, that the guards had to track down their various witnesses over the course of almost a month – remains a point of difficulty for various people.

Another, more controversial point of difficulty is the fact that there had been a squad car in Blackrock on the night that Conor died. People had seen the fluorescent syncopation of its lights as it cruised along the main street and out towards Dun Laoghaire at around 3 am. The guards have always maintained that they saw no evidence of a violent incident in progress at this time. The Harrises, in private, have considered pressing this point, arguing for a charge of criminal negligence. This was during the period when they were ready to consider prosecuting anyone and everyone, including the bouncers employed by Harry’s Niteclub, in the hope of finding some redress, some compensation.

My own belief is that the squad car passed Harry’s Niteclub far too early to have done anything about Conor Harris.

The two bouncers who worked the door at Harry’s, I suppose I should explain, insisted to gardaí and journalists that, although they had seen the fight, they had agreed that it was taking place outside what they called their territory, the notional six-metre semicircle that extended around the door of the club, beyond which they were not supposed to go in the defusing of a violent incident. So they did nothing. And then they went home.

Conor’s death was the third headline on RTÉ radio’s morning news programme: twenty-one-year-old man dies after being kicked and beaten outside a Dublin nightclub. Barry Fox’s father heard the story and registered the name of the club. He tried Barry’s mobile and left a voicemail message that Barry heard only later, after he had already heard the news from someone else.

As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, Barry Fox’s father was one of only three people directly involved in the case who learned about Conor’s death from the radio that morning.