The other two people were Katherine and Richard Culhane.

In the hours following the identification of Conor’s body in St Vincent’s Hospital, the gardaí took brief statements from Brendan and Eileen Harris and from Conor’s older brother. They established who Conor had gone to the club with (Fergal Morrison) and who he was likely to have encountered there (this was mostly guesswork on the Harrises’ part: a ragbag list of remembered names, among which was the name of Laura Haines).

The Harrises hadn’t been particularly alarmed when Conor failed to make it home on the night of 31 August (or the morning of 1 September). He often stayed overnight in a friend’s house. Brendan and Eileen had in fact assumed that Conor would stay at Fergal Morrison’s.

Fergal Morrison was the one of the first people questioned about Conor’s death. He had left the nightclub early with a St Anne’s girl. They had gone to Eddie Rocket’s and then he had taken her in a taxi to her home in Dalkey, where, for half an hour or so, they had ‘made out’ on the couch of her family’s living room. Fergal was reticent about the details of this half-hour – understandably: the girl (her name was Joanna Carruthers) was seventeen years old, and Fergal, at this time, was twenty-two.

The officer in charge of investigating Conor’s ‘suspicious’ death was Detective Sergeant Michael Feather, a red-faced Tipperary man who had been educated at Clongowes Wood. He visited Joanna Carruther’s house in Dalkey and established that Fergal Morrison had, in fact, been on her couch at about 3 am.

Privately Fergal told me that he had spent most of this half-hour trying to persuade Joanna to have sex with him. She offered a compromise in the form of a blow job. So at the moment Conor received his third and final kick to the head and his brain was irreparably damaged, Fergal Morrison was getting his cock sucked by a seventeen-year-old girl in low-rider jeans and a pink string top from BT2.

(I think about this often, this question of simultaneity. What were we all doing at the moment of Richard’s kick – at the moment of the kick we all assume to have been Richard’s? Eileen and Brendan Harris were asleep. So were the Culhanes and the O’Briens. It happens that Laura Haines’s mother was awake, boiling a kettle for coffee in the striplit kitchen and watching some foxes in her back garden. In that sense, Laura’s mother had the drop on the rest of us: she was an insomniac before Conor died. The rest of us took a night or two to catch up on our sleeplessness.)

Detective Sergeant Feather extracted from Joanna Carruthers a list of people she knew had been in Harry’s that evening and who might possibly have stuck around long enough to have witnessed the fight. It wasn’t a long list. It became clear that all of the girls Joanna named were in her year at St Anne’s College, Foxrock. Although they were technically underage, most of them had been taken to the club by their college-age boyfriends. Detective Sergeant Feather hoped that these boyfriends would eventually start to look like a shortlist of suspects.