The details of Laura’s interview went largely unnoticed in the incident room that Michael Feather had established at Donnybrook Garda Station. It wasn’t until Detective Sergeant Feather spoke to Debbie Guilfoyle, Dave Whelehan’s girlfriend, that he procured a list of suspects.

Eventually the gardaí assembled almost eight hundred statements about the events of 31 August 2004. But Debbie’s was the one that closed the case. She cried as she told the guards about the fight. She said she could only remember three people who were near Conor at the moment he fell.

Stephen O’Brien.

Barry Fox.

And Richard Culhane.

The boys were arrested at 7 am on the morning of 25 September 2004.

PART THREE

Heavy Damage

41

Once, from the window of a coach that was taking the Brookfield Senior Cup team to a training session in Kildare, Richard Culhane had a vision of hell. They were passing through a council estate, a promontory of damp grey pebble-dashed houses, rows of them, in the middle of a treeless plain of sickly greensward. For a moment Richard was oblivious to the gaudy shouts and howling of his team. He was gripped by what he saw. Two girls in pink tracksuits pushed matching buggies, their faces narrow and strained, as though, Richard thought, they had just sucked on something sour. There was graffiti on the houses and on the crumbling boundary walls. Men stood around in dispirited cliques, their clothes dirty – it was obvious even at this distance. In a flickering instant Richard had a vision of an alternate self: a self condemned to live out a short and desolate life on this barren ground, a self trapped by a pregnant girlfriend or a financial holocaust, a self with no choices, no future.

It caused him some anxiety over the following months. He imagined he had been given a glimpse of the worst possible course his life could take.

Of course, we never see the actual failures that await us, the failures that surprise us by being at once so banal and so lurid. We never foresee failure’s power to ruin, insidiously, not simply the rude outline of a life – the sturdy trajectory of school–college–career–marriage–retirement – but the miniscule, auxiliary things, the pleasure we take in a pop song or a game of rugby.

Have I mentioned that, after Conor’s death, Richard never played rugby again? This hasn’t been remarked upon in the popular discourse, perhaps because so few people are aware of it. But it’s true: he stopped playing. He has never, as far as I know, spoken aloud about why this might be.

Eventually, everything in Richard’s life was poisoned by its actual or potential association with the thing that had destroyed him. In the year after Conor’s death he found he couldn’t read any book that mentioned death, or watch any film that contained a scene set in a nightclub.

There was nothing he could think about that didn’t lead him inexorably back to that night outside Harry’s in Blackrock.