In the warm house in Sandycove that smelled of lavender and furniture polish, Richard watched as the pleasure was drained from his life. He accepted it, I think.

He thought it was only fair.

42

On the morning of 25 September Michael Feather questioned the boys in a small interrogation room in Donnybrook Garda Station. First he let them wait in separate cells. Then, one by one, he sat them down at the cratered wooden table with the tape deck and the notepad and asked them, in his oddly stilted and formulaic stammer, about 31 August.

In the words of one reporter, Barry Fox and Stephen O’Brien coped ‘extremely badly’ with this first brief imprisonment and with the interrogations that followed. They sweated and cried. They muttered things like, ‘This isn’t fucking fair,’ and, ‘We had nothing to do with it, man.’

Later, in private, Stephen O’Brien admitted that he had assumed that he would never be arrested. ‘Things like that just don’t fucking happen,’ he said. What he meant was, Things like that don’t happen to people like me.

Richard was calm – unusually so. Because of this Michael Feather, during those first few hours, pegged Stephen O’Brien as the ringleader. (It wasn’t until the Laura Haines connection surfaced that Richard assumed his proper status.) But Richard was calm because he had anticipated all of this: the whitewashed cells, the smell of disinfectant in the corridors. He knew his tour of important buildings had begun.

The boys had solicitors present during their questioning, of course. As soon as Richard drove away in the squad car, Peter Culhane had called a family friend named Gerald Clinch, who arrived at Donnybrook Station at 11 am and who was sitting beside Richard when Michael Feather asked his questions.

Gerald Clinch was a nervous little man, brimming with thwarted love for the world, aggressive when he meant to seem passionate, scathing when he meant to seem kind. Gerald had done a law degree at UCD and then got his parchment at Blackhall Place in Dublin. He wore grey suits with gold cufflinks in the shape of small harps. He slapped Richard hard on the shoulder and told him that everything would be absolutely fine as long as Richard told the truth about what had happened.

What seemed to matter to people later on was that Gerald Clinch and Peter Culhane had been at Brookfield together. They had both been on the SCT.

Barry and Stephen shared a solicitor named Peter Mason, who had agreed, at Maurice O’Brien’s request, to defend both his son and his son’s friend.

Mason was a Merrion boy. A joke about him became famous, during the trial: he was said to have been the only member of his SCT who could carry a bucket of water across the field, hung from his erect penis, without spilling a drop.

Many phone calls were made that morning, as the boys waited in their separate cells. Peter Culhane rang people he knew: people who worked in the Department of Justice, people who worked for Fianna Fáil, people who worked for law firms and medical-insurance firms and tax-accountancy firms. He wanted to find out two things. He wanted to find out if he could get Richard off the hook, and he wanted to find out how much it would cost if he couldn’t.