And he was right. He never did go back. Neither did Stephen O’Brien or Barry Fox. For a few weeks Peter Culhane talked about sending Richard to Cambridge to resume his studies, ‘when all this has blown over’. I don’t know what became of this plan. Maybe Peter still entertains it, maybe it’s one of the things he brings up every now and then in the big white house on Inishfall.

Every morning, while they waited for the trial to start, Richard went into the garden and met the refusing stare of the empty swimming pool. Peter had had the water drained because the pool’s upkeep was costing him too much money.

The worst thing about Richard’s guilt was how utterly it had arrested him in time. He knew that his real existence had ended at the very same time that Conor’s did, in the very same heartbeat. Now Richard was a ghost in his own life. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, he began to fear that he was a ghost, quite literally: not his own ghost, not the ghost of Richard Culhane, but the lingering spirit of Conor Harris.

And it would follow him, comprehensively, this stasis, this guilt. When he turned sixty-five he would still be the boy who killed Conor Harris. When he shuffled into the nursing home, he would still be the boy who killed Conor Harris. When he died himself – he increasingly felt – he would just be catching up.

Although the pool was empty, Richard still found consolation in staring down at its leaf-strewn tiles. He thought that Peter had been right to drain the pool. There was something indecent about its slap and shimmer, some quality of luxuriousness that none of them felt they deserved any longer.

So for half an hour or more every morning Richard Culhane stared into an empty swimming pool as if trying to descry his future.

And what were the Harrises doing, during this period of procedural quiescence?

Eileen Harris had taken to making ever larger patchwork quilts. She no longer attempted to sell the results. She assembled a small library of pattern books and a chaotic archive of scraps and frayed samples. She sat in the kitchen of the house in Donnybrook and sewed patches together. I don’t think any of the quilts she began were ever finished.

Brendan Harris watched television. He had left the running of the restaurants in the hands of his executive assistant, and now that he had nothing to do all day, he sat in the living room and watched television for hours, shrunken in the armchair like a very old man. He had constantly to remind himself that Conor was dead. Mourning, he thought, must be a state of appalled recognition, continually renewed.

It seemed to him that he had already lived through his whole empty future.

One day Father Connelly called on them.

‘I wanted to offer my condolences,’ he said as he stood on the doorstep in the rain.