Katherine noticed that Namwali always sniffed as she entered the house, as though performing a quick olfactory diagnosis of the hall, the living room, the kitchen. Katherine came to find this wariness vaguely reassuring.

Katherine took up smoking again. She stayed in bed until noon and spent the rest of the day padding around the house in her dressing gown. One afternoon she noticed dust on the bottles and cases of make-up that stood ranked beneath her bedroom mirror. She found that the house, in which she had taken such pride, had become merely a place in which to suffer, somewhere to remark on the glacial progress of ordinary pain, measured, it seemed, in millimetres of unvacuumed dust, in streaks of unscrubbed urine that turned the toilet bowl the colour of a sun-bleached newspaper.

She found it impossible to speak to Richard. He seemed to spend most of his time in the long back yard, staring down at the surface of the pool, which by now, with autumn well advanced, was full of fallen leaves. Katherine watched him from the kitchen window, unable to approach his shrunken frame. A psychiatrist – hired at Peter’s expense – had told them to keep Richard on a kind of informal suicide watch. And so Katherine watched him, listlessly, inattentively. She knew that her son would never commit suicide. It was worse than that. He would live, he would endure, hauling around his burden, his curse, the curse that condemned the rest of them, too, the curse that meant the agonizing end of their beautiful family. Whenever she came upon him in the kitchen or the conservatory – holding one of the cups of coffee he spent all day making and never drank – she would flinch, and this craven gesture, unwelcome and unwilled, came to stand for her relations with the rest of the world. She flinched often, now. She flinched when she turned on the television, when she opened the big front door.

Nonetheless, she read the newspapers, looking for news about the case. She conferred hopelessly with solicitors. And, obsessively, she debated with herself the nature of Richard’s crime.

She wondered if what Richard had done was a sin, whether in the eyes of the Lord Richard was guilty of some profound and damnable offence. But if it was a sin, she reasoned, calmly working through the logical equation, then what kind of sin was it? Not a sin of omission, surely, because Conor’s death hadn’t been brought about by inaction, by neglect. Then perhaps it was a sin of commission: Richard’s kick had killed Conor Harris. But he hadn’t meant to kill. So it wasn’t a sin of commission, either. Perhaps it wasn’t a sin at all.

But it felt like a sin. It felt like a sin she had committed herself. It left the same hollow, fretful afterglow. She might as well have been there on the night that Conor died.

I wonder if she thinks about this still, Katherine Culhane, if this is what she cries about, out there in the big white house on Inishfall.