Peter nodded.

‘We’ll keep you in for observation, anyhow. Just to make sure.’

Peter knew some people at Vincent’s. They gave him sleeping pills and a bed in a semi-private room on the third floor. In the twilit quiet of the hospital Peter lay wide awake. He suspected that the sleeping pills were placebos. From the neighbouring bed a white-haired woman stared at him, unsleeping. Peter sat up and put on the trousers Katherine had hurriedly packed for him.

He was worried about the media. What if the papers found out he was here? For Peter this was the most painful aspect of the case, more painful even than the certain knowledge that his son had been involved in the death of another young man. There was something obscene about the fact that his family were constantly appearing in the papers, on the television. And what was worse, they were constantly linked with the O’Briens and the Foxes, as though they no longer possessed an individual identity, as though all three families were somehow the same. Richard wasn’t like those other boys, Peter thought. Richard had something, a nobility.

On the radio during the week Peter had heard a woman say, ‘Richard Culhane is nothing but a thug. You can dress it up all you want but that’s what he is, a thug.’

And Brendan Harris kept saying to the press, ‘My son was murdered and I want his murderers punished in a court of law.’

Peter Culhane was an old-fashioned man. And he was a Brookfield boy. This means that he had sentimental notions about honour and propriety.

He had discovered that he hated his son almost as much as he loved him.

Richard had hardly spoken to Peter since the beginning of the trial. They said hello when they passed on the stairs. That was it.

Two weeks before, someone had sent an anonymous envelope to the house, addressed to Richard. It contained an old-fashioned magnetic tape of a song called ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ by a band called The Adverts. Gary Gilmore had been a murderer in the seventies, Peter remembered. He threw the tape away and burned the envelope before Richard could find it.

Richard went out into the back garden every morning now and stared into the empty swimming pool.

One by one, the little things were being taken away from them.

Katherine had spent most of her time over the past year buying paintings for the living room. She liked to buy paintings by up-and-coming Irish artists who painted soothing watercolour seascapes or forested hills. She had also paid for a catalogue raisonne of her small collection to be printed and laminated. She left the catalogue on a sideboard in the living room, so that visitors could identify the paintings that hung there.

But there weren’t visitors anymore, not as such. Just lawyers and priests and, very occasionally, Pat Kilroy, who came at times when he thought it unlikely that he would be noticed by the press.