‘I’ve caused enough controversy already,’ Pat would say as he accepted a cup of tea and a scone from Katherine.

Peter was grateful for Pat Kilroy’s continued support. But the real truth of things, he knew, was that his family was alone, consummately alone. All they had left was each other.

The pain in Peter’s chest had gone away. He got into his shirt and shoes and went downstairs to the ER.

Peter knew that this was where Conor Harris had been taken on the last night of summer, 2004. This was where he had been pronounced dead.

Peter walked out of the ER and down to the Rock Road. He hailed a passing taxi and asked the driver to take him to Blackrock. By now it was six o’clock in the morning and the dawn light was visible in the east, out over Dublin Bay.

It was very cold.

At Blackrock DART station Peter paid the driver and climbed the steps that led to the sea wall. He stood on a bridge that crossed the tracks. The first trains would begin to run in a few minutes. They came into the station more quickly than you expected. Warning signs told you to stand behind the yellow line.

On the other side of the bridge was a short shingly beach. Waves came in at deafening volume. We hear more acutely in the early mornings, Peter knew. We’re more used to silence, less prepared to screen out the noise of the day.

The waves came in and drew away, came in and drew away. They reached for the shingles and came away with nothing.

The tracks began to vibrate with the approach of a train. It sounded like snapped whips, or a steel cable, dangerously uncoiling. The train was coming out from town. People were waiting on the platform beneath.

Peter looked at the sea and he looked at the tracks.

He thought about his son.

Richard had something, a nobility.

Was it possible that Richard wasn’t different? Was it possible that he was just like the other Harry’s Niteclub boys? That he was just like Stephen O’Brien and Barry Fox and Conor Harris? That there was nothing between them, no way to tell them apart, nothing to distinguish any of them from the others?

Harry’s Niteclub, closed now and boarded up, was a two-minute walk from the station, Peter knew. Harry’s Niteclub, where his son had beaten Conor Harris to death.

He climbed down from the bridge, went into the DART station, paid for a ticket with the change in his pockets, and rode the train out to Dun Laoghaire station.

48

On a Wednesday morning in late April 2005 Laura went to see her counsellor. This was three weeks into the first of the trials. She sat in the waiting room of Dr Reid’s office in Ranelagh and looked at the paintings that hung on the walls. The walls were painted beige: Laura knew that places like this were always decorated in calm and soothing colours. The paintings themselves were somnolent watercolours of seascapes, sailboats, sand dunes.