THE sound of teenagers playing football is deeply saddening for Sammy and Joan Malcolm. It reminds them of the loss of their football mad teenage son, Gavin, "who was murdered two years ago half a mile away from his home in Lurgan, Co Armagh.
"Our garden there used to have bits kicked out of it by Gavin and now it's so perfect, but you feel the worse for it and I wish it was all kicked up", says Mr Malcolm, seated in the living room of his detached home in a neat middle class Protestant estate.
It was Mr Malcolm who, in the early hours, of April 8th, 1994, identified the battered corpse of his 15 year old son in Lurgan's Mourneview estate.
His voice falters as he tells how he stayed awake all night waiting for the phone call from Gavin that never came. Mrs Malcolm was in England at the time visiting Gavin's older brother, Graeme.
When he tuned in to the radio news at 7 a.m., Mr Malcolm, a retired bank manager, heard a report that a young boy's body had been found in Mourneview estate. "I just instinctively knew it was Gavin. That awful icy clutch of fear grips you", he says.
Gavin's family initially believed that he had been involved in a traffic accident, so bad were, his injuries. He was covered in cuts and bruises and his skull and spine were fractured.
The following week, when four" local young men were charged with his murder, the family learned that he had been the victim of an unprovoked and apparently motiveless attack.
Gavin had been walking home at 2.30 a.m. when he was set, upon, beaten and kicked, before being dragged unconscious into a nearby block of flats and thrown from a second floor window.
One of the arrested men, Thomas Haggan (19), confessed to Gavin's murder and was convicted last year. Two of the others, William Turkington (18) and Keith Brown (23), were jailed yesterday for 12 years after they pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
The third, Jason Chittick (22), a private in the Royal Irish Regiment, was jailed for two years for assisting offenders and withholding information about the murder.
Brown and Turkington, who both had previous convictions for assault, were kneecapped by the UVF months after the killing for their part in it, according to local police sources.
"It wasn't even a sectarian killing. Not that would have made us feel any better. But there would have been a reason for it", Mrs Malcolm says.
She is comforted by small details, like the fact that shortly before his death, while playing snooker with a friend, Gavin suddenly asked him: "Are you ready to meet your maker because you never know the minute? I'm ready."
She said: "It was as if he had given me this sign. It was a comfort to me at the time to know he had said that."
Her husband said: "I don't know how people can forgive. They say that they forgive but when it happens to themselves they might find it completely different."