These chapters are chock full of foreshadowing of various kinds.

I think the renewal of Patrick and Nicola's friendship is quite important structurally in that they have clearly had little contact since Christmas, and I think there needs to be some kind of reminder so that when, later, Patrick is thinking that he would have trusted Nicola not to read the exam paper whereas he isn't quite sure about Ginty, there's some recent grounding for it. (I hope that makes sense.)