The Secret Place

by Tana French

  ‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’

  The grin hardened over. ‘I believe you, all right. And for yous, if a girl did the business, she was a slut; if she didn’t, she was frigid. Either way, yous had a perfect reason to treat her like dirt.’

  It was a bit true; not a lot, not for me. I said, ‘No. Either way, she got even more exciting. If she did the do, then there was a chance you might get to have sex, and when you’re a young fella that’s the biggest thing in the world. If she didn’t, there was a chance she might think you were special enough to do it with. That’s pretty big too, believe it or not. Having a girl think you’re something special.’

  ‘Smooth talker, you. Bet that got you into a lot of bras.’

  ‘I’m only telling you. You asked.’

  Conway thought that over, chewing apple. Decided she believed me; enough, anyway.

  ‘If I was guessing,’ she said, ‘back then, I’d’ve said Julia and Gemma had had sex, Rebecca’d never even had a snog, and the rest were somewhere in between.’

  ‘Julia? Not Selena?’

  ‘Why? Because Selena’s got bigger tits, she’s the slapper?’

  ‘Jaysus! No. I wasn’t noticing their . . . Ah, fuck’s sake, now.’

  But Conway was grinning again: winding me up, and she’d snared me. ‘You fuck,’ I said, ‘that’s disgusting, that is,’ and she laughed. She had a good laugh, rich, open.

  She was starting to like me, whether she liked it or not. People do, mostly. Not bragging here; just saying. You have to know your strengths, in this job.

  The mad part was, a bit of me was starting to like her too.

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ Conway said, laugh gone. ‘If I was guessing now, I’d guess the same again about Holly’s gang.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘The four of them. Pretty girls, right?’

  ‘Jesus, Conway. What do you take me for?’

  ‘I’m not calling you a perv. I’m saying when you were sixteen. Would you have been into them? Asked them out, Facebooked them, whatever kids do these days?’

  When I was sixteen, I would’ve seen those girls like polished things in museum cases: stare all you want, get drunk on the dazzle of them, but no touching, unless you’ve got the tools and the balls to smash through reinforced glass and dodge armed guards.

  They looked different, now I’d seen that board. I couldn’t see pretty, any more, without seeing dangerous underneath. Splinters.

  I said, ‘They’re grand. Holly and Selena are good-looking, yeah. I’d say they get plenty of attention – not from the same guys, probably. Rebecca’s going to be good-looking soon enough, but when I was sixteen I might not have copped that, and she doesn’t seem like great crack, so I’d have kept moving. Julia: she’s no supermodel, but she’s not bad, and she’s got plenty of attitude; I’d’ve looked twice. I’d say she does OK.’

  Conway nodded. ‘That’s about what I’d’ve said. So why no boyfriends? If I’m guessing right, why’ve none of them got any action in the last year?’

  ‘Rebecca’s a late bloomer. Still at boys are icky and the whole thing’s embarrassing.’

  ‘Right. And the other three?’

  ‘Boarding school. No guys. Not a lot of free time.’

  ‘Hasn’t stopped Heffernan’s gang. Two yeses, one no, one sort-of: that’s what I’d expect, give or take. Holly’s gang: no, no, no, no, straight down the line. No one takes a second to decide what to say, no one says it’s complicated, no one’s giggling and blushing, nothing. Just flat-out no.’

  ‘You figure what? They’re gay?’

  Shrug. ‘All four of them? Could be, but the odds say no. They’re a close bunch, though. Scare one of them off the fellas, you’d scare off the lot.’

  I said, ‘You think someone did something to one of them.’

  Conway threw her apple core. She had a good arm; it skimmed long and low between the trees, smashed into a bush with a rattle that sent a couple of small birds panicking upwards. She said, ‘And I think something’s fucked up Selena’s head. And I don’t believe in coincidences.’

  She pulled out her phone, nodded at my apple. ‘Finish that. I’m gonna check my messages, then we move.’

  Still giving the orders, but her tone had changed. I’d passed the test, or we had: the click was there.

  Your dream partner grows in the back of your mind, secret, like your dream girl. Mine grew up with violin lessons, floor-to-high-ceiling books, red setters, a confidence he took for granted and a dry sense of humour no one but me would get. Mine was everything that wasn’t Conway, and I would’ve bet hers was everything that wasn’t me. But the click was there. Maybe, just for a few days, we could be good enough for each other.

  I shoved the rest of my apple in my coffee cup, found my mobile too. ‘Sophie,’ Conway told me, phone to her ear. ‘No prints on anything. The lads in Documents say the words came out of a book, medium quality, probably fifty to seventy years old going by the typeface and the paper. From the focus on the photo, Chris wasn’t the main subject; he was just in the background, someone cropped out the rest. Nothing on the location yet, but she’s running comparisons with photos from the original investigation.’

  When I turned on my phone, it beeped: a text. Conway’s head came round.

  A number I didn’t recognise. The text was so far from what I was expecting, took my eyes a second to grab hold of it.

  Joanne kept the key to the boarders wing/school door taped inside the Life of St Therese, third year common room bookshelf. It could be gone now but it was there a year ago.

  I held the phone out to Conway.

  Her face went focused. She held her mobile next to mine, tapped and flicked fast at the screen.

  Said, ‘The number’s none of our girls, or it wasn’t last year. None of Chris’s friends, either.’

  All their numbers, still on her phone a year later. No thread cut, not even the finest.

  I said, ‘I’ll text back. Ask who it is.’

  Conway thought. Nodded.

  Hi – thanks for that. Sorry, I don’t have everyone’s numbers, who’s this?

  I passed it to Conway. She read it three times, gnawing apple-juice sticky off her thumb. Said, ‘Go.’

  I hit Send.

  Neither of us said it; no need. If the text was true, then Joanne and at least one other girl, probably more, had had a way to get out of the school the night Chris Harper was killed. One of them could have seen something.

  One of them could have done something.

  If the text was true, then today had turned into something different. Not just about finding the card girl, not any more.

  We waited. Down on the playing field, the rhythm of the hockey sticks had turned ragged: the girls had spotted us, they were missing easy shots craning over their shoulders trying to pick us out of the shadows. Little feisty birds clicking and wing-flipping in and out of the trees above us. Sun fading and blooming as thin clouds shifted. Nothing.

  I said, ‘Ring it?’

  ‘Ring it.’

  It rang out. The voicemail greeting was the default one, droid woman telling me to leave a message. I hung up.

  I said, ‘It’s one of our eight.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Anything else is way too much coincidence. And it’s not your Holly. She brought you the card, she’d bring you the key.’

  Conway pulled out her phone again. Rang one number after another: Hello, this is Detective Conway, just confirming that we still have the correct phone number for you, in case we need to get in touch . . . All the voices were recorded – ‘School hours,’ Conway said, tapping; ‘phones have to be switched off in class’ – but all of them were the right ones. None of our girls had changed her number.

  Conway said, ‘You got a pal at any of the mobile networks?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Neither did she, or she wouldn’t have asked. You stockpile useful pals, build yourself a nice fat list, over time. I felt it like a thump: us, two rookies, in the middle of
this.

  ‘Sophie does.’ Conway was dialling again. ‘She’ll get us the full records on that number. By the end of the day, guaranteed.’

  I said, ‘It’ll be unregistered.’

  ‘Yeah, it will. But I want to know who else it’s been texting. If Chris was meeting someone, he arranged it somehow. We never found out how.’ She slid down off the wall, phone to her ear. ‘Meanwhile, let’s go see if Little Miss Text’s fucking us around.’

  McKenna came out of her office all ready to wave us goodbye, wasn’t a happy camper when she found out we weren’t goodbyeing anywhere. By now we were front-page headlines all round the school. Any minute the day girls would be heading home to tell their parents the cops were back, and McKenna’s phone would start ringing. She’d been banking on being able to say this little unpleasantness was over and done with: just a few follow-up questions, Mr and Mrs, don’t worry your pretty heads, all gone now. She didn’t ask how long it would be. We pretended not to hear her wanting to know.

  A nod from McKenna, and the curly secretary gave us the key to the boarders’ wing, gave us the combinations to the common rooms, gave us signed permission for us to search. Gave us everything we wanted, but the smile had gone. Tight face, now. Tense line between her eyebrows. Not looking at us.

  That bell went again, as we came out of her office. ‘Come on,’ Conway said, lengthening her stride. ‘That’s the end of classes. The matron’ll be opening the connecting door, and I don’t want anyone getting in that common room before we do.’

  I said, ‘Combination locks on the common rooms. Were those there last year?’

  ‘Yeah. Years, they’ve had those.’

  ‘How come?’

  Behind the closed doors, the classrooms had exploded into gabble and scraping-back chairs. Conway took the stairs down to the ground floor at a run. ‘The kids leave stuff there. There’s no locks on the bedroom doors, in case of fire or lesbians; the bedside tables lock, but they’re tiny. So a lot of stuff winds up in the common rooms – CDs, books, whatever. With the combination, anything gets robbed, there’s only a dozen people who could’ve done it. Easy enough to solve.’

  I said, ‘I thought no one here did stuff like that.’

  Wry sideways glance from Conway. ‘“We don’t attract that type.” Right? I said that to McKenna, said had there been problems with theft? She did the face, said no, none whatsoever. I said not since the combination locks, anyway, am I right? She did the face some more, pretended she didn’t hear me.’

  Through the connecting door, standing open.

  The boarders’ wing felt different from the school. White-painted, cooler and silent, a bright white silence floating down the stairwell. A tinge of some scent, light and flowery. The air nudged at me like I needed to back off, let Conway go on alone. This was girls’ territory.

  Up the stairs – a Virgin Mary in her nook on the landing gave me an enigmatic smile – and down a long corridor, over worn red tiles, between closed white doors. ‘Bedrooms,’ Conway said. ‘Third- and fourth-years.’

  ‘Any supervision at night?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. The matron’s room’s down on the ground floor, with the little kids. Two sixth-years on this floor, prefects, but they’re asleep, what’re they gonna do? Anyone who wasn’t a massive klutz could sneak out, no problem.’

  Two oak doors at the end of the corridor, one on each side. Conway went for the left-hand one. Pushed buttons on the lock, no need to look at the secretary’s piece of paper.

  Cosy enough to curl up in, the third-year common room. Storybook stuff. I knew better, I’d seen it on the board in black and white and every slap-sharp colour, but I still couldn’t picture bad things here: someone being bitch-whipped out of a conversation into one of those corners, someone snug in one of the sofas longing to cut herself.

  Big squashy sofas in soft oranges and golds, a gas fire. Vase of freesias on the mantelpiece. Old wooden tables, for doing homework. Girls’ bits and bobs everywhere, hairbands, ice-creamy nail polish, magazines, water bottles, half-rolls of sweets. A meadow-green scarf with little white daisies hanging off the back of a chair, fine as a Communion veil, rising in the soft breeze through the window. A motion-sensor light snapped on like a warning, not a welcome: You. Watching you.

  Two alcoves of built-in bookshelves. Ceiling-high, every shelf layers deep in books.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ said Conway. ‘They couldn’t just have a telly?’

  A spill of high voices down the corridor, and the door banged open behind us. We both whipped round, but the girls were smaller than our lot: three of them, jammed in the doorway, staring at me. One of them giggled.

  ‘Out,’ Conway said.

  ‘I need my Uggs!’

  The kid was pointing. Conway picked up the boots, tossed them over. ‘Out.’

  They backed away. The whispering started before I got the door closed.

  ‘Uggs,’ Conway said, pulling out her gloves. ‘Fucking things should be banned.’

  Gloves on. If that book and that key existed, the prints on them mattered.

  One alcove each. Finger along the spines, skim, scoop the front row of books onto the floor and start on the back one. Fast, wanting to see something solid rise to the surface. Wanting it to be me who found it.

  Conway had spotted the stare and giggle, or felt the shove in the air. She said, ‘Watch yourself. I was taking the piss out of you, before, but you want to be careful around this lot. That age, they’re dying to fancy someone; they’ll practice on any half-decent fella they can get. See that staff room? You think it’s a coincidence all the guy teachers are trolls?’ She shook her head. ‘It’s to keep the crazy level down. Few hundred girls, hormones up to ninety . . .’

  I said, ‘I’m no Justin Bieber. I’m not gonna start any riots.’

  That got a snort. ‘It doesn’t take Justin Bieber. You’re not a troll and you’re not sixty: good enough. They want to fancy you, great, you can use that. Just don’t ever be alone with any of them.’

  I thought of Gemma, the Sharon Stone leg-cross. I said, ‘I’m not planning to be.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Conway said, and the sudden lift in her voice had me on my feet before I knew it. ‘Here we go.’

  Low shelf, back layer, hidden away behind slick bright colours. Old hardback, dust jacket gone tatty at the edges. St Thérèse of Lisieux: The Little Flower and the Little Way.

  Conway pulled it out, carefully, one fingertip. Dust came with it. Sepia young one in a nun-veil on the front, pudgy-faced, thin lips curved in a smile that could have been shy or sly. The back cover didn’t close right.

  I put two fingers on the book, top and bottom, held it steady while Conway eased open the back. The corner of the jacket flap had been folded in, taped to make a triangular pocket. Inside, when Conway gently hooked it open, was a Yale key.

  Neither of us touched.

  Conway said, like I’d asked, ‘I’m not calling it in yet. We’ve got nothing definitive.’

  This was the moment to bring in the cavalry: the full search team scouring the school, the Forensics lads taking prints to match up, the social worker in the corner of every interview. This wasn’t a scrap of card, fifty/fifty chance of a bored teenager playing attention games. This was one girl, probably four, maybe eight, who had had the opportunity to be at the murder scene. This was real.

  If Conway rang for the cavalry, she would have to show O’Kelly all the shiny new good stuff that justified him blowing his budget on a case turned cold. And bang, fast enough to make our heads spin, I would be headed home and she would be paired up with someone with years under his belt, O’Gorman or some other hint-dropper who would find a way to put his name on the solve, if there was a solve. Thanks for your help, Detective Moran, see you around next time someone drops a big fat clue into your hand.

  I said, ‘We don’t know for sure that this was actually the key to the connecting door.’

  ‘Exactly. I’ve got a copy of the real t
hing back at HQ, I can match it against that. Till then, I’m not calling out half the force for the key to someone’s ma’s booze cupboard.’

  ‘And we’ve only got the text girl’s word on who put it here and when. It might not even have been here last May.’

  ‘Might not.’ Conway let the pocket drop closed. ‘I wanted to take this place apart, top to bottom. The gaffer said no. Said there was no evidence that anyone inside Kilda’s was involved. What he meant was, all the posh mummies and daddies would have a conniption about some dirty detective going through their little darlings’ undies. So yeah: for all we know, the key wasn’t there to find.’

  I said, ‘Why would Joanne’s lot leave it here, all this time? Why not bin it when Chris got killed and people started asking questions?’

  Conway shut the book. Delicate touch, when she needed it. ‘You should’ve seen this place, after the murder. The kids didn’t get left on their own for a second, in case Hannibal Lecter jumped out of a wardrobe and ate their brains. None of them would go to the jacks without five of their mates in tow. Our lot everywhere, teachers patrolling the corridors, nuns flapping about, everyone going off like fire alarms if they spotted anything out of the ordinary. This’ – she flicked a finger at the book, no touching – ‘would’ve been the smart thing to do: leave the key, don’t risk getting caught moving it. And just a few weeks later, the school year finished up. When our girls came back in September, they were fourth-years. No code for this room, no good reason to be in it. Coming after the key would’ve been riskier than leaving it. How often do you think this book gets read? What’s the odds of anyone finding the key, or knowing what it was if they did?’

  ‘If Joanne or whoever didn’t bin the key, it’s a good bet she didn’t wipe down the book.’

  ‘Nah. We’ll get prints.’ Conway pulled a plastic evidence bag out of her satchel, shook it open with a snap. ‘Who d’you figure for the text? None of Holly’s lot are mad about Joanne.’

  She held the bag open while I balanced the book into it, two-fingered. I said, ‘“Who” isn’t the bit that’s getting me. I’d love to know why.’