The Secret Place

by Tana French

  Wry glance from Conway, as she tucked the bag back into her satchel. ‘My scare speech wasn’t good enough for you?’

  ‘It was good. But it wouldn’t scare anyone into texting us about this. What’s to be scared of? Why would the killer come after her for knowing this key was here?’

  ‘Unless,’ Conway said. She was pulling off her gloves, carefully, finger by finger. ‘Unless the killer’s Joanne.’

  The first time we’d had a name to say. It sent a fine zing through the air, rippling the throws on the sofas, twitching the curtains.

  I said, ‘You’re the boss. But if it was me, I wouldn’t go at her yet.’

  I half-expected a slap-down. Didn’t get one. ‘Me neither. If Joanne hid this, her buddies knew about it. Who d’you want to try? Alison?’

  ‘I’d go for Orla. Alison’s nervier, all right, but that’s not what we need. One push and she’ll run crying to Daddy, and we’re bollixed.’ The we flicked Conway’s eyebrow, but she said nothing. ‘Orla’s more solid, and she’s thick enough that we can run rings round her. I’d try her.’

  ‘Mm,’ Conway said. She was opening her mouth to say something else when we heard the sound.

  Thin shrilling sound, dipping and rising like an alarm. Before I copped what it was, Conway was up and running for the door. The savage bright burst on her face as she passed me said Yes, said Action, said At fucking last.

  Girls clotted halfway down the corridor, a dozen of them, more. Half of them out of their uniforms now, bright in hoodies and T-shirts, cheap bangles shaking; a few half-changed, clutching buttons together, shoving into sleeves. All of them crowding and yammering, high and fast, Whatwhatwhat? In the middle of the clot someone was screaming.

  We were taller than them. Over shining heads: Joanne and her lot, surrounded. Alison was the one screaming, back pressed against the wall, hands splayed in front of her face. Joanne was trying to do something, cradle her, ministering angel, who knows. Alison was too far gone even for that.

  Holly, between heads, the only one not gawping at Alison. Holly was scanning faces, with eyes like her da’s. Holly was watching for someone to give something away.

  Conway grabbed the nearest kid by the arm, little dark girl who leaped and screamed. ‘What’s the story?’

  ‘Alison saw a ghost! She saw, she said, she said she saw Chris Harper, his ghost, she saw—’

  The shrieks kept coming; the kid was jumping and rattling under them. Conway said, loud, so anyone who could hear anything could hear her: ‘You know why he’s back, right?’

  The kid stared, open-mouthed. Other girls were starting to look at us, baffled, tennis-heading, trying to work out through the brain-battering noise why these adults weren’t stepping in and getting control and turning everything back to sane.

  ‘Because someone here knows who killed him. He’s come back to make her talk. We see it all the time, on murder cases, all the time, amn’t I right?’

  Conway shot me a look like a dig. I nodded. Said, ‘This is just the start. It’s gonna get worse.’

  ‘They know, murder victims do, they don’t like it when someone keeps them from getting justice. Chris isn’t happy. He won’t be able to rest till everyone’s told us everything they know.’

  The kid made a muffled whine. Gasps around us, a girl catching her friend’s arm, ‘OhmyGod—’ High, trembling right on the edge of a scream to join Alison’s. ‘OhmyGod—’

  ‘Murder victims, they’re raging. Probably Chris was a lovely guy, when he was alive, but he’s not like you remember him. He’s angry now.’

  A shiver swayed them. Teeth and sharp shards of bone, they saw, coming to rip the warm flesh off them. ‘OhmyGod—’

  McKenna, surging through the boiling girls, massive. Conway dropped the kid’s arm like a hot snot, stepped back smooth and fast.

  McKenna boomed ‘Quiet!’ and the jabber fizzled to nothing. Only Alison’s shrieks were left, exploding like fireworks into the shocked air.

  McKenna didn’t look at us. She got Alison’s shoulders and spun her, face to face. ‘Alison! Quiet!’

  Alison swallowed a shriek, choked on it. Stared up at McKenna, gulping and red-faced. Swaying, like she was hanging from McKenna’s big hands.

  ‘Gemma Harding,’ McKenna said, not taking her eyes off Alison. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Gemma found her jaw. ‘Miss, we were just in our room, we weren’t doing anything—’

  She sounded years younger, looked years younger, a shaken little girl. McKenna said, ‘I’m not interested in what you weren’t doing. Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘Alison just went to the loo, and then we heard her screaming out here. We all ran out. She was . . .’

  Gemma’s eyes zipping around the others, finding Joanne, grabbing for signals. McKenna said, ‘Continue. At once.’

  ‘She was just – she was up against the wall and she was screaming. Miss, she said, she said she saw Chris Harper.’

  Alison’s head fell back. She made a high whining noise. ‘Alison,’ McKenna said sharply. ‘You will look at me.’

  ‘She said he grabbed her arm. Miss, there’s – there’s marks on her arm. I swear to God.’

  ‘Alison. Show me your arm.’

  Alison scrabbled at the sleeve of her hoodie, limp-fingered. Finally managed to pull it up to her elbow. Conway swept girls out of our way.

  First it looked like a grip-mark, like someone had got hold of Alison and tried to drag her away. Bright red, wrapped around her forearm: four fingers, a palm, a thumb. Bigger than a girl’s hand.

  Then we got in close.

  Not a grip-mark. The red skin was puffy and bubbled, thick with tiny blisters. A scald, an acid burn, a poison weed.

  The press of girls rippled, necks craning. Moaned.

  McKenna said acidly, ‘Were any of you unaware that Alison suffers from allergies? Please, raise your hands.’

  Stillness.

  ‘Did any of you somehow miss the incident last term when she required medical attention after borrowing the wrong brand of tanning product?’

  Nothing.

  ‘No one?’

  Girls looking at sleeves twisted round their thumbs, at the floor, sideways at each other. They were starting to feel silly. McKenna was bringing them back.

  ‘Alison has been exposed to a substance that triggered her allergies. Presumably, if she has just been to the toilet, it was either a hand soap or a product used by the cleaning staff. We will investigate this and make sure the trigger is removed.’

  McKenna still hadn’t looked at us. Bold kids get ignored. Talking to us too, though, or at us.

  ‘Alison will take an antihistamine and will be fully recovered within an hour or two. The rest of you will go to your common rooms and will write me a three-hundred-word essay on allergy triggers, to be done by tomorrow morning. I am disappointed in all of you. You are old enough and intelligent enough to deal with this kind of situation with good sense rather than silliness and hysteria.’

  McKenna took one hand off Alison’s shoulder – Alison slumped against the wall – and pointed down the corridor. ‘You may go now. Unless any of you have anything useful to share?’

  ‘Miss,’ Joanne said. ‘One of us should stay with her. In case—’

  ‘No, thank you. Common rooms, please.’

  They went pressed together in clumps, arm-linking and whispering, throwing back glances. McKenna stared them out of sight.

  Said to us, ‘I assume you realise what caused this.’

  ‘Haven’t a notion,’ said Conway. She moved in, between McKenna and Alison, till McKenna let go. ‘Alison. Did anyone say something about Chris Harper’s ghost, before you went to the toilet?’

  Alison was white and purple-shadowed. She said faintly, ‘He was in that door. Doing pull-ups off the top of the frame. His legs were waving.’

  Always doing something, Selena had said. I don’t believe in ghosts. Felt the shiver rise up between my shoulder blades anyway.<
br />
  ‘I think maybe I screamed. Anyway he saw me. He jumped down and came running down the corridor, really fast, and he grabbed me. He was laughing right into my face. I screamed more and I kicked him, and he disappeared.’

  She sounded almost peaceful. She was wrung out, like a little kid after puking its guts.

  ‘That will do,’ McKenna said, in a voice that could have scared grizzlies. ‘Whatever allergy trigger you touched, it caused a brief hallucination. Ghosts do not exist.’

  I said, ‘Is your arm sore?’

  Alison gazed at her arm. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s really sore.’

  ‘Unsurprisingly,’ McKenna said coldly. ‘And will continue to be until it is treated. On which note, Detectives, please excuse us.’

  ‘He smelled like Vicks,’ Alison told me, over her shoulder as McKenna marched her off. ‘I don’t know if he used to smell like Vicks before.’

  Conway watched them go. Said, ‘What’s the betting the Ugg kids spread the word we were in their common room?’

  ‘No takers. And it had plenty of time to get round.’

  ‘To Joanne. Who had to guess what we were after.’

  I nodded after Alison. Footsteps rattling around the stairwell, echoing; her and McKenna were taking the stairs at a snappy old pace. ‘That wasn’t put on.’

  ‘Nah. Alison’s suggestible, but. And she was half hysterical to start with, after the interview and all.’ Conway was keeping her voice down, head tilted backwards to listen to the popcorn crackle of voices from the common rooms. ‘She’s headed for the jacks, Joanne gives it loads about Chris’s ghost being all stirred up – she knows Alison inside out, remember, knows exactly how to get her going. Then she sticks fake tan on her hand, gives Alison’s arm a squeeze. It’s a decent bet Alison’ll go mental over one thing or the other. Joanne’s hoping there’ll be enough chaos that we’ll leg it out of the common room, leave the door open, she’ll have a chance to nip in there and swipe the book.’

  Sixteen-year-old kid, I almost said: would she be up to that? Copped myself on in time. Said, instead, ‘Alison’s wearing long sleeves.’

  ‘So Joanne got her before she put on the hoodie.’

  It could work; maybe, just about, with plenty of luck. I said, ‘Joanne didn’t try to go for the common room, but. She stayed right here, in the middle of the action.’

  ‘Maybe she was betting we’d take Alison away, she could take her time.’

  ‘Or Joanne had nothing to do with it. The ghost was Alison’s imagination and the arm’s accidental, like McKenna said.’

  ‘Could be. Maybe.’

  The footsteps had faded out of the stairwell. That white silence was sifting down again, filling the air with corner-of-the-eye shapes, making it hard to believe that anything in here was as simple as imagination and accident.

  I said, ‘Does McKenna live here?’

  ‘Nah. Got more sense. But she’s not going home till we do.’

  We. ‘Hope she likes canteen food.’

  Conway flipped her bag open, checked the book tucked away inside. ‘Things happening,’ she said. Didn’t even try to hide the blaze of satisfaction. ‘Told you.’

  Chapter 12

  In a way they were right: it’s not the same the second time they sneak out, or the third. It turns out that doesn’t matter. The glade where they lie and talk always has that other one behind it, a promise waiting for the right moment to be kept. It colours everything.

  I never thought I’d have friends like you guys, Becca says, deep inside the third night. Never. You’re my miracles.

  Not even Julia bats that away. Their four hands are twined together on the grass, loose and warm.

  Late in January, half past ten at night. Fifteen minutes till lights-out, for third-years and fourth-years at Kilda’s and at Colm’s. Chris Harper – brushing his teeth, half-thinking about the cold soaking into his feet from the tiled floor of the bathroom, half-listening to a couple of guys giving a first-year hassle in a toilet cubicle and wondering whether he can be arsed stopping them – has just under four months left to live.

  A breadth of darkness away in Kilda’s, snow brushes at the dorm-room window, small fitful flakes, not sticking. Winter has clamped down hard: early sunsets, petty sleet and the streaming cold that’s been going around mean it’s been a week since Julia and Holly and Selena and Becca felt daylight, and they’re jiggly with confinement and leftover sniffles. They’re arguing about the Valentine’s dance.

  ‘I’m not going,’ Becca says.

  Holly is lying on her bed in her pyjamas, copying Julia’s maths as fast as she can, throwing in the odd minor mistake for authenticity. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’d rather burn off my own fingernails with a lighter than wiggle myself into some stupid dress with a stupid micro-mini skirt and a stupid stuck-on low-cut top, even if I owned that kind of crap, which I don’t and I’m not going to ever. Is why.’

  ‘You have to go,’ Julia says, from her bed, where she’s face-down reading.

  ‘No I don’t.’

  ‘If you don’t, you’ll get sent to Sister Ignatius and she’ll ask if you don’t want to go because you were abused when you were little, and when you tell her you weren’t, she’ll say you need to learn self-esteem.’

  Becca is sitting on her bed with her arms around her knees, clenched into a furious red knot. ‘I have self-esteem. I have enough self-esteem that I’m not going to wear something stupid just because everyone else is.’

  ‘Well, fuck you very much. My dress isn’t stupid.’ Julia has a shimmy of a dress, black with scarlet polka dots, that she spent months saving for and bought in the sales just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the tightest thing she’s ever owned, and she actually kind of likes the look of herself in it.

  ‘Your dress isn’t. Me in your dress would be. Because I’d hate it.’

  Selena says, through the pyjama top she’s pulling over her head, ‘Why don’t you wear whatever you like best?’

  ‘I like jeans best.’

  ‘So wear jeans.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Are you going to?’

  ‘I’m wearing that blue dress that was my granny’s. The one I already showed you.’ It’s a sky-blue minidress that Selena’s granny wore back in the sixties, when she was a shopgirl in cool parts of London. It’s tight on Selena’s chest, but she’s wearing it anyway.

  ‘Exactly,’ Becca says. ‘Hol, are you wearing jeans?’

  ‘Ah, bugger,’ Holly says, scrubbing at a mistake that turned out bigger than she expected. ‘My mum bought me this purple dress for Christmas. It’s actually OK. I might wear that.’

  ‘So I’d be the only loser in jeans, or else I have to go buy some stupid dress I hate and be a total compromise coward liar. No thanks.’

  ‘Do the dress,’ says Julia, turning a page. ‘Give us all a laugh.’

  Becca gives her the finger. Julia grins and gives it right back. She approves of the new feisty Becca.

  ‘It’s not funny. You’re going to let me sit here by myself that night doing Sister Ignatius’s stupid self-esteem exercises, while you’re all wiggling in stupid dresses for—’

  ‘So come, for fuck’s sake—’

  ‘I don’t want to!’

  ‘Then what do you want? You want the rest of us to stay home just because you don’t feel like wearing a dress?’ Julia has ditched her book and is sitting up. Holly and Selena have stopped what they’re doing at the snap in her voice. ‘Because yeah, no: fuck that.’

  ‘I thought the whole point was we don’t have to do stuff just because everyone else does—’

  ‘I’m not going because everyone else is, genius, I’m going because I actually want to. Because it’s fun, you’ve heard of that, right? If you’d rather sit here doing self-esteem exercises, knock yourself out. I’m going.’

  ‘Oh, thanks, thanks a lot – you’re supposed to be my friend—’

  ‘Right, which doesn’t mean being your bitch—’

&n
bsp; Becca is up on her knees on the bed, fists clenched and hair crackling with fury. ‘I never fucking asked you to—’

  The light bulb spits a furious sizzle, pops and goes out. They all scream.

  ‘Shut up!’ the second-floor prefects both yell from down the corridor. A breathless ‘Jesus—’ from Julia, a thump and ‘Ow!’ as Selena knocks her shin off something, and then the light flicks back on.

  ‘What the hell,’ Holly says. ‘What happened?’

  The bulb is burning innocently, not a flicker.

  ‘It’s a sign, Becs,’ Julia says, with that breathless note almost under control. ‘The universe wants you to quit whinging and go to the dance.’

  ‘Ha ha, so very funny,’ Becca says. Her voice isn’t under control at all; it sounds like a kid’s, high and wobbly. ‘Or the universe doesn’t want you going, and it’s annoyed because you said you were.’

  Selena says, to Becca, ‘Did you do that?’

  ‘You are shitting me,’ Julia says. ‘Right?’

  ‘Becsie?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ Julia says. ‘Come on. Don’t even go there.’

  Selena is still looking at Becca. So is Holly. In the end Becca says, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Julia says. ‘I can’t even.’ She falls flat on her stomach on her bed and slams her pillow over her head.

  Selena says, ‘Do it again.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘However you did it before.’

  Becca is staring at the light bulb like it might leap at her. ‘I didn’t. I don’t think. I don’t know.’

  Julia groans, under her pillow. ‘Better do it fast,’ Holly says. ‘Before she suffocates.’

  ‘I just . . .’ Becca holds up one thin palm, wavering. ‘I was upset. Because of . . . And I just . . .’ She closes her fist. The light goes out.

  This time none of them scream.

  ‘Turn it back on?’ Selena’s voice says, quietly, in the darkness.

  The light comes back on. Julia has taken the pillow off her head and is sitting up.

  ‘Oh,’ Becca says. She has her back pressed against the wall and a knuckle in her mouth. ‘Did I . . . ?’