The Secret Place

by Tana French

  He says, ‘I thought . . .’

  He’s looking at her like he’s never seen her before; like some ghost of what just happened found its way into him, too. He says, ‘You looked . . .’

  Selena smiles at him. She says, ‘I felt weird for a second. I’m OK now.’

  ‘Some girl fainted earlier, did you see? It’s boiling in here.’

  ‘Is that how come you’re not dancing?’

  ‘I was, before. I just felt like watching for a while.’ Chris takes a swallow of his punch and makes a face at the cup.

  Selena doesn’t move away. The handprint on her arm is shining red-gold, floating in the dark air. She wants to keep talking to him.

  ‘You’re friends with her,’ Chris says. ‘Right?’

  He’s pointing at Becca. Becca is dancing like an eight-year-old but the kind of eight-year-old who barely existed even back when they were eight, the kind who’s never even seen a music video: no booty-shake, no hip-wiggle, no chest-thrust, just dancing, like no one’s ever told her there’s a right way; like she’s doing it just for her own fun.

  ‘Yeah,’ Selena says. Seeing Becca makes her smile. Becca looks totally happy. Holly doesn’t; Marcus Wiley is dancing behind her, trying to rub up against her arse.

  ‘Why’s she wearing that?’

  Becca is wearing jeans and a white camisole with lace at the edges, and she has her hair in a long plait. ‘She likes it,’ Selena explains. ‘She doesn’t really like dresses.’

  ‘What, is she a lesbian?’

  Selena considers that. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says.

  Marcus Wiley is still trying to rub up against Holly. Holly stops dancing, turns around, and spells something out in small words. Marcus’s mouth opens and he stands there, blinking, till Holly gives him an off-you-go finger-wave; then he half-dances off, trying to look like he just happens to be edging away, and manically checking whether anyone saw whatever just happened. Holly holds out her hands to Becca and they start spinning around. This time they both look happy. Selena almost laughs out loud.

  ‘You should’ve talked to her,’ Chris says. ‘Got her to wear something normal. Or even something like what you’re wearing.’

  ‘Why?’ Selena asks.

  ‘Because look.’ He nods at Joanne, who is wiggling to the music and gabbling something in Orla’s ear at the same time. Both of them are wearing smirks and staring over at Becca and Holly. ‘They’re slagging her off.’

  Selena asks, ‘How come you care?’

  She’s not being snippy, she just wonders – she wouldn’t have guessed that Chris even knew Becca existed – but Chris glances around sharply. ‘I’m not into her! Jesus.’

  ‘OK,’ Selena says.

  Chris goes back to watching the dance floor. He says something, but the DJ is fading up a song loaded with bass, and Selena can’t hear. ‘What?’ she yells.

  ‘I said she reminds me of my sister.’ The DJ slides the volume up to earthquake level. ‘Jesus!’ Chris yells, a sudden rush of irritation jerking his head back. ‘This fucking noise!’

  Joanne’s spotted them; her eyes snap away when she sees Selena looking, but the curl to her top lip says she’s not pleased. Selena shouts, ‘Let’s go outside.’

  Chris stares, trying to work out if she means what most girls would mean. Selena can’t think of a good way to explain, so she doesn’t try. ‘How?’ he yells, eventually.

  ‘Let’s just ask.’

  He looks at her like she’s mental, but not in a bad way. ‘Since we’re not going to be snogging,’ Selena explains, ‘we don’t need somewhere private, just somewhere quiet. We can sit right outside the doors. They might be OK with that.’

  Chris looks taken aback about five different ways. Selena waits, but when he doesn’t come up with anything, she says, ‘Come on,’ and heads for the doors.

  Most times people would be staring at them all the way, but Fergus Mahon just poured punch down Garret Neligan’s collar so Garret Neligan tackled him and they fell over on top of Barbara O’Malley who has spent the last couple of weeks telling everyone that her dress is by Roksanda Somebody and who is screaming at the top of her lungs. Chris and Selena are invisible.

  Something is on their side, smoothing the way for them. Even at the doors: if Sister Cornelius was there, they’d have no chance – even if Sister Cornelius wasn’t crazy, this year the nuns take one look at Selena and get the urge to lock her up, for guys’ sake or hers or the sake of morality in general, probably even they don’t know – but it’s Miss Long standing guard, while Sister Cornelius is off shouting at Fergus and Garret.

  ‘Miss Long,’ Selena yells. ‘Can we go sit on the stairs?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Miss Long says, distracted by Annalise Fitzpatrick and Ken O’Reilly huddled together in a corner, with one of Ken’s hands out of view.

  ‘We’ll just be right out there. At the bottom of the steps, where you can see us. We just want to talk.’

  ‘You can talk here.’

  ‘We can’t. It’s too loud, and it’s . . .’ Selena spreads out her hands at the lights and the dancers and everything. She says, ‘We want to talk properly.’

  Miss Long takes her eye off Annalise and Ken for a second. She examines Selena and Chris sceptically. ‘“Properly,”’ she says.

  Something makes Selena smile at her, a burst of a smile, real and radiant. She doesn’t mean to; it happens by itself, out of nowhere, because there’s a pinwheel whirl deep in her chest telling her something amazing is happening.

  For half a second, Miss Long almost smiles back. She presses her lips together and it’s gone. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘At the bottom of those stairs. I will be checking on you every thirty seconds, and if you’re not there, or if you’re so much as holding hands, you will both be in enormous trouble. More trouble than you can even imagine. Is that clear?’

  Selena and Chris nod, putting in every drop of sincerity they can find. ‘It’d better be,’ Miss Long says, with one eye on Sister Cornelius. ‘Now go on. Go.’

  As she turns away from them, her eyes sweep the hall like for that minute it’s turned different, it’s leaped up to meet her sparkling and strawberry-sweet and chiming with maybes. Selena, slipping out of the door, understands that she and Chris weren’t the ones who got the permission; that it was a decades-lost boy at some half-forgotten dance, his bright eager face, his laugh.

  Chapter 15

  Conway banged the door open hard enough that I jumped a mile, hands leaping out of the wardrobe like I’d been doing something dirty. The corner of a grin, malicious, said she hadn’t missed it.

  She dumped her bag on Rebecca’s bed. ‘How’d you get on?’

  I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Julia’s got half a pack of smokes and a lighter wrapped up in a scarf at the back of her bit of wardrobe. That’s it.’

  ‘Good little girls,’ Conway said, not like a compliment. She was moving around the room, fast, tilting the frames on the bedside lockers to glance at the photos; or to make sure the room looked good and searched. ‘Any of them come looking for you? Looking to talk, jump your bones, whatever?’

  I shut my mouth on the slice of shadow at the door; maybe that grin, maybe the fact that I couldn’t swear there had been anything there. ‘Nah.’

  ‘They’ll come. The longer we leave them to it, the tighter they’ll wind themselves. I listened outside the common room: they’re up to ninety, the place sounds like a wasps’ nest. Give them long enough and someone’ll snap.’

  I shoved Selena’s flute case back into the wardrobe, shut the door on it. ‘How’s Alison getting on?’

  Conway snorted. ‘Tucked up in the sick room like she’s dying in some season finale. Little fadey voice on her and all. She’s having a great old time. The arm’s grand, almost; the mark’s still there, but the blisters have gone down. I’d say she’d be back in the common room by now, only McKenna’s hoping the mark’ll go, doesn’t want the rest of them gawping at it.’ She pulled Holly’s
book out of her locker, zipped a nail through the pages and tossed it back in. ‘I tried to get at whether Joanne put the whole stunt in Alison’s head, but the minute she heard Chris’s name she shut down, gave me the bunny stare. I don’t blame her: McKenna and Arnold were right there, dying to jump on anything they didn’t like. So I backed off.’

  I said, ‘How about the phone?’

  Triumph lifted Conway’s chin. Winning looked good on her. She flipped her satchel open, held up an evidence bag. The mobile I’d seen on Alison’s bed: pretty pearly-pink flip-phone, small enough to fit in a palm, silver charm dangling. Chris had picked carefully.

  ‘Alison got it off Joanne. She didn’t like admitting it; tried to dodge, pretended she felt faint. I didn’t fall for it, kept pushing, in the end she came clean. Joanne sold her the phone just after last Christmas, a year and a bit ago. Sixty quid, she charged her. Robbing bitch.’

  Conway threw the phone back in her satchel, started circling again. The triumph had worn off fast. ‘That’s all Alison would give me, though. When I started asking about where Joanne got the phone, why she was selling it, Alison went whiny on me: “I don’t know I don’t know my arm hurts I feel dizzy can I have a drink of water?” That helium voice girls do, what the fuck is that? Do guys think that’s sexy?’

  ‘Never thought about it,’ I said. Conway was still moving. Something had her wound tight. I stayed back against the wall, out of her way. ‘Does nothing for me, anyway.’

  ‘Makes me want to punch them in the mouth. There’s nothing left on the phone from before last Christmas, no texts, no call logs: Joanne wiped it before she sold it. Here’s the good part, though. Alison didn’t swap her old SIM card into Joanne’s phone. When she bought it, her old one was out of credit, and Joanne’s one had twenty-odd quid left on it, so she just binned her old one and switched to using Joanne’s number. Which means we don’t need to track that number down, beg the network for the records, all that shit: we’ve got them already. Me and Costello pulled records on half the school, last year, including Alison. I rang Sophie; she’ll have them e-mailed to me any minute.’

  ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I thought you said none of the girls’ numbers linked up to Chris’s.’

  ‘They didn’t. But if Chris gave Joanne this phone’ – Conway gave her bag a slap, as she paced past – ‘to keep the relationship secret, that means he thought people might go through their normal phones. Right?’

  ‘Kids snoop.’

  ‘Kids, parents, teachers, whoever. People snoop. If Chris didn’t want that, and he was loaded, like Julia said? I guarantee he had a dedicated girlie-phone of his own. We go through the records off Joanne’s one’ – another slap to the bag, harder – ‘what’s the odds we find one number showing up for a couple of months before last Christmas, a shitload of contact back and forth?’

  I said, ‘And then we check that number, Chris’s secret number, for links to the phone that texted me today. If he did this with one girl, chances are he did it with a few. If Selena actually was with him, she might have her own spare phone lying around.’

  ‘We cross-check Chris’s secret number for links to everyone. I knew, back last year, I knew it was weird he didn’t have his phone on him. These kids, they don’t take a shite without bringing their phones along. I should’ve— Jesus!’ A savage kick to Rebecca’s bedpost; it had to hurt, but Conway kept pacing circles like she felt nothing. ‘I should’ve fucking known.’

  There it was. Anything like reassurance – No way you could know, no one could’ve – would get me ripped apart. ‘If Joanne’s our woman,’ I said, ‘she’d have a good reason to take Chris’s phone off his body. It would’ve linked her to him.’

  Conway pulled open a drawer, raked through the neat stacks of knickers. ‘No shit. And it’s probably landfill by now; no way we can prove he ever had it to begin with. We wave the records at Joanne, she says she was texting someone she met online or fuck only knows what she’ll come up with. And there’s nothing we can do.’

  I said, ‘Unless we track down someone else Chris was contacting on the secret phone. Get her to come clean.’

  Conway laughed, short and harsh. ‘Right. Get her to come clean. Easy as that. ’Cause that’s how this case rolls.’

  ‘Worth a shot.’

  She slammed the drawer on the mess she’d made. ‘Jaysus, you’re a little ray of sunshine, aren’t you? Like working with bleeding Pollyanna—’

  ‘What do you want me to say? “Ah, fuck it, it’s never gonna work, let’s go home”?’

  ‘Do I look like quitting to you? I’m going nowhere. But if I have to listen to you being fucking chirpy, I swear to God—’

  Both of us glaring, Conway shoving her face and her finger in close, me still against the wall so I couldn’t have backed off if I’d wanted to. We were on the edge of a full-on barney.

  I don’t argue, not with people who have my career in their hands. Not even when I should; definitely not over bugger-all.

  I said, ‘You’d rather have Costello, yeah? Depressing fucker like him? How’d that work out for you?’

  ‘You shut your—’

  A buzz from Conway’s jacket. Message.

  She wheeled away instantly, grabbing for her pocket. ‘That’s Sophie. Joanne’s phone records. About bloody time.’ She hit buttons, watched the download, knee jiggling.

  I stayed well back. Waited, heart going ninety, for Fuck off home.

  Conway glanced up, impatient. ‘What’re you doing? Come see this.’

  Took me a second to cop: the fight was over, gone.

  I took a breath, moved in at her shoulder. She tilted the phone so I could see the screen.

  There it was. October, November, a year and a half back: one number going back and forth with the phone that had been Joanne’s, over and over again.

  No calls, just messages. Text from the new number, text to it, media message from, text from, from, from, to. Chris chasing, Joanne playing it cool.

  First week of December, the pattern changed. Text to the new number, text to, text to, text to, text to. Chris ignoring, Joanne pressing, Chris ignoring harder. Then, when she finally gave up, nothing.

  Down the corridor outside, rattle of a trolley, clinking plates, warm smell of chicken and mushrooms making my mouth water. Someone – I pictured a frilly apron – was bringing dinner up to the fourth-years. McKenna wasn’t going to have them heading down to the canteen, spreading stories and panic like flu, yammering away with no nun to listen in. She was keeping them corralled nice and safe in their common room, everything under control.

  Joanne’s phone records went blank till mid-January. Then a mix of other numbers, to and from, calls and texts. No sign of Chris’s number. Just what you’d expect off a girl’s normal phone; off Alison.

  ‘Sophie, you fucking star,’ Conway said. ‘We’ll get her on to the network, see if that number links to—’

  I felt her go still. ‘Hang on a second. Two nine three—’ She snapped her fingers at me, staring at the screen. ‘Your phone. Show me that text.’

  I pulled it up.

  That triumph lifting Conway’s head again, making her profile into something off a statue. ‘Here we go. I knew I’d seen that number.’ She held out the two phones, side by side. ‘Have a look at this.’

  That memory. She was right. The number that had told me where to find the key was the same number that had been playing phone footsie with Joanne.

  ‘Fuck me,’ I said. ‘Didn’t see that coming.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘So either Joanne’s secret romance wasn’t with Chris at all, it was with one of our other seven—’

  Conway shook her head. ‘Nah. A breakup would explain why the two gangs hate each other, yeah, but you can’t tell me we wouldn’t have got even one hint from somewhere. Gossip, or Joanne giving it loads of “So-and-so’s a big dyke, she tried to jump my sexy body,” trying to get the ex in shite. Nah.’

  I said, ‘—or else someone j
ust texted me off Chris Harper’s secret phone.’

  A moment of silence.

  Conway said, ‘Looks like it.’ Something in her voice, but I couldn’t tell whether it was exhilaration or anger, or smelling blood. Whether there was a difference, for her.

  The day had changed again, shifted under our eyes into something new. We weren’t looking for a witness, in that roomful of shining hair and restless feet and watching eyes. We were looking for a killer.

  ‘The way I see it,’ I said, ‘there’s three ways that could’ve happened. One: Joanne killed Chris, took his phone, she used it to text us about the key because she wants to get caught—’

  Conway snorted. ‘She does in her arse.’

  ‘Yeah, me neither. Two: the killer – Joanne or someone else – took the phone, handed it on to someone else.’

  ‘The same way Joanne sold her own to Alison. That’d fit her.’

  ‘Three,’ I said. ‘Someone else killed Chris, took the phone, has it still.’

  Conway started pacing again, but steady this time, none of that restless looking for something to wreck. She was focusing. ‘Why, but? She has to know the phone’s evidence. Hanging onto it is dangerous. Why not bin it, a year ago?’

  ‘Dunno. But it mightn’t be the actual phone she kept. She might’ve ditched the phone, just hung onto the SIM card. That’s a lot safer. Then today, she needs an anonymous number to text us from, swaps Chris’s SIM into her own phone . . .’

  ‘Why hang on to any of it?’

  I said, ‘Say it’s Theory Two, the killer passed it on to someone else. Maybe the other girl had a feeling there was something dodgy about it, something to do with Chris; she hung onto the phone, or just the SIM card, in case she ever felt like turning it in to us. Or maybe she didn’t cop there was a connection, just liked the idea of having an anonymous number stashed away. Or maybe it just had credit left on it, like the one Joanne sold Alison.’

  Conway nodded. ‘OK. That’ll work with Theory Two. I don’t see how it works with One or Three. Which means the girl who texted you isn’t the killer.’

  I said, ‘That says the killer’s got plenty of nerve. Handing Chris’s phone off to someone else, instead of binning it, when it could put her in jail.’