Secret Place (9780698170285)

by French, Tana

  I believed it. “I used to tune it out. Smile, nod, do my own thing.”

  “Yeah. But this year Julia’s watching us like we’re actual people, you and me.” Conway finished her coffee in one long gulp. “I can’t work out if that’s gonna be a good thing or a bad one.”

  I said, “Holly?”

  “Holly,” Conway said. “Back when you first met her, what was she like?”

  “Sharp. Stubborn. Plenty going on.”

  Wry flip to the corner of her mouth. “No change there, anyway. The big difference, you already picked up on. Last year, we had to drag every word out of her. This year, Little Miss Helpful, card in one hand, theory in the other, motive up her sleeve. Something’s going on there.” She stuffed the cling film into her coffee cup. “What d’you think of her theory? Someone else got one of these eight to put up the card for her?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “You’re aiming to stay anonymous, so you get someone else in on the game? Someone who isn’t even one of your best mates?”

  “Nah. Your Holly’s just spreading the love. She wants us looking at the whole school, not focusing on her gang. You know what that makes me want to do?”

  “Focus on her gang.”

  “Too fucking right. Even though, say one of them knows something and Holly doesn’t want us identifying her: why bring in that card at all? Why not bin it, give your mate the tip-line number, keep it anonymous?” Conway shook her head. Said, again, “Something’s going on there.”

  The tip line gets you whoever’s on duty. The card had got her me. I wondered.

  Conway said, “If we keep talking to Holly and her lot. She going to call Daddy?”

  The thought itched my back. Frank Mackey is hard core. Even if he’s on your side, you need to be watching him from more angles than you’ve got eyes. He was the last thing I wanted in this mix.

  “Doubt it,” I said. “She basically told me she doesn’t want him onboard. What about McKenna?”

  “Nah. You joking? He’s a parent. She’s up there saying rosaries that none of the parents find out we’re here till we’re good and gone.”

  The itch went; not gone, but down. “She’ll be lucky,” I said. “One kid phones home . . .”

  “Bite your tongue. We’re on McKenna’s side there. For once.” Conway jammed the cling film down harder. “So how about Julia and Rebecca’s theory? A gang from Colm’s came in here, something went wrong.”

  I said, “That one could play. If the lads were planning on a bit of vandalism, maybe digging another cock and balls into the grass, they could’ve nicked the hoe out of the stables. They’re messing about, fighting or pretending to fight—guys that age, half the time there’s no difference. And someone gets carried away.”

  “Yeah. Which puts the card on Joanne, Gemma or Orla. They’re the ones going out with Colm’s guys.” The boyfriend question, suddenly making sense. The sardonic slant to Conway’s eye said she’d seen the penny drop.

  I said, “Whatever happened to Chris, it’s been bothering one of the guys who was there. He doesn’t want to talk to an adult, but he opens up to his girlfriend.”

  “Or he tells her because he thinks it’ll make him sound interesting, get him into her knickers. Or he makes the whole thing up.”

  “We’ve ruled out Gemma and Orla. That leaves Joanne.”

  “Her fella, Andrew Moore, he was matey enough with Chris. Arrogant little prick.” Snap of anger. One of those complaints had come from Andrew’s da.

  I said, “Did you work out how Chris got out of Colm’s?”

  “Yeah. Security over there was even shittier than in this place—they didn’t have to worry about any of their little princes coming back pregnant after a night on the tiles. The fire door in the boarders’ wing was alarmed, supposedly, but one kid was an electronics whiz, worked out how to disable the alarm. Took some doing to get it out of him, but we got there in the end.” Grim smile in Conway’s voice, remembering. “He got expelled.”

  “When’d he disable it?”

  “A couple of months before the murder. And the kid, Finn Carroll, he was good mates with Chris. He said Chris knew all about the door, had snuck out plenty of times, but he wouldn’t name any other names. Not a chance him and Chris were the only two, though. Julia and Rebecca could be on to something: gang of Colm’s boys on the prowl, they’re going to think of this place.” Conway rubbed her apple to a shine on her trouser thigh. “If Chris is out for a bit of vandalism with the lads, though, what’s he doing with a condom?”

  I said, “Last year. Did you ask the girls were they sexually active?”

  “Course we asked. They all said no. Headmistress sitting right there, staring them out of it, what else are they gonna say?”

  “You think they were lying?”

  “What, you figure I can tell just by looking?”

  But there was a grin at the corner of her mouth. I said, “Better than I can, anyway.”

  “Like being back in school. ‘D’you think she’s Done It yet?’ All we talked about, when I was that age.”

  “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 sh
e’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 humor 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. Going by 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 recognize. 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 Thérèse, 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 voice mail 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 dialing 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 good-bye, wasn’t a happy camper when she found out we weren’t good-byeing 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.

  Cozy 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 color, 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, hair bands, 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.”