by French, Tana
Selena says, “Can you get out of school at night?”
She hears the hiss of caught breath in the air all around her. She wants to say back, It’s OK, I know what I’m doing, but she knows it wouldn’t be true.
Chris’s eyebrows go up. “At night? No way. You can? Seriously?”
Selena says, “I’ll give you my number. If you find a way, text me.”
“No,” he says, instantly. “Maybe it’s different here, but the guys go through each other’s phones all the time, looking for . . . well. Stuff. The Brothers do it too. I’ll find a way to get in touch. Just not like that. OK?”
Selena nods. “About getting out,” Chris says. “One of my mates. He might be able to figure something out.”
“Ask him.”
Chris says, “I’ll make him.”
Selena says, “Don’t tell him why. And till then, don’t talk to me. If we see each other around the Court or something, we’ll act like we don’t even know each other; like before. Otherwise it’ll all get ruined.”
Chris nods. He says, obscurely and out to the hall but Selena understands, “Thanks.”
Miss Long bangs the door open. “Selena! You, whatsyourname! Inside. Now.” This time she stays there, staring.
Chris jumps up and holds out a hand to Selena. She doesn’t take it. She stands up, feeling the movement spin little eddies up into the high darkness. She smiles at Chris and says, “See you soon.” Then she moves around him, carefully so not even the hem of her dress brushes up against him, and goes back into the gym. The handprint, wrapped around her arm, is still glowing.
17
Search time,” Conway said. “And if we’re stuck in here . . .” She shoved the sash window up.
A whirl of breeze shot in, carried the mess of body sprays away. Outside, the light was cooling and the sky was turning pale. It was almost evening.
“One more second of that stink,” Conway said, “I was gonna puke my ring.”
The stir-crazy was starting to needle at her. I felt it too. We’d been in those rooms a long time.
Conway pulled the wardrobe open, said “Fuck me,” at the amount or the labels. Started running her hands down hanging dresses. I went for the beds, Gemma’s first. Pulled back the bedclothes, shook them out, patted down the mattress. Not just checking for big lumps of phone or old book, the way I had been the first time. This time we were after something that could be as small as a SIM card.
“The door,” Conway said. “What was up with that?”
I’d have only loved to leave that. But the way she’d been straight in there, got my back on whatever I hadn’t told her; I heard myself say, “When you were off talking to Alison, I thought I saw someone behind the door. Thought it could be someone trying to get up the guts to talk to us, but by the time I opened the door there was no one there. So, when I saw something behind there again . . .”
“You went for it.” I waited for the slagging—And you went full-on, fair play to you, you’d’ve been all ready to save the day if one of the kids had built herself a nuke in Physics class—but she said, “The first time, while I was out. You positive there was someone there?”
I flipped the mattress up to check the bottom. Said, “Nah.”
Conway squeezed her way down a puffy jacket. “Yeah. We had the same thing last year, a few times: thought we saw something, nothing there. Something about this place, I don’t know. Costello had this theory about the windows being different in old buildings: they’re not the same shapes and sizes as what you get now, not placed the same way. So the light comes in at different angles, and if you catch something in the corner of your eye, it’s gonna look wrong.” She shrugged. “Who knows.”
I said, “If it’s that, it could be why people keep seeing Chris’s ghost.”
“The kids are used to this light, but. And an actual ghost? Is that what you saw?”
“Nah. Bit of shadow, just.”
“Exactly. They’re seeing Chris because they want to. Feeding off each other, trying to impress each other, give each other something good.” She shoved the jacket back into the wardrobe. “They need to get out more, this lot. They spend too much time together.”
Nothing down behind Gemma’s bedside table, nothing under the drawer. “At this age, that’s what it’s about.”
“Yeah, they’re not gonna be this age forever. When it hits them that there’s a great big world out there, they’re gonna get the shock of their lives.”
The scraping of satisfaction on her voice, I didn’t feel that. Instead I felt the wind that would hit you from every side, raw-edged and gritty, smelling of spices and petrol, whirling hot in your hair, when you stepped out of a place like this and the door slammed behind you.
I said, “I’d say Chris getting murdered made the great big world hard to miss.”
“You think? Even that was all about each other, for these. ‘Look, I cried harder than her, so I’m a better person.’ ‘We all saw his ghost together, look how close we are.’”
I moved on to Orla’s bed. Conway said, “I remember you from training.”
Her head was in the wardrobe, I couldn’t see her face. I said—carefully, skimming back—“Yeah? Good or bad?”
“You don’t remember, no?”
If I’d talked to her beyond “Howya” in corridors, I’d forgotten. “Tell me I didn’t make you do push-ups.”
“Would you remember if you had?”
“Ah, Jaysus. What’d I do?”
“Relax the kacks. I’m just wrecking your head.” I could hear the grin in Conway’s voice. “You never did anything on me.”
“Thank fuck. You had me worried there.”
“Nah, you were grand. I don’t think we ever even talked. I only clocked you to start with because of the hair.” Conway pulled something out of a hoodie pocket, grimaced: wad of tissues. “After that, but, I kept noticing because you did your own thing. You had mates, but you weren’t hanging out of anyone. All the rest, fuck me: they spent the whole time crawling up each other’s hole. Half of them trying to network, like the little bastards at Colm’s: if I get all buddy-buddy with the commissioner’s kid, I’ll never have to do traffic duty and I’ll make inspector by thirty. The other half trying to bond, like this lot here: oh, these are the best days of our lives and we’ll all be best pals forever and tell these stories at our retirement dinners. I was like, what the fuck? You’re grown adults; you’re here to learn the job, not to swap friendship bracelets and do each other’s eyeshadow.” She shoved clothes down the crowded rail. “I liked that you didn’t get sucked into that either.”
I didn’t tell her: a part of me watched my classmates bonding away like goodo, and wished. Just like Conway said, it was my own choice that I wasn’t in there swapping friendship bracelets with the best of them. Mostly that made it OK.
I said, “If you think back, we were kids; only a couple of years older than this lot. People wanted to belong. Nothing strange there.”
Conway thought, unrolling tights. “I’ll tell you,” she said. “It’s not the making friends that gets on my tits. Everyone needs those. But I had mine back at home. Still do.”
Glance at me. I said, “Yeah.”
“Right. So you didn’t need to go chasing more. If you make friends inside some bubble that’s going to burst on you in a couple of years—like training, or like here—you’re an idiot. You start thinking that’s the whole world, nowhere else exists, then you end up with all this hysterical shite. Best friends forever, she-said-you-said-I-said wars, everyone working themselves into fits over they don’t even know what. Nothing’s just normal; everything’s right up here, all the time.”
Hand above head level. I thought of the Murder squad room. Wondered if Conway was thinking of it too.
“Then you head out into the big bad world,” she said, “everything looks differen
t all of a sudden, and you’re fucked.”
I ran a hand under the slats of Joanne’s bed frame. “Orla and Alison, you mean? No way Joanne’s going to be hanging out with them in college.”
Conway snorted. “Yeah, not a chance. Here, they’re useful; out there, they’ll be gone. And they’ll be devastated. I wasn’t thinking of them, though. I meant the gangs that actually genuinely care about each other. Like your Holly and her mates.”
“I’d say they’ll still be mates on the outside.” I hoped so. That something special, gilding the air. You want to believe it’ll last forever.
“Could be. Probably, even. That’s not the point. The point is, right now, they don’t give a fuck about anyone except each other. Great, that’s cute, I bet they’re delighted with themselves.” Conway threw a handful of bras back into a drawer, slammed it. “But when they get out there? That’s not going to be an option any more. They won’t be able to hang out of each other’s hole twenty-four-seven, ignore everyone else. Other people are going to start mattering, whether these four like that or not. The rest of the world’s gonna be there. It’s gonna be real. And that’s gonna fuck up their heads like they can’t even imagine.”
She pulled out another drawer, hard enough that it nearly fell on her foot. “I don’t like bubbles.”
Down the back of Joanne’s headboard: dust and nothing. I said, “How about the squad?”
“What about it?”
“Murder’s a bubble.”
Conway flipped out a T-shirt with a snap. “Yeah,” she said. Jaw set like she was seeing fights ahead. “Murder’s a lot like here. The difference is, I’m there for good.”
I thought about asking if that meant she was planning on making friends on the squad. Decided I had better sense.
Conway said, like she’d heard me anyway, “And I’m still not gonna get all buddy-buddy with the squad lads. I don’t want to belong. I want to do my fucking job.”
I did my fucking job—ran my hand over shiny posters; nothing—and thought about Conway. Tried to work out if I envied her, or felt sorry for her, or thought she was talking bollix.
We were finishing up when Conway’s phone buzzed. Message.
“Sophie,” she said, slamming the wardrobe door. “Here we go.” This time I went to her shoulder without waiting for an invitation.
The e-mail said, Records for the number that texted Moran. My guy’s working on the actual texts, says they should still be in the system but might take him an hour or two. Probably all “OMGLOLWTFbwahaha!!!!” but you want them, you’re getting them. Enjoy. S.
The attachment was pages long; Chris had been getting plenty of use out of his special phone. He’d activated it at the end of August, just before he went back to school—good little Boy Scout, coming prepared. By the middle of September, two numbers were showing up. No calls, but plenty of texts and media messages back and forth with both, every day, a few times a day. “You were right,” Conway said, hard-edged. I felt her think it: witnesses she should have found.
“Ladies’ man, our Chris.”
“And smart, too. See all these picture messages? Those weren’t pics of fluffy kitties. If one of his girls started threatening to tell the world, these would keep her nice and quiet.”
I said, “That’ll be why none of them said it to you last year. They were hoping if they kept their mouths shut, no one would link these to them.”
Conway’s head came round, suspicious, ready to shove my comfort up my hole. I kept my eyes on the screen till she turned back to it.
October, both of Chris’s girls got the boot—same MO we’d seen on Joanne’s records: he ignored their texts, the flood of calls from one of them, till they gave up. As they faded, Joanne’s number kicked in. By the middle of November, Chris was two-timing her; after Joanne faded away in December, the other girl hung on a couple more weeks, but by Christmas she was history. January, a new number swapped a handful of texts and vanished: something that never got off the ground.
Conway said, “I wondered all along. Why Chris hadn’t had a girlfriend in a year. Popular guy like him, good-looking, did fine with the girls before; it didn’t add up. I should’ve . . .” Quick jerk of her head, angry. She didn’t bother finishing.
Last week in February, the next run of texts started. One a day, then two, then half a dozen. All the one number. Conway scrolled down: March, April, the texts kept coming.
She tapped the screen. “That’ll be Selena.”
I said, “And he wasn’t two-timing her.”
We left a second for what that meant. My theory, the girl who had caught Chris cheating, she was out. Conway’s was getting stronger.
Conway said, “See that? No media messages, just texts. No tit pics here. Selena wasn’t giving Chris what he was after.”
“Maybe he dumped her for that.”
“Maybe.”
April twenty-second, Monday, the usual couple of texts back and forth during the day—setting up the meeting, probably. That night, Joanne had taken the video.
Early on April twenty-third, Chris texted Selena. She answered before school, he came straight back to her. No answer. Chris texted her again after school: nothing.
He tried three more times the next day. Selena didn’t answer.
Conway said, “Something went wrong, anyway, that night. After Joanne and Gemma went inside.”
I said, “And she’s the one dumping him.” Conway’s theory swelled bigger.
It was the twenty-fifth, Thursday, when Selena finally got back to Chris. Just the one text. No answer.
Over the next few weeks, she texted him six times. He didn’t answer any of them. Conway’s eyebrows were pulled together.
Early on the morning of the sixteenth of May, Thursday, a text from Selena to Chris and, finally, one back. That night, Chris had been murdered.
After that, nothing into his phone or out, for a year. Then, today, the text to me.
Below the window, a tumble of high voices: girls outside, getting fresh air on their break between dinner and study. Nothing on our corridor. McKenna was keeping this lot where they were, under her eye.
Conway said, “It goes bad the night of the twenty-second. Next day, Chris tries to apologize, Selena tells him to fuck off. He keeps trying, she ignores him.”
“Over the next few days,” I said, “she comes out of shock, starts getting mad. She decides she wants to confront Chris. By that time, though, he’s in a snot because she didn’t accept his apology; he’s decided to move on. Like that story Holly told us, with the muffin: he didn’t like not getting what he wanted.”
“Or it’s started to sink in that this is serious shit, and he’s scared Selena’s going to tell. He figures the safest thing he can do is cut off contact; if she comes forward, he’ll call her a liar, claim the person she was texting wasn’t him, he never had anything to do with her.”
“Finally,” I said, “on the sixteenth of May, Selena finds a way to get him to meet up. Maybe he figures he needs to get the phone off her, in case there’s a way it can be traced back to him.”
The rest turned in the air between us. On the grass below the window a huddle of little girls were chattering, indignant as small birds: She totally knew I wanted it and she like looked at me going for it and then she just barged right in front—
Conway said, “I told you in the car I didn’t fancy Selena for it, didn’t think she could get the job done. I still don’t.”
I said, “Julia’s very protective of Selena.”
“You spotted that, yeah? I make noises about questioning Selena, say I don’t play nice; Julia’s straight in with the info about Joanne and Chris, throwing another ball for me to chase.”
“Yeah. And I’d say it’s not just Julia: all four of them look after each other. If Chris did something to Selena, or tried to, and the others found out . . .”
“Revenge,” Conway said. “Or they saw Selena losing the plot, thought she’d go back to normal if Chris was gone and she felt safe again. And I’d say any of those three could get the job done just fine.”
“Rebecca?” But I remembered it, that lift of her chin, the glint that had told me Not so frail after all. Thought of the poem on her wall, of what her friends meant to her.
“Yeah. Even her.” After a second, carefully not looking at me: “Even Holly.”
I said, “Holly’s the one who brought me that card. She could’ve just binned it.”
“I’m not saying she did anything. I’m just saying I’m not ready to rule her out yet.”
Made me prickle, the carefulness; like Conway thought I was going to throw a full-on hissy, demand she take my Holly off the list, start making calls to my big daddy Mackey. I wondered all over again what Conway had heard about me.
I said, “Or it could be all three of them.”
“Or all four,” Conway said. She pressed her fingers to her nose, rubbed them along her cheekbones. “Fuck.”
She looked like today was starting to close over her head. She was longing to leave: go back to Murder and turn in her paperwork, sit in the pub with a mate till her head was wiped clear, start fresh in the morning.
She said, “This fucking place.”
“Long day,” I said.
“You want to go, go.”
“And do what?”
“Do whatever you do. Go home. Get your glad rags on and go clubbing. There’s a bus stop down the main road, or you can phone a taxi. Send me the receipt, I’ll put it on expenses.”
I said, “If I’ve got the choice, I’m staying.”
“I’m gonna be here a while. I don’t know how long.”
“No problem.”
Conway looked at me, eyebag to eyebag. Fatigue had rasped the coppery sheen off her skin, left her bare and hard and dusty.
She said, “Ambitious little fucker, aren’t you?”
It stung, places where it shouldn’t have, because it was true and because it wasn’t all the truth. I said, “It’s your case. No matter what I do, it’s your name going on the solve. I just want to work it.”