by French, Tana
“Selena’s not with him. Remember? I’m just asking if. For the laugh. If working on the girl was out, how would you work on Chris?”
Gemma pulls pink lip gloss and a mirror out of her weekend bag and puts it on, taking her time, like it helps her think. She says, “Joanne told me to tell him Selena’s got gonorrhea. Which would probably do it.”
Julia changes her mind: bright spot or no bright spot, she wishes Joanne and Chris had stayed together. They’re perfect for each other.
She says, “Do it and I’ll tell Holly’s dad you buy speed off the groundskeeper to lose weight.”
“Whatever.” Gemma rubs her lips together and examines them in the mirror. “You seriously figure Selena’s not shagging him?”
“Yeah. And she’s not going to.”
“Well,” Gemma says. She screws the lip gloss shut and drops it back into her bag. “You could try telling him that. Probably he won’t believe you, because he thinks he’s just so irresistible only a crazy person would actually say no to him. But if you can convince him, then he’ll dump Selena for the first girl who does it. That fast.”
“So why doesn’t Joanne go for it? Tell him she wants his sexy body, but only if he breaks it off with Selena?”
“I said that. She said no way, he had his chance and he missed it.”
In other words, Joanne is terrified Chris would turn her down. “You’re her little sidekick,” Julia says. “You’re not going to do her dirty work?”
A slow, wet smile opens Gemma’s mouth, but she shakes her head. “Um, yeah, no?”
“Like you’re not into him? I didn’t think you’d even need an excuse.”
“He’s totes yum. Not the point. Joanne would have a coronary.”
Julia says, suddenly, “If you’re that scared of her, why do you hang out with her?”
Gemma inspects her mouth in the mirror, dabs away a smear with the tip of her little finger. “I’m not scared of her. I just don’t piss her off.”
“She’d be seriously pissed off if she found out you’d told me about Chris dumping her.”
“Yeah, I’d rather she didn’t find out. Obviously.”
Julia is turned in her seat, watching Gemma straight on. She says, “So how come you told me? It’s not like you care if Selena gets her heart broken.”
Gemma lifts one shoulder. “Not a lot.”
“So?”
“Because fuck him. Probably you’re right and Joanne’s a bitch, but she’s my friend. And you didn’t see the state she was in, afterwards.” Gemma clicks the mirror shut and slides it back into her bag. “We already started a rumor that she dumped him because he wanted to wear a nappy and have her change it for him—”
“Ew,” Julia says, impressed.
Gemma shrugs. “It’s an actual thing. There’s guys who are into that. It didn’t work, though; nobody believed it. We should’ve just said he couldn’t get it up, or he had a tiny dick or something.”
“So,” Julia says, “since you didn’t manage to fuck him up, you want me to do it for you. I get Selena to dump him, then you’ll make sure everyone knows he got dumped, embarrass him the same way he embarrassed Joanne.”
“Basically,” Gemma says, unfazed. “Yeah.”
“OK,” Julia says. “Here’s the deal. I’ll get them split up. Fast.” She has no idea how. “But you make sure Joanne and whatstheirnames don’t tell anyone he was ever with Selena. You guys can say Joanne dumped him or something, if you want to embarrass him. Selena doesn’t come into it. Ever. None of that gonorrhea crap, nothing. Deal?”
Gemma thinks it over. Julia says, “Or I’ll tell Joanne you told me she thought she was going to marry Chris and have his ickle babies.”
Gemma makes a wry face. “OK,” she says. “Deal.”
Julia nods. “Deal,” she says, almost to herself. She wonders if there’s any chance Gemma will stay there, not talking, just being solid and smelling of sticky lip gloss, till they get to school.
The bus pulls up at a stop, rocks under the rush of feet getting on. High excited voices, girls—“OhmyGod, you did not just say that, you did not—”
“See you around,” Gemma says. She gets up and heaves her weekend bag onto her shoulder. Up front the Colm’s guys see her stand up, and get louder. Just before Gemma swings her hips down the aisle towards them, she smiles at Julia and lifts her hand in a little wave.
23
The art room was turning chilly. Conway had pulled her chair up the table, next to mine. Bad Cop in the house.
This time she didn’t turn round when Mackey and I came in. Neither did Holly, just kept gouging deep fingernail-curves in her ball of clay and thinking her own things. They hadn’t been listening to each other, not this time; they’d been checking their armor, their weapons, preparing for the moment when we walked back in. Over by the window, the copper-wire school bloomed with a cold shimmer. The moon was high, staring in at us all.
Mackey leaned back on his table again. Every time he shifted, I twitched. All I could think about: what it was, that he was waiting to do. His look, cold and amused, said he hadn’t missed it.
Conway caught my eye, as I sat down beside her. Hers said: Ready. Steady. Go.
She didn’t rewind to where we’d been, to how Holly had to have hated Chris. No point: Mackey had wrecked that moment, nice and thorough. Instead she said, “You were right: we’ve narrowed the card down to the eight of you. One of the other seven knows who killed Chris.”
Holly rolled the clay along the table, from hand to hand. “Yeah, well. Or at least she says she does.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Incredulous face. “How do I feel? What is this, Guidance? You want me to draw a picture of my feelings in colored pencil?”
“Are you worried?”
“If I was worried, I wouldn’t have brought you the card to begin with. Duh.”
Too brazen, that hair-flick. Holly was putting it on.
That morning, she’d been grand with the card. Since then, something had happened.
I said, “That just means you weren’t worried this morning. How about now?”
“What would I worry about?”
Conway said, “That one of your friends knows something that could put her in danger. Or that someone knows something that you might not want us to find out.”
Holly threw herself back in her chair, hands flying up. “Oh my God, look. Nobody in school knows what happened to Chris. Joanne invented the card because she was looking for attention. OK?”
Conway lifted an eyebrow. “How come you didn’t say this to Detective Moran when you brought him the card? ‘Here you go, and by the way, it’s a load of bollix, this girl Joanne Heffernan made it up.’ Or did something happen since this morning, to make Joanne into your favorite theory?”
“Joanne keeps trying to get us into shit, is what’s happened. When you guys showed up, obviously she totally freaked out—she probably wasn’t expecting actual police, because she’s an actual idiot. So she’s spent all day frantically trying to make you look at us, so you won’t figure out what she did and she won’t get in trouble for wasting your time. Why would she be arsed, unless she had something she didn’t want you noticing?”
Conway said, “If she wanted to make us look at you and your mates, she’s done a good job.”
“Yeah, obviously. Or I wouldn’t be sitting here. It never even occurred to you that she might be a huge liar?”
“I’d say she is, all right. But we don’t need to take her word for anything. Selena meeting Chris, for example: when all we had was Joanne’s word for it, we weren’t too impressed. But then she showed us video. Of the two of them together.”
Something skidding across Holly’s face. Not surprise.
That video was how Holly had known about Chris and Selena.
S
he said, coolly, “What a pervert. I’m not even surprised.”
Conway said, and I felt her mind right there next to mine, “Did she show it to you?”
Snort. “Yeah, no. Joanne and I don’t share stuff.”
Conway shook her head. “I wasn’t thinking about sharing and caring. I was thinking about blackmail.”
Blank. “Like how?”
“Joanne went out with Chris for a while. Before he was with Selena.”
Holly’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah? Shame it didn’t work out.”
Still no surprise. I asked, “You think Joanne was happy that he dumped her for Selena?”
“I doubt it. I hope it gave her a brain aneurysm.”
“Just about,” Conway said. “You know Joanne better than I do. You think it would piss her off enough that she’d want him dead?”
“Oh yeah. Definitely. Can I go now, and you can bother her instead?”
“Thing is,” I said, “we’re pretty sure Joanne didn’t actually kill Chris. We’re wondering if she got someone to do it for her.”
“Orla,” Holly said promptly. “Any dirty work Joanne wants done, she gets Orla to do it.”
Conway was shaking her head. “Nah. We’ve got solid evidence that it was one of your four.”
Still nothing out of Mackey, not yet, but his eyes were fixed on Conway. Holly had the same look on her. No more messing with the clay, that was over. She knew: this was the heart of it. She said, “Evidence like what?”
“We’ll get to that. We think maybe Joanne showed that video to one of you four. Told her, ‘Get rid of Chris for me, or this goes to McKenna and you all get expelled.’”
Conway was leaning in, picking up the rhythm. I eased back, put my head down over my notebook. Left her to it.
Holly’s eyebrows were up. “And we just went, ‘Uhhh, OK, anything you say’? Seriously? If we were that terrified of being expelled, we wouldn’t’ve snuck out to begin with. We’d’ve stayed inside like good little girls.”
“Not just because you were scared of being expelled. Joanne picked carefully. She picked someone who’d do a lot to protect her mates, who was already frantic about the damage Chris was doing, already hated his guts—”
Conway was ticking off finger after finger, relentless. Holly snapped, “I’m not stupid—Dad, leave me alone, I want to say this! If I was going to kill someone, which I didn’t, no way would I do it in some kind of conspiracy with Joanne Heffernan. And be stuck for the rest of my life with that bitch holding that over my head? Do I look brain-dead? No fucking way. No matter what she had on video.”
“Language,” said Mackey lazily. Eyes still sparking alert, but there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth. His kid was holding her own.
“Whatever. And before you even start to say, oh, then it could’ve been Julia or Selena or Becca, the exact same thing goes for them. Did we do something to make you think we’re the biggest idiots you’ve ever met? Or what?”
Conway was giving Holly her head, let her get it out of her system. Mackey said, “And while we’re on the subject, ignore me if you want, but you’re making this Joanne out to be a pretty big idiot herself. She wants a murder committed, so she asks a cop’s kid? The person most likely to send her straight to jail, do not pass go? Holly: this Joanne, she have any head injuries?”
“No. She’s a bitch, but she’s not stupid.”
Mackey spread his hands at us: There you go. Conway said, “We’re not married to the blackmail motive. There’s plenty of other possibilities.”
She left it till Holly rolled her eyes. “Like what?”
“You told Detective Moran that when you found out what was wrong with Selena, you just stuck your head in the sand and hoped it’d go away. That rings my bullshit alarm. I don’t see you being that much of a wimp. Are you a wimp, yeah?”
“No. I just didn’t know what to do. Sorry I’m not some kind of genius.”
I’d got to Holly before, from this angle; Conway was banking on getting to her again. Mackey was paying attention.
“Like you just said, though, you’re not some kind of idiot, either. You wouldn’t freeze up just because you had to deal with something all by yourself. You’re not a baby. Are you?” It was working. Holly had her arms folded, starting to knot into a furious ball. “I think you went to Selena, told her you knew about Chris. I think she told you she was planning on getting back with him. And I think you went, Fuck no. Made a chance to get hold of Selena’s phone, texted Chris to meet up. Probably you just wanted him to leave Selena alone, did you?”
Holly had her face turned away from Conway, staring out the window.
“How’d you try to convince him? You said before, Chris wasn’t happy that he was never going to get anywhere with you. Did you offer him a swap: leave Selena alone, I’ll make up for it?”
That almost lifted her out of the chair. “I’d rather have my skin peeled off than do anything with Chris. Jesus!”
Nothing from Mackey. Holly hadn’t even clocked him on that, and she would have, if she’d hooked up with Chris: talking about your sex life in front of Daddy, that had to get some reaction. She was telling the truth: she’d never touched Chris.
Conway said, “Then how’d you go at him?”
Holly bit down on her lip, angry at herself: she’d been got. Turned her face away again, started the ignoring from scratch.
“Whatever you tried, you gave it a few shots, it didn’t work. Finally you made one more appointment with him. For the sixteenth of May.”
Holly biting her lip harder, stop herself answering. Mackey didn’t move, but he was pulled like a crossbow on the edge of it.
“This time you weren’t planning on any persuading. You got out early, you got your weapon ready, and when Chris showed up—”
Holly whipped round on Conway. “Are you stupid? I didn’t kill Chris. We can stay here all night and you can come up with four million different reasons I could’ve killed him, and I still won’t have done it. Do you actually think I’m going to get confused enough that in the end I’ll just be like, ‘OhmyGod, you know what, maybe I totally did climb up a tree and drop a piano on his head because I hated his poncy haircut’?”
Mackey was grinning. “Nicely put,” he told her.
Holly and Conway didn’t even hear him, too focused on each other. “If you didn’t,” Conway said, “then you know who did. Why did you hide that phone?”
“I told you. I didn’t want Selena—”
“You said she hadn’t been in touch with Chris for weeks before he died. The phone would’ve showed that. What’s incriminating there?”
“I didn’t say it was incriminating, I said you’d have given her hassle. Which you would have.”
“You’re a cop’s kid, you know better than to conceal evidence in a murder case, but you do it to save your mate a bit of hassle? Nah. No way.” Holly tried to say something, but Conway’s voice came down hard on top of hers. “One of you four had been texting Chris from that phone, after he split up with Selena. Arranging meetings with him. One of you four had arranged to meet him the night he died. Now that’s incriminating, amn’t I right? That’s something you’d want to cover up.”
“Whoa whoa whoa,” Mackey said, lifting a hand. “Hang on a minute there. That’s your evidence? Texts sent from someone else’s phone?”
Conway said, to Holly, “A hidden phone, that you had access to. You and no one else that we know of, except Selena, and we’re satisfied Selena didn’t send the texts.”
Mackey said, “A phone kept in a room that four girls share. Are the texts signed in Holly’s handwriting, yeah? Got her prints on them?”
I copped, finally, why Mackey had told me that touching little tale about how Holly wound up boarding. He had been telling me how much she loved her friends. Anything we got out of her, there was how he was going to
shoot it down: Holly’s protecting her friends. Prove she’s not.
Hard to be sure of anything, ever, with Mackey. I was sure of this: he would throw an innocent sixteen-year-old under a bus without thinking twice, if it would save his kid.
A hundred percent positive of this: he’d throw me and Conway.
Conway kept ignoring him. Said to Holly, “You’re the one who knew the phone needed to disappear. None of the others: just you. And the killer had been deleting the meeting texts as she went; you’d never have known they existed, unless you were the one who sent them.”
Mackey said, “Or unless someone told her, or unless she guessed, or unless she overreacted to what she already knew—God forbid a teenage girl should overreact, am I right?”
Conway looked at him then. Said, “I’m done interviewing you. You answer one more question, we’re getting a different appropriate adult.”
Mackey thought her over. Glint in his eye, raking her, would’ve had me twitching; Conway didn’t notice or didn’t care. Just waited for him to finish up and answer her.
“Seems to me,” he said, and stood up, “that you and I both need a moment to clear our heads. I’m going out for a smoke. I think you should join me.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“I’m not looking for a chance to give you shite about your attitude, Detective. That I could do right here. I’m suggesting that a deep breath and a bit of fresh air might do us both good; get us back on the right foot. When we come back, I promise not to answer any more questions for Holly. How’s that?”
I moved. This was it; I couldn’t tell what or how, but I could feel it, yelling warnings. Conway glanced at me; I thought Careful, loud as I could. She glanced at Mackey’s smile—open, straightforward, just the right bit sheepish.
Said, “Smoke fast.”
“You’re the boss.”
I followed them to the doorway. When Mackey arched an eyebrow at me, I said, “I’ll wait out here.”
His grin said Good boy, you protect yourself from the scary little girl. I didn’t bite. He matched Conway’s pace down the corridor, so their steps fading away sounded like one person’s. Shoulder to shoulder, they looked like partners.