The Secret Place

by Tana French

  Conway held up her phone. ‘So why’d you dump him after this night?’

  Selena went vague, but I got that feeling again: she was wrapping the vague around her. ‘I didn’t.’

  Conway tapped at her screen, quick and deft. ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. ‘That’s records of the texts going back and forth between you and Chris. See here? This is the couple of days after that night in the video. He’s trying to get in touch, but you’re ignoring him. You’d never done that before. Why after that night?’

  Selena never even thought about denying the number was hers. She looked at the phone like it was alive and strange, maybe dangerous. She said, ‘I just needed to think.’

  ‘Yeah? About what?’

  ‘Chris and me.’

  ‘Yeah, I figured that. I meant what specifically? Did he do something, that night, that made you rethink the relationship?’

  Selena’s eyes went away somewhere, for real this time. She said quietly, ‘That was the first time we kissed.’

  Conway gave her the scepticals. ‘That doesn’t match our information. You’d been seen kissing at least once before.’

  Selena shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘No? That doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about Chris. You’d met up, how many times?’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘And never laid a hand on each other. All pure and innocent, no bad thoughts, never anything the nuns couldn’t’ve seen. Seriously?’

  A faint pink had come up in Selena’s cheeks. Conway was good; every time Selena tried to drift away into her cloud, Conway got a finger on her. ‘I didn’t say that. We’d held hands, we’d sat there with our arms round each other, we . . . But we’d never kissed before. So I needed to think. Whether it should happen again. Stuff like that.’

  I couldn’t tell if she was lying. As hard to gauge as Joanne, not for the same reasons. Conway nodded away, turning her phone between her fingers, thinking. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So that means you and Chris weren’t having sex?’

  ‘No. We weren’t.’ No wiggle, no giggle, none of that shite. That rang true. Score one for Conway’s instincts.

  ‘Was Chris OK with that?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really? A lot of guys his age would’ve been putting on the pressure. Did he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Here’s the thing,’ Conway said. Her tone was good: gentle, but direct, no talking down to the kiddie; just woman to woman, working through something tough together. ‘A lot of times, people who get sexually assaulted don’t want to report it because the aftermath is so much hassle. Medical examinations, testifying in court, getting cross-examined, maybe watching the attacker walk away scot-free: they don’t want to deal with any of that mess, they just want to forget the whole thing and move on. Hard to blame them for that, right?’

  A pause to let Selena nod. She didn’t. She was listening, though, eyebrows pulled together. She looked bewildered.

  Conway said, a notch slower, ‘See, though, this is different. There’s not gonna be any medical exam, since this happened a year ago; and there’s not gonna be any trial, since the attacker’s dead. Basically, you can tell me what happened, and it won’t blow up into some huge big thing. If you want, you can talk to someone who’s had a load of practice helping people deal with things like this. That’s it. End of story.’

  ‘Wait,’ Selena said. The bewilderment had got bigger. ‘You mean me? You think Chris raped me?’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘No! God, no way!’

  It looked real. ‘OK,’ Conway said. ‘Did he ever make you do anything you didn’t want to do?’ You always rephrase this one, keep coming at it from different angles. Scary, how many girls think it doesn’t count as rape unless it’s a laneway stranger with a knife; how many guys do.

  Selena was shaking her head. ‘No. Never.’

  ‘Keep touching you after you told him to stop?’

  Still shaking her head, steady and vehement. ‘No. Chris wouldn’t have done that to me. Never.’

  Conway said, ‘Selena, we know Chris wasn’t an angel. He hurt a lot of girls. Slagging them, two-timing them, messing them around and then blanking them when he got bored.’

  Selena said, ‘I know. He told me. He shouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘It’s easy to romanticise someone who’s dead, specially someone who meant a lot to you. Fact is, Chris had a cruel streak, specially when he didn’t get what he wanted.’

  ‘Yeah. I know that; I’m not romanticising.’

  ‘Then why’re you telling me he wouldn’t have hurt you?’

  Selena said – not defensive, just patient – ‘That was different.’

  Conway said, ‘That’s what all the other girls thought, too. Every one of them thought she had something special with Chris.’

  Selena said, ‘Maybe they did have. People are complicated. When you’re a little kid, you don’t realise, you think people are just one thing; but then you get older, and you realise it’s not that simple. Chris wasn’t that simple. He was cruel and he was kind. And he didn’t like realising that. It bothered him, that he wasn’t just one thing. I think it made him feel . . .’

  She drifted for long enough that I wondered if she’d left the sentence behind, but Conway kept waiting. In the end, Selena said, ‘It made him feel fragile. Like he could break into pieces any time, because he didn’t know how to hold himself together. That was why he did that with those other girls, went with them and kept it secret: so he could try out being different things and see how it felt, and he’d be safe. He could be as lovely as he wanted or as horrible as he wanted, and it wouldn’t count, because no one else would ever know. I thought, at first, maybe I could show him how to hold the different bits together; how he could be OK. But it didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘Right,’ Conway said. No interest in the deep and meaningfuls, but I could feel her clocking that I had been right: no short bus for Selena. She skimmed a finger over her phone, held it out again. ‘See here? After that night on the video, you ignored Chris for a few days, but then you stopped. These here, these are texts from you to him. What changed your mind?’

  Selena had her head turned away from the phone, like she couldn’t look. She said, to the slowing light outside the window, ‘I knew the right thing to do was cut him off totally. Never be in touch again. I knew that. But . . . you saw that. The video.’ A bare nod towards the phone. ‘It wasn’t just that I missed him. It was because that was special. We made it together, me and Chris, it was never going to exist anywhere else in the world, and it was beautiful. Wrecking something like that, grinding it up to nothing and throwing it away: that’s evil. That’s what evil is. Isn’t it?’

  Neither of us answered.

  ‘It felt like a terrible thing to do. Like it might even be the worst thing I’d ever done – I couldn’t tell for sure. So I thought maybe I could save just some of it. Maybe, even if we weren’t going to be together, we could still . . .’

  Everyone’s thought that: maybe even if, maybe we could still, maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colours: for a second I believed it, all over again.

  Selena said, ‘It would never have worked out like that. Probably I knew that; I think I might’ve. But I had to try. So I texted Chris a couple of times. Saying let’s stay friends. Saying I missed him, I didn’t want to lose him . . . Stuff like that.’

  ‘Not a couple of times,’ Conway said. ‘Seven.’

  Selena’s eyebrows pulling together. ‘Not that many. Two? Three?’

  ‘You were texting him every few days. Including the day he died.’

  Selena shook her head. ‘No.’ Anyone would’ve said that, anyone with half a brain. But the bewildered look: I would’ve nearly sworn that was real.

  ‘It’s right here in black and white.’ Conway’s tone was turning. Not hard, not ye
t, but firm. ‘Look. Text from you, no answer. Text from you, no answer. Text from you, no answer. This time Chris was ignoring you.’

  Things moved in Selena’s face. She was watching the screen like a telly, like she could see it all happening in front of her, all over again.

  ‘That had to have hurt,’ Conway said. ‘Didn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah. It did.’

  ‘So Chris was prepared to hurt you, after all. Right?’

  Selena said, ‘Like I told you. He wasn’t just one thing.’

  ‘Right. So is that why you broke up with him? Because he did something to hurt you?’

  ‘No. That, when he didn’t answer my texts, that was the first time Chris ever hurt me.’

  ‘Must’ve made you pretty angry.’

  ‘Angry,’ Selena said. Turned the word over. ‘No. I was sad; I was so sad. I couldn’t figure out why he’d do that, not at first. But angry . . .’ She shook her head. ‘No.’

  Conway waited, but she was done. ‘And then? Did you figure it out in the end, yeah?’

  ‘Not till afterwards. When he died.’

  ‘Right,’ Conway said. ‘So why was it?’

  Selena said, simply, ‘I was saved.’

  Conway’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You mean you – what? Found God? Chris broke it off because—’

  Selena laughed. The laugh startled me: fountaining up into the air, full and sweet, like laughter out of girls splashing in some tumbling river, miles from any watcher. ‘Not saved like that! God, can you imagine? I think my parents would’ve had a heart attack.’

  Conway smiled along. ‘The nuns would’ve been delighted, though. So what way were you saved?’

  ‘Saved from getting back with Chris.’

  ‘Huh? You said being with Chris was great. Why did you need saving?’

  Selena examined that. Said, ‘It wasn’t a good idea.’

  That flash again. Wrapped in the pearly mist was someone wide awake and careful, someone we’d barely met.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Like you said. He messed around all the other girls he was with. Going out with someone brought out his worst side.’

  Conway trying to box Selena in, Selena leading her in loops. Conway said, ‘But you said he never did anything bad on you till after you split. What bad side did being with you bring out?’

  ‘It hadn’t had time to, yet. You said it would’ve, sooner or later.’

  Conway dropped it. ‘Probably would’ve,’ she said. ‘So someone saved you.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who?’

  So smooth and easy, it slid out.

  Selena thought. She thought without moving: no ankles twisting or fingers weaving, not even her eyes flicking; just still, gazing, one hand loose in the other.

  Said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does to us.’

  Selena nodded. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yeah. You do.’

  Selena met Conway’s eyes straight on. She said, ‘No, I don’t. I don’t need to.’

  ‘But you’ve got a guess.’

  She shook her head. Slow and adamant: the end.

  ‘OK,’ Conway said. If she was pissed off, she didn’t give any sign. ‘OK. The phone Chris gave you: where is it now?’

  Something. Wariness, guilt, worry; I couldn’t tell. ‘I lost it.’

  ‘Yeah? When?’

  ‘Ages ago. Last year.’

  ‘Before Chris died, or after?’

  Selena thought about that for a while. ‘Around then,’ she said, helpfully.

  ‘Right,’ Conway said. ‘Let’s try this. Where were you keeping it?’

  ‘I’d cut a slit in the side of my mattress. The side that was against the wall.’

  ‘Good. So think hard, Selena. When’s the last time you took it out?’

  ‘By the end I knew he wasn’t going to text me. So I only checked last thing at night, sometimes. Just in case. I tried not to.’

  ‘The night he died. Did you check?’

  The thought of that night sent Selena’s eyes skidding. ‘I don’t remember. Like I said, I was trying not to.’

  ‘But you’d texted him that day. You didn’t want to see if he’d answered?’

  ‘I hadn’t. I mean, I don’t think so. Maybe I might’ve, but . . .’

  ‘What about after you heard he’d died? Did you go for the phone, see if he’d sent you one last text?’

  ‘I can’t remember. I wasn’t . . .’ Selena caught her breath. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. A lot of that week doesn’t . . . it’s not really in my head.’

  ‘Think hard.’

  ‘I am. It’s not there.’

  ‘OK,’ Conway said. ‘You keep trying, and if it comes back, you let me know. What’d the phone look like, by the way?’

  ‘It was little, like this big. Light pink. It was a flip phone.’

  Conway’s eye found mine. The same phone Chris had given Joanne; he must have got a job lot. ‘Did anyone know you had it?’ she asked.

  Selena said, ‘No.’ And flinched. The others, certain sure that there were no secrets in their holy circle: under cover of the night she had slipped out of that circle, left them sleeping and trusting. ‘None of them knew.’

  ‘You positive? Living in each other’s pockets, it’s not easy to keep a secret. Specially not one as big as that.’

  ‘I was super-careful.’

  Conway said, ‘They knew you were with Chris, though, right? It was just the phone they didn’t know about?’

  ‘No. They didn’t know about Chris.’ Flinch. ‘I only went out to him like once a week, and I waited till I was completely sure the others were asleep. Sometimes they take ages, specially Holly, but once they’re asleep they don’t wake up for anything. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, so I knew.’

  ‘I thought yous were so close. Shared everything. Why didn’t you tell them?’

  Another flinch. Conway was hurting her, on purpose. ‘We are. I just didn’t.’

  ‘Would they have had a problem with you seeing Chris?’

  Vague look. The pain had her moving away again, taking refuge in her mist. Another girl would have been shifting as the pressure went on, glancing at the door, asking if she could go; Selena didn’t need to. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘So that’s not why you dumped him? Someone found out you two were seeing each other, didn’t like it?’

  ‘Nobody found out.’

  ‘You positive? Anything ever make you worry that you’d been sussed? Like maybe one of the others said something that sounded like a hint, or maybe you found the phone in the wrong position one night?’

  Conway trying to go after her, haul her back. One flicker in Selena’s eyes and I thought she had her, but then the gauze came down again. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘After he died, though. You told them then, right?’

  Selena shook her head. She was gone: gazing at Conway peacefully, the way you gaze at a fish swimming up and down an aquarium, all the pretty colours.

  Conway looked puzzled. ‘Why not? It’s not like it could’ve done any harm: Chris was the one who’d wanted privacy, and he wasn’t around to care. And you’d lost someone who meant a lot to you. You needed support from your mates. It would’ve only made sense to tell them.’

  ‘I didn’t want to.’

  Conway waited. ‘Huh,’ she said, when she got nothing else. ‘Fair enough. They must’ve copped that something was up, though. I’d say you were in tatters; anyone would’ve been. Even before Chris died: you said you were upset that he was ignoring you. Your friends can’t have missed that.’

  Selena gazing, tranquil, waiting for the question.

  ‘Did any of them ever say it to you? Ask you what was up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you’re all so close, how’d they miss that?’

  Silence, and those peaceful eyes.

  ‘OK,’ Conway said, in the end. ‘Thanks, Selena. If you remember when you last saw that phon
e, you tell me.’

  ‘OK,’ Selena said, agreeably. Took her a second to think of standing up.

  As she drifted for the door, Conway said, ‘When all this is sorted, I’ll e-mail you that video.’

  That turned Selena fast, in a quick rush of breath. For a second she was vivid, blazing at the heart of the room.

  Then she switched it off, deliberately. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No? I thought you said nothing bad happened that night. Why wouldn’t you want the video? Unless it brings back bad memories?’

  Selena said, ‘I don’t need to have what Joanne Heffernan saw. I was there.’ And she went out, closing the door gently behind her.

  Chapter 18

  In the Court the pink-and-red Valentine windows are gone, all the big-eyed furry things holding hearts, enticing and barbed: For you or not for you, will you won’t you dare you hope? In their place Easter eggs are starting to pop up, surrounded by shredded green paper to remind you that, somewhere on the other side of the pissed-off-and-on drizzle, it’s going to be spring. Outside, in the Field, crocuses have started in corners and people who stayed indoors for the winter have buttoned their jackets high and come out to see what they can find.

  Chris Harper is sitting on a weed-grown heap of rubble, away from the rest, looking out over the bare Field. His elbows are leaning on his knees and a pick-and-mix bag is hanging forgotten from one hand, and something in the set of his shoulders makes him seem older than the yelping rest of them. It stabs Selena in her palms and her chest, like she’s being hollowed, how much she wants the right to go to him: sit down by his side on the rubble, clasp his hand close, lean her head against his and feel him ease against her. For a flashing second she wonders what would happen if she did it.

  She and Julia and Holly and Becca have been there half an hour, sitting among the weeds sharing a couple of cigarettes, and he hasn’t said a word to her, hasn’t even looked at her. Either he’s doing exactly what they planned, or he’s changed his mind about the whole thing; he wishes he’d never left the dance with her. I’ll find a way to get in touch, he said. That was weeks ago.