The Secret Place

by Tana French

  I said, ‘She said she was saved from doing it. This is what she meant. If Chris had texted her back, no way she would’ve stayed hardline about not meeting up. They would’ve been back together inside a couple of weeks. Maybe that’s what Mystery Girl was at: keeping them apart.’

  ‘If you were a teenage girl,’ Conway said. ‘And you wanted to keep Chris away from Selena, for whatever reason. And you were fairly sure she hadn’t been shagging him. And you knew what Chris was like.’

  Silence, and the long red stretch of the corridor, tiles shifting queasily.

  ‘He brought a condom.’

  I said, ‘Not Rebecca. She wouldn’t think of it.’

  ‘Nah.’

  Julia would have thought of it.

  13th of May: I’ll be there.

  14th of May, Selena again. Don’t worry, I know you’re not going to answer this. I just like talking to you anyway. If you want me to stop, tell me and I will. Otherwise I’ll keep texting you. We had a substitute today for Maths, when she smiled she looked exactly like Chucky - Cliona got mixed up and called her Mrs Chucky and we all almost died laughing :-D

  Rewinding, back to the small stories for laughs, trying to bring Chris back with her to a safe place. I said, ‘For a while, Mystery Girl’s able to convince Chris to stay away from Selena. Wouldn’t be hard: he’s pissed off with her anyway, and if Mystery Girl’s giving him something Selena wasn’t . . . But Selena keeps texting him. If he cared about her, if that was the real thing, then those texts had to get to him. After a while, it doesn’t matter what Mystery Girl’s bringing. Chris wants Selena back.’

  Conway said, ‘And Mystery Girl has to come up with a new plan.’

  16th of May, 9.12 a.m.. The morning before Chris died.

  Selena’s phone to Chris’s: Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

  4.00 p.m. – he must have checked his messages after school – Chris’s phone to Selena’s: OK.

  Whoever had set up that meeting had killed Chris Harper. We had room for a crack of doubt – interception, coincidence. No more than that.

  ‘Love to know who he thinks he’s meeting,’ Conway said.

  ‘Yeah. Not Mystery Girl’s usual day, not her usual MO – this time she asks for an answer.’

  ‘It’s not Selena. “Cypress clearing”, Selena wouldn’t’ve said that. That was their spot. “Same time same place,” she’d’ve said.’

  Selena was out, again. I said, ‘But Chris could’ve thought it was her.’

  ‘Could be what Mystery Girl wanted him to think. By now, she’s planning. She breaks the routine to get Chris wondering, make sure he shows up. Takes the risk of having him text her back – maybe she does nick the phone outright, this time. She knows no one’s gonna be using it from now on.’

  Conway’s voice was level and low, rough-edged with fatigue. Small eddies of air nosed around it, curious, carried it away down the corridor.

  ‘Maybe Joanne’s twisting her arm; maybe she’s doing it off her own bat, for whatever reason. That night she sneaks out early, takes the hoe out of the shed – she’s wearing gloves, so no prints. She heads for the grove, hides in among the trees till Chris arrives. When he’s mooning around the clearing waiting for his twue wuv to show up, our girl hits him with the hoe. He goes down.’

  The lazy drone of bees, this morning, long ago. Seed-heads round my ankles, smell of hyacinths. Sunlight.

  ‘She waits till she’s sure. Then she wipes down the hoe, puts it back where she got it. She takes Chris’s secret phone off his body and gets rid of it. Gets rid of Selena’s, too. Maybe she does it that night, goes over the wall and ditches them in a bin; maybe she hides them somewhere in the school till the fuss dies down. Now there’s nothing to link her or her mates to the crime – except maybe Joanne, and Joanne’s got enough cop to keep her mouth shut. Our girl goes back inside. Goes to bed. Waits for the morning. Gets ready to squeal and cry.’

  I said, ‘Fifteen years old. You think any of them would have that kind of nerve? The murder, OK. But the wait? This whole last year?’

  Conway said, ‘She did it for her friend. One way or another. For her friend’s sake. That’s got power. You do that, you’re Joan of Arc. You’ve gone through fire; nothing’s gonna break you.’

  Shiver building dark in my spine, the way it does when power comes near. That beat of pain again, deep in the palms of my hands.

  ‘There’s someone else who knows, but. And she hasn’t been through fire for her mate; she hasn’t got that kind of nerve. She holds in the secret as long as she can, but it finally gets to be too much. She cracks, makes the postcard. Probably she genuinely doesn’t think it’ll go further than that board, corridor gossip. The bubble again: you’re inside it, the outside doesn’t feel real. But your Holly’s been to the outside before. She knows it’s there.’

  Sound from the fourth-year common room, sharp and sudden. Something heavy thudding to the floor. A squeal.

  I was half off the windowsill when Conway’s hand clamped round my bicep. She shook her head.

  ‘But—’

  ‘Wait.’

  Murmur like bees, swelling and bristling.

  ‘They’re going to—’

  ‘Let them.’

  A wail, rising above that murmur, high and trembling. Conway’s hand tightened.

  Words, a terrified cry too garbled to catch through the thick door. Then the screaming started.

  Conway was down and hitting the combination lock before I realised her hand was gone off my arm. The door opened on a different world.

  The noise punched me in the face, sent my vision skidding. Girls up and on their feet, hands and hair flying – I’d been seeing them through texts for so long, just narrow snippets of minds shooting through dark, it felt like a double-take seeing them real and solid. And nothing like I’d seen them before, nothing. Those glossy gems, watching us cool-eyed and assessing with their knees perfectly crossed: gone. These were white and scarlet, wide-mouthed, clawed and clutching at each other, these were wild things.

  McKenna was shouting something, but none of them heard her. Shrieks launched off them like birds, battering against the walls. I caught words, here and there, I see him oh my God oh God I see him it’s Chris Chris Chris—

  It was the high sash window they were fixed on, the one where Holly and her mates had been sitting an hour or two earlier. Empty now, blank evening sky. Heads back, arms open to that rectangle, they were screaming like it was a joy, a physical one. Like it was the one thing they’d been dying to do, for years and years, and the time had come.

  It’s him it’s him look oh God look— Conway’s ghost story had paid off.

  Conway dived in. Aiming for Holly and her lot, pressed together in a far corner. They weren’t screaming, weren’t gone, but they were huge-eyed, Holly’s teeth sunk into her forearm, Rebecca crouched in an armchair gasping, hands pressed over her ears. Get them now, we might get them talking.

  I stayed put. To guard the door, I told myself. In case anyone made a break for it; the state those girls were in, one of them could do something stupid, down the stairwell before you know it and then we’d be in trouble—

  Load of shite. I was afraid. Cold Cases takes you to bad motherfuckers, these were just little girls, but these were the ones that stopped me dead. These were the ones that would smell me stepping over their threshold and turn, hands rising, come for me in a rush of streaming hair and silence and rip me into a thousand bloody gobbets, one for each reason they had.

  Oh God oh God oh—

  The overhead bulb exploded. Sudden rush of dimness and slips of glass firing like golden arrows through the light of the standing lamps, a fresh burst of screams; a girl clapping her hand to her face, blood black in the shadows. The window burned pale, lit their upturned faces like worshippers’.

  Alison was on her feet on the seat of a sofa, spindly and rocking. One skinny arm stretched out, finger pointing. Not at the window. At Holly’s four: Rebecca he
ad back and white-eyed, Holly and Julia grabbing at her arms, Selena glazed and swaying. Alison was screaming on and on, screams huge enough to rise up over all the rest: ‘Her it was her I saw her I saw her I saw her—’

  Conway’s head came round. She clocked Alison, scanned frantically for me. Caught my eye and gestured over the whirl of heads, yelled something I couldn’t hear, but I saw it: Fucking come on!

  I took a breath and I dived in.

  Hair slicing across my cheek, an elbow ramming my ribs, a hand clawing at my sleeve and I wrenched away. My skin leaped at every touch, nails or for a second I thought teeth raked the back of my neck, but I was moving fast and nothing dug in. Then Conway’s shoulder was against mine like protection.

  We got Alison under the arms, lifted her off the sofa – her arms were rigid, brittle, sticks of chalk, she didn’t struggle – had her back through the boiling mess and out of the door before McKenna could do anything but see us go. Conway slammed the door behind us with her foot.

  The sudden quiet and brightness almost turned me light-headed. We got Alison down the corridor so fast her feet barely touched the ground, dumped her on the landing at the far end. She collapsed, heap of arms and legs, still screaming.

  Faces in the white stairwell, craning over the circling banister-rails above and below us, open-mouthed. I called out, deep official voice, ‘Attention, please. Everyone go back to your common rooms. No one’s been hurt; everything’s fine. Go back to your common rooms immediately.’ Kept going till the faces pulled back, slowly, and were gone. Behind us McKenna was still shouting; the noise level was slowly going down, shrieks starting to crumble to sobs.

  Conway was on her knees, up in Alison’s face. Sharp as a slap: ‘Alison. You look at me.’ Snapping her fingers, over and over, in front of Alison’s eyes: ‘Hey. Right here. Nowhere else.’

  ‘He’s there don’t let him please nononoooo—’

  ‘Alison. Focus. When I say, “Go,” you’re gonna hold your breath while I count to ten. Ready. Go.’

  Alison cut herself off in mid-scream, with a sound like a burp. Almost made me start laughing. That was when I realised if I started, I might not stop. The scrapes down the back of my neck throbbed.

  ‘One. Two. Three. Four.’ Conway kept the beat ruthlessly steady, ignored the noise still bubbling down the corridor. Alison stared at her, lips clamped shut. ‘Five. Six—’ A swell of squealing in the common room, Alison’s eyes zigzagged— ‘Hey. Over here. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten. Now breathe. Slowly.’

  Alison’s mouth fell open. Her breath came shallow and loud, like she was half hypnotised, but the screaming was gone.

  ‘Nice,’ Conway said, easily. ‘Well done.’ Her eyes slid up over Alison’s shoulder, to me.

  I did a double-take out of a cartoon. Me?

  Flare of her eyes. Get a move on.

  I was the one who’d made it work with Alison earlier. I had the best chance. The biggest interview of the case, or it could be if I didn’t fuck up.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, sliding down to sit cross-legged on the tiles. Glad of the excuse: my knees were still shaking. Conway slipped away sideways, into a corner behind Alison, tall and black and raggedy against the smooth white wall. ‘Feeling better?’

  Alison nodded. She was red-eyed, more white-mousey than ever. Her legs stuck out at mad angles, like someone had dropped her from a height.

  I gave her my big reassuring smile. ‘Good. You’re grand to talk, right? You don’t need the matron, more allergy medicine, anything like that?’

  She shook her head. The chaos at the end of the corridor had ebbed to nothing; McKenna had the fourth-years under control at last. Any minute now, she was going to come looking for us.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘You said, in there, that you saw one of Selena Wynne’s gang do something. You were pointing at one of them. Which one?’

  We braced and waited, me and Conway, to hear Julia.

  Alison let out a little sigh. She said, ‘Holly.’

  That easy. On the corridors above us and below, the older girls and the younger ones had gone back into their common rooms and closed the doors. There was no sound anywhere, none at all. That white silence came sifting down again, piling into little drifts in the corners, slipping down our backs to collect in the folds of our clothes.

  Holly was a cop’s kid. Holly was my star witness. Holly was the one who had brought me that card. Even after I’d seen her here, deep in her own world, I had somehow thought she was on my side.

  ‘OK,’ I said. Easy and loose, like it was nothing, nothing at all. Felt Conway’s eyes, on me, not on Alison. ‘What’d you see?’

  ‘After the assembly. The one where they told us about Chris. I was . . .’

  Alison was getting that look again, the one from earlier: slack and dazed, like someone after a seizure. ‘Stick with me,’ I said, smiling away. ‘You’re doing great. What happened after the assembly?’

  ‘We were coming out of the hall, into the foyer. I was right beside Holly. She looked round, just quickly, like she was checking if anyone was watching her. So I noticed that, you know?’

  Observant, just like I’d told her that morning. Prey animal’s fast eyes.

  ‘And then she stuck her hand down her skirt, like in the waist of her tights?’ A snigger, limp and automatic. ‘And she pulled out this thing. Wrapped in a tissue.’

  Making sure she wouldn’t leave prints. Just like Mystery Girl had done with the hoe. I nodded along, all interested. ‘That’d catch your eye, all right.’

  ‘It was just weird, you know? Like, what would you keep down your tights? I mean, ew? And then I kept looking because some of it was sticking out of the tissue, and I thought it was my phone. It was the same as mine. But I checked my pocket, and my phone was there.’

  ‘What did Holly do next?’

  Alison said, ‘The lost-and-found bin’s in the foyer, right at the door of reception. It’s this big black bin with a hole at the top, so you can put things in but you can’t get them out? You have to go to Miss O’Dowd or Miss Arnold and they have the key. We were going past reception, and Holly kind of ran her hand across the bin – like she was just doing it for no reason, she didn’t even look at it, but then the phone wasn’t in her hand any more. Just the tissue.’

  I saw Conway’s eyes close for a second on the Should’ve searched. She said, from her corner, ‘How come you didn’t say this to me last year?’

  Alison flinched. ‘I didn’t know it had anything to do with Chris! I never thought—’

  ‘Course you didn’t,’ I said soothingly. ‘You’re grand. When did you start to wonder?’

  ‘Just a couple of months ago. Joanne was . . . I’d done something she didn’t like, and she said, “I should call the detectives and tell them your phone used to text with Chris Harper. You’d get in sooo much trouble.” I mean, she was just saying it, she wouldn’t have actually done it?’

  Alison was looking anxious. ‘Course not,’ I said, all understanding. Joanne would’ve dropped Alison in a shredder feet first, if it had suited her.

  ‘But I started thinking. Like, “OhmyGod, what if they actually did look at my phone, they’d totally think I’d been with Chris!” And then I thought about that phone I saw Holly with. And I went, like, “What if she was getting rid of it because she was scared of the same thing?” And then I was like, “OhmyGod, what if she actually was with Chris?”’

  I said, ‘Did you talk about it to Holly? Or anyone else?’

  ‘OhmyGod, no way, not to Holly! I said it to Gemma. I thought she’d know what to do.’

  ‘Gemma’s smart, all right.’ Which she was. Alison hadn’t worked out that the phone might have been Selena’s. Gemma would have. ‘What’d she say?’

  Alison squirmed. Down to her lap: ‘She said it was none of our business. To just shut up and forget the whole thing.’

  Conway shaking her head, jaw clenched. I said, ‘And you tried. But you couldn’t manage.’

  Head-shak
e.

  I said, ‘So you made that card. Put it up on the Secret Place.’

  Alison stared, bewildered. Shook her head.

  ‘Nothing wrong with that. It was a good idea.’

  ‘But I didn’t! I swear to God, I didn’t!’

  I believed her. No reason she would lie, not now. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK.’

  Conway said, ‘Well done, Alison. Probably you were right to begin with and it’s nothing to do with Chris, but Detective Moran and I will have a chat with Holly, clear it up. First we’ll take you back down to Miss Arnold. You’re looking a bit pale.’

  Keep her isolated, so she couldn’t spread the story. I stood up, kept my smile nailed in place. One of my feet had gone to sleep.

  Alison pulled herself up by the banister rail, but she stayed there, holding onto it with both thin hands. In the white air her face looked greenish. She said, to Conway, ‘Orla told us about that case you did. With the—’ A shudder twisted her. ‘The, the dog. The ghost dog.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Conway said. More hair had come out of her bun. ‘Nasty one, that was.’

  ‘Once the guy confessed. Did the dog – did it keep coming back for him?’

  Conway examined her. Said, ‘Why?’

  Alison’s face looked bonier, fallen in. ‘Chris,’ she said. ‘In there, in the common room. He was there. In the window.’

  Her certainty hooked me in the spine, pulled a shiver. The hysteria rising up again, somewhere behind the air: gone for now, not for good.

  ‘Yeah,’ Conway said. ‘I got that.’

  ‘Yeah, but . . . he was there because of me. Earlier, too, out here in the corridor. He came to get me, because I hadn’t told you about Holly with the phone. In the common room’ – she swallowed – ‘he was looking right at me. Grinning at—’ Another shudder, rougher, wrenching at her breath. ‘If you hadn’t come in then, if you hadn’t . . . Is he . . . is he going to come back for me?’

  Conway said, stern, ‘Have you told us everything? Every single thing you know?’

  ‘I swear. I swear.’

  ‘Then Chris won’t be coming back for you. He might hang around the school, all right, because there’s plenty of other people keeping secrets that he wants them to tell us. But he won’t be back for you. You probably won’t even be able to see him any more.’