The Secret Place

by Tana French

  Becca keeps watching. Down at the Court, as they wander through the chilled hollow air and the candy-coloured neon, she watches for some guy who looks over their way too much or too little, for some guy who changes Selena just by walking past. Marcus Wiley’s eyes ferret down Selena’s top but even if he wasn’t disgusting Selena would never, not after he sent Julia that picture. Andrew Moore checks if they’re looking as he dead-arms one of his friends and howls with lunatic laughter; Becca is about to think Yeah right, a no-personality moron like that, she would never, when she realises like a punch in the gut she has no clue what Selena would never.

  Andrew Moore?

  Finn Carroll, head flicking away too sharply when he sees Becca see him looking across the doughnut stand? Finn is smart; he could do it. Chris Harper, crossing them on the escalators with a red slash on his cheek that might not be just sunburn, Selena’s eyelashes flickering fast as she bends her head low over her carrier bag full of colours? The thought of Chris fishhooks Becca under the breastbone in weird sore ways, but she doesn’t flinch: it could be. Seamus O’Flaherty, everyone says Seamus is gay but someone cunning could start that rumour himself, to get close to girls off guard; François Levy, beautiful and different, different could make Selena feel like it didn’t count; Bryan Hynes, Oisín O’Donovan, Graham Quinn, for a second every one of them leaps out with a wet red grin like it’s him him him. He’s everywhere; he’s claiming everything.

  The air in the Court has been processed to something so thin and chilly that Becca can hardly breathe it. Next to her Holly is talking too fast and insistent to notice that Becca’s not answering. Becca pulls her cardigan sleeves down over her hands and keeps watching.

  She watches at night, too. It’s Selena she’s guarding – not that she knows what she would do if – but when she finally sees the slow rise and unfurl of bedclothes, it’s on the wrong bed. Becca can tell by the delicacy of every movement, the wary flash of eyes before Julia straightens, that she’s not going to the toilet.

  The sound comes out before Becca can stop it, rips out of her gut, dirty and raw. This guy is running all through them, like an infection looking for the next place to erupt, he’s everywhere—

  Julia freezes. Becca turns and flops, doing bad-dream mutters; lets them subside, breathes deep and even. After a long time she hears Julia start moving again.

  She watches Julia sneak out, watches her sneak in an hour later; watches her change fast into her pyjamas and jam her clothes deep into the wardrobe. Watches her disappear to the bathroom, come back a long time later in a thick fog of flowers and lemon and disinfectant.

  There’s no phone down the side of Julia’s bed, the next evening during second study when Becca finds an excuse. There’s a half-empty packet of condoms.

  It scalds Becca’s fingers like hot grease; even after she shoves it back it keeps scalding, corroding right into her blood and pumping all through her body. Julia isn’t Selena; no one could sweet-talk her into this, no amount of puppy-dog eyes and sensitive stories. This had to be something vicious, clotted with cruelty, a hard jerk of her arm up behind her back: Do it or I’ll tell on Selena, get her expelled, I’ll send tit shots of her to every phone in the school— Someone more than cunning. Someone evil.

  Becca, kneeling on the floor between the beds, bites into the meat of her palm to keep that sound from wrenching out of her again.

  Who who?

  Someone who doesn’t understand the immensity of what he’s done. He thinks this is nothing. Turning girls from what they are into what he wants them to be, twisting and forcing till they’re nothing but his desires, that’s no big deal: just what they were there for, to begin with. Becca’s teeth make deep dents in her hand.

  Those moments in the glade that were supposed to last forever, that were supposed to be theirs to reclaim no matter how far away and apart the four of them travel: he’s robbing those. He’s scrubbing away the glowing map-lines that were supposed to lead each of them back. Selena’s and then Julia’s, he’ll go after Holly next, he’s a crow gobbling their crumb-trails and never full. The road of dots across Becca’s belly leaps with fresh pain.

  Who who whose smell in the air of her room, whose fingerprints all over her friends’ secret places—

  Outside the window the moon is a thin white smear behind purple-grey clouds. Becca unclenches her teeth and holds out her palms.

  Save us

  The clouds pulse. They bubble at the edges.

  Julia broke the vow; even if she was forced to, that doesn’t matter, not to this. So did Selena, whatever she did or didn’t do with him. If she danced along the line, if she broke up with him before they went right over, this doesn’t care. None of those things change the punishment.

  Forgive us. Burn this out of us turn us pure again. Get him out get us back to how we used to be

  The sky simmers and thrums. The answers heave under a thin skin of cloud.

  Something is required.

  Whatever you want. You want blood I’ll cut myself open

  The light dims, rejecting. Not that.

  Becca thinks of poured wine, clay figurines, flash of a knife and scatter of feathers. She has no clue where she would get a bird, or wine actually, but if—

  What tell me what

  With a vast silent roar the sky bursts open, the clouds explode to fragments that dissolve before they hit the ground. Out of the white and enormous blaze it drops into her open palms:

  Him.

  She was thinking like a stupid little kid. Booze nicked from Mum’s wine rack, chicken blood; baby stuff, for eyelinered idiots playing witch games they don’t understand.

  In old times, there were punishments for forcing a girl who had made a vow. Becca’s read about them: buried alive, flayed, clubbed to death—

  Him. No other sacrifice could ever be enough, not to purify this.

  Becca almost gets up and runs, back to the common room and French homework. She knows she could, if she wanted. Nothing would stop her.

  Selena staring into her palmful of hair, the hunch of Julia’s shoulders when she came back in from the seething dark, the fast desperate beat of Holly’s voice. The moments, over the last few weeks, when Becca’s hated all three of them. Any day now it’ll be too late for them to find their way back, ever again.

  Yes. Yes I’ll do it. Yes I’ll find a way.

  The ferocity of celebration that rises to meet that, outside her and inside, almost throws her across the room. The dots across her belly drum wild rhythms.

  But I don’t know who I need to

  Not Chris Harper. Chris didn’t need to be kind to Becca, he didn’t do it to get something – Becca knows perfectly well that a guy like Chris isn’t after someone like her – and free kindness doesn’t go with evil. But that leaves Finn Andrew Seamus François everyone, how can she—

  It comes to her like the curve of a great smile: she doesn’t have to know who. All she has to know is where and when. And she can choose those for herself, because she’s a girl, and girls have the power to call guys running any time they want.

  Becca knows how to be super-careful. Nothing is going to crack open her secret.

  All the sky streams with white, great joyous cool sheets of it pouring down over her hands and her upturned face and her whole body, filling her open mouth.

  On Thursday morning Becca wears her outgrown kilt again, and this time Sister Cornelius loses the head and bangs her desk with the ruler and gives the whole class a hundred lines of I will pray to the Blessed Virgin to grant me modesty. And then she sends Becca back to her room to change.

  There’s no way to know what time this guy and Selena were meeting, but at least Becca knows one place where they met. Tonight in that clearing place? one text said, way back in March. Same time?

  In the last place in the world where she should have brought him. For a second, zipping up her too-long new kilt, Becca’s afraid this guy must have power of his own behind him, to turn Selena into such a total
lobotomised idiot. She spots a dropped scrap of paper on the carpet, launches it spinning like a moth around the light fixture to remind herself: she has power too.

  The phone doesn’t feel black and hot any more; it’s turned foam-light and nimble, buttons pressing themselves almost before Becca’s thumb can find them. She redoes the text four times before she’s positive it’s OK. Can you meet tonight? 1 in the cypress clearing?

  She might not get the chance to check for an answer, but it doesn’t matter: he’ll be there. Maybe Julia’s already set up a meeting for tonight – Becca doesn’t know how she contacts him – but he’ll blow Julia off, if he thinks Selena’s beckoning. It rises off his texts like heat: what he really wants is Selena.

  He can’t have her.

  Becca leaves soon after midnight, to give herself time to prepare. In the mirror on their wardrobe door, she looks like a burglar: dark-blue jeans and her dark-blue hoodie, and her designer black leather gloves that Mum gave her for Christmas and she’s never worn before. Her hood strings are pulled so tight that just her eyes and nose stick out. It makes her grin – You look like the world’s fattest bank robber – but the grin doesn’t show; she looks solemn, almost stern, balanced on the balls of her feet ready for battle. Around her the others breathe slow and deep as enchanted princesses in a fairy tale.

  The night glows like some strange daytime, under a huge low half-moon packed tight in stars. Over the wall and far away music is playing, just a tantalising thread of it, a sweet voice and a beat like running feet. Becca freezes in a shadow and listens. Never thought that everything we lost could feel so near, found you on a— and it’s gone, faded on a change of wind. After a long time she starts moving again.

  The groundskeeper’s shed is dark, thick earth-smelling dark and she’s not about to turn on the light, but she prepared for this. Two steps forward, face left, five steps, and her outstretched hands hit the stack of tools propped against the wall.

  The hoe is at the far right of the stack, where she left it yesterday. Spades and shovels are too heavy and too clumsy, anything short-handled would mean getting too close, but one hoe had a blade so sharp it almost split her fingertip like ripe fruit. Gemma came in and saw her choosing, but Becca’s not worried about her. This isn’t balconette bras and low-carb foods; this is a thousand miles outside what Gemma’s mind can reach.

  She sets branches parting like swinging doors in front of her, to leave her path clear. In the centre of the glade she practises, swinging the hoe up behind her head and down; getting used to the heft of it, the reach. The gloves mean she needs to hold it extra tight, to stop her fingers sliding. The swish of it is fast and strong and satisfying. Low under the trees, here and there, luminous eyes watch her, curious.

  One more go because it feels good, and Becca stops: she doesn’t want her arms to get tired. She spins the hoe between her palms and listens. Only the comfortable, familiar sounds of the night: her own breathing, the undergrowth-rustles of small things about their business. He’s nowhere near.

  He’ll come from the back of the grounds. The path, under arching branches, is an endless black cave flecked with snippets of white light. She pictures different guys stepping out of it: Andrew, Seamus, Graham. She pictures, carefully and methodically, everything that needs to come after that.

  The hoe has stopped spinning between her hands. She hears its swish again, and this time the splintering thud and squelch at the end.

  Her whole body would love it to be James Gillen – the thought opens her mouth in almost a smile – but that at least she knows Selena would never. She hopes it’s Andrew Moore.

  Becca feels lucky, so lucky she could lift right off the ground and somersault amid the whirling stars, to have been chosen for this. The beauty of the glade turns her heart over. All the clearing is lavish with every glory it can call up; the air is drenched with moonlight and the sweetness of hyacinths, owls sing like nightingales and hares dance and the cypresses are pearled in silver and lavender, for the celebration.

  In the crosshatched dark away down the path, something cracks. The cypresses catch one deep breath and shiver on tiptoe. He’s here.

  For one second Becca is terrified, bones jackhammered to jelly by the same terror that Julia must have felt as she lay down for him, that Selena must have felt in the instant before she said I love you. It comes to her that, afterwards, she’ll be different from everyone else. Her and this guy: that thud will take them both across one-way borderlines, into worlds they can’t imagine.

  She bites down on her cheek till she tastes blood, and with one arc of her hand she sweeps a long rustle like a black wing all around the tops of the cypresses. The other place has been there all along; for months now the borders have been turning porous, sifting away. If she wanted to be frightened, if she wanted to run, the moments for that were a long time ago.

  The terror is gone, as fast as it came. Becca moves back into the shadows under the trees and waits for him like a girl waiting for a secret lover, lips parted and dark blood thrumming in her throat and her breasts, all her body reaching out for the moment when at long last she’ll see his face.

  Chapter 27

  I went round to the front of the school. My feet crossing the grass felt strange, too solid, sinking down and down like the lawn was made of mist. Girls still watching as I passed, still whispering. This time it didn’t matter.

  I waited at the corner of the boarders’ wing, pressed back into the shadow. If we’re taking a break, Detective Conway, I think I’ll walk down with you, have a quick smoke . . . No? Any reason why not? With Mackey around, you need to stay ahead.

  I felt like someone else, waiting there for Conway. Someone changed.

  She came fast. One minute the oak door looked shut forever; the next she was poised at the top of the steps, scanning for me. Floodlights on her hair. Took me a second to feel the big grin right across my face.

  No Mackey behind her. I stepped out of the shadow, lifted an arm.

  The matching grin lit her up. She came striding across the white pebbles, held out a hand for a high-five. It whipcracked out into the night, pure triumph, left a hard clean sting on my palm. ‘We did all right there.’

  I was glad of the half-light. ‘Would you say Mackey bought it?’

  ‘I’d say so, yeah. Hard to tell for definite.’

  ‘What’d you tell him?’

  ‘Now? Just looked pissed off, said I had to sort out some shite and it’d only take me a minute, don’t go anywhere. I’d say he thinks you’re bitching about having to wait around.’ She glanced back at the door, a dark crack open. We started moving, into the shadow and round the boarders’ wing, out of sight.

  I asked, ‘Getting anywhere with Holly?’

  Conway shook her head. ‘I threw around possible motives for a while, but nothing looked like it clicked. Went back to how she wasn’t there for Selena, what she would’ve done to make up for it; the kid got stroppy, but she didn’t give me anything new. I didn’t want to push too hard: if she started going to bits, Mackey would’ve walked, and I wanted to give you time. What’ve you got?’

  I said, ‘Rebecca was going through the shovels and spades in the groundskeepers’ shed. The day before the murder.’

  Conway went still. Stopped breathing.

  After a moment: ‘Who said?’

  ‘Gemma. She was looking to buy diet pills, walked in on Rebecca. Rebecca jumped a mile, did a legger.’

  ‘Gemma. Joanne’s lapdog Gemma.’

  ‘I don’t think she was bullshitting me. They weren’t covering for themselves, anyway. They didn’t cop that there was anything dodgy about Rebecca being at the tools. They thought the suss bit was her being in there at all – thought she was buying drugs off the groundskeeper to give to Chris, because she was into him, and then he turned her down and she lost it. I said Rebecca was too small to do the job; they said if Chris was sitting down, she could’ve hit him with a rock. If they knew the weapon was a hoe, no way could they h
ave stopped themselves bringing it up. They don’t have that kind of self-control. They don’t know.’

  Conway still hadn’t moved: feet braced, shoulders braced, hands dug in her pockets. Things going fast behind her eyes. She said, ‘I don’t see it. The drugs thing, maybe that could play; Rebecca could’ve been bribing Chris to stay away from Selena. But remember the condom? Chris went out there expecting a ride. You think Rebecca’d been shagging him? Seriously?’

  I said, ‘I don’t think the earlier meetings were Rebecca. Remember what Holly said? When she realised something was up with Selena, she tried to talk to Julia about it. Julia didn’t want to know: told her to forget it, Selena’d get over it sooner or later. Does that sound like Julia to you? She’s a scrapper. One of her mates is in trouble, she’s just going to stick her fingers in her ears, hope it goes away?’

  Conway moved then. Her head went back, moonlight on the whites of her eyes. ‘Julia was already on it.’

  ‘Yeah. She didn’t want Holly getting involved, making things more complicated. So she told her to leave it.’

  ‘Fuck,’ Conway said. ‘Remember what Joanne told us? She put her bitches on night duty, make sure Selena had stopped sneaking out to see Chris. No sign of Selena, but they saw Julia, all right. They thought she was meeting Finn Carroll. And we went along with that. Pair of fucking fools.’

  I said, ‘No way to keep a secret for long, in a room that size. Somewhere in there, Rebecca found out – either about Chris and Selena, or about Chris and Julia.’

  ‘Yeah. And Holly said even the thought of anything being wrong with any of them made Rebecca go mental.’

  ‘The thought of the four of them not being enough to make everything OK. She couldn’t handle that.’ I saw the poster, the calligraphy that had taken hours, weeks, a fresh start for every finger-slip. If crouds of dangers should appeare, Yet friendship can be unconcern’d.