The Secret Place (5 page)

Instead it’ll be shaped by the others. Holly looks at them and feels today shifting, fitting itself into the outlines she’ll remember in twenty years’ time, fifty: the day Julia came up with the Daleks, the day Selena and Becca brought her and Julia to the cypress glade.

‘We better go in soon,’ Becca says, without moving.

‘It’s early,’ Julia says. ‘You said we’re allowed to do whatever we want.’

‘We can, mostly. When you’re new, though, they get hyper about being able to see you all the time. Like you might run away otherwise.’

They laugh, softly, into the circle of still air. That flash hits Holly again – thread of wild-goose calls strung high across the sky, her fingers woven deep into the cool pelt of grass, flutter of Selena’s lashes against the sun and this has been forever, everything else is a daydream falling away over the horizon. This time it lasts.

A few minutes later Selena says, ‘Becs is right, though. We should go. If they come looking for us
.
.
.’

If a teacher came into the glade: the thought squirms in their spines, pokes them up off the grass. They brush themselves off; Becca picks fragments of green out of Selena’s hair and finger-combs it into place. ‘I need to finish unpacking anyway,’ Julia says.

‘Me too,’ Holly says. She thinks of the boarders’ wing, the high ceilings that feel ready to fill up with cold airy nun-voice harmonies. It seems like there’s someone new hovering by the yellow-striped bed, waiting for her moment: a new her; a new all of them. She feels the change seeping through her skin, whirling in the vast spaces between her atoms. Suddenly she understands what Julia was doing at dinner, poking Joanne. This flood was rocking her on her feet, too; she was kicking into its current, proving that she had a say in where it took her, before it could close over her head and bowl her away.

You know you can come home any time you want,
Dad said, like eighty thousand times.
Day or night: one phone call, and I’ll be there inside the hour. Got it?

Yeah I know I get it thanks,
Holly said eighty thousand times,
if I change my mind I’ll call you and come straight back home
. It didn’t occur to her, up until now, that it might not work like that.

Chapter 3

She liked her cars, Conway. Knew them, too. In the pool, she went straight for a vintage black MG, stunner. A retired detective left it to the force in his will, his pride and joy. The fella who runs the pool wouldn’t have let Conway touch it if she hadn’t known her stuff – transmission’s playing up, Detective, sorry ’bout that, lovely VW Golf just over here
.
.
. She waved, he tossed her the keys.

She handled the MG like it was her pet horse. We headed southside, where the posh people live, Conway nipping fast around corners in the whirl of laneways, laying into the horn when someone didn’t scarper fast enough.

‘Get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This is my show. You got problems taking orders from a woman?’

‘No.’

‘They all say that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Good.’ She braked hard, in front of a wheatbran-looking café where the windows needed washing. ‘Get me coffee. Black, no sugar.’

My ego’s not that weak; it won’t collapse without a daily workout. Out of the car, two coffees to go, even got a smile out of the depressed waitress. ‘There you go,’ I said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Conway took a swig. ‘Tastes like shit.’

‘You picked the place. Lucky they didn’t make it out of beansprouts.’

She almost smiled, clamped it back. ‘They did. Bin it. Both of them; I don’t want that stink in my car.’

The bin was across the road. Out, dodge traffic, bin, dodge traffic, back into the car, starting to see why Conway was still flying solo. She hit the pedal before I had my leg in the door.

‘So,’ she said. A little thawed out, but only a little. ‘You know the case, yeah? The basics?’

‘Yeah.’ Dogs on the street knew the basics.

‘You know we got no one. Grapevine say anything about why?’

The grapevine said plenty. Me, I said, ‘Some cases go that way.’

‘We hit a wall, is why. You know how it works: you’ve got the scene, you’ve got whatever witnesses you can pick up, and you’ve got the victim’s life, and one of those better give you something. They gave us a fuckton of nothing.’ Conway spotted a bike-sized gap in the lane she wanted, manoeuvred us in with a spin of the wheel. ‘Basically, there was no reason anyone would want to kill Chris Harper. He was a good kid, by all accounts. People say that anyway, but this time they might’ve actually meant it. Sixteen, in fourth year at St Colm’s, boarder – he’s from down the road, practically, but his da figured he wouldn’t get the
full benefit of the Colm’s experience
unless he boarded. Places like that, they’re all about the contacts; make the right friends at Colm’s, and you’ll never have to work for less than a hundred K a year.’
The twist to Conway’s mouth said what she thought about that.

I said, ‘Kids cooped up together, you can get bad situations. Bullying. Nothing like that on the radar, no?’

Over the canal, into Rathmines. ‘Nada. Chris was popular at school, plenty of mates, no enemies. The odd fight, but boys that age, that’s what they do; nothing major, nothing that took us anywhere. No girlfriend, not officially anyway. Three exes – they start young, nowadays – but we’re not talking true love, we’re talking a couple of snogs at the cinema and then everyone moves on; all the breakups were more than a year back and no hard feelings, as far as we could find out. He got on fine with the teachers – they said he got rowdy sometimes, but it was just too much energy, not badness. Average brains, no genius, no idiot; average worker. Got on fine with his parents, the little he saw of them. One sister, a lot younger, got on well with her. We pushed all of them – not because we thought there was anything there; because they were all we’d got. Nothing. Not a sniff of anything.’

‘Any bad habits?’

Conway shook her head. ‘Not even. Mates said he’d had the odd smoke at parties, both kinds, and he got pissed every now and then when they could get their hands on drink, but there was no alcohol in him when he died. No drugs in his system, either, and none in his stuff. No links to gambling. A couple of porn sites in his computer history, at his parents’ gaff, but what do you expect? That’s the worst he ever did, far as we could establish: few puffs of spliff and a bit of online minge.’

The side of her face was calm. Eyebrows a little down, focused on the driving. You’d have said, anyway, she was fine with her fuckton of nothing: just the way the dice roll, nothing to take to heart.

‘No motive, no leads, no witnesses; after a while we were chasing our tails. Interviewing the same people over and over. Getting the same answers. We had other cases; we couldn’t afford to spend another few months hitting ourselves over the head with this one. In the end I called it quits. Stuck it on the back burner and hoped something like this would turn up.’

I said, ‘How’d you end up as the primary?’

Conway’s foot went down on the pedal. ‘You mean, how’d a little girlie end up with a big case like this. I should’ve stuck to domestics. Yeah?’

‘No. I mean you were a newbie.’

‘So
what
? You saying that’s why we got nowhere?’

Not fine with it. Covering well enough to keep the squad lads off her back, but a long way from fine. ‘No, I’m not. I’m saying—’

‘Because fuck you. You can get out right here, get the fucking bus back to Cold Cases.’

If she hadn’t been driving, she’d have had a finger in my face. ‘
No.
I’m saying a case like this, a kid, a posh school: yous had to know it’d be a big one. Costello had seniority. How come he didn’t put his name on top?’

‘Because I’d earned it. Because he knew I’m a fucking good detective. You got that?’

Needle still sliding up, over the limit. ‘Got it,’ I said.

Bit of quiet. Conway eased off the pedal, but not a lot. We had hit the Terenure Road; once the MG got some space, it started showing what it could do. I said, once I’d left enough silence, ‘The car’s a beauty.’

‘Ever drive it?’

‘Not yet.’

Backwards nod, like that matched what she already thought of me. ‘A place like St Kilda’s, you have to come in up here.’ Hand higher than her head. ‘Get the respect.’

That told me something about Antoinette Conway. Me, I’d have picked out an old Polo, too many miles, too many layers of paint not quite hiding the dings. You come in playing low man on the totem, you get people off guard.

‘That kind of place, yeah?’

Her lip pulled up. ‘Jesus fuck. I thought they were gonna put me through a decontamination chamber, get rid of my accent. Or throw me a cleaner’s uniform and point me at the tradesmen’s entrance. You know what the fees are? They
start
at eight grand a year. That’s if you’re not boarding, or taking any
extracurricular activities
. Choir, piano, drama. You have any of that, in school?’

‘We had a football in the yard.’

Conway liked that. ‘One little geebag: I go into the holding room and call out her name for interview, and she goes, “Em, I can’t exactly go
now
, I’ve got my clarinet lesson in five?”’ That curl rising at the corner of her mouth again. Whatever she’d said to the girl, she’d enjoyed it. ‘Her interview lasted an hour. Hate that.’

‘The school,’ I said. ‘Snobby and good, or just snobby?’

‘I could win the Lotto, still wouldn’t send my kid there. But
.
.
.’ One-shouldered shrug. ‘Small classes. Young Scientist awards everywhere. Everyone’s got perfect teeth, no one ever gets up the duff, and all the shiny little pedigree bitches go on to college. I guess it’s good, if you’re OK with your kid turning out a snobby shite.’

I said, ‘Holly’s da’s a cop. A Dub. From the Liberties.’

‘I know that. You think I missed that?’

‘He wouldn’t send her there if she was turning into a snobby shite.’

Conway edged the MG’s nose past a red light. Green: she floored it. Said, ‘She fancy you?’

I almost laughed. ‘She was just a kid: nine when we met, ten when it went to trial. I didn’t see her after that, till today.’

Conway shot me a look that said I was the kid here. ‘You’d be surprised. She a liar?’

I thought back. ‘She didn’t lie to me. Not that I caught, anyway. She was a good kid, back then.’

Conway said, ‘She’s a liar.’

‘What’d she say?’

‘Dunno. I didn’t catch her out either. Maybe she didn’t lie to me. But girls that age, they’re liars. All of them.’

I thought about saying,
Next time you’ve got a trick question, save it for a suspect.
Said, instead, ‘I don’t give a damn who’s a liar, as long as she’s not lying to me.’

Conway shifted up a gear. The MG loved it. ‘Tell us,’ she said. ‘What did your little pal Holly say about Chris Harper?’

‘Not a lot. He was just a guy. She knew him from around.’

‘Right. You think she was telling the truth?’

‘I haven’t worked that out yet.’

‘You go ahead and let me know when you do. Here’s why we paid special attention to Holly and her mates. There’s four of them that hang out together, or did back then: Holly Mackey, Selena Wynne, Julia Harte and Rebecca O’Mara. They’re like that.’ Crossed fingers. ‘Another girl in their class, Joanne Heffernan, she said the vic had been going out with Selena Wynne.’

‘So you figure that’s what he was doing in St Kilda’s. Snuck in to meet her.’

‘Yeah. Here’s something we didn’t release, so try not to blab it in interview: he had a condom in his pocket. Fuck-all else, no wallet, no phone – those were back in his room – just a condom.’ Conway craned her neck, spun the wheel, whipped us round a VW snail and out of the way of a lorry just in time. The lorry wasn’t happy. ‘Fuck you, you want to start with me?
.
.
. And there were flowers on the body – that wasn’t released either. Hyacinths – those blue curly ones, real strong sweet smell? Four stems of them. They came from a flowerbed on the school grounds, not far from the scene, so the killer could’ve put them there, but
.
.
.’ Shrug. ‘Guy in his girlfriend’s school after midnight, with a condom and flowers? I’m gonna say he was on a promise.’

‘The school was definitely the primary scene, yeah? He wasn’t dumped there after he died?’

‘Nah. The blow split his head right open, shitloads of blood. The way it flowed, the Tech Bureau worked out he stayed still after he was hit. No dump job, no trying to crawl for help, he didn’t even reach up and touch the wound – no blood on his hands. Just bang’ – she snapped her fingers – ‘and down he went.’

I said, ‘I’m betting Selena Wynne said she’d had no plans to meet him that night.’