Tana French - The Secret Place

‘Right. Until you turn around and say, “Oops, actually, we’ve decided those texts were from her, not from you! Sorry!”’

‘Bit late for that,’ I said. ‘And we’ve had a lot of practice figuring out when people are lying. We both think Selena’s telling us the truth.’

‘Great. Glad to hear it.’

‘So if we believe her, why don’t you? She’s meant to be your mate; how come you think she’s a murderer?’

‘I don’t. I think she’s never done anything worse than talking during study period. OK?’

The defences shooting up in Julia’s voice, I’d heard those before. That was when it clicked: the interview in her room that afternoon, that note in her voice, something left snagged in my mind. I said, ‘You’re the one who texted me.’

Off Chris’s phone.

Her profile tightening. She didn’t look at me.

‘To tell me where Joanne kept the key to the connecting door. That was you.’

Nothing.

‘You said to us, this afternoon: When you found out about Joanne’s key, she turned it around on me. If anyone had told you about her and Chris, she’d have got back at them the same way. Meaning Joanne was getting back at you for telling us about the key.’

I got one corner of Julia’s eye. It said, Good catch. Now prove it.

Conway turned on the bench, pulled up one leg so she could face Julia straight on. ‘Listen. Selena’s in bad shape. You know that. You thought it was because she couldn’t handle being a killer, had to hide in cloud-cuckoo land. It’s not that. You want me to swear? I’ll swear on anything you want: it’s not.’

She said it clear and warm, the way she’d have said it to a friend, a best friend, to her closest sister. She was holding out a hand and beckoning Julia to cross that river. Go from the lifelong-familiar side where grown-ups were faceless mentallers trying to wreck everything, no point trying to understand them, over to this new strange place where we could talk face to face.

Julia looking at Conway. Things moving across her face said she knew the crossing was one-way. That you can never tell who’ll still be beside you, on the other side, and who’ll be left behind.

I kept quiet. This was theirs. I was outside.

Julia took a long breath. She said, ‘You’re sure. It wasn’t her.’

‘We don’t suspect her. You’ve got my word.’

‘Lenie’s not just naturally crazy, though. You don’t know her; I do. She wasn’t like this before Chris got killed.’

Conway nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. But what’s wrecking her head isn’t that she killed him. It’s that she knows something she can’t handle. She’s spacing out so she doesn’t have to deal with it.’

It was getting colder. Julia pulled her jumper tight at her neck. She said, ‘Like what?’

‘If we knew, we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation. I’ve got ideas, no proof. All I can tell you for sure is: you’re not gonna get Selena in hassle by telling me the truth. I swear. OK?’

Julia tugged her sleeves down, the pale smudges of her hands vanishing into the red. She said quietly, ‘OK. I texted you about the key.’

Conway said, ‘How’d you know where Joanne and them kept it?’

‘I’m the one who gave her the idea about the book.’

I said, ‘And the one who gave her the key.’

‘You make it sound like it was her birthday present. Actually, they saw us heading out one night, and Joanne said she’d tell McKenna what bad girls we’d been if we didn’t make her a copy of the key. So I did.’

‘And gave her advice on where to keep it?’ Conway raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re very helpful altogether.’

Julia matched the eyebrow. ‘When someone could get me expelled, yeah, I am. She wanted to know where we kept ours, which I wasn’t going to tell her because fuck the bitch-’

‘Which was where? While we’re at it.’

‘Down the inside of my phone case. Simple, and it was always on me. Like I said, though, I wasn’t about to give the Heifer Heffernan any more than I had to. So I told her the only way to be safe was to keep it in the common room, so if it got found no one could connect it to her, right? I was like, “Pick a book no one ever reads. Who’d you do your saint essay on?” – the common rooms are all full of saint biogs, no one ever looks at them except once a year for essays, and we’d just handed ours in. She went, “Thérèse of Lisieux. The Little Flower” – she actually got this holy face on, like that somehow made her into Joanne of Lisieux.’ Conway was grinning. ‘So I went, “Perfect. No one’s going to look at the book again till at least next year. Stick the key in there, you’re sorted.”’

‘And you figured she’d taken your word for it?’

‘Joanne has zero imagination, except about herself. No way could she have come up with a place. Anyway, I checked. I thought it might come in useful.’

‘And it did,’ Conway said. ‘How come you decided to tell us?’

Julia hesitated. The small noises all around were moving deeper into night: flurries in leaves said hunting, the laughter from the lawn was long gone. I wondered how little time we had. Didn’t look at my watch.

I said, ‘The interviews, earlier on. Did Selena come out of hers upset?’

After a moment: ‘I mean, she wouldn’t have looked upset to most people. Just spacy; well, spacier than usual. But that is upset, for Selena. That’s how she gets.’

I said, ‘You were afraid we’d shaken her up enough that she might let something slip, maybe even confess. You needed us looking in another direction, at least till you could get her settled down again. So you threw us Joanne’s key, to keep us occupied. And it worked. You’ve got a gift for this, you know that?’

‘Gee, thanks.’

Conway said, ‘And if you’re the one who texted us, that means you’ve got Chris Harper’s secret phone.’

Julia went still. Her face was a new kind of wary.

‘Ah, come on. Records say that text came from that phone. There’s not a lot of point in mucking about.’

A tilt of the head, acknowledging. Julia leaned back and wriggled a phone out of her jeans pocket, slim little thing in a snappy orange case. ‘Not his phone. Just his SIM card.’

She pulled the case away from the back of the phone and tapped a SIM card into her palm. Handed it to Conway.

Conway said, ‘We’re going to need to hear the story.’

‘There’s no story.’

‘Where’d you get it?’

‘Don’t I have the right to an attorney, or something? Before I start telling you where I got a dead guy’s SIM?’

I knew. I said, ‘You got his phone off Selena, after he died. She gave it to you, or you found it in her stuff. That’s why you think she killed Chris.’

Julia’s eyes flicked away from me. Conway said, ‘We still don’t. And it’s pretty obvious you didn’t do the job, or you wouldn’t be climbing the walls thinking she did.’ That got a faint one-sided grin. ‘So dial down the paranoia and talk to me.’

The night was turning that red jumper the colour of a banked fire, compressed and waiting. Julia said, ‘I was actually trying to get rid of Selena’s phone, the one we’d both used to text Chris. Imagine my surprise when this showed up.’

Conway said, ‘When was this?’

‘The day after Chris got killed.’

‘What time?’

An unconscious grimace, as she remembered. ‘Jesus. I started trying before noon – they had this big high-drama assembly to tell us about The Tragedy, we had to say a prayer or something… All I could think was I had to get Selena’s phone out of our room. Before you guys decided to search the place.’

‘What were you going to do with it?’