Tana French: The Secret Place

I said, ‘You figure she knew something?’

Sharp glance, lift of the statement sheet. ‘How’d you end up with this?’

‘Holly Mackey was a witness in a case I worked, back in ’07. We got on. Even better than I thought, looks like.’

Conway’s eyebrow went up. She’d heard about the case. Which meant she’d heard about me. ‘OK,’ she said. Nothing in her tone, either way. ‘Thanks.’

She swung her chair away from me and punched at her phone. Clamped the receiver under her jaw and leaned back in her chair, rereading.

Rough, my mam would have called Conway. That Antoinette one, and a sideways look with her chin tucked down: a bit rough. Not meaning her personality, or not just; meaning where she came from, and what. The accent told you, and the stare. Dublin, inner city; just a quick walk from where I grew up, maybe, but miles away all the same. Tower blocks. IRA-wannabe graffiti and puddles of piss. Junkies. People who’d never passed an exam in their lives but had every twist and turn of dole maths down pat. People who wouldn’t have approved of Conway’s career choice.

There’s people who like rough. They think it’s cool, it’s street, it’ll rub off and they’ll be able to pull off all the good slang. Rough doesn’t look so sexy when you grew up on the banks of it, your whole family doggy-paddling like mad to keep their heads above the flood tide. I like smooth, smooth as velvet.

I reminded myself: no need to be Conway’s best bud. Just be useful enough to get on her gaffer’s radar, and keep moving.

‘Sophie. It’s Antoinette.’ Her mouth loosened when she talked to someone she liked; got a ready-for-anything curl to the corner, like a dare. It made her younger, made her into someone you’d try and chat up in the pub, if you were feeling gutsy. ‘Yeah, good. You?… I got a photo coming your way… Nah, the Harper case. I need fingerprints, but can you have a look at the actual pic for me, too? Check out what it was taken on, when it was taken, where, what it was printed out on. Anything you can give me.’ She tilted the envelope closer. ‘And I got words stuck on it. Cut-out words, like ransom-note shite. See can you figure out where they got cut out of, yeah?… Yeah, I know. Make me a miracle. See you ’round.’

She hung up. Pulled a smartphone out of her pocket and took shots of the card: front, back, up close, far off, details. Headed over to a printer in the corner to print them off. Turned back to her desk and saw me.

Stared me out of it. I looked back.

‘You still here?’

I said, ‘I want to work with you on this one.’

A slice of a laugh. ‘I bet you do.’ She dropped back into her chair, found an envelope in a desk drawer.

‘You said yourself you got nowhere with Holly Mackey and her mates. But she likes me enough, or trusts me enough, that she brought me this. And if she’ll talk to me, she’ll get her mates talking to me.’

Conway thought about that. Swung her chair from side to side.

I asked, ‘What’ve you got to lose?’

Maybe the accent did it. Most cops come up from farms, from small towns; no love for the smart-arse Dubs who think they’re the centre of the universe, when everyone knows that’s Ballybumfuck. Or maybe she liked whatever it was she’d heard about me. Either way:

She scrawled a name on the envelope, slid the card inside. Said, ‘I’m going down the school, take a look at this noticeboard, have a few chats. You can come if you want. If you’re any use to me, we can talk about what happens next. If you’re not, you can fuck off back to Cold Cases.’

I knew better than to let the Yes! show. ‘Sounds good.’

‘Do you need to ring your mammy and say you’re not coming home?’

‘My gaffer knows the story. It’s not a problem.’

‘Right,’ Conway said. She shoved her chair back. ‘I’ll get you up to speed on the way. And I drive.’

Someone wolf-whistled after us, low, as we went out the door. Ripple of snickers. Conway didn’t look back.

On the first Sunday afternoon of September, the boarders come back to St Kilda’s. They come under a sky whose clean-stripped blue could still belong to summer, except for the V of birds practising off in one corner of the picture. They come screaming triple exclamation marks and jump-hugging in corridors that smell of dreamy summer emptiness and fresh paint; they come with peeling tans and holiday stories, new haircuts and new-grown breasts that make them look strange and aloof, at first, even to their best friends. And after a while Miss McKenna’s welcome speech is over, and the tea urns and good biscuits have been packed away; the parents have done the hugs and the embarrassing last-minute warnings about homework and inhalers, a few first-years have cried; the last forgotten things have been brought back, and the sounds of cars have faded down the drive and dissolved into the outside world. All that’s left is the boarders, and the matron and the couple of staff who drew the short straws, and the school.

Holly’s got so much new coming at her, the best she can do is keep up, keep a blank face and hope that, sooner or later, this starts to feel real. She’s dragged her suitcase down the unfamiliar tiled corridors of the boarders’ wing, the whirr of the wheels echoing up into high corners, to her new bedroom. She’s hung her yellow towels on her hook and spread the yellow-and-white-striped duvet, still neatly creased and smelling packet-fresh of plastic, on her bed – she and Julia have the window beds; Selena and Becca let them have first dibs, after all. Out of the window, from this new angle, the grounds look different: a secret garden full of nooks that pop in and out of existence, ready to be explored if you’re fast enough.

Even the canteen feels like a new place. Holly’s used to it at lunch hour, boiling to the ceiling with gabble and rush, everyone yelling across tables and eating with one hand and texting with the other. By dinnertime the arrival buzz has worn off and the boarders clump in little knots between long stretches of empty Formica, sprawled over their meatballs and salad, talking in murmurs that wander aimlessly around the air. The light feels dimmer than at lunch and the room smells stronger somehow, cooked meat and vinegar, somewhere between savoury and nauseating.

Not everyone is keeping it to a murmur. Joanne Heffernan and Gemma Harding and Orla Burgess and Alison Muldoon are two tables away, but Joanne takes it for granted that everyone in any room wants to hear every word she says, and even when she’s wrong it’s not like most people have the balls to tell her. ‘Hello, it was in Elle , don’t you read? It’s supposed to be totes amazeballs, and let’s face it, I mean not being mean but you could do with an amazeballs exfoliator, couldn’t you, Orls?’

‘Jesus,’ Julia says, grimacing and rubbing her Joanne-side ear. ‘Tell me she’s not that loud at breakfast. I’m not a morning person.’

‘What’s an exfoliator?’ Becca wants to know.

‘Skin thing,’ Selena says. Joanne and the rest of them do every single thing the magazines say you have to do to your face and your hair and your cellulite.

‘It sounds like a gardening thing.’

‘It sounds like a weapon of mass destruction,’ Julia says. ‘And they’re the droid exfoliation army, just following orders. We will exfoliate.’

Her Dalek voice is deliberately loud enough that Joanne and the others whip around, but by that time Julia is holding up a forkful of meat and asking Selena if it’s actually supposed to have eyeballs in it, like Joanne has never occurred to her. Joanne’s eyes scan, blank and chilly; then she turns back, with a hair-toss like paparazzi are watching, to poking through her food.