The Secret Place (77 page)

‘Don’t call me
we
,’ Rebecca said. She got up and headed for the door, not a glance at the social worker, who was clicking her tongue and tucking in her chins.

At the door she turned. ‘It’s going to be all over the news,’ she said, to Conway. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t heard you caution her,’ the social worker said, pointing a waggy finger at Conway. ‘You can’t use anything she says.’ To Rebecca: ‘We need to be very quiet right now. Like two little mice.’

‘The media won’t use your name,’ Conway said. ‘You’re a minor.’

Rebecca smiled like we were the kiddies. ‘The internet isn’t going to care how old I am,’ she pointed out. ‘Joanne isn’t going to care, the exact second she gets online.’

McKenna said to all of us, one notch too loud, ‘Every student and staff member in this school will be under the strictest instructions not to make any of today’s events public knowledge. On or off the internet.’

We all left a second for that to fall into. When it was gone Rebecca said, ‘If anyone goes looking for my name, like in a hundred years, they’re going to find mine and Chris’s. Together.’

That shiver again, hard as a spasm.

Conway said, ‘It’ll be headlines for a few days now, a few days later on.’ She didn’t say
during the trial
. ‘Then it’ll go off the radar. Online, it’ll drop even quicker. One celebrity caught shagging the wrong person, and this is yesterday’s news.’

That curled the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t care what people think.’

Conway said, ‘Then what?’

‘Rebecca,’ McKenna said. ‘You can speak to the detectives tomorrow. When your parents have arranged for appropriate legal counsel.’

Rebecca, thin in the slanted space of the door-frame, where one sideways turn would vanish her into the immeasurable dark of the corridor. She said, ‘I thought I was getting him off us. Getting him off Lenie, so she wouldn’t be stuck to him forever. And instead I am. When I saw him, there in the common room—’

‘I’ve told her,’ the social worker said, through a tight little mouth. ‘You all heard me tell her.’

Rebecca said, ‘So that has to mean I did the wrong thing. I don’t know how, because I was sure, I was so—’

‘I can’t
force
her to be quiet,’ the social worker told whoever. ‘I can’t
gag
her. That’s not my job.’

‘But either I got it wrong, or else I got it right and that doesn’t make a difference: I’m supposed to be punished anyway.’ The paleness of her face blurred its edges, bled her like watercolour. ‘Could it work like that? Do you think?’

Conway lifted her hands. ‘Way above my pay grade.’

If crouds of dangers should appeare, yet friendship can be unconcern’d.
That afternoon I had read it the same way Becca had. Somewhere along the way, it had changed.

I said, ‘Yeah, it could.’

Rebecca’s face turned towards me. She looked like I had lit something in her: a deep, slow-burning relief. ‘You think?’

‘Yeah. That poem you have on your wall, that doesn’t mean nothing bad can ever happen if you’ve got proper friends. It just means you can take whatever goes wrong, as long as you’ve got them. They matter more.’

Rebecca thought about that, didn’t even feel the social worker tugging at the leash. Nodded. She said, ‘I didn’t think of that last year. I guess I was just a little kid.’

I asked, ‘Would you do it again, if you knew?’

Rebecca laughed at me. Real laugh, so clear it made you shiver; a laugh that dissolved the exhausted walls, sent your mind unrolling into the vast sweet night. She wasn’t blurry any more; she was the solidest thing in the room. ‘Course,’ she said. ‘Silly, course I would.’

‘
Right
,’ said the social worker. ‘That’s
enough
. We’re saying good night now.’ She grabbed Rebecca by the bicep – nasty little pinch off those stubby fingers, but Rebecca didn’t flinch – and shoved her out of the door. Their steps faded: the social worker’s pissed-off clatter, Rebecca’s runners almost too light to hear, gone.

Conway said, ‘We’re going to head as well. We’ll be back tomorrow.’

McKenna turned her head to look at us like her neck hurt. She said, ‘I’m sure you will.’

‘If her parents get back to you, you’ve got our numbers. If Holly and Julia and Selena need anything else from their room, you’ve got the key. If anyone has anything to tell us, whatever time of night, you make sure they get the chance.’

McKenna said, ‘You have made yourselves abundantly clear. I think you can safely leave now.’

Conway was already moving. I was slower. McKenna had turned so ordinary; just one of my ma’s mates, worn down by a drunk husband or a kid in trouble, trying to find her way through the night.

I said, ‘You told us earlier: this school’s survived a lot.’

‘Indeed,’ McKenna said. She had one last punch left in her: that fisheye came up and hit me square on, showed me exactly how she smashed snotty teenagers into cringing kids. ‘And while I appreciate your belated concern, Detective, I am fairly sure that it can survive even such an impressive threat as yourselves.’

‘Put you in your place,’ Conway said, a safe distance down the corridor. ‘And serve you right for arse-licking.’ The dark took her face, her voice. I couldn’t tell how much she was joking.

Us, leaving St Kilda’s. The banister-rail arching warm under my hand. The entrance hall, slants of white spilling through the fanlight onto the chequered tiles. Our footsteps, the clear bell-jingle of Conway’s car keys hanging off her finger, the faint slow toll of a great clock striking midnight somewhere, all spiralling up through still air to the invisible ceiling. For one last second, the place we’d come to that morning materialised out of the dark for me: beautiful; whorled and spired of mother-of-pearl and mist; unreachable.

The walk to the car lasted forever. The night was wide open, full to dripping with itself, it smelled of hungry tropical flowers and animal scat and running water. The grounds had gone rogue: every flash of moonlight off a leaf looked like bared white teeth, the tree over the car looked dense with shadow-things hanging ready to drop. Every sound had me leaping around, but there was never anything to see. The place was only mocking or warning, showing me who was boss.

By the time I slammed myself inside the car I was sweating. I thought Conway hadn’t noticed, till she said, ‘I’m only fucking delighted to get out of here.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Same.’

We should’ve been high-fiving, high-stepping, high as kites. I didn’t know how to find that. All I could find was the look on Holly’s face and Julia’s, watching the last shadow of something craved and lost; the distant blue of Selena’s eyes, watching things I couldn’t see; Rebecca’s laugh, too clear to be human. The car was cold.

Conway turned the key, reversed out fast and hard. Pebbles flew up as she hit the drive. She said, ‘I’ll be starting the interview at nine. In Murder. I’d rather have you for backup than one of those dickheads off the squad.’

Roche and the rest of them, putting an extra spike in their jabs now that Conway had got her big solve after all. Ought to be back-slaps and free pints, fair play to you and welcome to the club. It wouldn’t be. If I wanted to be part of the Murder guy-love someday, my best bet was to leg it back to Cold Cases as fast as my tiny toesies would carry me.

I said, ‘I’ll be there.’

‘You’ve earned it. I guess.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

‘You managed a whole day without fucking up big-time. What do you want, a medal?’

‘I said thanks. What do you want, flowers?’

The gates were closed. The night watchman had missed the long sweep of our headlights all the way down the drive; when Conway beeped, he did a double-take up from his laptop. ‘Useless bollix,’ Conway and I said, in unison.

The gates opened on one long slow creak. The second there was an inch to spare on either side, Conway floored it, nearly took off the MG’s wing mirror. And Kilda’s was gone.

Conway felt in her jacket pocket, tossed something on my lap. The photo of the card. Chris smiling, golden leaves.
I know who killed him.

She said, ‘Who’s your money on?’

Even in the dimness, every line of him was packed electric enough with life that he could’ve leapt off the paper. I tilted the photo to the dashboard light, tried to read his face. Tried to see if that smile blazed with the reflection of the girl he was looking at; if it said
love
, brand-new and brand-fiery. It kept its secrets.

I said, ‘Selena.’

‘Yeah. Same here.’

‘She knew it was Rebecca, from when Rebecca brought her Chris’s phone. She managed to keep it to herself for a year, but in the end it was wrecking her head so badly she couldn’t take it any more, had to get it out.’

Conway nodded. ‘But she wasn’t about to squeal on her mate. The Secret Place was perfect: get it out of your system, blow off the pressure, without telling anyone anything that mattered. And Selena’s flaky enough, she never realised it’d bring us in. She thought it’d be a day’s worth of gossip, then gone.’

Street lights came and went, flickered Chris in and out of existence. I said, ‘Maybe now she’ll stop seeing him.’

I wanted to hear Conway say it.
He’s gone. We dissolved him right out of her mind. Left them both free.

‘Nah,’ Conway said. Hand over hand on the wheel, strong and smooth, arcing us round a corner. ‘The state of her? She’s stuck with him for good.’

The gardens we’d passed that morning were empty, deep under a thick fall of silence. We were metres from a main road, but among all that careful graceful leafiness we were the only thing moving. The MG’s smooth engine sounded rude as a raspberry.

‘Costello,’ Conway said, and left it, like she was deciding whether to keep talking. The people with the five-foot concrete mug-handle had it floodlit; make sure we could all appreciate it twenty-four-seven, or make sure no one nicked it to go with his eight-foot concrete mug.

Conway said, ‘They haven’t replaced him yet.’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘O’Kelly was talking about July; something about after the mid-year budget. Unless this goes tits-up, I should still be in the good books then. If you were thinking of applying, I could put in a word.’

That meant partners.
You want him, Conway, you work with him
.
.
. Me and Conway.

I saw it all, clear as day. The slaggings from the butch boys, the sniggers rising when I found the gimp mask on my desk. The paperwork and the witnesses that took just that bit too long to reach us; the squad pints we only heard about the next morning. Me trying to make nice, making an eejit of myself instead. Conway not trying at all.

It means you can take whatever goes wrong,
I had said to Rebecca.
As long as you’ve got your friends.

I said, ‘That’d be deadly. Thanks.’

In the faint glow of the car lights I saw the corner of Conway’s mouth go up, just a fraction: that same ready-for-anything curl it had had when she was on the phone to Sophie, way back in the squad room. She said, ‘Should be good for a laugh, anyway.’

‘You’ve got a funny idea of a laugh.’

‘Be glad I do. Or you’d be stuck in Cold Cases for the duration, praying for some other teenage kid to bring you another ticket out.’

‘I’m not complaining,’ I said. Felt a matching curl take the corner of my mouth.

‘Better not,’ Conway said, and she spun the MG onto the main road and hit the pedal. Someone smacked his horn, she smacked hers back and gave him the finger, and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us for ever.

Chapter 30

They come back to school for fourth year in the rain, thick clammy rain that leaves your skin splashed with sticky residue. The summer was weird, disjointed: someone was always away on holiday with her parents, someone else always had a family barbecue or a dentist appointment or whatever, and somehow the four of them have barely seen each other since June. Selena’s mum has taken her to have her new short hair cut properly – it makes her look older and sophisticated, till you get a proper look at her face. Julia has a hickey on her neck; she doesn’t tell, and none of them ask. Becca has shot up about three inches and got her braces off. Holly feels like she’s the only one who’s still the same: a little taller, a little more shape to her legs, but basically just her. For a dizzy second, standing with her bag dragging at her shoulder in the doorway of the Windex-smelling room they’ll be sharing this year, she’s almost shy of the others.

None of them mention the vow. None of them mention getting out at night, not to talk about how cool it was, not to suggest they could find a new way. One tiny corner of Holly starts to wonder if for the others it was one big joke, just a way of making school or themselves more interesting; if she made a tool of herself, believing it mattered.