The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(102)

Selena shook her head. Her colour was starting to come back.

‘No? Me, I would’ve minded. I’d’ve figured, either this guy thinks I’m not good enough to take out in public, or he wants to keep his options open. Either way, I’m not happy.’

Selena said simply, ‘I didn’t think that.’

Conway left a pause, but that was it. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Would you say it was a good relationship?’

Selena had herself back. She said, slowly, turning over the words before she let them out, ‘It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever had. That and my friends. Nothing’s ever going to be like that again.’

The words dissolved and spread into the air, turned it those still, backlit blues. She was right; course she was. You don’t get a second first time. It seemed like she shouldn’t have had to know that, not yet. Like she should have had the chance to leave that glade behind, before she realised she could never go back.

Conway held up her phone. ‘So why’d you dump him after this night?’

Selena went vague, but I got that feeling again: she was wrapping the vague around her. ‘I didn’t.’

Conway tapped at her screen, quick and deft. ‘Here,’ she said, holding it out. ‘That’s records of the texts going back and forth between you and Chris. See here? This is the couple of days after that night in the video. He’s trying to get in touch, but you’re ignoring him. You’d never done that before. Why after that night?’

Selena never even thought about denying the number was hers. She looked at the phone like it was alive and strange, maybe dangerous. She said, ‘I just needed to think.’

‘Yeah? About what?’

‘Chris and me.’

‘Yeah, I figured that. I meant what specifically? Did he do something, that night, that made you rethink the relationship?’

Selena’s eyes went away somewhere, for real this time. She said quietly, ‘That was the first time we kissed.’

Conway gave her the scepticals. ‘That doesn’t match our information. You’d been seen kissing at least once before.’

Selena shook her head. ‘No.’

‘No? That doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about Chris. You’d met up, how many times?’

‘Seven.’

‘And never laid a hand on each other. All pure and innocent, no bad thoughts, never anything the nuns couldn’t’ve seen. Seriously?’

A faint pink had come up in Selena’s cheeks. Conway was good; every time Selena tried to drift away into her cloud, Conway got a finger on her. ‘I didn’t say that. We’d held hands, we’d sat there with our arms round each other, we . . . But we’d never kissed before. So I needed to think. Whether it should happen again. Stuff like that.’

I couldn’t tell if she was lying. As hard to gauge as Joanne, not for the same reasons. Conway nodded away, turning her phone between her fingers, thinking. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘So that means you and Chris weren’t having sex?’

‘No. We weren’t.’ No wiggle, no giggle, none of that shite. That rang true. Score one for Conway’s instincts.

‘Was Chris OK with that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Really? A lot of guys his age would’ve been putting on the pressure. Did he?’

‘No.’

‘Here’s the thing,’ Conway said. Her tone was good: gentle, but direct, no talking down to the kiddie; just woman to woman, working through something tough together. ‘A lot of times, people who get sexually assaulted don’t want to report it because the aftermath is so much hassle. Medical examinations, testifying in court, getting cross-examined, maybe watching the attacker walk away scot-free: they don’t want to deal with any of that mess, they just want to forget the whole thing and move on. Hard to blame them for that, right?’

A pause to let Selena nod. She didn’t. She was listening, though, eyebrows pulled together. She looked bewildered.

Conway said, a notch slower, ‘See, though, this is different. There’s not gonna be any medical exam, since this happened a year ago; and there’s not gonna be any trial, since the attacker’s dead. Basically, you can tell me what happened, and it won’t blow up into some huge big thing. If you want, you can talk to someone who’s had a load of practice helping people deal with things like this. That’s it. End of story.’

‘Wait,’ Selena said. The bewilderment had got bigger. ‘You mean me? You think Chris raped me?’

‘Did he?’

‘No! God, no way!’

It looked real. ‘OK,’ Conway said. ‘Did he ever make you do anything you didn’t want to do?’ You always rephrase this one, keep coming at it from different angles. Scary, how many girls think it doesn’t count as rape unless it’s a laneway stranger with a knife; how many guys do.

Selena was shaking her head. ‘No. Never.’

‘Keep touching you after you told him to stop?’

Still shaking her head, steady and vehement. ‘No. Chris wouldn’t have done that to me. Never.’

Conway said, ‘Selena, we know Chris wasn’t an angel. He hurt a lot of girls. Slagging them, two-timing them, messing them around and then blanking them when he got bored.’