The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(128)

Almost four years of her teens left. I didn’t envy Mackey. I said, ‘You know Selena was sneaking out on her own to meet Chris Harper. Right?’

Holly pulled out the teenage vacant stare, bottom lip hanging. Made her look thick as pig shite, but I knew better.

‘We’ve got proof.’

‘Did you read it in your favourite gossip mag? Right under “R-Patz and K-Stew broke up again”?’

‘Behave,’ Mackey said, didn’t bother looking up. Holly rolled her eyes.

She was being a bitch because, for this reason or that one, she was scared. I leaned forward, close, till against her will she caught my eye. ‘Holly,’ I said gently. ‘This morning, you came to me for a reason. Because I was never thick enough to patronise you, and because you thought there was a chance I might understand more than most people. Right?’

Twitch of her shoulder. ‘I guess.’

‘You’re going to end up talking to someone about this stuff. I’d say you’d love to go back to your mates and pretend all this never happened – and I don’t blame you – but you don’t have that option.’

Holly was slumped in her chair, arms folded, eyes on the ceiling, like I was boring her into an actual coma here? She didn’t bother answering.

‘You know that as well as I do. You can talk to me, or you can talk to someone else. If you want to stick with me, I’ll do my best to live up to your good opinion. I don’t think I’ve let you down yet.’

Shrug.

‘So. You want to stick with me, or you want someone else?’

Mackey was watching me, under his eyelids, but he kept his mouth shut, which couldn’t be a compliment. Another shrug from Holly. ‘Whatever. Stick with you, I guess. I don’t care.’

‘Good,’ I said, and gave her a smile: We’re a team. Pulled my chair up closer to the table, ready for work. ‘So here’s the story. Selena’s already told us she was seeing Chris Harper. She’s told us she had a phone matching this description, which she used to text him. We have the phone records between the two of them. We have the actual texts setting up late-night meetings.’ Fast glance from Holly, before she could stop herself. She hadn’t known we could do that. ‘It’s not like I’m asking you to tell us something we don’t already know. I’m only asking for confirmation. So, one more time: did you know Selena was meeting Chris?’

Holly glanced at Mackey. He nodded.

‘Yeah,’ she said. The teen-brat shtick was gone, that fast. She sounded older. More complicated; more careful. ‘I knew.’

‘When did you find out?’

‘Last spring. Like a couple of weeks before Chris died, maybe? It was over by then, though. They weren’t meeting any more.’

‘How’d you find out?’

Holly was meeting my eyes now, cool and under control. She had her hands folded together on the table. She said, ‘Sometimes, when it’s hot, I can’t sleep. This one night, it was boiling, I was going mental trying to find cool bits of the bed; but then I thought, OK, maybe if I stay totally still I’ll fall asleep, right? So I made myself do it. It didn’t work, but Selena must’ve thought I’d gone to sleep. I heard her moving around and I thought, Maybe she’s awake too and we can talk, so I opened my eyes. She was holding a phone – I could see the screen, lit up – and she was kind of curled over it, like she didn’t want anyone to see. She wasn’t texting, or reading messages; just holding it. Like she was waiting for it to do something.’

‘And that made you curious.’

Holly said, ‘There’d been something wrong with Lenie. She’s always really calm, no matter what. Peaceful. But the last while before that night, she’d been . . .’ Something rippling that cool, as she remembered. ‘She seemed like something terrible had happened to her. Half the time she looked like she’d been crying, or she was about to. We’d be talking to her and a minute later she’d go, “What?” like she hadn’t even heard us. She wasn’t OK.’

I was nodding along. ‘And you were worried about her.’

‘I was crazy worried. I figured nothing terrible could’ve happened at school, because we were all together all the time, we’d have known. Right?’ Wry twist to Holly’s mouth. ‘But at home, at the weekends – Selena’s parents are split up, and they’re both kind of weird. Her mum and her stepdad have these parties, and her actual dad lets weird hippie guys stay on his sofa . . . I thought something could’ve happened at one of their places.’

‘Did you talk to anyone about it? See if maybe Julia or Rebecca had any ideas?’

‘Yeah. I tried talking to Julia, but she just went, “Jesus, dial down the drama, everyone gets moods; like you don’t? Give her a week or two, she’ll be fine.” And then I tried Becca, but Becca can’t really handle stuff like that – anything being wrong with any of us. She got so freaked out that in the end I told her it had just been my imagination, to get her to calm down.’

Trying to sound like it was nothing. But something was blowing across Holly’s face, just a wisp; something rain-coloured, something flavoured with sadness and with missing the long-lost. It startled me. Made her look older again, made her look like she understood things.