The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(150)

He says, ‘I’m just not sure this is a good idea.’

He knows something’s wrong here. The poor bastard probably thinks he’s going to figure out what. There aren’t enough small words in the world. ‘Who cares?’ Julia says. ‘It’s not like you’ve got anything to lose: Selena doesn’t want to see you ever again, or she’d have answered your texts. And anyway, even if you turn around and go home right now, I’m going to tell her we did it. So we might as well.’

She gives Chris a big perky smile and unzips her hoodie. She can read every thought scrolling through his head, clear as print. She can see all the red-raw places where Selena used to be, the bruise-black hole where he thought she was going to be tonight, the bright flashes of him hating Selena and every girl he’s been with and Julia most of all. She can see the moment when he decides. He smiles back at her and reaches out a hand for the condom.

Julia knows what to expect. The wind in the cypresses rising to a roar like a hunting pack, the warning call screaming across the black sky. The clearing heaving and rolling under her. The moon smashing to shards, the sharpest of them all arrowing down to rip her open from groin to throat, the smell of hot dark blood spilling from deep inside. The pain, bright enough to blind her forever.

Nothing happens. The clearing is just a patch of prissily trimmed grass; the cypresses are just trees that some gardener figured would be low-maintenance. The calling sound is still circling, but all the spookiness has leached out of it; it’s just some bird, yelping mindlessly because that’s all it knows how to do. Even the pain is nothing special, just a dull unemphatic rasp. Julia shifts her arse off a sharp pebble and grimaces over Chris’s bobbing shoulder. The moon has flattened to a disc of paper pasted to the sky, lightless.





Chapter 25


I stood there in the corridor, just stood, my stupid gob hanging open and a big cartoon bubble saying ‘!!??!!’ bouncing over my fat head. Stood till I copped that Mackey or Conway might come out and find me there. Then I moved. Past the Secret Place, cards jostling and hissing. Down the stairs. Caught myself moving slow and careful, like I’d taken a kicking and something hurt like f*ck, if I could work out where.

The foyer was dark, I had to grope my way to the main door. It felt heavier or the strength had gone out of me, I had to lean my shoulder on it and heave, feet slipping on the tiles, picturing Mackey watching and grinning from the stairs. I half-fell outside sweating. Let the door slam behind me. I didn’t know any other way back into the school, but I wasn’t going to need one.

I thought about ringing a taxi to take me home. The picture of Mackey and Conway coming out and finding me gone, flounced off to have a little cry on my pillow, turned me red in the twilight. I left my phone in my pocket.

Twenty to ten, and nearly dark. Outdoor lights were on, turning the grass whitish without actually illuminating it, doing strange eye-bending things in among the trees. I looked at that tree line and saw it the way the sixth-years had to see it, outline sharpened to slicing by the knowledge that it was about to sift away down the sky like a flower-fall, out of view. Something that would be there forever and ever; for other people, not for me. I was almost gone.

I picked my way down the steps – that light turned them depthless, treacherous – and started walking, along the front of the school and down the side of the boarders’ wing. My feet crunched in pebbles, and that morning’s jumpy reflex – head turning, checking for the gamekeeper siccing the hounds on the unwashed – was back.

I scrabbled through the mess for something good somewhere, couldn’t find it. Told myself if Mackey was right about Conway – course he was, Mackey has something on everyone, no need to invent it – then she had just done me a favour: better out than in. I told myself I’d be relieved in the morning, when I wasn’t wrecked and starving, when I hadn’t used up everything I had. Told myself in the morning I wouldn’t feel like something priceless had landed in my hand, been robbed away and smashed before I could close my fingers.

Couldn’t make it stick. Cold Cases waiting for me outside these walls and Mackey had been right, the smirky f*cker: now I was the kid who couldn’t hack twelve hours in the big leagues, and he and Conway between them would make sure everyone knew that. Cold Cases had looked so shiny to me, my first day, such a wide glittering sweep of step up. Now it looked like a dingy dead end. This here, this was what I wanted. One day, and gone.

The only smudge of silver lining I could come up with: it was almost over. Even before Mackey’s backstabbing break, we’d been starting to go in circles. If he didn’t pull the plug soon, Conway would. I just had to wait out the last of their patience, then I could go home and try to forget today had ever happened. I’d’ve only loved to be one of those blokes who drink till days like this dissolve. Better: one of those blokes who texts his mates, days like this, Pub. Feels their circle click closed around him.

Everyone knows a wife and kids tie you down. What people miss somehow is that mates, the proper kind, they do the same just as hard. Mates mean you’ve settled, made your bargain: this, wherever you are together, this is as far as you’re going, ever. This is your stop; this is where you get off.

Not just where you are: they tie you down to who you are. Once you have mates who know you, right down under the this-and-that you decide people want to see today, then there’s no room left for the someday person who’ll magic you into being all your finest dreams. You’ve turned solid: you’re the person your mates know, forever.