The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(169)

‘We’ll try asking your mates.’ I said it nice and casual. The moonlight blazed into my face, felt like it was stripping me naked. I tried not to turn away. ‘Do they do drama as well, yeah? Or would they be able to tell us about other groups?’

‘We’re not actually surgically attached. Holly does dance. Selena and Becca do instrument practice.’

So they would have had to go back to their room to get their instruments. Two of them together, to protect each other from the brain-eating maniac; they would have been allowed.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘How many people in those, do you know?’

Julia shrugged. ‘Lots of people do dance. Like forty? Instruments, maybe like a dozen.’

The odds said the rest had been day girls. We would check the logbook, but if the numbers held, Rebecca and Selena had been the only ones through that door.

The sudden quiet, all the day’s jabbering and wailing fizzled away into that white silence. Rebecca holding out the phone she had taken to make sure that Selena was safe, that no one could ever link her to Chris. Holding it out like a gift, priceless. Like salvation.

Or: Selena burrowing in the wardrobe for her flute, slow with shock and grief. Behind her back, Rebecca, light as a ghost and just as urgent, leaning over her bed. Selena was the one who had started keeping secrets. She was the one who had let Chris in, to start things cracking apart. It had been her fault.

I looked at Conway, across that lone gallant slash of red. She was looking at me.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Your mates might remember someone leaving. Worth a shot, anyway.’

‘I’d say Selena was too upset to do much noticing,’ Conway said. ‘Let’s ask Rebecca.’ And she stood up.

Mostly people look relieved. Julia looked taken aback. ‘What, that’s it?’

‘Unless there’s something else you want to tell us.’

Blank second. Head-shake, almost reluctant.

‘Then yeah, that’s it. Thanks very much.’

I stood up too, turned towards the path. Julia said, ‘What did I give you?’

She was looking at nothing. I said, ‘Hard to tell at this point. We’ll have to see as we go.’

Julia didn’t answer. We waited for her to stand up, but she didn’t move. After a minute we left her there, looking out over what used to be her kingdom; black hair and white face and that ember of red, and the white grass spread all around her.





Chapter 28


They’re eating breakfast when Holly feels the thread-tug of something gone wrong, deep in the weave of the school. Too many footsteps tumbling too fast, down a corridor; nun-voices too shrill outside the window, snapping to hushed too suddenly.

No one else notices. Selena is ignoring her muesli and twisting at a loose pyjama button, Julia is eating cornflakes with one hand and doing her English homework with the other. Becca is gazing at her toast like it’s turned into the Virgin Mary, or maybe like she’s trying to lift it off the plate without touching it, which would be a hugely stupid idea but Holly doesn’t have time to worry about it right now. She nibbles her toast in circles, and keeps one eye on the window and the other on the door.

Her toast is down to thumb-sized when she sees the two uniformed cops, hurrying down the edge of the back lawn, trying for out of sight but getting it just wrong.

Someone says at another table, wide awake all of a sudden, ‘OhmyGod! Were those policemen?’ A suck of breath sweeping across the canteen, and then every voice rising at once.

That’s when Matron comes in and tells them breakfast is over, and to go up to their rooms and get ready for school. Some people complain automatically, even if they’ve already finished their breakfast, but Holly can tell from Matron’s face – slanted towards the window, no time to hear whinge – that they’re on a loser. Whatever’s happening isn’t small.

While they get dressed Holly watches the window. One movement and she’s there, face to the glass: McKenna and Father Voldemort, in a smoke-whirl of black robe, heading down the grass at charge speed.

Whatever’s happened, it’s happened to a Colm’s boy.

Something blue-white zips along Holly’s bones. The face on Joanne as she held out that screen, tongue-tip curling, wet-fanged at the delicious thought of doing damage. The way she licked up the shock Holly couldn’t help showing, every drop. Joanne would do bad stuff, stuff that comes from places most people would never know how to imagine.

Don’t worry. We’ll get him.

Holly knows how to imagine the places where bad stuff begins. She’s had practice.

‘What the f*ck?’ says Julia, craning against her shoulder. ‘There’s people in the bushes, look.’

Off in the haze of layered greens beyond the grass, a flick of white. Like Technical Bureau boiler suits.

‘They look like they’re looking for something,’ Selena says, leaning in at Holly’s other side. Her voice has that floppy, hard-work sound it’s had for the last couple of weeks; it gives Holly the plunk of guilt she’s starting to get used to. ‘Are they police too? Or what?’

Other people have noticed: excited jabber is filtering through the walls, feet go thumping down the corridor. ‘Maybe some guy was running away from the cops and he threw something over the wall,’ Julia says. ‘Drugs. Or a knife he used to stab someone, or a gun. If only we’d been out last night. Now that would’ve made life more interesting.’