The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(175)

People ask her questions in McKenna’s office. She keeps her mouth shut and doesn’t break down.



Just like Holly said, they get called into McKenna’s office one by one. There’s McKenna, there’s a woman with black hair, and there’s a fat old guy, all sitting in a row behind the long battered gloss of McKenna’s desk. Becca never noticed before – the couple of times she was in here, she was too panicky to notice anything – that McKenna’s chair is extra tall, to make you feel little and helpless. Actually, with three of them back there and only one tall chair, it just looks funny, like the woman detective’s feet must be dangling in mid-air, or like McKenna and the guy detective are midgets.

They start with the stuff they ask everyone. Becca thinks back to what she was just a few months ago and does that, huddling up and tangling her legs and answering into her lap. If you’re shy enough, no one sees anything else. The guy detective takes notes and bites down on a yawn.

Then the lady detective says – examining an unravelling thread in her jacket cuff, like this is no big deal – ‘What did you think about your friend Selena going out with Chris?’

Becca frowns, bewildered. ‘Lenie never went out with him. I think maybe they talked to each other a couple of times at the Court, but that was ages ago.’

The detective’s eyebrows go up. ‘Nah. They were a couple. You mean you didn’t know?’

‘We don’t have boyfriends,’ Becca says disapprovingly. ‘My mum says I’m too young.’ She likes that touch. Looking like a kid might as well come in useful for once.

The lady detective and the man detective and McKenna all wait, staring at her from behind the sun-patterns slanted across the desk. They’re so huge and meaty and hairy, they think they’ll just squash her down till her mouth pops open and everything comes gushing out.

Becca looks back at them and feels her flesh stir and transform silently into something new, some nameless substance that comes from high on pungent-forested mountain slopes. Her borders are so hard and bright that these lumpy things are being blinded just by looking at her; she’s opaque, she’s impermeable, she’s a million densities and dimensions more real than any of them. They break against her and roll off like mist.



That night Holly stays awake as long as she can, watching the others like just by watching she can keep them safe. She’s sitting up with her arms around her knees, too electric to lie down, but she knows none of them will try to start a conversation. Today has gone on long enough.

Julia is sprawled and far away. Becca daydreams, eyes dark and solemn as a baby’s, flicking back and forth as she watches something Holly can’t see. Selena is pretending to be asleep. The light over the transom does bad things to her face, turns it puffy and purple in tender places. She looks pounded.

Holly remembers that time back when she was a kid, how everything felt ruined, around her and inside her. Slowly, when she wasn’t looking, most of that washed away. Time does things. She tells herself it’ll do them for Selena.

She wants to be in the grove. She can feel it, how the moonlight would pour over them all, calcify their bones to a strength that could take this weight. She knows they would be insane even to think about trying it tonight, but she falls asleep craving it anyway.



When Holly’s breathing evens out, Becca sits up and takes her pin and her ink out of her bedside table. In the faint light from the corridor the line of blue dots swings across her white stomach like the track of some strange orbit, from her rib cage down to her belly button and back up to the ribs on the other side. There’s just room for one more.



Selena waits till even Becca’s finally gone to sleep. Then she looks to see if there’s a text for her on the red phone, but it’s gone. She sits in the tangle of sheets and wants to go frantic, scream and claw, in case it did come from Chris. But she can’t remember how – her arms and her voice seem like they’ve been unhooked from her body – and anyway it would be too much work.

She wonders, like a retch, if she did see this waiting all along, and closed her eyes because she wanted Chris so much. The more she tries to remember, the more it slips and twists and leers at her. In the end she knows she’s never going to know.

She goes back to staying still. She carefully cordons off enough of her mind to do the necessary stuff, like showers and homework, so people won’t come bothering her. She puts the rest into concentrating.

After a while she understands that something destroyed Chris to save her.

After a while longer she understands that this means it wants her for its own, and that she belongs to it for good now.

She cuts her hair off, for an offering, to send the message that she understands. She does it in the bathroom and burns the soft pale heap in the sink – the glade would be better, but they haven’t been back there since it happened, and she can’t tell if that’s because the others know some reason she hasn’t figured out. Her hair takes the lighter flame with a fierceness she didn’t expect, a whump and a wide-mouthed roar like faraway trees taking forest fire. She whips her hand away, but not fast enough, and her wrist is left with a small drumming wound.

The smell of burning stays. For weeks afterwards she catches it on her, savage and holy.

Chunks of her mind fall off sometimes. At first it frightens her, but then she realises once they’re gone she doesn’t miss them, so it doesn’t bother her any more. The burn scars red and then white.