The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(176)

When Chris has been dead for four days, Julia hears that Finn’s been expelled for hotwiring the fire door, and starts waiting for the cops to come for her.

They gave her and the others some hassle about Selena going out with Chris, but it was the cunning mirage hassle Holly talked about, looked impressive till you got up close and saw there was nothing solid there. It dissolved after a few days of blank head-shakes. Which means that Gemma couldn’t keep Joanne from flapping her yap altogether – in fairness, nothing short of surgery could – but she must have managed to get it through Joanne’s thick skull that, no matter how incredibly awesomesauce the drama would be, they need to keep the details quiet for their own sakes.

But Julia couldn’t exactly get that through to Finn. (Hi, Jules here! Remember how u thot i was usin u 2 shag ur mate? U no wat wd b totes amazeballs? If u cud not mention dat 2 d cops. Kthxbai!!) All she could do was keep her fingers crossed he would somehow work out all the stuff Holly warned about, and this is the kind of situation that requires more than crossed fingers. A bunch of Colm’s idiots versus those two detectives: of course someone slipped up, in the end.

She doesn’t have a clue what she’ll say when they come. As far as she can see, she has two options: spill her guts about how she wasn’t the only one meeting Chris, or deny everything and hope her parents get her a good lawyer. A month ago she would have said she’d go to jail before she’d throw Selena under a bus, no question; but things have changed, in ferocious tangled ways she’s having trouble getting a grip on. Lying awake late, she runs through each scenario in her head, tries to imagine each one playing out. They both feel impossible. Julia understands that doesn’t mean they can’t happen. The whole world has come apart and gone lunatic, gibbering.

By the end of the week she thinks the cops are playing mind-games with her, waiting for the suspense to break her down. It’s working. When she drops a binder – she and Becca are in the back of the library, collecting binders full of old Irish exams for the class to practise on – she almost leaps through the roof. ‘Hey,’ Becca says. ‘It’s OK.’

‘I’m actually smart enough to decide for myself whether it’s OK or not,’ Julia snaps in a whisper, scooping dusty pages off the staticky carpet. ‘And believe me, it f*cking isn’t.’

‘Jules,’ Becca says gently. ‘It is. I swear. It’s all going to be totally fine.’ And she runs the backs of her fingers along Julia’s shoulder, down her arm, like someone calming a spooked animal.

Julia, whipping upright to rip her a new one, finds Becca looking back with steady brown eyes and not a hint of a flinch, even smiling a little. It’s the first time in weeks she’s looked at Becca properly. She realises that Becca is taller than her now, and that – unlike Selena and Holly and, Christ knows, Julia herself – she doesn’t look like shit. The opposite: she looks smoothed, luminous, as if her skin’s been stripped away and remade out of something denser and so white it’s almost metallic, something you could shatter your knuckles on. She looks beautiful.

It makes Julia feel even farther away from her. She doesn’t have the energy to rip anyone anything; she just wants to sit down on the disgusting carpet and lean her head against the bookshelves and stay there for a long time. ‘Come on,’ she says instead, heaving up her armful of binders. ‘Let’s go.’

After another week she realises that the cops aren’t coming. Finn hasn’t given them her name. He could have used it to bargain down the expulsion into a suspension, thrown it to the cops to get them off his back, but he didn’t.

She wants to text him, but anything she said would come out as Ha-ha, you’re in the shit and I’m not, sucker. She wants to ask his friends how he’s doing, but either he’s told them everything and they hate her, or he hasn’t and it would start rumours, or they’d tell him and he’d hate her even more, and the whole mess would just bubble up viler. Instead she waits till the others are asleep and bawls like a stupid whiny baby all night long.



After two and a half weeks the centre of the world is starting to turn away from Chris Harper. The funeral is over; everyone’s talked themselves tired of the photographers outside the church and who cried and how Joanne fainted during Communion and had to be carried outside. Chris’s name has fallen off the front pages, into the occasional snippet in spare corners that need filling. The detectives are gone, most of the time. The Junior Cert is just a few days from pouncing, and the teachers get narky instead of guidance-y if someone messes up a class by bursting into tears or seeing Chris’s ghost. He’s drifted off to one side: there, all the time, but in the corner of your eye.

On the way to the Court, under trees puffed up with full summer green, Holly says, ‘Tonight?’

‘Hello?’ Julia says, eyebrows shooting up. ‘And walk straight into a dozen of your dad’s buddies just waiting for someone to be that incredibly f*cking stupid? Seriously?’

Becca is hopscotching over cracks, but Julia’s whipcrack voice gets her watching. Selena keeps on walking with her head tipped back, face turned up to the sweet swirls of leaves. Holly has her elbow to make sure she doesn’t smash into anything.

‘There aren’t any detectives. Dad’s always complaining about how he can’t even get surveillance authorised on, like, major drug dealers; no way would they authorise it on a girls’ school. So duh, incredibly f*cking stupid yourself.’