The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(183)

‘I know that.’

‘And you kept me down there so they could make Becca confess. Because you knew if I got up here, I’d shut her up. You made me leave her here till she . . .’ Her throat closed.

Mackey said, ‘I’m asking you, as a favour to me: let’s go home. Please.’

Holly said, ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’ She straightened, joint by joint, moved out from under the cypresses. Mackey took a fast breath to call after her, then bit it down. Conway and I both had better sense than to look at him.

In the centre of the clearing, Holly dropped to her knees in the grass. For a second I thought the others were going to tighten their backs against her. Then they opened like a puzzle, arms unfurling, reached out to draw her in and closed around her.

A nightbird ghosted across the top of the glade, calling high, trailing a dark spiderweb of shadow over our heads. Somewhere a bell grated for lights-out; none of the girls moved. We left them there as long as we could.



We waited in McKenna’s office for the social worker to come take Rebecca away. For a different crime, we could have released her into McKenna’s custody, let her have one last night at Kilda’s. Not for this. She would spend the night, at least, in a child detention school. Whispers crowding around the new girl, eyes probing for clues to where she fit in and what they could do with her: deep down, under the rough sheets and the raw smell of disinfectant, it wouldn’t be too different from what she was used to.

McKenna and Rebecca faced each other across the desk, Conway and I stood around in empty space. None of us talked. Conway and I couldn’t, in case something came across like questioning; McKenna and Rebecca didn’t, being careful or because they had nothing to say to us. Rebecca sat with her hands folded like a nun, gazing out of the window, thinking so hard she sometimes stopped breathing. Once she shivered, all over.

McKenna didn’t know what face to wear, for any of us, so she looked down at her hands clasped on the desk. She had layered up her makeup but she still looked ten years older than that morning. The office looked older too, or a different kind of old. The sunlight had given it a slow voluptuous glow, packed every scrape with a beckoning secret and turned every dust-mote into a whispering memory. In the stingy light off the overhead bulb, the place just looked worn out.

The social worker – not the one from that morning; a different one, fat in floppy tiers like she was made of stacked pancakes – didn’t ask questions. You could tell from the fast sneaky glances that her job gave her more piss-sprayed blocks of flats than places like this, but she just said, ‘Well! Time we were getting some sleep. Off we go,’ and held the door open for Rebecca.

‘Don’t call me we,’ Rebecca said. She got up and headed for the door, not a glance at the social worker, who was clicking her tongue and tucking in her chins.

At the door she turned. ‘It’s going to be all over the news,’ she said, to Conway. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘I haven’t heard you caution her,’ the social worker said, pointing a waggy finger at Conway. ‘You can’t use anything she says.’ To Rebecca: ‘We need to be very quiet right now. Like two little mice.’

‘The media won’t use your name,’ Conway said. ‘You’re a minor.’

Rebecca smiled like we were the kiddies. ‘The internet isn’t going to care how old I am,’ she pointed out. ‘Joanne isn’t going to care, the exact second she gets online.’

McKenna said to all of us, one notch too loud, ‘Every student and staff member in this school will be under the strictest instructions not to make any of today’s events public knowledge. On or off the internet.’

We all left a second for that to fall into. When it was gone Rebecca said, ‘If anyone goes looking for my name, like in a hundred years, they’re going to find mine and Chris’s. Together.’

That shiver again, hard as a spasm.

Conway said, ‘It’ll be headlines for a few days now, a few days later on.’ She didn’t say during the trial. ‘Then it’ll go off the radar. Online, it’ll drop even quicker. One celebrity caught shagging the wrong person, and this is yesterday’s news.’

That curled the corner of Rebecca’s mouth. ‘That doesn’t matter. I don’t care what people think.’

Conway said, ‘Then what?’

‘Rebecca,’ McKenna said. ‘You can speak to the detectives tomorrow. When your parents have arranged for appropriate legal counsel.’

Rebecca, thin in the slanted space of the door-frame, where one sideways turn would vanish her into the immeasurable dark of the corridor. She said, ‘I thought I was getting him off us. Getting him off Lenie, so she wouldn’t be stuck to him forever. And instead I am. When I saw him, there in the common room—’

‘I’ve told her,’ the social worker said, through a tight little mouth. ‘You all heard me tell her.’

Rebecca said, ‘So that has to mean I did the wrong thing. I don’t know how, because I was sure, I was so—’

‘I can’t force her to be quiet,’ the social worker told whoever. ‘I can’t gag her. That’s not my job.’

‘But either I got it wrong, or else I got it right and that doesn’t make a difference: I’m supposed to be punished anyway.’ The paleness of her face blurred its edges, bled her like watercolour. ‘Could it work like that? Do you think?’