The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(57)

‘If you weirdos are serious about this,’ Julia says, ‘let’s do it.’

No one leaps out at them from a doorway, no stair creaks. On the ground floor Matron is snoring. When Becca fits the key into the door to the main building, it turns like the lock’s been oiled. By the time they reach the maths classroom and Julia reaches up to the fastening of the sash window, they already know the watchman is asleep or on the phone and will never look their way. Boots on and out of the window, one two three four quick and slick and silent, and they’re standing on the grass and it’s not a game any more.

The grounds are still as a set for a ballet, waiting for the first shivering run of notes from a flute; for the light girls to run in and stop, poised perfect and impossible, barely touching the grass. The white light comes from everywhere. The frost sings high in their ears.

They run. The great spread of grass rolls out to greet them and they skim down it, the crackle-cold air flowing like spring water into their mouths and running their hair straight out behind them when their hoods fall back and none of them can stop to pull them up again. They’re invisible, they could stream laughing past the night watchman and tweak off his cap as they went, leave him grabbing at air and gibbering at the wild unknown that’s suddenly everywhere, and they can’t stop running.

Into the shadows and down the narrow paths enclosed by dark spiky weaves of branches, past leaning trunks wrapped with years of ivy, through smells of cold earth and wet layers of leaves. When they burst out of that tunnel it’s into the white waiting glade.

They’ve never been here before. The tops of the cypresses blaze with frozen fire like great torches. There are things moving in the shadows, things that when they manage to catch a hair-thin glimpse are shaped like deer and wolves but they could be anything, circling. High in the shining column of air above the clearing, birds whirl arc-winged, long threads of savage cries trailing behind them.

The four of them open their arms and whirl too. The breath is spun out of them and the world rocks around them and they keep going. They’re spun out of themselves, spun to silver dust flying, they’re nothing but a rising arm or a curve of cheek in and out of ragged white bars of light. They dance till they collapse.

When they open their eyes they’re in the glade they know again. Darkness, and a million stars, and silence.

The silence is too big for any of them to burst, so they don’t talk. They lie on the grass and feel their own moving breath and blood. Something white and luminous is arrowing through their bones, the cold or the moonlight maybe, they can’t tell for sure; it tingles but doesn’t hurt. They lie back and let it do its work.

Selena was right: this is nothing like the thrill of necking vodka or taking the piss out of Sister Ignatius, nothing like a snog in the Field or forging your mum’s signature for ear-piercing. This has nothing to do with what anyone else in all the world would approve or forbid. This is all their own.

After a long time they straggle back to the school, dazzled and rumple-haired, heads buzzing. Forever, they say, at the threshold of the window, with their boots in their hands and the moonlight turning in their eyes. I’ll remember this forever. Yes forever. Oh forever.

In the morning they’re sprinkled with cuts and scrapes they can’t remember getting. Nothing that actually hurts; just tiny mischievous reminders, winking up from their knuckles and their shins when Joanne Heffernan flips something bitchy at Holly for taking too long in the breakfast queue, or when Miss Naughton tries to make Becca cringe for not paying attention. It takes them a while to realise it’s not just people being annoying; they actually are spacy, Holly actually was staring at the toast for like ever, and none of them have a clue what Naughton was on about. Their foothold has shifted; it’s taking them a while to get their balance back.

‘Do it again soon?’ Selena says, at break-time, through her juice straw.

For a second they’re afraid to say yes, in case it’s not the same, next time. In case that can only happen once, and they try to get it back and end up sitting in the glade getting colds up their gees and staring at each other like a pack of tossers.

They say it anyway. Something’s started; it’s too late to stop it. Becca picks a sliver of twig out of Julia’s hair and stashes it in her blazer pocket, to keep.





Chapter 11


It was gone three o’clock. Conway knew where the canteen was, poked around till she found some drudge scrubbing spotless steel, told him to make us food. He tried a hairy look but Conway’s beat his. I kept an eye on him while he slapped together ham and cheese sandwiches, make sure he didn’t spit in them. Conway went to a coffee machine, hit buttons. Snagged apples out of a crate.

We took the food outside. Conway led, to a low wall off to one side of the grounds, overlooking the playing field and the gardens below it. On the playing field little girls were running around swinging hockey sticks, PE teacher keeping up a string of motivational shouts. Trees threw down shadows that stopped them spotting us. Between the branch-stripes, the sun heated my hair.

‘Eat fast,’ Conway said, parking herself on the wall. ‘After this, we search their rooms for whatever book those words got cut out of.’

Meaning she wasn’t packing me back to Cold Cases, not yet. And she wasn’t heading back to base either. A look at the noticeboard, a few chats, we’d come for. Somewhere along the line it had turned into more. Those glimpses of something peeking out at us from behind what we were being told: neither of us wanted to leave without pulling it out into the open, getting a proper look.