The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(62)

I shoved the rest of my apple in my coffee cup, found my mobile too. ‘Sophie,’ Conway told me, phone to her ear. ‘No prints on anything. The lads in Documents say the words came out of a book, medium quality, probably fifty to seventy years old going by the typeface and the paper. From the focus on the photo, Chris wasn’t the main subject; he was just in the background, someone cropped out the rest. Nothing on the location yet, but she’s running comparisons with photos from the original investigation.’

When I turned on my phone, it beeped: a text. Conway’s head came round.

A number I didn’t recognise. The text was so far from what I was expecting, took my eyes a second to grab hold of it.

Joanne kept the key to the boarders wing/school door taped inside the Life of St Therese, third year common room bookshelf. It could be gone now but it was there a year ago.

I held the phone out to Conway.

Her face went focused. She held her mobile next to mine, tapped and flicked fast at the screen.

Said, ‘The number’s none of our girls, or it wasn’t last year. None of Chris’s friends, either.’

All their numbers, still on her phone a year later. No thread cut, not even the finest.

I said, ‘I’ll text back. Ask who it is.’

Conway thought. Nodded.

Hi – thanks for that. Sorry, I don’t have everyone’s numbers, who’s this?

I passed it to Conway. She read it three times, gnawing apple-juice sticky off her thumb. Said, ‘Go.’

I hit Send.

Neither of us said it; no need. If the text was true, then Joanne and at least one other girl, probably more, had had a way to get out of the school the night Chris Harper was killed. One of them could have seen something.

One of them could have done something.

If the text was true, then today had turned into something different. Not just about finding the card girl, not any more.

We waited. Down on the playing field, the rhythm of the hockey sticks had turned ragged: the girls had spotted us, they were missing easy shots craning over their shoulders trying to pick us out of the shadows. Little feisty birds clicking and wing-flipping in and out of the trees above us. Sun fading and blooming as thin clouds shifted. Nothing.

I said, ‘Ring it?’

‘Ring it.’

It rang out. The voicemail greeting was the default one, droid woman telling me to leave a message. I hung up.

I said, ‘It’s one of our eight.’

‘Oh, yeah. Anything else is way too much coincidence. And it’s not your Holly. She brought you the card, she’d bring you the key.’

Conway pulled out her phone again. Rang one number after another: Hello, this is Detective Conway, just confirming that we still have the correct phone number for you, in case we need to get in touch . . . All the voices were recorded – ‘School hours,’ Conway said, tapping; ‘phones have to be switched off in class’ – but all of them were the right ones. None of our girls had changed her number.

Conway said, ‘You got a pal at any of the mobile networks?’

‘Not yet.’ Neither did she, or she wouldn’t have asked. You stockpile useful pals, build yourself a nice fat list, over time. I felt it like a thump: us, two rookies, in the middle of this.

‘Sophie does.’ Conway was dialling again. ‘She’ll get us the full records on that number. By the end of the day, guaranteed.’

I said, ‘It’ll be unregistered.’

‘Yeah, it will. But I want to know who else it’s been texting. If Chris was meeting someone, he arranged it somehow. We never found out how.’ She slid down off the wall, phone to her ear. ‘Meanwhile, let’s go see if Little Miss Text’s f*cking us around.’



McKenna came out of her office all ready to wave us goodbye, wasn’t a happy camper when she found out we weren’t goodbyeing anywhere. By now we were front-page headlines all round the school. Any minute the day girls would be heading home to tell their parents the cops were back, and McKenna’s phone would start ringing. She’d been banking on being able to say this little unpleasantness was over and done with: just a few follow-up questions, Mr and Mrs, don’t worry your pretty heads, all gone now. She didn’t ask how long it would be. We pretended not to hear her wanting to know.

A nod from McKenna, and the curly secretary gave us the key to the boarders’ wing, gave us the combinations to the common rooms, gave us signed permission for us to search. Gave us everything we wanted, but the smile had gone. Tight face, now. Tense line between her eyebrows. Not looking at us.

That bell went again, as we came out of her office. ‘Come on,’ Conway said, lengthening her stride. ‘That’s the end of classes. The matron’ll be opening the connecting door, and I don’t want anyone getting in that common room before we do.’

I said, ‘Combination locks on the common rooms. Were those there last year?’

‘Yeah. Years, they’ve had those.’

‘How come?’

Behind the closed doors, the classrooms had exploded into gabble and scraping-back chairs. Conway took the stairs down to the ground floor at a run. ‘The kids leave stuff there. There’s no locks on the bedroom doors, in case of fire or lesbians; the bedside tables lock, but they’re tiny. So a lot of stuff winds up in the common rooms – CDs, books, whatever. With the combination, anything gets robbed, there’s only a dozen people who could’ve done it. Easy enough to solve.’