The Secret Place (Dublin Murder Squad, #5)(82)

‘You should’ve talked to her,’ Chris says. ‘Got her to wear something normal. Or even something like what you’re wearing.’

‘Why?’ Selena asks.

‘Because look.’ He nods at Joanne, who is wiggling to the music and gabbling something in Orla’s ear at the same time. Both of them are wearing smirks and staring over at Becca and Holly. ‘They’re slagging her off.’

Selena asks, ‘How come you care?’

She’s not being snippy, she just wonders – she wouldn’t have guessed that Chris even knew Becca existed – but Chris glances around sharply. ‘I’m not into her! Jesus.’

‘OK,’ Selena says.

Chris goes back to watching the dance floor. He says something, but the DJ is fading up a song loaded with bass, and Selena can’t hear. ‘What?’ she yells.

‘I said she reminds me of my sister.’ The DJ slides the volume up to earthquake level. ‘Jesus!’ Chris yells, a sudden rush of irritation jerking his head back. ‘This f*cking noise!’

Joanne’s spotted them; her eyes snap away when she sees Selena looking, but the curl to her top lip says she’s not pleased. Selena shouts, ‘Let’s go outside.’

Chris stares, trying to work out if she means what most girls would mean. Selena can’t think of a good way to explain, so she doesn’t try. ‘How?’ he yells, eventually.

‘Let’s just ask.’

He looks at her like she’s mental, but not in a bad way. ‘Since we’re not going to be snogging,’ Selena explains, ‘we don’t need somewhere private, just somewhere quiet. We can sit right outside the doors. They might be OK with that.’

Chris looks taken aback about five different ways. Selena waits, but when he doesn’t come up with anything, she says, ‘Come on,’ and heads for the doors.

Most times people would be staring at them all the way, but Fergus Mahon just poured punch down Garret Neligan’s collar so Garret Neligan tackled him and they fell over on top of Barbara O’Malley who has spent the last couple of weeks telling everyone that her dress is by Roksanda Somebody and who is screaming at the top of her lungs. Chris and Selena are invisible.

Something is on their side, smoothing the way for them. Even at the doors: if Sister Cornelius was there, they’d have no chance – even if Sister Cornelius wasn’t crazy, this year the nuns take one look at Selena and get the urge to lock her up, for guys’ sake or hers or the sake of morality in general, probably even they don’t know – but it’s Miss Long standing guard, while Sister Cornelius is off shouting at Fergus and Garret.

‘Miss Long,’ Selena yells. ‘Can we go sit on the stairs?’

‘Of course not,’ Miss Long says, distracted by Annalise Fitzpatrick and Ken O’Reilly huddled together in a corner, with one of Ken’s hands out of view.

‘We’ll just be right out there. At the bottom of the steps, where you can see us. We just want to talk.’

‘You can talk here.’

‘We can’t. It’s too loud, and it’s . . .’ Selena spreads out her hands at the lights and the dancers and everything. She says, ‘We want to talk properly.’

Miss Long takes her eye off Annalise and Ken for a second. She examines Selena and Chris sceptically. ‘“Properly,”’ she says.

Something makes Selena smile at her, a burst of a smile, real and radiant. She doesn’t mean to; it happens by itself, out of nowhere, because there’s a pinwheel whirl deep in her chest telling her something amazing is happening.

For half a second, Miss Long almost smiles back. She presses her lips together and it’s gone. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘At the bottom of those stairs. I will be checking on you every thirty seconds, and if you’re not there, or if you’re so much as holding hands, you will both be in enormous trouble. More trouble than you can even imagine. Is that clear?’

Selena and Chris nod, putting in every drop of sincerity they can find. ‘It’d better be,’ Miss Long says, with one eye on Sister Cornelius. ‘Now go on. Go.’

As she turns away from them, her eyes sweep the hall like for that minute it’s turned different, it’s leaped up to meet her sparkling and strawberry-sweet and chiming with maybes. Selena, slipping out of the door, understands that she and Chris weren’t the ones who got the permission; that it was a decades-lost boy at some half-forgotten dance, his bright eager face, his laugh.




Chapter 15


Conway banged the door open hard enough that I jumped a mile, hands leaping out of the wardrobe like I’d been doing something dirty. The corner of a grin, malicious, said she hadn’t missed it.

She dumped her bag on Rebecca’s bed. ‘How’d you get on?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing. Julia’s got half a pack of smokes and a lighter wrapped up in a scarf at the back of her bit of wardrobe. That’s it.’

‘Good little girls,’ Conway said, not like a compliment. She was moving around the room, fast, tilting the frames on the bedside lockers to glance at the photos; or to make sure the room looked good and searched. ‘Any of them come looking for you? Looking to talk, jump your bones, whatever?’

I shut my mouth on the slice of shadow at the door; maybe that grin, maybe the fact that I couldn’t swear there had been anything there. ‘Nah.’