I went round to the front of the school. My feet crossing the grass felt strange, too solid, sinking down and down like the lawn was made of mist. Girls still watching as I passed, still whispering. This time it didn’t matter.
I waited at the corner of the boarders’ wing, pressed back into the shadow. If we’re taking a break, Detective Conway, I think I’ll walk down with you, have a quick smoke . . . No? Any reason why not? With Mackey around, you need to stay ahead.
I felt like someone else, waiting there for Conway. Someone changed.
She came fast. One minute the oak door looked shut forever; the next she was poised at the top of the steps, scanning for me. Floodlights on her hair. Took me a second to feel the big grin right across my face.
No Mackey behind her. I stepped out of the shadow, lifted an arm.
The matching grin lit her up. She came striding across the white pebbles, held out a hand for a high five. It whipcracked out into the night, pure triumph, left a hard clean sting on my palm. “We did all right there.”
I was glad of the half light. “Would you say Mackey bought it?”
“I’d say so, yeah. Hard to tell for definite.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“Now? Just looked pissed off, said I had to sort out some shite and it’d only take me a minute, don’t go anywhere. I’d say he thinks you’re bitching about having to wait around.” She glanced back at the door, a dark crack open. We started moving, into the shadow and round the boarders’ wing, out of sight.
I asked, “Getting anywhere with Holly?”
Conway shook her head. “I threw around possible motives for a while, but nothing looked like it clicked. Went back to how she wasn’t there for Selena, what she would’ve done to make up for it; the kid got stroppy, but she didn’t give me anything new. I didn’t want to push too hard: if she started going to bits, Mackey would’ve walked, and I wanted to give you time. What’ve you got?”
I said, “Rebecca was going through the shovels and spades in the groundskeepers’ shed. The day before the murder.”
Conway went still. Stopped breathing.
After a moment: “Who said?”
“Gemma. She was looking to buy diet pills, walked in on Rebecca. Rebecca jumped a mile, did a legger.”
“Gemma. Joanne’s lapdog Gemma.”
“I don’t think she was bullshitting me. They weren’t covering for themselves, anyway. They didn’t cop that there was anything dodgy about Rebecca being at the tools. They thought the suss bit was her being in there at all—thought she was buying drugs off the groundskeeper to give to Chris, because she was into him, and then he turned her down and she lost it. I said Rebecca was too small to do the job; they said if Chris was sitting down, she could’ve hit him with a rock. If they knew the weapon was a hoe, no way could they have stopped themselves bringing it up. They don’t have that kind of self-control. They don’t know.”
Conway still hadn’t moved: feet braced, shoulders braced, hands dug in her pockets. Things going fast behind her eyes. She said, “I don’t see it. The drugs thing, maybe that could play; Rebecca could’ve been bribing Chris to stay away from Selena. But remember the condom? Chris went out there expecting a ride. You think Rebecca’d been shagging him? Seriously?”
I said, “I don’t think the earlier meetings were Rebecca. Remember what Holly said? When she realized something was up with Selena, she tried to talk to Julia about it. Julia didn’t want to know: told her to forget it, Selena’d get over it sooner or later. Does that sound like Julia to you? She’s a scrapper. One of her mates is in trouble, she’s just going to stick her fingers in her ears, hope it goes away?”
Conway moved then. Her head went back, moonlight on the whites of her eyes. “Julia was already on it.”
“Yeah. She didn’t want Holly getting involved, making things more complicated. So she told her to leave it.”
“Fuck,” Conway said. “Remember what Joanne told us? She put her bitches on night duty, make sure Selena had stopped sneaking out to see Chris. No sign of Selena, but they saw Julia, all right. They thought she was meeting Finn Carroll. And we went along with that. Pair of fucking fools.”
I said, “No way to keep a secret for long, in a room that size. Somewhere in there, Rebecca found out—either about Chris and Selena, or about Chris and Julia.”
“Yeah. And Holly said even the thought of anything being wrong with any of them made Rebecca go mental.”
“The thought of the four of them not being enough to make everything OK. She couldn’t handle that.” I saw the poster, the calligraphy that had taken hours, weeks, a fresh start for every finger-slip. If crouds of dangers should appeare, yet friendship can be unconcern’d.
Conway said, “This doesn’t mean Holly’s out.”
She didn’t say it the way she would have an hour or two before, a sideways eye checking me for a flinch or a flicker. Just said it. Eyes narrowed up at the school building, like it was daring her.
I said, “Right. Doesn’t rule out Julia, either, or the whole three of them: for all we know it was one to find the weapon, one to lure Chris to the grove, one to do the job when he had his mind on other things. All we know for sure is Rebecca’s in.”
“Get anything else?”
After a moment I said, “That’s it.”
Conway’s face came round to me. “But what?”
“But.” I wanted to twist away from it, but she needed to know. “Joanne and them, they weren’t pleased when I said I had to head. They were trying to do something, I don’t even know what. Flirt with me, get me to stay. Something like that.”
“Any touching?”
“Yeah. Joanne put her finger on my leg. I talked them down, she took the hand away, I got the fuck out of Dodge.”
Conway watched me. “Is this you saying I shouldn’t have thrown you into the shark tank all on your ownio?”
“No. I’m a big boy. If I hadn’t’ve wanted to talk to them, I wouldn’t have.”
“’Cause I would’ve done it myself, if I could. But I’d have got nothing. It had to be you.”
Me, the perfect bait, whatever whoever wanted. “I know. I’m only telling you. I figure you should know.”
She nodded. “Don’t worry about it.” She saw me shift, Easy for you to say. “Seriously. They won’t say anything. The amount we’ve got on them, they’d have to be mental to try and fuck with us. You think they want McKenna knowing about the diet pills? The sneaking out at night?”
“They might not think that far.”
Conway snorted. “They’re experts on thinking that far. That’s what they do.” More seriously, whatever she saw in my face: “They’re scary fuckers, but we’ve got them pinned down. OK?”
“Yeah,” I said. The way she said it—scary fuckers—like she knew, like she’d been there: that was what helped, more than the reassurance. “OK.”
“Good.” Conway clapped me on the shoulder. Awkward as a boy, but her hand felt strong and steady. “Fair play to you.”
I said, “It’s not enough. We’ve got enough to arrest Rebecca, but the DPP won’t charge her on this. If she doesn’t confess—”
Conway was shaking her head. “Not even enough for an arrest. If she was some skanger kid, then yeah, sure, haul her in and see how far we get. But a girl from Kilda’s? We arrest her, we have to be able to charge her. No ifs. Otherwise we’re fucked. O’Kelly’s gonna pop a vein, McKenna’s gonna pop a vein, the commissioner’s phone’s gonna be ringing off the hook, the media’ll scream cover-up, and we’ll be sharing a desk in Records till we retire.” That bitter curl to her mouth. “Unless you’ve got friends in high places.”
“That was the best I’d got.” I nodded upwards, towards the art room. “And I’d say that’s well scuppered now.”
That got part of a laugh. “Then we need more on Rebecca. And we need it fast. We have to get her in custody tonight, or we’re fucked. Julia and Holly, they’re both smart enough to figure out where this is going—if they don’t already know.”
I said, “Holly knows.”
“Yeah. We leave the four of them together overnight, they’ll talk. We’ll come back tomorrow morning and they’ll have their stories all nice and matched up, butter won’t melt, they’ll have worked out exactly where to lie and where to keep their mouths shut. Not a chance in hell we’ll crack them.”
I said, “We won’t crack Holly now. She’s given us everything she’s going to.”
Conway was shaking her head again. “Forget her. And Selena. We need Julia.”
I remembered what she had said earlier: This year Julia’s watching us like we’re actual people, you and me. And then: I can’t work out if that’s gonna be a good thing or a bad one.
“Mackey and Holly,” I said. “Leave them where they are, yeah?”
“Yeah. We might need them again, and we don’t want them running around getting in our way. If they don’t like it—”
This time we both froze. Only a few yards behind us, round the front of the boarders’ wing, someone’s foot had slid on pebbles.
Conway’s eyes met mine. She mouthed Mackey.
We moved fast and silent, swung round the corner together. The carriage sweep was wide and white, empty. The grass was bare. In the dark crack of the door, nothing moved.
Conway cupped a forearm round her eyes, blocking out the floodlights, and squinted into the trees. Nothing.
“D’you know where Julia is?”
“Didn’t see them. They’re not on the back lawn.”
She eased back into the shadow. Said, for no one farther than me, “They’ll be in that glade.”
We were both half thinking about sneaking up on them, having a quick eavesdrop, see if they were talking hoes and texts and Chris. Not a hope. That pretty little woodlandy path, the one we’d walked that morning: the trees touching above it slashed the light to scraps, left us fumbling. We went crashing along like Land Rovers, twigs snapping, branches flapping, birds losing the head everywhere.
“Jesus,” Conway hissed, when I went in a bush up to my knee. “Did you never do Boy Scouts, no? Go camping?”
“Where I’m from? No, I bleeding didn’t. You want me to hotwire a car, no problem.”
“I can do that myself. I want some woodcraft.”
“You want some posh bastard who went pheasant-shooting every—” I caught my foot in something, shot forward flailing. Conway grabbed my elbow before I went on my snot. We snorted with giggles like a pair of kids, sleeves over our mouths, trying to glare each other silent.
“Shut up—”
“Fuck’s sake—”
Only made us worse. We’d gone giddy: the moon-stripes swirling the ground under our feet, the spin of rustles spreading out all around us; the hard weight of what we were going to have to do at the end of the path. I was only waiting to see Chris Harper leaping widemouthed like a wildcat off a branch in front of us, couldn’t tell if we’d scream like teenage girls or whip out our guns and blow his ghostly arse away—
“State of you—”
“Look who’s talking—”
Around a bend, out from under the trees.
Smell of hyacinths.
Up the little rise, in the clearing among the cypresses, the moonlight came down full and untouched. The three of them leaned shoulder to shoulder, legs curled among the bobbing seed-heads; for a second they looked like one triple creature that made my hair lift. Still as an old statue, as smooth and white and as blank-faced. Watching us, three pairs of bottomless eyes. We had stopped laughing.
None of them moved. The hyacinth-smell rose over us like a wave.
Rebecca, shoulder against Selena’s. Her hair was down and she was all patches of black and white, like an illusion. Like one blink would turn her into moonlight on grass.
Beside me Conway said, just loud enough to reach them, “Julia.”
They didn’t move. I had time to wonder what we would do if they never did; I knew better than to get any closer. Then Julia straightened, away from Selena’s side, brought her legs under her and stood up. She came down the rise to us without a glance at the others, came swishing through the hyacinths with her back straight and her eyes on something behind us. My neck itched.
Conway said, “Let’s walk down this way. We’ll only need a few minutes.”
She headed on down the path, deeper into the grounds. Julia fell into place behind her. The other two watched, side pressed to side, till I turned away. At my back, nearly made me leap, came the deep sigh of the cypress trees.
Even Julia’s walk was different, out here. No mocking arse-sway now; she took the path deft as a deer, barely shifted a twig. Like this was her territory, she could’ve crept up on a sleeping bird and taken it in her hand.
Conway said, without looking over her shoulder, “I’m gonna assume Selena’s updated you. We know yous were getting out at night, we know she had something going with Chris, we know they’d split up. And we know you were meeting Chris. Right up until he died.”
Nothing. The path broadened out, wide enough for the three of us to walk abreast. Julia’s legs were shorter than ours, but she didn’t speed up; left us to slow to her pace or leave her behind, whichever. We slowed.
“We’ve got your texts. On the special super-secret phone he gave Selena.”
Her silence felt unbreakable. She had put on a red jumper, no jacket, and the air was turning cold. She didn’t seem to notice.
Conway said, “Is that why Selena broke it off with Chris, yeah? We couldn’t work that out. Was it because she knew you were into him, didn’t want him getting between you?”
That got to Julia. “I was never into Chris. I have taste.”
“Then what were you doing with him out here at midnight? Algebra?”
Silence, and her silent steps. Time running out was pounding at me: Rebecca waiting behind us, Mackey and Holly waiting above us, McKenna waiting to ring the bell that would end the day. Rushing this would only slow it down.
Conway said, “How many times did you meet him?”
Nothing.
“If it wasn’t you, it was one of your mates. Had Selena got back together with him?”
Julia said, “Three times. I met him three times.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“He got killed. It put a damper on the relationship.”
“Relationship,” I said. “What kind?”
“Intellectual. We talked world politics.”
The sarcasm was heavy enough to be all the answer we needed. Conway said, “If you weren’t into him, then why?”
“Because. You never did anything stupid, when it came to guys?”
“Plenty. Trust me.” The quick look between the two of them startled me: a matched look like understanding, a wry edge of smile on Conway. Like we’re actual people. “But I always had a reason. A shite one, but it was there.”
Julia said, “It seemed like a good idea at the time. What can I say: I was dumber then.”
I said, “You were keeping him away from Selena. You knew he was trouble—you knew what he’d done to Joanne, knew Selena wasn’t strong enough to handle the same thing happening to her. Selena had broken it off with him, but you read her texts; you knew all Chris had to do was snap his fingers and she’d come running. So you had to make sure he didn’t snap them.”
“You’re tougher than Selena,” Conway said. “Tough enough to take whatever a fool like Chris could dish out. So you took the bullet for her.”
Julia walked, hands in her pockets. Watched something off in the trees ahead. The slice of her face I could see reminded me of Holly. That grief.
Conway said, “You think Selena killed Chris. Don’t you?”
Julia’s head snapped sideways like Conway had flicked her in the face. I hadn’t realized till I heard the words fall into the air. This was what Julia had been thinking, all day; all year.
And that was her out. Julia out, Selena out, Rebecca in. Holly flickering on the line.
Conway said, “We say we’re going to talk to Selena: bang, you throw us a stick to chase, send us dashing off after Joanne. I say maybe Selena had got back with Chris: bang, all of a sudden you’re talking to us, coming clean about meeting him. You wouldn’t need to protect her unless you thought she had something to hide.”
We were speeding up. Julia was walking faster, smashing twigs and rattling pebbles, not caring.
I said, “You think Selena found out you were hooking up with Chris. Is that it? She was so angry, or so jealous, or so gutted, she lost the head and killed him. That makes it your fault. So it’s up to you to protect her.”
Only a pace or two ahead of us, she was already smudging away into the dark, just the red slash of her jumper glowing. “Julia,” Conway said, and stopped walking.
Julia stopped too, but the line of her back pulled like a leashed dog’s. Conway said, “Sit down.”
In the end Julia turned. A pretty little wrought-iron bench, overlooking tidy flowerbeds—closed up for the night, now, all the daytime colors and petal-flourishes turned in tight on themselves. Julia aimed for the end of the bench. Conway and I boxed her into the middle.
Conway said, “Listen to me. We don’t suspect Selena.”
Julia rolled her a look. “Uh-huh. I’m so reassured, I might need to fan myself.”
“All our evidence says she hadn’t been in touch with Chris for weeks before he died.”
“Right. Until you turn around and say, ‘Oops, actually, we’ve decided those texts were from her, not from you! Sorry!’”
“Bit late for that,” I said. “And we’ve had a lot of practice figuring out when people are lying. We both think Selena’s telling us the truth.”
“Great. Glad to hear it.”
“So if we believe her, why don’t you? She’s meant to be your mate; how come you think she’s a murderer?”
“I don’t. I think she’s never done anything worse than talking during study period. OK?”
The defenses shooting up in Julia’s voice, I’d heard those before. That was when it clicked: the interview in her room that afternoon, that note in her voice, something left snagged in my mind. I said, “You’re the one who texted me.”
Off Chris’s phone.
Her profile tightening. She didn’t look at me.
“To tell me where Joanne kept the key to the connecting door. That was you.”
Nothing.
“You said to us, this afternoon: When you found out about Joanne’s key, she turned it around on me. If anyone had told you about her and Chris, she’d have got back at them the same way. Meaning Joanne was getting back at you, for telling us about the key.”
I got one corner of Julia’s eye. It said, Good catch. Now prove it.
Conway turned on the bench, pulled up one leg so she could face Julia straight on. “Listen. Selena’s in bad shape. You know that. You thought it was because she couldn’t handle being a killer, had to hide in cloud-cuckoo land. It’s not that. You want me to swear? I’ll swear on anything you want: it’s not.”
She said it clear and warm, the way she’d have said it to a friend, a best friend, to her closest sister. She was holding out a hand and beckoning Julia to cross that river. Go from the lifelong-familiar side where grown-ups were faceless mentallers trying to wreck everything, no point trying to understand them, over to this new strange place where we could talk face-to-face.
Julia looking at Conway. Things moving across her face said she knew the crossing was one-way. That you can never tell who’ll still be beside you, on the other side, and who’ll be left behind.
I kept quiet. This was theirs. I was outside.
Julia took a long breath. She said, “You’re sure. It wasn’t her.”
“We don’t suspect her. You’ve got my word.”
“Lenie’s not just naturally crazy, though. You don’t know her; I do. She wasn’t like this before Chris got killed.”
Conway nodded. “Yeah, I know. But what’s wrecking her head isn’t that she killed him. It’s that she knows something she can’t handle. She’s spacing out so she doesn’t have to deal with it.”
It was getting colder. Julia pulled her jumper tight at her neck. She said, “Like what?”
“If we knew, we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation. I’ve got ideas, no proof. All I can tell you for sure is: you’re not gonna get Selena in hassle by telling me the truth. I swear. OK?”
Julia tugged her sleeves down, the pale smudges of her hands vanishing into the red. She said quietly, “OK. I texted you about the key.”
Conway said, “How’d you know where Joanne and them kept it?”
“I’m the one who gave her the idea about the book.”
I said, “And the one who gave her the key.”
“You make it sound like it was her birthday present. Actually, they saw us heading out one night, and Joanne said she’d tell McKenna what bad girls we’d been if we didn’t make her a copy of the key. So I did.”
“And gave her advice on where to keep it?” Conway raised an eyebrow. “You’re very helpful altogether.”
Julia matched the eyebrow. “When someone could get me expelled, yeah, I am. She wanted to know where we kept ours, which I wasn’t going to tell her because fuck the bitch—”
“Which was where? While we’re at it.”
“Down the inside of my phone case. Simple, and it was always on me. Like I said, though, I wasn’t about to give the Heifer Heffernan any more than I had to. So I told her the only way to be safe was to keep it in the common room, so if it got found no one could connect it to her, right? I was like, ‘Pick a book no one ever reads. Who’d you do your saint essay on?’—the common rooms are all full of saint biogs, no one ever looks at them except once a year for essays, and we’d just handed ours in. She went, ‘Thérèse of Lisieux. The Little Flower’—she actually got this holy face on, like that somehow made her into Joanne of Lisieux.” Conway was grinning. “So I went, ‘Perfect. No one’s going to look at the book again till at least next year. Stick the key in there, you’re sorted.’”
“And you figured she’d taken your word for it?”
“Joanne has zero imagination, except about herself. No way could she have come up with a place. Anyway, I checked. I thought it might come in useful.”
“And it did,” Conway said. “How come you decided to tell us?”
Julia hesitated. The small noises all around were moving deeper into night: flurries in leaves said hunting, the laughter from the lawn was long gone. I wondered how little time we had. Didn’t look at my watch.
I said, “The interviews, earlier on. Did Selena come out of hers upset?”
After a moment: “I mean, she wouldn’t have looked upset to most people. Just spacy; well, spacier than usual. But that is upset, for Selena. That’s how she gets.”
I said, “You were afraid we’d shaken her up enough that she might let something slip, maybe even confess. You needed us looking in another direction, at least till you could get her settled down again. So you threw us Joanne’s key, to keep us occupied. And it worked. You’ve got a gift for this, you know that?”
“Gee, thanks.”
Conway said, “And if you’re the one who texted us, that means you’ve got Chris Harper’s secret phone.”
Julia went still. Her face was a new kind of wary.
“Ah, come on. Records say that text came from that phone. There’s not a lot of point in mucking about.”
A tilt of the head, acknowledging. Julia leaned back and wriggled a phone out of her jeans pocket, slim little thing in a snappy orange case. “Not his phone. Just his SIM card.”
She pulled the case away from the back of the phone and tapped a SIM card into her palm. Handed it to Conway.
Conway said, “We’re going to need to hear the story.”
“There’s no story.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Don’t I have the right to an attorney, or something? Before I start telling you where I got a dead guy’s SIM?”
I knew. I said, “You got his phone off Selena, after he died. She gave it to you, or you found it in her stuff. That’s why you think she killed Chris.”
Julia’s eyes flicked away from me. Conway said, “We still don’t. And it’s pretty obvious you didn’t do the job, or you wouldn’t be climbing the walls thinking she did.” That got a faint one-sided grin. “So dial down the paranoia and talk to me.”
The night was turning that red jumper the color of a banked fire, compressed and waiting. Julia said, “I was actually trying to get rid of Selena’s phone, the one we’d both used to text Chris. Imagine my surprise when this showed up.”
Conway said, “When was this?”
“The day after Chris got killed.”
“What time?”
An unconscious grimace, as she remembered. “Jesus. I started trying before noon—they had this big high-drama assembly to tell us about The Tragedy, we had to say a prayer or something . . . All I could think was I had to get Selena’s phone out of our room. Before you guys decided to search the place.”
“What were you going to do with it?”
Julia shook her head. “I hadn’t even thought that far. I just wanted it out. But I could not get a fucking second alone in there. I guess McKenna had given orders that none of us were allowed to be alone in case a maniac was roaming the corridors, I don’t know. I said I’d forgotten my French homework in my room, and they sent a prefect up with me—I had to pretend the shock had turned me into an airhead, ooo it was in my bag all along! Then I said I’d got my period, but they wouldn’t let me go to my room, they sent me to the nurse instead. And then when school ended, McKenna made this announcement—‘All students will please report immediately to their activity groups, while remaining calm and blah blah blah stiff upper lip school spirit . . .’”
She did a good McKenna, even if the wank mime was out of character. “I do drama group, so we had to go to the hall and pretend we were rehearsing. It was a mess, no one knew where they were supposed to be and all the teachers were trying to take like four groups at once and people were still crying—well, you were there.”
That was to Conway, who nodded. “Loony bin,” she said, to me.
“Exactly. So I thought maybe I could just slide out and sneak up to my room, seeing as I had the key on me, right? But nooo, the corridors were riddled with nuns and I got sent back to the hall. I tried again during study, said I needed some book, and Sister Patricia came with me. And then it was practically lights-out, you guys were still doing whatever down in the grounds, and I still hadn’t got that fucking phone out of the way.”
Julia’s voice was tightening towards something. “So Holly and Becca go to brush their teeth, and I’m messing around hoping Selena goes too. But she’s sitting on her bed, just sitting there staring into space. She’s not going anywhere, and Holly and Becs are gonna be back any minute. So I say, ‘Lenie, I need that phone.’ She looks at me like I just landed in a UFO. I go, ‘The phone Chris gave you. We don’t have time to dick around. Come on.’
“She’s still staring, so I’m just like, OK, forget this. I shove past her and I stick my hand down the side of her bed, where she kept the phone—it was this little foofoo pink thing, just like Alison’s; I guess that’s what Chris thought was appropriate for girls. I’m hoping to Jesus she hasn’t moved it, ’cause I don’t have time to try and figure out where, so I’m a happy girlie when I feel it there, right? Only then I pull it out, and it’s red.”
The memory made Julia take a hard in-breath through her nose, bite down on her lip. She wasn’t someone you could pat on the head with the old You’re doing great. Conway gave her a second before she said, “Chris’s.”
“Yeah. I’d seen it on him; it fell out of his pocket once, when we were . . . I go, ‘Lenie, what the fuck?’ She looks at me and she’s like, ‘Huh?’ I swear I nearly shoved the phone up her arse. I went, ‘Where did you get this? And where’s your one?’ She looks at the phone and after a second she says—this is it, this is all she says—‘Oh.’”
Julia shook her head. “Just like that. ‘Oh.’ I still feel sick thinking about it.”
Conway said, “You figured she’d killed Chris.”
“Duh, yeah, I did. I just— What was I supposed to think? I thought she’d been out meeting him and he told her about me, and she— And then when she was legging it back inside, she grabbed the wrong phone somehow. If they’d, I don’t know, if they’d taken off their clothes and their phones had ended up—”
I said, “Or she might have taken it so we couldn’t link her to Chris.”
“Yeah, no. Selena? Wouldn’t even occur to her. What freaked me out was where was her phone, like had she left it wherever Chris was? But I figured I couldn’t worry about that. I just grabbed the phone and I was out of there.”
It jibed with Holly’s story, or partway. Holly had thought faster: like her dad, always on top of the just-in-case, never let the off chance sneak up on her. She had swiped Selena’s phone early in the morning, before the full story got through to McKenna and the school went into lockdown. Between then and study time, someone else had found a way into that room.
Conway said, “Where’d you put it?”
“Locked myself in a toilet cubicle, deleted the shit out of the message folders, took out the SIM and stuck the phone in a cistern. I figured even if you found it, you couldn’t link it to us, and without the SIM you probably couldn’t link it to Chris either. That weekend when I went home, I left the phone on the bus. If no one stole it, it’s probably in the Dublin Bus lost and found.”
She had guts, Julia. Guts and enough loyalty for a dozen. She was good stuff. I wished I knew how badly we were going to break her heart.
“Why keep the SIM card?” I asked.
“I thought it could come in useful. I was pretty sure Selena was about to get arrested—even if by some miracle she hadn’t left evidence all over the place, I figured she’d go to pieces and confess. Do you even remember what a wreck she was?”
“So was everyone else,” Conway said. The sharp point on her voice said Should’ve known. “She wasn’t bawling or fainting: she looked to be in better nick than most.”
Julia’s eyebrow flicked. “Yeah, if only you’d told me that back then. I was there expecting you guys to come for her any minute. I thought if there was at least a way to show you that she was the one who’d dumped Chris, and that he was a total dickhead to girls, Lenie might get—I don’t know, a lighter sentence or whatever. Otherwise everyone would just think he dumped her and she went psycho, lock the evil bitch up and throw away the key. I don’t know, I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly; I just figured keeping it couldn’t hurt, at least for now, and it might help.”
If Julia had talked to any of the others, she would have known that the story had tangles, that not everything pointed straight to Selena. No way to guess what they would have done next, but they would have done it together.
It had been months too late for that to happen. Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.
I said, “Can you remember if anyone did manage to go up to the boarders’ wing before study period that day? We’ll check the logbook, but while we have you here: anything come to mind?”
I had Julia’s attention. She was watching me hard. “What? You think someone else put that phone down behind Selena’s bed?”
“If Selena didn’t take that phone off Chris, someone else did. And then somehow it got to where you found it.”
“Like, someone tried to frame her?”
Behind her shoulder, Conway’s eyes said Careful. I shrugged. “We can’t say that yet. I’d just like to know if anyone had the opportunity.”
Julia thought. Shook her head, reluctantly. “I don’t think so. I mean, obviously I’d love to say yeah, but actually there’s not a chance in hell anyone would’ve got up there without a really good excuse. And even then, no way would she have been allowed on her own. Seriously, when I asked could I go get my French homework, Houlihan acted like I’d asked to go into a drug den and buy heroin.”
The violin under Rebecca’s bed. The flute in Selena’s bit of wardrobe. I said, “What about during activities? Anyone go missing then?”
“Seriously? You think I’d’ve noticed? If you’d seen the mess the place was in . . . Plus I was concentrating on trying to get that phone. Joanne and Orla do drama too, and I know they were both there because Joanne kept trying to burst into tears”—Julia mimed puking—“and Orla had to comfort her and shit. But they’re the only ones I remember.”
“We’ll try asking your mates.” I said it nice and casual. The moonlight blazed into my face, felt like it was stripping me naked. I tried not to turn away. “Do they do drama as well, yeah? Or would they be able to tell us about other groups?”
“We’re not actually surgically attached. Holly does dance. Selena and Becca do instrument practice.”
So they would have had to go back to their room to get their instruments. Two of them together, to protect each other from the brain-eating maniac; they would have been allowed.
“Right,” I said. “How many people in those, do you know?”
Julia shrugged. “Lots of people do dance. Like forty? Instruments, maybe like a dozen.”
The odds said the rest had been day girls. We would check the logbook, but if the numbers held, Rebecca and Selena had been the only ones through that door.
The sudden quiet, all the day’s jabbering and wailing fizzled away into that white silence. Rebecca holding out the phone she had taken to make sure that Selena was safe, that no one could ever link her to Chris. Holding it out like a gift, priceless. Like salvation.
Or: Selena burrowing in the wardrobe for her flute, slow with shock and grief. Behind her back, Rebecca, light as a ghost and just as urgent, leaning over her bed. Selena was the one who had started keeping secrets. She was the one who had let Chris in, to start things cracking apart. It had been her fault.
I looked at Conway, across that lone gallant slash of red. She was looking at me.
“Right,” I said. “Your mates might remember someone leaving. Worth a shot, anyway.”
“I’d say Selena was too upset to do much noticing,” Conway said. “Let’s ask Rebecca.” And she stood up.
Mostly people look relieved. Julia looked taken aback. “What, that’s it?”
“Unless there’s something else you want to tell us.”
Blank second. Headshake, almost reluctant.
“Then yeah, that’s it. Thanks very much.”
I stood up too, turned towards the path. Julia said, “What did I give you?”
She was looking at nothing. I said, “Hard to tell at this point. We’ll have to see as we go.”
Julia didn’t answer. We waited for her to stand up, but she didn’t move. After a minute we left her there, looking out over what used to be her kingdom; black hair and white face and that ember of red, and the white grass spread all around her.