The Secret Place (37 page)

I used to dream of that, when I was a young fella. Never had it. Even when I was sixteen years old and ninety per cent dick, I kept away from the girls in my school; scared that if I went beyond the odd snog and grope, I’d wake up the next morning a daddy in a council flat, stuck to the sticky linoleum forever. Dreamed of it instead. Dreams I can still taste.

By the time I got away and found other girls, it was too late. When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again.

Chris wove his fingers in Selena’s hair, lifted it so that it fell strand by strand. She turned her head to touch her lips to his arm. They were like underwater dancers, like time was holding still just for them and every minute gave them a million years. They were beautiful.

Close to the phone, Joanne or Gemma snickered. The other one made a tiny gagging noise. Something like that in front of them, feet away, the real thing, and they couldn’t even see it.

Selena raised her fingers to Chris’s cheek, and his eyes closed. Moonlight ran down her arm like water. They moved closer, faces tilting together, lips opening.

Beep, end of the video.

‘So,’ Joanne said. ‘Is
that
, like, enough
evidence
that Selena and all of them had a key? And that she was doing it with Chris?’

Conway took the phone off me and messed with it, hitting buttons. Joanne flipped out a palm. ‘Ex
cuse
me, that’s mine?’

‘You’ll get it back when I’m done.’ Joanne tsked and threw herself back against the wall. Conway ignored her. To me: ‘Twenty-third of April. Ten to one in the morning.’

Three and a half weeks before Chris died. I said, ‘So you and Gemma saw Selena leaving her room, and you followed her?’

‘Gemma saw them out in the grounds by accident the first time, like a week before – she was meeting some guy, I don’t even remember who. After that, we took turns watching the corridor at night.’ Grim project-manager voice on Joanne; I could picture her going for the jugular if one of the others had the nerve to doze off at her post. ‘This night, Alison saw Selena sneak out of their room, so she woke me up and I followed Selena.’

‘You brought Gemma along?’

‘Um, I wasn’t exactly about to go out there by my
self
? And anyway, I needed Gemma to show me where they were having their little makeout sessions. By the time we got dressed, Selena was well gone. She couldn’t wait to get the action started. Some people are just sluts.’

More midnight traffic than a train station, these grounds. McKenna was in for a coronary if she ever heard this. ‘So you tracked them down,’ I said, ‘and you filmed this clip. Just the one?’

‘Yeah. That’s not enough for you?’

‘What happened after you stopped filming?’

Joanne prissed up her mouth. ‘We went back in. I wasn’t going to stand there and watch them
do
it. I’m not a perv.’

Conway’s phone buzzed. ‘Sent myself the video,’ she told me. To Joanne: ‘Here.’ She tossed the mobile over.

Joanne made a big deal of wiping off the working-class germs on her duvet. I asked, ‘What were you planning to do with this clip?’

Shrug. ‘I hadn’t decided yet.’

Conway said, ‘Wild guess. You used it to blackmail Selena into dumping Chris. “Stay away from him, or this goes to McKenna.”’

Joanne’s top lip pulled up, that near-animal snarl. ‘Um, excuse me, no I didn’t?’

I said – leaning forward, move her off Conway – ‘It would’ve been for Selena’s own good if you had. That there, that wasn’t the healthiest way for her to be spending her nights.’

Joanne thought that over, decided she liked it. Did something with her face that was meant to look virtuous, came out looking stuffed. ‘Well. I would’ve if I’d had to. But I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘That’ – Joanne flicked a finger at the phone – ‘that was the last time Selena and Chris met up. I’d already had a chat with Julia, and after this she sorted it out. End of.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Well, I didn’t, like, take Julia’s
word
for it, if that’s what you mean. I’m not stupid. That’s why I got the video: just in case she needed a little nudgie. We watched the corridor for weeks after, and Selena never went out on her own. The four of them still went out together, to do whatever they did out there – I heard they’re witches, so maybe they were like sacrificing a cat or something, I literally don’t even want to
know
?’ Exaggerated wiggle of disgust. ‘And Julia went out a couple of times – she had this thing with Finn Carroll, which, I mean, nobody actually
wants
to be with a ginger but I guess if you look like Julia you take whatever you can get. But Selena had stopped going. So obviously her and Chris had broken up. Like, surprise?’

‘Any idea who did the breaking?’

Shrug. ‘Do I look like I care? I mean, obviously I hoped for Chris’s sake that he’d suddenly got some
standards
, but
.
.
. Guys: they only care about one thing. If Chris was getting it off Selena, and he didn’t have to, like, be
seen
with her, why would he dump her? So I figure it had to be Selena. Either Julia knocked some sense into her, or else Selena copped that, hello, Chris was only using her for an easy you-know-what and a pig like her was never going to be his actual
girlfriend
.’

Chris’s face bent over Selena’s, holy with wonder. He’d been good, but that good?

‘Why didn’t you want them going out together?’ I asked.

Joanne said coolly, ‘I don’t like her. OK? I don’t like any of them. They’re a bunch of freaks, and they act like that’s totally OK; like they’re so special, they can just do whatever they want. I thought Selena should find out that it doesn’t work like that. Like you said, I was actually doing her a favour.’

I did puzzled. ‘You were fine with Julia and Finn, but. Any particular reason why Selena and Chris was a problem?’

Shrug. ‘Finn was OK, if you go for that kind of thing, but he wasn’t a big deal. Chris was. Everyone was into him. I wasn’t going to let Selena think someone like her had a right to get someone like that. Hello, Earth calling whale: just because you do whatever disgusting stuff you did to even get Chris to
look
at you, that doesn’t mean you get to keep him.’

I said, ‘It wasn’t because you’d been going out with Chris, just a few months earlier.’

Joanne didn’t miss a beat. Gusty sigh, eye-roll. ‘Hello, haven’t we been
over
this already? Am I imagining things? Am I out of my mind? I never went out with Chris. Only in his dreams.’

Conway lifted the evidence bag with Alison’s phone, waggled it at Joanne. ‘Try again.’

Half a second where Joanne went rigid. Then she turned her head away from Conway, folded her arms deliberately.

‘Oh, ouch,’ Conway said, hand to her heart. ‘That’s put me in my place.’

‘Joanne,’ I said, leaning in. ‘I know this is none of our business, or anyway it wouldn’t be normally. But if you were close enough to Chris that he might have told you anything that could be important, then we need to know. Make sense?’

Joanne thought. I could see her trying out the star-witness seat, liking the feel.

I said, ‘That phone that my partner’s got, that was yours till you sold it to Alison. And we’ve got records of a million texts back and forth between that number and Chris’s secret phone.’

Joanne sighed. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘All right.’

She rearranged herself on the edge of the bed. Hands folded, ankles crossed, eyes down. She was getting into character: bereaved girlfriend. ‘Chris and I were together. For a couple of months, the autumn before last.’

It practically exploded out of her. She’d been only dying to tell, for a year now. Held it in because it might get her suspected, because she didn’t want to admit she’d been dumped, because we were adults and the enemy, who knew. Finally, we’d given her the excuse to talk.

‘But he never said anything about, like, having an
enemy
or anything. And he would’ve told me. Like you said, we were really close.’

‘Is that what you used that key for?’ I asked. ‘Going out at night to meet Chris, yeah?’

Joanne shook her head. ‘I only got the key after we split up. And anyway, he couldn’t get out at night either. I mean, obviously he found some way later, because he was meeting that fat cow, but he couldn’t when we were together.’

‘And he had a secret phone specially for texting you, as well?’

‘Yeah. He said the guys at Colm’s went through each other’s phones all the time, looking for sexts or photos – you know,
photos
? From girls?’ Meaningful stare. I nodded. ‘Chris said the priests did it too – some of them are such perverts, it’s just
eww
. I was like, “Hello, if you think you’re getting pictures of my la-la, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to work a little harder than that?” But it wasn’t like that; Chris just wasn’t going to have anyone reading my texts. Anything I said meant too much to him to have some D-head leching over them.’

I caught a glance off Conway. Chris had been good, all right. ‘What kind of phone was it?’ I asked. ‘Did you ever see it?’

Misty smile, reminiscent. ‘Exactly like my one, only red. “A matching pair,” that’s what Chris said. “Like us.”’

Conway’s eye said
Puke.
‘How come all the secrecy?’ I asked. ‘Why not just tell everyone you were together?’

That made Joanne move, a defensive jerk: the secret hadn’t been her idea. She took a breath and got back in character. ‘I mean, this wasn’t just some stupid shallow teenage thing. We had something special, me and Chris. It was so intense, it was like, ohmyGod, something out of a
song
? People wouldn’t have understood; they literally wouldn’t have been able to get it. I mean, obviously we were going to tell them anyway, in a while. Just not yet.’

Coming out too pat and brittle, learned off by heart. The lines Chris had given her, that she’d told herself over and over to make it feel OK.

I asked, ‘It wasn’t because there was someone specific who Chris didn’t want finding out? A jealous ex, something like that?’

‘No. I mean
.
.
.’ Joanne thought about that, liked it. ‘There could’ve been. I mean, lots of people would’ve been
so
jel if they’d known. But he never mentioned anyone.’

‘How’d you manage to meet up in secret, if you couldn’t get out at night?’

‘At the weekends, mostly. Sometimes in the afternoons, between classes and study period, but it was hard finding a place where we wouldn’t get spotted. This one time, you know the little park down past the Court? It was November, so it was dark early and the park was closed, but me and Chris climbed over the railings. There’s this little roundabout, for kids; we sat on that and
.
.
.’

Joanne was half-smiling, unconsciously, remembering. ‘I was there, “OhmyGod, I can’t believe I’m doing this, climbing around in the dark like some skanger; you’d better buy me something nice after this,” but I was just joking. It was actually
.
.
. fun. We were laughing so hard. We had fun, that day.’

A wisp of a laugh. A frail thing, lost, drifting between the slick posters and the makeup-smeared tissues. Not a laugh she’d learned off some reality star and practised; just her, missing that day.

Here was why she had needed to see Selena and Chris through a dirty snicker and a gagging noise. That was the only way she could stand to look.

I said, ‘So what happened? You were together a couple of months, you said. Why’d you split up?’

That slammed Joanne shut again. Fake stare clanging into place, vein of hurt vanished behind it. ‘I broke up with him. I feel sooo terrible about it now—’

‘Ah-ah,’ Conway said, waving the bag again. ‘That’s not what this says.’

‘You kept texting him and ringing him after he stopped answering,’ I explained. Joanne’s mouth thinned. ‘What happened?’

She got on top of that one faster than I expected. With another sigh: ‘Well. Chris got frightened of his feelings. I mean, like I already told you, what we had was totally special? Like really intense?’ Wide earnest eyes, parted lips, voice pitched high. She was being someone off the telly; I hadn’t a clue who, don’t watch the right stuff. ‘And a lot of guys can’t cope with that. I think Chris was just kind of immature. If he was alive, then probably by now we’d be
.
.
.’ Another sigh. Gaze drifting off, at a picturesque angle, into the might-have-beens.