I said, ‘Why the art room?’
‘Keep her thinking about that postcard, remembering there’s someone out there who knows.’ Conway tugged the elastic out of what was left of her bun. Hair came down around her shoulders, straight and heavy. ‘You start us off. Good Cop, nice and gentle, don’t spook her and don’t spook Daddy. Just set up the facts: she was getting out at night, she knew about Chris and Selena, she didn’t like Chris. Try and fill in the details: why she didn’t like him, whether she discussed the relationship with the others. When you need Bad Cop, I’ll come in.’
A couple of fast twists of her wrists, a snap of hairband, and the bun was in place, smooth and glossy as marble. Her shoulders had straightened; even the scoured look had fallen away from her face. Conway was ready.
The common-room door opened. Holly in the doorway, with McKenna behind her. Ponytail, jeans, a turquoise hoodie with sleeves that hid her hands.
I’d been thinking of her all snap and sheen, but that was gone. She was white and ten years older, daze-eyed, like someone had shaken her world like a snow globe and nothing was coming down in the same places. Like she had been so confident she was doing everything right, and all of a sudden nothing looked that simple any more.
It turned me cold. I couldn’t look at Conway. Didn’t need to; I knew she’d seen it too.
Holly said, ‘What’s going on?’
I remembered her nine years old, so stiff with courage she would break your heart. I said, ‘Your dad’s on his way. I’d say he’d rather we don’t talk till he gets here.’
That burned off the daze. Holly’s head went back in exasperation. ‘You called my
I didn’t answer. Holly saw the look on me and closed her mouth. Disappeared behind the smoothness of her face, innocent and secretive all at once.
‘Thanks,’ Conway said to McKenna. To me and Holly: ‘Let’s go.’
The long corridor we’d walked down that morning, to find the Secret Place. Then it had been humming with sun and busyness; now – Conway passed the light switch without a glance – it was twilit and sizeless. Evening through the window behind us gave us faint shadows, me and Conway stretched even taller on either side of the straight slip of Holly, like guards with a hostage. Our steps echoed like marching boots.
The Secret Place. In that light it looked like it was rippling, just off the corner of your vision, but it had lost that boil and jabber. All you could almost hear off it was a long murmur made of a thousand muffled whispers, all begging you to hear. A new postcard had a photo of one of those gold living statues you get on Grafton Street; the caption said,
The art room. Not morning-fresh and rising with sunlight now. The overhead lights left murky corners; the green tables were smeared with shreds of clay, Conway’s balls of paper were still tumbled under chairs. McKenna must have cancelled the cleaners. Battening down the school as tight as she could, everything under control.
Outside the tall windows the moon was up, full and ripe against a dimming blue. On the table against them, that morning’s dropcloth had been pulled away, not put back. Where it had been was the whole school in miniature, in fairytale, in the finest curlicues of copper wire.
I said, ‘That. Is that the project you were working on last night?’
Holly said, ‘Yeah.’
Close up, it looked too delicate to stay standing. The walls were barely sketched, just the odd line of wire; you could look straight through them, to wire desks, ragged cloth blackboards scribbled with words too small to read, high-backed wire armchairs cosy around a fire of tissue-paper coals. It was winter; snow was piled on the gables, around the bases of the columns and the wine-jar curves of the balustrade. Behind the building, a lawn of snowdrift trailed off the edge of the baseboard into nothing.
I said, ‘That’s here, yeah?’
Holly had moved in, hovering, like I might smash it. ‘It’s Kilda’s a hundred years ago. We researched what it used to be like – we got old photos and everything – and then we built it.’
The bedrooms: tiny copper-wire beds, wisps of tissue paper for sheets. In the boarders’ wing and the nuns’, fingernail-length parchment scrolls swung in the windows, from threads fine as spiderweb. ‘What are the bits of paper?’ I asked. My breath set them spinning.
‘The names of people who were listed living here in the 1911 census. We don’t actually know who had what room, obviously, but we went on what age they were and the order they were listed in – like probably friends would be one after the other, because they would’ve been sitting together. One girl was called Hepzibah Cloade.’
Conway was spinning chairs into place around one of the long tables. One for Holly. One six feet down the table: Mackey. She brought them down hard, flat bangs on the lino.
I said, ‘Whose idea was it?’
