He leaned back in the doorway, flicked the lighter and watched the flame. He was smoking this one differently, taking his time on every drag.
‘You were right about how we picked St Kilda’s – well done there: Olivia’s alma mater. And you were right about me not being into the boarding idea. Holly asked at the beginning of second year, I said over my dead body. She kept begging, I kept saying hell no, but in the end I asked why she wanted it so badly. Holly said it was because of her mates – Becca and Selena were boarding already, Julia was running the same campaign on her folks. The four of them wanted to be together.’
Flipped the lighter spinning into the air, caught it.
‘She’s smart, my girl Holly. The next few months, any day she had one of her mates over, she was a holy angel: helping around the house, doing her homework, never a complaint about anything, happy happy joy joy. When she wasn’t having a mate round, she was a raging pain in the hole. Trailing round the house like something out of an Italian opera, giving us these accusing lip-trembly stares; ask her to do anything and she’d burst into tears and fling herself into her room – don’t get overexcited there, Detective, they all throw drama fits, it’s not a sign of juvenile delinquency. But after a while, Liv and me were dreading the days it was just the three of us. Holly had us trained like a pair of German shepherds.’
‘Stubborn,’ I said. ‘Must get it from your wife.’
Wry sideways look. ‘Stubborn would’ve got her nowhere. If it was just that, I would’ve kept taking the piss out of her till she dropped the act; would’ve been a pleasure. But one evening Holly’s throwing a full-on teen-queen strop – I can’t even remember why, I think we’d said she couldn’t go over to Julia’s – and she yells, “They’re the only people I trust to be there no matter what. They’re like my sisters! Because of you guys, they’re the only sisters I’m ever going to have! And you’re keeping me away from them!” And off she ran upstairs, to slam her door and sob into her pillow about how unfair it all was.’
Another long drag on his ciggie. He tilted his head back, watched the stream of smoke spiral out between his teeth, up into the soft air.
‘But the thing was, the kid had a point. It’s a bitch when that happens. Family’s important. And Liv and I haven’t exactly done a bang-up job of providing Holly with one of those. If she’s doing a better job of making her own, who am I to stand in her way?’
Fuck me. I would’ve bet a few pints that Frank Mackey only knew the meaning of guilt from the outside: something that came in useful for arm-twisting other people. Holly had him twisted into a reef knot.
I said, ‘So you decided to let her go for it.’
‘So we decided she could try boarding during the week for one term, see how she got on. Now we’d have to hire a tow truck to drag her away. I don’t like it on principle, and I miss the little madam like hell, but like you said: when it’s your kid at stake, everything else goes out the window.’
Mackey slid his lighter back in his jeans pocket. ‘And there you go. A heart-to-heart with Uncle Frankie. Wasn’t that fun?’
It was true. Maybe the whole truth, maybe not, but true.
‘Does that answer all your questions?’
I said, ‘One left. I don’t get why you’d tell me all that.’
‘I’m establishing interdepartmental cooperation, Detective. Showing the love, in a professional kind of way.’ Mackey flicked his smoke onto the ground, crushed it out in one heel-twist. ‘After all,’ he said over his shoulder with a great big grin, as he pushed the door open, ‘we’re working together.’
Holly was sitting where we’d left her; Conway was at the window, hands in her pockets, looking down at the gardens. They hadn’t been talking. The air in the room, the fast turn from both of them when we came in, said they’d been listening hard to each other instead.
Mackey shifted his spot, keep us on our toes: sat on a table behind Holly, found himself a stray chunk of modelling clay to play with. I pulled Selena’s phone towards me. Turned the evidence bag in circles on the table, between my fingertips.
‘So,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to this phone. You say you found it on the foyer floor, the morning after Chris died. Let’s stick with that for now. You’d seen Selena’s secret phone; you knew what it looked like. You had to know this was it.’
Holly shook her head. ‘I thought it was Alison’s. Selena kept hers down the side of her bed; how would it get to the foyer?’
‘You didn’t even ask her?’
‘No way. Like I told you, I didn’t want to get into that with her. If I even thought about it – and I don’t remember if I did – I would’ve figured, if it was somehow Selena’s phone, then she’d rather go get it out of the lost-and-found than have to talk about how I knew it was hers and all that crap.’
