The Secret Place полностью

‘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.’