The Secret Place полностью

‘I think you were out there the night he died, and I think you saw something. No’ – I raised a hand, masterful – ‘let me finish. Maybe you’re protecting someone. Maybe you’re afraid. Maybe you don’t want to believe what you saw. I’m sure you’ve got a good reason for saying you weren’t there.’

Conway, in the corner of my eye, giving me a sliver of a nod. We were back on safe ground. If Joanne repeated that speech to her counsel someday, it said witness, loud and clear. But if it worked, if she admitted to being at the scene, she crossed over the line to suspect, no leeway left.

‘But I’m also sure, Joanne, I’m just as sure that you saw something, or heard something. You know who killed Chris Harper.’ I let my voice rise. ‘Time to stop hiding it. You heard what Detective Conway said, earlier. It’s time to tell us – before we find out on our own, or someone else does. Now.’

Joanne wailed, ‘But I don’t! Honest to God, I swear, I didn’t go out that night! I hadn’t been out in weeks.’

‘You’re trying to tell me you didn’t have anyone to meet? Almost six months after Chris dumped you, you were still single?’

‘Not still – I went out with Oisín O’Donovan for a while, you can ask anyone, but I dumped him weeks before Chris happened! Ask him. I wasn’t out that night. I don’t know anything. I swear!’

Huge-eyed, hand-wringing, all the trimmings: the way she’d learnt that innocent looked, off the telly or wherever. Truth or lie, it would look exactly the same.

Another minute and she’d be scrunching up her face, trying to cry. Conway’s eye said Kill it.

I eased back, on the soft intimate squash of Gemma’s bed. Joanne drew a long shaky breath, snatched a sideways glance at me to make sure I’d caught it.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘OK, Joanne. Thank you.’

Joanne and her shorts headed back to the common room. Her arse watched us watching her, same as Julia’s, only not the same at all.

‘That’s one pissed-off little geebag,’ Conway said, tinge of enjoyment. She was leaning a shoulder against the wall of the corridor, hands in her pockets. ‘She can spin it however she wants: she was well fucked off with Chris Harper.’

‘Fucked off enough to kill him?’

‘Sure. She’d’ve loved to. But…’

Silence. Neither of us wanted to say it.

‘If she could’ve pushed a button,’ I said. ‘Stuck a pin in a voodoo doll. Then yeah.’

‘Yeah. Like that.’ Finger-snap. ‘But heading out there in the dark, smacking him in the head with a hoe… I can’t see Joanne taking that kind of risk. She wouldn’t even go after Selena without dragging Gemma along. Very careful of herself, our Joanne. And she doesn’t step outside her comfort zone. Fuck.’

‘The card could still be her.’ I heard the silver-lining note in my voice, waited for another Pollyanna jab. Didn’t get it.

‘If it is, she’s trying to steer us towards Selena. Now there’s revenge. You rob my fella, I’ll frame you for murder.’

‘Or towards Julia,’ I said. ‘She made sure to tell us Julia was sneaking out right up until the murder, did you notice?’

‘Julia and Finn,’ Conway said. Forehead-smack. ‘I knew there had to be a reason why Finn decided to hotwire the fire door all of a sudden. He wouldn’t say. I should’ve known. Same as everything fucking else today.’

I said, ‘Why was everyone keeping their love lives secret, but? When I was a young fella, if you had a girlfriend, you told the world. Did girls keep this stuff under wraps, when you were that age?’

‘Fuck, no. That was half the point of going out with someone to begin with: show everyone that you had a fella. That meant you were a success, not some pathetic single loser. You’d shout it from the rooftops.’

‘And this generation, they care a lot less about privacy than we did. Everything goes online, unless it’s embarrassing or it’ll get them in trouble.’

A kid came out of the third-year common room and headed towards the jacks, frantically trying to check us out without looking at us. Conway swung back into Joanne and Company’s room, kicked the door shut. ‘Even then. My cousin’s kid had a pregnancy scare; what’s the first thing she did? Put it on Facebook. Then got pissed off with her ma for finding out.’

‘And they weren’t shy about telling us who they’re going out with now,’ I said. ‘Joanne gave us the bit of hassle, but that was just to be a bitch to you, not because she actually wanted to keep it secret. So what was different last year?’

Conway had started pacing circles around the room again. Whatever poor bastard ended up partnered with her, he was going to spend a lot of his time dizzy. ‘That crap Joanne gave us, about her and Chris keeping it to themselves because they were sooo intense or whatever the fuck. You believe that?’