The Secret Place

Chapter 3

She liked her cars, Conway. Knew them, too. In the pool, she went straight for a vintage black MG, stunner. A retired detective left it to the force in his will, his pride and joy. The fella who runs the pool wouldn’t have let Conway touch it if she hadn’t known her stuff – transmission’s playing up, Detective, sorry ’bout that, lovely VW Golf just over here… She waved, he tossed her the keys.

She handled the MG like it was her pet horse. We headed southside, where the posh people live, Conway nipping fast around corners in the whirl of laneways, laying into the horn when someone didn’t scarper fast enough.

‘Get one thing straight,’ she said. ‘This is my show. You got problems taking orders from a woman?’

‘No.’

‘They all say that.’

‘I mean it.’

‘Good.’ She braked hard, in front of a wheatbran-looking café where the windows needed washing. ‘Get me coffee. Black, no sugar.’

My ego’s not that weak; it won’t collapse without a daily workout. Out of the car, two coffees to go, even got a smile out of the depressed waitress. ‘There you go,’ I said, sliding into the passenger seat.

Conway took a swig. ‘Tastes like shit.’

‘You picked the place. Lucky they didn’t make it out of beansprouts.’

She almost smiled, clamped it back. ‘They did. Bin it. Both of them; I don’t want that stink in my car.’

The bin was across the road. Out, dodge traffic, bin, dodge traffic, back into the car, starting to see why Conway was still flying solo. She hit the pedal before I had my leg in the door.

‘So,’ she said. A little thawed out, but only a little. ‘You know the case, yeah? The basics?’

‘Yeah.’ Dogs on the street knew the basics.

‘You know we got no one. Grapevine say anything about why?’

The grapevine said plenty. Me, I said, ‘Some cases go that way.’

‘We hit a wall, is why. You know how it works: you’ve got the scene, you’ve got whatever witnesses you can pick up, and you’ve got the victim’s life, and one of those better give you something. They gave us a fuckton of nothing.’ Conway spotted a bike-sized gap in the lane she wanted, manoeuvred us in with a spin of the wheel. ‘Basically, there was no reason anyone would want to kill Chris Harper. He was a good kid, by all accounts. People say that anyway, but this time they might’ve actually meant it. Sixteen, in fourth year at St Colm’s, boarder – he’s from down the road, practically, but his da figured he wouldn’t get the full benefit of the Colm’s experience unless he boarded. Places like that, they’re all about the contacts; make the right friends at Colm’s, and you’ll never have to work for less than a hundred K a year.’ The twist to Conway’s mouth said what she thought about that.

I said, ‘Kids cooped up together, you can get bad situations. Bullying. Nothing like that on the radar, no?’

Over the canal, into Rathmines. ‘Nada. Chris was popular at school, plenty of mates, no enemies. The odd fight, but boys that age, that’s what they do; nothing major, nothing that took us anywhere. No girlfriend, not officially anyway. Three exes – they start young, nowadays – but we’re not talking true love, we’re talking a couple of snogs at the cinema and then everyone moves on; all the breakups were more than a year back and no hard feelings, as far as we could find out. He got on fine with the teachers – they said he got rowdy sometimes, but it was just too much energy, not badness. Average brains, no genius, no idiot; average worker. Got on fine with his parents, the little he saw of them. One sister, a lot younger, got on well with her. We pushed all of them – not because we thought there was anything there; because they were all we’d got. Nothing. Not a sniff of anything.’

‘Any bad habits?’

Conway shook her head. ‘Not even. Mates said he’d had the odd smoke at parties, both kinds, and he got pissed every now and then when they could get their hands on drink, but there was no alcohol in him when he died. No drugs in his system, either, and none in his stuff. No links to gambling. A couple of porn sites in his computer history, at his parents’ gaff, but what do you expect? That’s the worst he ever did, far as we could establish: few puffs of spliff and a bit of online minge.’

The side of her face was calm. Eyebrows a little down, focused on the driving. You’d have said, anyway, she was fine with her fuckton of nothing: just the way the dice roll, nothing to take to heart.

‘No motive, no leads, no witnesses; after a while we were chasing our tails. Interviewing the same people over and over. Getting the same answers. We had other cases; we couldn’t afford to spend another few months hitting ourselves over the head with this one. In the end I called it quits. Stuck it on the back burner and hoped something like this would turn up.’

I said, ‘How’d you end up as the primary?’

Conway’s foot went down on the pedal. ‘You mean, how’d a little girlie end up with a big case like this. I should’ve stuck to domestics. Yeah?’

‘No. I mean you were a newbie.’

‘So what? You saying that’s why we got nowhere?’

Not fine with it. Covering well enough to keep the squad lads off her back, but a long way from fine. ‘No, I’m not. I’m saying–’

‘Because fuck you. You can get out right here, get the fucking bus back to Cold Cases.’

If she hadn’t been driving, she’d have had a finger in my face. ‘No. I’m saying a case like this, a kid, a posh school: yous had to know it’d be a big one. Costello had seniority. How come he didn’t put his name on top?’

‘Because I’d earned it. Because he knew I’m a fucking good detective. You got that?’

Needle still sliding up, over the limit. ‘Got it,’ I said.

Bit of quiet. Conway eased off the pedal, but not a lot. We had hit the Terenure Road; once the MG got some space, it started showing what it could do. I said, once I’d left enough silence, ‘The car’s a beauty.’

‘Ever drive it?’

‘Not yet.’

Backwards nod, like that matched what she already thought of me. ‘A place like St Kilda’s, you have to come in up here.’ Hand higher than her head. ‘Get the respect.’

That told me something about Antoinette Conway. Me, I’d have picked out an old Polo, too many miles, too many layers of paint not quite hiding the dings. You come in playing low man on the totem, you get people off guard.

‘That kind of place, yeah?’

Her lip pulled up. ‘Jesus fuck. I thought they were gonna put me through a decontamination chamber, get rid of my accent. Or throw me a cleaner’s uniform and point me at the tradesmen’s entrance. You know what the fees are? They start at eight grand a year. That’s if you’re not boarding, or taking any extracurricular activities. Choir, piano, drama. You have any of that, in school?’

‘We had a football in the yard.’

Conway liked that. ‘One little geebag: I go into the holding room and call out her name for interview, and she goes, “Em, I can’t exactly go now, I’ve got my clarinet lesson in five?”’ That curl rising at the corner of her mouth again. Whatever she’d said to the girl, she’d enjoyed it. ‘Her interview lasted an hour. Hate that.’

‘The school,’ I said. ‘Snobby and good, or just snobby?’

‘I could win the Lotto, still wouldn’t send my kid there. But…’ One-shouldered shrug. ‘Small classes. Young Scientist awards everywhere. Everyone’s got perfect teeth, no one ever gets up the duff, and all the shiny little pedigree bitches go on to college. I guess it’s good, if you’re OK with your kid turning out a snobby shite.’

I said, ‘Holly’s da’s a cop. A Dub. From the Liberties.’

‘I know that. You think I missed that?’

‘He wouldn’t send her there if she was turning into a snobby shite.’

Conway edged the MG’s nose past a red light. Green: she floored it. Said, ‘She fancy you?’

I almost laughed. ‘She was just a kid: nine when we met, ten when it went to trial. I didn’t see her after that, till today.’

Conway shot me a look that said I was the kid here. ‘You’d be surprised. She a liar?’

I thought back. ‘She didn’t lie to me. Not that I caught, anyway. She was a good kid, back then.’

Conway said, ‘She’s a liar.’

‘What’d she say?’

‘Dunno. I didn’t catch her out either. Maybe she didn’t lie to me. But girls that age, they’re liars. All of them.’

I thought about saying, Next time you’ve got a trick question, save it for a suspect. Said, instead, ‘I don’t give a damn who’s a liar, as long as she’s not lying to me.’

Conway shifted up a gear. The MG loved it. ‘Tell us,’ she said. ‘What did your little pal Holly say about Chris Harper?’

‘Not a lot. He was just a guy. She knew him from around.’

‘Right. You think she was telling the truth?’

‘I haven’t worked that out yet.’

‘You go ahead and let me know when you do. Here’s why we paid special attention to Holly and her mates. There’s four of them that hang out together, or did back then: Holly Mackey, Selena Wynne, Julia Harte and Rebecca O’Mara. They’re like that.’ Crossed fingers. ‘Another girl in their class, Joanne Heffernan, she said the vic had been going out with Selena Wynne.’

‘So you figure that’s what he was doing in St Kilda’s. Snuck in to meet her.’

‘Yeah. Here’s something we didn’t release, so try not to blab it in interview: he had a condom in his pocket. Fuck-all else, no wallet, no phone – those were back in his room – just a condom.’ Conway craned her neck, spun the wheel, whipped us round a VW snail and out of the way of a lorry just in time. The lorry wasn’t happy. ‘Fuck you, you want to start with me?… And there were flowers on the body – that wasn’t released either. Hyacinths – those blue curly ones, real strong sweet smell? Four stems of them. They came from a flowerbed on the school grounds, not far from the scene, so the killer could’ve put them there, but…’ Shrug. ‘Guy in his girlfriend’s school after midnight, with a condom and flowers? I’m gonna say he was on a promise.’

‘The school was definitely the primary scene, yeah? He wasn’t dumped there after he died?’

‘Nah. The blow split his head right open, shitloads of blood. The way it flowed, the Tech Bureau worked out he stayed still after he was hit. No dump job, no trying to crawl for help, he didn’t even reach up and touch the wound – no blood on his hands. Just bang’ – she snapped her fingers – ‘and down he went.’

I said, ‘I’m betting Selena Wynne said she’d had no plans to meet him that night.’

‘Oh, yeah. The three mates said the same. Selena wasn’t meeting him, she wasn’t going out with him, she only knew him from around. Shocked, they were, that I’d suggest anything like that.’ A dry edge on Conway’s voice. Not convinced.

‘What did Chris Harper’s mates say?’

Snort. ‘“Urgh, dunno,” mostly. Sixteen-year-old boys, you’d get more sense going down the zoo and interviewing the chimp cage. There was one that could make sentences – Finn Carroll – but it’s not like he had much to tell us. They’re not staying up all night having heart-to-hearts, the way the girls are. They said yeah, Chris fancied Selena, but he fancied a lot of girls, and a lot of girls fancied him. As far as the guys knew, him and Selena never went further than that.’

‘Anything to contradict that? Contact on their phones, on Facebook?’

Conway shook her head. ‘No calls or texts between them, nothing on Facebook. These kids all have Facebook accounts, but the boarders mostly only use them during the holidays; both the schools block social networking sites on their computers, don’t allow smartphones. God forbid little Philippa runs off with some internet pervert she met on school time. Or even worse, little Philip. Imagine the lawsuit.’

‘So it’s just Joanne Heffernan’s evidence.’

‘Heffernan didn’t have evidence. All she had was “And then I saw him look at her, and then I saw her look at him, and then he said something to her this other time, so they were definitely shagging.” Her mates all swore they thought the same, but they would. She’s a poison bitch, Heffernan is. Her gang, they’re the cool crowd, and she’s the queen bee. The rest are petrified of her. Any of them blink without her say-so, they’ll be out in the cold, taking nonstop shit from her and the posse till they leave school. They say what they’re told.’

I said, ‘Holly and her lot. Cool crowd or not?’

Conway watched another red light and tapped two fingers on the steering wheel, in time to her blinker. ‘Odd crowd,’ she said, in the end. ‘Not the boss bitches; not part of Heffernan’s gang. But I wouldn’t say Heffernan gives them any hassle, either. She dropped Selena in the shit when she got the chance, nearly wet her knickers with the thrill, but she wouldn’t take them on face to face. They’re not the top of the totem pole, but they’re high enough.’

Something in my face, start of a grin.

‘What?’

‘You’re talking like these are girl gangs from East LA. Razor blades in their hair.’

‘Close,’ said Conway, and swung the MG off the main road. ‘Close enough.’

The houses turned bigger, set farther back off the street. Big cars, sparkly new ones; not a lot of those about, these days. Electric gates everywhere. One front garden had a statue thing made of polished concrete, looked like a five-foot mug handle.

I said, ‘So you fancied Selena for it? Or someone who was jealous of her going out with Chris, on one side or the other?’

Conway slowed down – not a lot, for a residential area. Thought.

‘I’m not saying I fancied Selena. You’ll see her; I wouldn’t’ve said she could get the job done, not right. Heffernan was jealous as fuck – Selena’s twice the looker Heffernan is – but I’m not saying I fancied her either. Not even saying I believed her. I’m just saying there was something. Just something.’

And there it was, probably: the reason she had let me come along. Something in the corner of her eye, gone when she looked at it straight. Costello hadn’t been able to pin it down either. Conway thought maybe a fresh pair of eyes; maybe me.

I said, ‘Could a teenage girl have done the job? Physically, like?’

‘Yeah. No problem. The weapon – and this wasn’t released either – the weapon was a hoe out of the groundskeepers’ shed. One blow, right through Chris Harper’s skull and into his brain. The Bureau said, with the long handle and the sharp blade, it wouldn’t have taken a lot of strength. A kid could’ve done it, easy, if she got a good swing.’

I started to ask something, but Conway spun the car into a turn – so sudden, no blinker, I almost missed the moment we crossed over: high black-iron gates, stone guardhouse, iron arch with ‘St Kilda’s College’ picked out in gold. Inside the gates she braked. Let me take a good look.

The drive swung a semicircle of white pebbles around a gentle slope of clipped green grass that went on forever. At the top of that slope was the school.

Someone’s ancestral home, once, someone’s mansion with grooms holding dancing carriage horses, with tiny-waisted ladies drifting arm in arm across the grass. Two hundred years old, more? A long building, soft grey stone, three tall windows up and more than a dozen across. A portico held up by slim curl-topped columns; a rooftop balustrade, pillars curved delicate as vases. Perfect, it was; perfect, everything balanced, every inch. Sun melting over it, slow as butter on toast.

Maybe I should have hated it. Community-school me, classes in run-down prefabs; keep your coat on when the heating went every winter, arrange the geography posters to cover the mould patches, dare each other to touch the dead rat in the jacks. Maybe I should have looked at that school and wanted to take a shite in the portico.

It was beautiful. I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.

‘Look at that,’ said Conway. Leaning back in her seat, eyes narrow. ‘This is the only time I’m sorry I’m a cop. When I see a shitpile like this and I can’t petrol-bomb it to fuck.’

Watching me, for my reaction. A test.

I could’ve passed, easy. Could’ve given out some stink about spoilt rich brats and my corpo-house life. Mostly I would’ve. Why not? I’d been wishing for the Murder squad for a long time. Work your way closer, make it yours.

Conway wasn’t someone I wanted to bond with.

I said, ‘It’s beautiful.’

Her head going back, mouth twisting sideways, what could have been a grin if it hadn’t been something else. Disappointment?

‘They’re gonna love you in here,’ she said. ‘Come on; let’s find you some West Brit arse to lick.’ She gunned it and we went shooting up the drive, pebbles flying out from under the wheels.

The car park was round to the right, screened off by tall dark-green trees – cypress, I was pretty sure; wished I knew trees better. No sparkly Mercs here, but no wrecks, either; the teachers could afford to drive something decent. Conway parked in a ‘Reserved’ space.

Odds were, no one at St Kilda’s was going to see the MG, not unless they’d been looking out of a front window when we came in the gate. Conway had picked it for herself; for how she wanted to go in, not how she wanted people to see her go in. I rewrote what I thought of her, again.

She swung herself out of the car, threw her bag over her shoulder – nothing girly, black leather satchel, more butch than most of the Murder lads’ briefcases. ‘I’ll take you round the scene first. Let you get your bearings. Come on.’

Through the cool curtain of shade under the screening trees. A sound like a sigh, above us; Conway’s head snapped up, but it was just wind nosing through the dense branches. On our left, when we came out into the sun again: the back of the school. Right: another great down-slope of grass, bordered by a low hedge.

The main building had wings, one stretching out to the rear from each end. Built on later, maybe, but built to match. Same grey stone, same light hand on the ornaments; someone going for line, not for frills.

Conway said, ‘Classrooms, hall, offices, all the school stuff, they’re in the main building. That’ – the near wing – ‘that’s the nuns’ gaff. Separate entrance, no connecting door to the school; the wing’s locked up at night, but all the nuns have keys, and they’ve got their own rooms. Any of them could’ve snuck out and bashed Chris Harper. There’s only a dozen of them left, most of them are about a hundred and none of them’s under fifty; but like I said before, it didn’t take a bodybuilder.’

‘Any motive?’

She squinted up at the windows. Sun flashed off them into our eyes. ‘Nuns are fucked up. Maybe one of them saw him stick his hand up some girl’s jumper, figured he was a minion of Satan, corrupting the innocent.’

She headed across the smooth lawn at a diagonal, away from the building. Nothing said keep off the grass, but it looked it. Two heads like us in a place like this: I was waiting for a gamekeeper to burst out of the trees and chase us off the grounds, attack dogs chewing the arses out of our trousers.

‘The other wing, that’s the boarders. Locked down tight as a nun’s gee at night; the girls don’t have keys. Bars on the ground-floor windows. Door at the back there, but it’s alarmed at night. Connecting door to the school on the ground floor, and that’s where it gets interesting. The school windows don’t have bars. And they’re not alarmed.’

I said, ‘The connecting door isn’t kept locked?’

‘Yeah, course it is. Day and night. But if there’s something important, like if some boarder forgets her homework in her room, or if she needs a book from the library to get some project done, she can ask for a key. The school secretary and the nurse and the matron – I’m not joking you, there’s a matron – they’ve got one each. And January last year, four months before Chris Harper, the nurse’s key went missing.’

‘They didn’t change the lock?’

Conway rolled her eyes. Not just her face was on the edge of foreign; something in the way she moved, too, in the straight back and the swing of her shoulders, the quickfire expressions. ‘You’d think, right? Nah. The nurse kept the key on a shelf, right above her bin; she figured it’d just fallen off, got dumped with the rubbish. Got a new one cut and forgot the whole thing, tra-la-la, everything’s grand, till we came asking questions. Honest to Jaysus, I don’t know who’s the most naïve in this place, the kiddies or the staff. If a boarder had that key? She could go through the connecting door into the school any night, nip out a window, do whatever she wanted till she had to show for breakfast.’

‘There’s no security guard?’

‘There is, yeah. Night watchman, they call him; I think they think it sounds classier. He sits in that gatehouse we passed coming in, does the rounds every two hours. Dodging him wouldn’t be a problem, though. Wait’ll you see the size of the grounds. Over here.’

A gate in the hedge, wrought-iron curlicues, long soft squeak when Conway swung it open. Beyond it was a tennis court, a playing field, and then: more green, this time carefully organised to look that bit less organised; not wild, just wild enough. Mishmash of trees that had taken centuries, birch, oak, sycamore. Little pebbled paths twisting between flowerbeds mounded with yellow and lavender. All the greens were spring ones, the ones so soft your hand would go right through.

Conway snapped her fingers in my face. ‘Focus.’

I said, ‘What do the boarders sleep in? Dorms or single rooms?’

‘First- and second-years, six to a dorm. Third- and fourth-years, four to a room. Fifth- and sixth-years, two to a room. So yeah, you’d have at least one roommate to worry about, if you were sneaking out. But here’s the thing: from third year up, you get to choose who you share with. So whoever’s in your room, chances are they’re already on your side.’

Down the side of the tennis court – nets loose, couple of balls rolled into a corner. I still felt the school windows staring at my back. ‘How many boarders are there?’

‘Sixty-odd. But we narrowed it down. The nurse gave some kid the key on a Tuesday morning, kid brought it straight back. Friday lunchtime, someone else asks for it and it’s gone. The nurse’s office is locked when she’s not there – she swears she managed to get that right, at least, stop anyone from mainlining Benylin or whatever she keeps in there. So if someone nicked the key, it was someone who was in to the nurse between Tuesday and Friday.’

Conway shoved a branch out of her way and headed down one of the little paths, deeper into the grounds. Bees working away at apple blossom. Birds up above, not rattly magpies, just little happy birds getting the gossip.

‘The nurse’s log said there were four of those. Kid called Emmeline Locke-Blaney, first-year, boarder; she was so petrified of us she practically wet herself, I don’t see her being able to keep anything back. Catríona Morgan, fifth-year, day girl – which doesn’t rule her out, she could’ve passed the key on to a mate who boarded, but they clique up pretty tight; day girls and boarders don’t really mix, don’tchaknow.’ A year on, every name off by heart, easy as that. Chris Harper had got to her, all right. ‘Alison Muldoon, third-year, boarder – one of Heffernan’s little bitches. And Rebecca O’Mara.’

I said, ‘Holly Mackey’s gang again.’

‘Yeah. See why I’m not convinced your little buddy’s telling you everything?’

‘Their reasons for going to the nurse. Did they check out?’

‘Emmeline was the only one with a verifiable reason: sprained her ankle playing hockey or polo or whatever, needed it strapped. The other three had headaches or period cramps or dizzy fits or some bullshit. Could’ve been legit, or they could’ve just wanted to get out of class, or…’ A lift of Conway’s eyebrow. ‘They got a couple of painkillers and a nice lie-down, right by the shelf with the key.’

‘And they all said they didn’t touch it.’

‘Swore to Jesus. Like I said, I believed Emmeline. The rest…’ The eyebrow again. Sun through the leaves striped her cheeks like war paint. ‘The headmistress swore none of her girls would yada yada and the key had to have gone in the bin, but she changed the lock on the connecting door all the same. Better late than never.’ Conway stopped, pointed. ‘Look. See that over there?’

Long low building, off to our right through the trees, with a bit of a yard in front. Pretty. Old, but all the faded brick was scrubbed clean.

‘That used to be the stables. For my lord and lady’s horses. Now it’s the shed for their highnesses’ groundskeepers – takes three of them, to keep this place up. In there’s where the hoe was.’

No movement in the yard. I’d been wondering for a while now; wondering where everyone was. Few hundred people in this school, minimum, had to be, and: nothing. A thin tink tink tink somewhere far away, metal on metal. That was it.

I said, ‘Is the shed kept locked?’

‘Nah. There’s a cupboard inside, where they keep the weedkiller and wasp poison and whatever; that’s locked, all right. But the actual stables? Walk right in, help yourself. Never occurred to this shower that practically everything in there is a weapon. Spades, hoes, shears, hedge trimmers; you could wipe out half a school with what’s in there. Or get good money from a fence.’ Conway jerked her head away from a cloud of midges, started moving again, down the path. ‘I said that to the headmistress. Know what she said? “We don’t attract the type who think in those terms, Detective.” With a face on her like I’d shat on her carpet. Fucking idiot. Kid’s lying out here, bashed to death, and she’s telling me their whole world’s made of frappuccinos and cello lessons and no one here ever has bad thoughts. See what I mean about naïve?’

I said, ‘That’s not naïve. That’s deliberate. And a place like this, things come from the top down. If the headmistress says everything’s perfect, and no one’s allowed to say it’s not… That’s not good.’

Conway’s head turning to look at me, full on and curious, like she was seeing something new. It felt good, walking side by side with a woman whose eyes met mine level, whose stride was the same length as mine. Felt easy. For a second I wished we liked each other.

She said, ‘Not good for the investigation, you mean? Or just not good?’

‘Both, yeah. But I meant just not good. Dangerous.’

I thought I had a slagging coming, for being dramatic. Instead she nodded. She said, ‘Something was that, all right.’

Round a bend in the path, out from thick trees and into a dapple of sun. Conway said, ‘That over there. That’s where the flowers came from.’

Blue, a blue that changed your eyes like you’d never seen blue before. Hyacinths: thousands of them, tumbling down a soft slope under trees, like they were being poured out of some great basket with no bottom. The smell could have set you seeing things.

Conway said, ‘I put two uniforms on that flowerbed. Going through every stalk, looking for broken-off ones. Two hours, they were there. Probably they still hate my guts, but I don’t give a fuck, ’cause they found the stems. Four of them, right about there, near the edge. The Bureau matched the break patterns to the flowers on Chris’s body. Not a hundred per cent definite, but near enough.’

That brought it home to me, that bed. Here, in this place that looked like nothing bad could ever happen in all the world: just last time those flowers bloomed, Chris Harper had come here looking for something. He must have smelled this, clearest thing in the dark around him. Last thing left, when everything else had dissolved away.

I asked, ‘Where was he?’

Conway said, ‘There.’ Pointed.

Maybe thirty feet off the path, up the slope, across short grass and past bushes clipped into neat balls: a grove of those same tall maybe-cypress trees, dense, dark, circled round a clearing. The grass in the middle had been left to grow long and wild. Haze of seed-heads, floating over it.

Conway took us around the side of the flowerbed and up. The slope pulled in my thighs. The air in the clearing was cooler. Deep.

I said, ‘How dark was it?’

‘Not. Cooper – you know Cooper, yeah? the pathologist? – Cooper said he died around one in the morning, give or take an hour or two either way. It was a clear night, half-moon, and the moon would’ve been highest a little after one. Visibility was about as good as it gets, for the middle of the night.’

Things moved in my head. Chris straightening with his hands full of blue, squinting to make out the quick shape in the moonlight glade, his girl, or…? And side by side with that, slipsliding in and out, the opposite. Someone stock-still in a shadow with their feet among flowers, her feet? his feet?, watching Chris’s face turn from side to side in the white among the cypress trees, watching him wait, waiting for him to stop watching.

Meanwhile, Conway was waiting and watching me. She reminded me of Holly. Neither of them would’ve liked that, but the narrowed slant to the eye, like a test, like a game of Snakes and Ladders: go careful: right move and you’ll be let in one more little step, wrong move and you’re back to square one.

I said, ‘What angle did the hoe hit him at?’

Right question. Conway took me by the arm, moved me a couple of yards nearer the middle of the clearing. Her hand was strong; not I’m-detaining-you cop, not I-fancy-you girl, just strong; well able to fix a car, or punch someone who needed punching. She turned me facing down to the flowers and the path, my back to the trees.

‘He was about here.’

Something buzzed, a bumblebee or a faraway lawnmower, I couldn’t tell; the acoustics were all swirl and ricochet. Seed-heads waved around my shins.

‘Someone came up behind him, or got him to turn away. Someone standing about here.’

Close behind me. I twisted my head around. She lifted the imaginary hoe over her left shoulder, two-handed. Brought it down, her whole body behind it. Somewhere behind the chirpy spring-sounds, the swish and thud shivered the air. Even though she was holding nothing, I flinched.

The corner of Conway’s mouth went up. She held up her empty hands.

I said, ‘And he went down.’

‘Got him here.’ She put the edge of her hand against the back of my skull, high up and to the left of the centre line, slanting up from left to right. ‘Chris was a couple of inches shorter than you: five foot ten. The killer wouldn’t’ve had to be tall. Over five foot, under six, was all Cooper could say from the angle of the wound. Probably right-handed.’

Her feet rustling, as she moved back from me. ‘The grass,’ I said. ‘Was it like this back then?’

Right question again, good boy. ‘Nah. They let it grow afterwards – some kind of memorial thing or the place spooks the groundskeepers, I don’t know. No one sees this part, so I guess it doesn’t ruin the school’s image. Back then, though, the grass was like the rest: short. If you had soft shoes, you could sneak across it without getting heard, no problem.’

And without leaving shoeprints, or at least none that the Bureau could use. The paths were pebbled: no prints there, either.

‘Where’d you find the hoe?’

‘Back in the shed, where it belonged. We spotted it because it matched what Cooper said about the weapon. The Bureau took about five seconds to confirm it. She – he, she, whatever – she’d tried to clean off the blade, smacked it into the earth over there a couple of times’ – the ground under one of the cypresses – ‘rubbed it on the grass. Smart; smarter than wiping it down with a cloth, then you’ve got the cloth to get rid of. But there was still plenty of blood left.’

‘Any prints?’

Conway shook her head. ‘The groundskeepers’. No one else’s epithelials, either, so no touch DNA. We figured she wore gloves.’

‘“She,”’ I said.

Conway said, ‘That’s what I’ve got. A load of shes and not a lot of hes. Back last year, one theory was it was some pervert, snuck in here to crack one off watching the girls’ windows or playing with their tennis rackets or whatever; Chris came in to meet someone, caught the guy out. Doesn’t fit the evidence – what, the guy had his mickey in one hand and a hoe in the other? – but a lot of people liked it anyway. Better than thinking it was some cute little rich girl. From a beautiful school like this.’

The slant to the eye again. Testing. A cross-beam of sun lightened her eyes to amber, like a wolf’s.

I said, ‘It wasn’t an outsider. Not with that postcard. If it had been, why all the secrecy? Why wouldn’t the girl just ring you up and tell you what she knew? If she’s not making up the lot, then she knows something about someone inside the school. And she’s scared.’

Conway said, ‘And we missed her first time round.’

A grim layer stamped on her voice. Not just hard on other people, Conway.

‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘They’re young, these girls. If one of them saw something, heard something, she might not have copped what it meant; not at the time. Specially if it had to do with sex, or relationships. This generation know all the facts, they’ve seen the porn sites, probably they know more positions than you and me put together; but when it comes to the real thing, they’re miles out of their depth. A kid could see something and know it was important, but not understand why. Now she’s a year older, she’s got a bit more of a clue; something makes her look back, and all of a sudden it clicks together.’

Conway thought about that. ‘Maybe,’ she said. But the grim layer stayed put: not letting herself off that easy. ‘Doesn’t matter. Even if she didn’t know she had info, it’s our job to know for her. She was right in there’ – backwards flick of her head, to the school – ‘we sat there and interviewed her, and we let her walk away. And I’m not fucking happy about it.’

It felt like the end of the conversation. When she didn’t say anything else I started to turn towards the path, but Conway wasn’t moving. Feet apart, hands in her pockets, staring into the trees. Chin out, like they were the enemy.

She said, without looking at me, ‘I got to be the primary because we thought this was a slam-dunk. That first day, the morgue boys hadn’t even taken away the body, we found half a kilo of E in the stables, back of the poison cupboard. One of the groundskeepers came up on the system: prior for supply. And St Colm’s, back at the Christmas dance they’d caught a couple of kids with E; we never got the supplier, the kids never squelt. Chris wasn’t one of the ones who had the E, but still… We figured it was our lucky day: two solves for the price of one. Chris snuck out to buy drugs off the groundskeeper, some fight over money, bang.’

That long sigh again, above us. This time I saw it, moving through the branches. Like the trees were listening; like they would’ve been sad about us, sad for us, only they’d heard it all so many thousand times before.

‘Costello… He was sound, Costello. The squad used to slag him off, call him a depressing fucker, but he was decent. He said, “You put your name on this one. Mark your card.” He must’ve known then, he was gonna put in his papers this year; he didn’t need a big solve. I did.’

Her voice was indoors-quiet, small-room quiet, falling through the wide sunshine. I felt the size of the stillness and green all round us. The breadth of it; the height, trees taller than the school. Older.

‘The groundskeeper alibied out. He’d had mates round to his gaff for poker and a few cans; two of them kipped on his sofa. We got him for possession with intent, but the murder…’ Conway shook her head. ‘I should’ve known,’ she said. She didn’t explain. ‘I should’ve known it wasn’t gonna be that simple.’

A bee thumped into the white of her shirt front; clung on, addled. Conway’s head snapped down and the rest of her went still. The bee crawled past the top button, reached over the edge of the cloth, feeling for skin. Conway breathed slow and shallow. I saw her hand come out of her pocket and rise.

The bee got its head together and took off, into the sunlight. Conway flicked some speck off her shirt where it had been. Then she turned and headed down the slope, past the hyacinths and back to the path.