But there was a grin at the corner of her mouth. I said, ‘Better than I can, anyway.’
‘Like being back in school. “D’you think she’s Done It yet?” All we talked about, when I was that age.’
‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Believe me.’
The grin hardened over. ‘I believe you, all right. And for yous, if a girl did the business, she was a slut; if she didn’t, she was frigid. Either way, yous had a perfect reason to treat her like dirt.’
It was a bit true; not a lot, not for me. I said, ‘No. Either way, she got even more exciting. If she did the do, then there was a chance you might get to have sex, and when you’re a young fella that’s the biggest thing in the world. If she didn’t, there was a chance she might think you were special enough to do it with. That’s pretty big too, believe it or not. Having a girl think you’re something special.’
‘Smooth talker, you. Bet that got you into a lot of bras.’
‘I’m only telling you. You asked.’
Conway thought that over, chewing apple. Decided she believed me; enough, anyway.
‘If I was guessing,’ she said, ‘back then, I’d’ve said Julia and Gemma had had sex, Rebecca’d never even had a snog, and the rest were somewhere in between.’
‘Julia? Not Selena?’
‘Why? Because Selena’s got bigger tits, she’s the slapper?’
‘Jaysus! No. I wasn’t noticing their . . . Ah, fuck’s sake, now.’
But Conway was grinning again: winding me up, and she’d snared me. ‘You fuck,’ I said, ‘that’s disgusting, that is,’ and she laughed. She had a good laugh, rich, open.
She was starting to like me, whether she liked it or not. People do, mostly. Not bragging here; just saying. You have to know your strengths, in this job.
The mad part was, a bit of me was starting to like her too.
‘Here’s the thing,’ Conway said, laugh gone. ‘If I was guessing now, I’d guess the same again about Holly’s gang.’
‘So?’
‘The four of them. Pretty girls, right?’
‘Jesus, Conway. What do you take me for?’
‘I’m not calling you a perv. I’m saying when you were sixteen. Would you have been into them? Asked them out, Facebooked them, whatever kids do these days?’
When I was sixteen, I would’ve seen those girls like polished things in museum cases: stare all you want, get drunk on the dazzle of them, but no touching, unless you’ve got the tools and the balls to smash through reinforced glass and dodge armed guards.
They looked different, now I’d seen that board. I couldn’t see pretty, any more, without seeing dangerous underneath. Splinters.
I said, ‘They’re grand. Holly and Selena are good-looking, yeah. I’d say they get plenty of attention – not from the same guys, probably. Rebecca’s going to be good-looking soon enough, but when I was sixteen I might not have copped that, and she doesn’t seem like great crack, so I’d have kept moving. Julia: she’s no supermodel, but she’s not bad, and she’s got plenty of attitude; I’d’ve looked twice. I’d say she does OK.’
Conway nodded. ‘That’s about what I’d’ve said. So why no boyfriends? If I’m guessing right, why’ve none of them got any action in the last year?’
‘Rebecca’s a late bloomer. Still at boys are icky and the whole thing’s embarrassing.’
‘Right. And the other three?’
‘Boarding school. No guys. Not a lot of free time.’
‘Hasn’t stopped Heffernan’s gang. Two yeses, one no, one sort-of: that’s what I’d expect, give or take. Holly’s gang: no, no, no, no, straight down the line. No one takes a second to decide what to say, no one says it’s complicated, no one’s giggling and blushing, nothing. Just flat-out no.’
‘You figure what? They’re gay?’
Shrug. ‘All four of them? Could be, but the odds say no. They’re a close bunch, though. Scare one of them off the fellas, you’d scare off the lot.’
I said, ‘You think someone did something to one of them.’
Conway threw her apple core. She had a good arm; it skimmed long and low between the trees, smashed into a bush with a rattle that sent a couple of small birds panicking upwards. She said, ‘And I think something’s fucked up Selena’s head. And I don’t believe in coincidences.’
She pulled out her phone, nodded at my apple. ‘Finish that. I’m gonna check my messages, then we move.’
Still giving the orders, but her tone had changed. I’d passed the test, or we had: the click was there.
Your dream partner grows in the back of your mind, secret, like your dream girl. Mine grew up with violin lessons, floor-to-high-ceiling books, red setters, a confidence he took for granted and a dry sense of humour no one but me would get. Mine was everything that wasn’t Conway, and I would’ve bet hers was everything that wasn’t me. But the click was there. Maybe, just for a few days, we could be good enough for each other.
I shoved the rest of my apple in my coffee cup, found my mobile too. ‘Sophie,’ Conway told me, phone to her ear. ‘No prints on anything. The lads in Documents say the words came out of a book, medium quality, probably fifty to seventy years old going by the typeface and the paper. From the focus on the photo, Chris wasn’t the main subject; he was just in the background, someone cropped out the rest. Nothing on the location yet, but she’s running comparisons with photos from the original investigation.’
When I turned on my phone, it beeped: a text. Conway’s head came round.
A number I didn’t recognise. The text was so far from what I was expecting, took my eyes a second to grab hold of it.
Joanne kept the key to the boarders wing/school door taped inside the Life of St Therese, third year common room bookshelf. It could be gone now but it was there a year ago.
I held the phone out to Conway.
Her face went focused. She held her mobile next to mine, tapped and flicked fast at the screen.
Said, ‘The number’s none of our girls, or it wasn’t last year. None of Chris’s friends, either.’
All their numbers, still on her phone a year later. No thread cut, not even the finest.
I said, ‘I’ll text back. Ask who it is.’
Conway thought. Nodded.
Hi – thanks for that. Sorry, I don’t have everyone’s numbers, who’s this?
I passed it to Conway. She read it three times, gnawing apple-juice sticky off her thumb. Said, ‘Go.’
I hit Send.
Neither of us said it; no need. If the text was true, then Joanne and at least one other girl, probably more, had had a way to get out of the school the night Chris Harper was killed. One of them could have seen something.
One of them could have done something.
If the text was true, then today had turned into something different. Not just about finding the card girl, not any more.
We waited. Down on the playing field, the rhythm of the hockey sticks had turned ragged: the girls had spotted us, they were missing easy shots craning over their shoulders trying to pick us out of the shadows. Little feisty birds clicking and wing-flipping in and out of the trees above us. Sun fading and blooming as thin clouds shifted. Nothing.
I said, ‘Ring it?’
‘Ring it.’
It rang out. The voicemail greeting was the default one, droid woman telling me to leave a message. I hung up.
I said, ‘It’s one of our eight.’
‘Oh, yeah. Anything else is way too much coincidence. And it’s not your Holly. She brought you the card, she’d bring you the key.’
Conway pulled out her phone again. Rang one number after another: Hello, this is Detective Conway, just confirming that we still have the correct phone number for you, in case we need to get in touch . . . All the voices were recorded – ‘School hours,’ Conway said, tapping; ‘phones have to be switched off in class’ – but all of them were the right ones. None of our girls had changed her number.
Conway said, ‘You got a pal at any of the mobile networks?’
‘Not yet.’ Neither did she, or she wouldn’t have asked. You stockpile useful pals, build yourself a nice fat list, over time. I felt it like a thump: us, two rookies, in the middle of this.
‘Sophie does.’ Conway was dialling again. ‘She’ll get us the full records on that number. By the end of the day, guaranteed.’
I said, ‘It’ll be unregistered.’
‘Yeah, it will. But I want to know who else it’s been texting. If Chris was meeting someone, he arranged it somehow. We never found out how.’ She slid down off the wall, phone to her ear. ‘Meanwhile, let’s go see if Little Miss Text’s fucking us around.’