The scraping of satisfaction on her voice, I didn’t feel that. Instead I felt the wind that would hit you from every side, raw-edged and gritty, smelling of spices and petrol, whirling hot in your hair, when you stepped out of a place like this and the door slammed behind you.
I said, ‘I’d say Chris getting murdered made the great big world hard to miss.’
‘You think? Even that was all about each other, for these. “Look, I cried harder than her, so I’m a better person.” “We all saw his ghost together, look how close we are.”’
I moved on to Orla’s bed. Conway said, ‘I remember you from training.’
Her head was in the wardrobe, I couldn’t see her face. I said – carefully, skimming back – ‘Yeah? Good or bad?’
‘You don’t remember, no?’
If I’d talked to her beyond ‘Howya’ in corridors, I’d forgotten. ‘Tell me I didn’t make you do pushups.’
‘Would you remember if you had?’
‘Ah, Jaysus. What’d I do?’
‘Relax the kacks. I’m just wrecking your head.’ I could hear the grin in Conway’s voice. ‘You never did anything on me.’
‘Thank fuck. You had me worried there.’
‘Nah, you were grand. I don’t think we ever even talked. I only clocked you to start with because of the hair.’ Conway pulled something out of a hoodie pocket, grimaced: wad of tissues. ‘After that, but, I kept noticing because you did your own thing. You had mates, but you weren’t hanging out of anyone. All the rest, fuck me: they spent the whole time crawling up each other’s hole. Half of them trying to network, like the little bastards at Colm’s: if I get all buddy-buddy with the Commissioner’s kid, I’ll never have to do traffic duty and I’ll make Inspector by thirty. The other half trying to bond, like this lot here: oh, these are the best days of our lives and we’ll all be best pals forever and tell these stories at our retirement dinners. I was like, what the fuck? You’re grown adults; you’re here to learn the job, not to swap friendship bracelets and do each other’s eyeshadow.’ She shoved clothes down the crowded rail. ‘I liked that you didn’t get sucked into that either.’
I didn’t tell her: a part of me watched my classmates bonding away like goodo, and wished. Just like Conway said, it was my own choice that I wasn’t in there swapping friendship bracelets with the best of them. Mostly that made it OK.
I said, ‘If you think back, we were kids; only a couple of years older than this lot. People wanted to belong. Nothing strange there.’
Conway thought, unrolling tights. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘It’s not the making friends that gets on my tits. Everyone needs those. But I had mine back at home. Still do.’
Glance at me. I said, ‘Yeah.’
‘Right. So you didn’t need to go chasing more. If you make friends inside some bubble that’s going to burst on you in a couple of years – like training, or like here – you’re an idiot. You start thinking that’s the whole world, nowhere else exists, then you end up with all this hysterical shite. Best friends forever, she-said-you-said-I-said wars, everyone working themselves into fits over they don’t even know what. Nothing’s just normal; everything’s right up here, all the time.’
Hand above head level. I thought of the Murder squad room. Wondered if Conway was thinking of it too.
‘Then you head out into the big bad world,’ she said, ‘everything looks different all of a sudden, and you’re fucked.’
I ran a hand under the slats of Joanne’s bed-frame. ‘Orla and Alison, you mean? No way Joanne’s going to be hanging out with them in college.’
Conway snorted. ‘Yeah, not a chance. Here, they’re useful; out there, they’ll be gone. And they’ll be devastated. I wasn’t thinking of them, though. I meant the gangs that actually genuinely care about each other. Like your Holly and her mates.’
‘I’d say they’ll still be mates on the outside.’ I hoped so. That something special, gilding the air. You want to believe it’ll last forever.
‘Could be. Probably, even. That’s not the point. The point is, right now, they don’t give a fuck about anyone except each other. Great, that’s cute, I bet they’re delighted with themselves.’ Conway threw a handful of bras back into a drawer, slammed it. ‘But when they get out there? That’s not going to be an option any more. They won’t be able to hang out of each other’s hole twenty-four-seven, ignore everyone else. Other people are going to start mattering, whether these four like that or not. The rest of the world’s gonna be there. It’s gonna be real. And that’s gonna fuck up their heads like they can’t even imagine.’
She pulled out another drawer, hard enough that it nearly fell on her foot. ‘I don’t like bubbles.’
Down the back of Joanne’s headboard: dust and nothing. I said, ‘How about the squad?’
‘What about it?’
‘Murder’s a bubble.’
Conway flipped out a T-shirt with a snap. ‘Yeah,’ she said. Jaw set like she was seeing fights ahead. ‘Murder’s a lot like here. The difference is, I’m there for good.’
I thought about asking if that meant she was planning on making friends on the squad. Decided I had better sense.
Conway said, like she’d heard me anyway, ‘And I’m still not gonna get all buddy-buddy with the squad lads. I don’t want to belong. I want to do my fucking job.’
I did my fucking job – ran my hand over shiny posters; nothing – and thought about Conway. Tried to work out if I envied her, or felt sorry for her, or thought she was talking bollix.
We were finishing up when Conway’s phone buzzed. Message.
‘Sophie,’ she said, slamming the wardrobe door. ‘Here we go.’ This time I went to her shoulder without waiting for an invitation.
The e-mail said, Records for the number that texted Moran. My guy’s working on the actual texts, says they should still be in the system but might take him an hour or two. Probably all ‘OMGLOLWTFbwahaha!!!!’ but you want them, you’re getting them. Enjoy. S.
The attachment was pages long; Chris had been getting plenty of use out of his special phone. He’d activated it at the end of August, just before he went back to school – good little Boy Scout, coming prepared. By the middle of September, two numbers were showing up. No calls, but plenty of texts and media messages back and forth with both, every day, a few times a day. ‘You were right,’ Conway said, hard-edged. I felt her think it: witnesses she should have found.
‘Ladies’ man, our Chris.’
‘And smart, too. See all these picture messages? Those weren’t pics of fluffy kitties. If one of his girls started threatening to tell the world, these would keep her nice and quiet.’
I said, ‘That’ll be why none of them said it to you last year. They were hoping if they kept their mouths shut, no one would link these to them.’
Conway’s head came round, suspicious, ready to shove my comfort up my hole. I kept my eyes on the screen till she turned back to it.
October, both of Chris’s girls got the boot – same MO we’d seen on Joanne’s records: he ignored their texts, the flood of calls from one of them, till they gave up. As they faded, Joanne’s number kicked in. By the middle of November, Chris was two-timing her; after Joanne faded away in December, the other girl hung on a couple more weeks, but by Christmas she was history. January, a new number swapped a handful of texts and vanished: something that never got off the ground.
Conway said, ‘I wondered all along. Why Chris hadn’t had a girlfriend in a year. Popular guy like him, good-looking, did fine with the girls before; it didn’t add up. I should’ve . . .’ Quick jerk of her head, angry. She didn’t bother finishing.
Last week in February, the next run of texts started. One a day, then two, then half a dozen. All the one number. Conway scrolled down: March, April, the texts kept coming.
She tapped the screen. ‘That’ll be Selena.’
I said, ‘And he wasn’t two-timing her.’