I said, ‘If Holly was getting into trouble at home, we’ll find out.’
‘Good boy. I’d expect no less.’
‘I’m asking you to save us the time and hassle.’
‘No problem. The biggest trouble Holly ever got into was getting grounded for not tidying her room. Hope that helps.’
We’d be checking. Mackey knew it. ‘Thanks,’ I said. Nodded.
He was going in. I said, before his hand reached the door handle, ‘I’d still love to know. The boarding, man. Why? It doesn’t come cheap. Someone wanted it pretty bad.’
Him watching me, amused, the way he used to seven years back, big dog watching feisty puppy. Seven years is a long time.
‘I know it’s nothing to do with our case, but it’s going to keep at me. So I’m asking.’
Mackey said, ‘Out of curiosity. Man to man.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Bollix. You’re asking detective to suspect’s father.’
Unblinking, daring me to deny it: God, no, she’s not a suspect . . . I said, ‘I’m asking.’
Mackey examined me. Did some kind of maths behind his eyes.
He found his smokes again. Flipped one into the side of his mouth.
‘Let me ask you this,’ he said, through it. Cupped his hand around the flame. ‘Just offhand, how much time would you guess Holly spends with my side of the family?’
‘Not a lot.’
‘Good guess. She sees one of my sisters a couple of times a year. On Olivia’s side there’s a pair of Christmastime cousins, and there’s Olivia’s ma, who buys Holly designer shite and takes her to poncy restaurants. And, since Olivia and I were split up or splitting for most of the relevant time-frame, Holly’s an only child.’
He leaned back in the doorway, flicked the lighter and watched the flame. He was smoking this one differently, taking his time on every drag.
‘You were right about how we picked St Kilda’s – well done there: Olivia’s alma mater. And you were right about me not being into the boarding idea. Holly asked at the beginning of second year, I said over my dead body. She kept begging, I kept saying hell no, but in the end I asked why she wanted it so badly. Holly said it was because of her mates – Becca and Selena were boarding already, Julia was running the same campaign on her folks. The four of them wanted to be together.’
Flipped the lighter spinning into the air, caught it.
‘She’s smart, my girl Holly. The next few months, any day she had one of her mates over, she was a holy angel: helping around the house, doing her homework, never a complaint about anything, happy happy joy joy. When she wasn’t having a mate round, she was a raging pain in the hole. Trailing round the house like something out of an Italian opera, giving us these accusing lip-trembly stares; ask her to do anything and she’d burst into tears and fling herself into her room – don’t get overexcited there, Detective, they all throw drama fits, it’s not a sign of juvenile delinquency. But after a while, Liv and me were dreading the days it was just the three of us. Holly had us trained like a pair of German shepherds.’
‘Stubborn,’ I said. ‘Must get it from your wife.’
Wry sideways look. ‘Stubborn would’ve got her nowhere. If it was just that, I would’ve kept taking the piss out of her till she dropped the act; would’ve been a pleasure. But one evening Holly’s throwing a full-on teen-queen strop – I can’t even remember why, I think we’d said she couldn’t go over to Julia’s – and she yells, “They’re the only people I trust to be there no matter what. They’re like my sisters! Because of you guys, they’re the only sisters I’m ever going to have! And you’re keeping me away from them!” And off she ran upstairs, to slam her door and sob into her pillow about how unfair it all was.’
Another long drag on his ciggie. He tilted his head back, watched the stream of smoke spiral out between his teeth, up into the soft air.
‘But the thing was, the kid had a point. It’s a bitch when that happens. Family’s important. And Liv and I haven’t exactly done a bang-up job of providing Holly with one of those. If she’s doing a better job of making her own, who am I to stand in her way?’
Fuck me. I would’ve bet a few pints that Frank Mackey only knew the meaning of guilt from the outside: something that came in useful for arm-twisting other people. Holly had him twisted into a reef knot.
I said, ‘So you decided to let her go for it.’
‘So we decided she could try boarding during the week for one term, see how she got on. Now we’d have to hire a tow truck to drag her away. I don’t like it on principle, and I miss the little madam like hell, but like you said: when it’s your kid at stake, everything else goes out the window.’
Mackey slid his lighter back in his jeans pocket. ‘And there you go. A heart-to-heart with Uncle Frankie. Wasn’t that fun?’
It was true. Maybe the whole truth, maybe not, but true.
‘Does that answer all your questions?’
I said, ‘One left. I don’t get why you’d tell me all that.’
‘I’m establishing interdepartmental cooperation, Detective. Showing the love, in a professional kind of way.’ Mackey flicked his smoke onto the ground, crushed it out in one heel-twist. ‘After all,’ he said over his shoulder with a great big grin, as he pushed the door open, ‘we’re working together.’
Holly was sitting where we’d left her; Conway was at the window, hands in her pockets, looking down at the gardens. They hadn’t been talking. The air in the room, the fast turn from both of them when we came in, said they’d been listening hard to each other instead.
Mackey shifted his spot, keep us on our toes: sat on a table behind Holly, found himself a stray chunk of modelling clay to play with. I pulled Selena’s phone towards me. Turned the evidence bag in circles on the table, between my fingertips.
‘So,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to this phone. You say you found it on the foyer floor, the morning after Chris died. Let’s stick with that for now. You’d seen Selena’s secret phone; you knew what it looked like. You had to know this was it.’
Holly shook her head. ‘I thought it was Alison’s. Selena kept hers down the side of her bed; how would it get to the foyer?’
‘You didn’t even ask her?’
‘No way. Like I told you, I didn’t want to get into that with her. If I even thought about it – and I don’t remember if I did – I would’ve figured, if it was somehow Selena’s phone, then she’d rather go get it out of the lost-and-found than have to talk about how I knew it was hers and all that crap.’
Smooth as butter. No one, not even Frank Mackey’s kid, comes up with that kind of good stuff off the top of her head. Holly had been thinking this through, stuck in that common room with wild things zapping the air. Methodically going through everything we could know, working out her answers.
Some innocent people would do that. Not a lot.
‘Makes sense,’ I said. Behind Holly, Mackey had flattened the clay into a disc, was trying to spin it on his finger. ‘Here’s the thing, but. The way our witness tells the story, you didn’t find the phone in the foyer. You had it tucked down your waistband, wrapped in a tissue.’
Holly’s eyebrows pulling together, baffled. ‘No I didn’t. I mean, I might’ve had a tissue in my hand, everyone was crying—’
‘You didn’t like Chris. And you’re not the type to fake a crying fit for someone you didn’t like.’
‘I never said I was crying. I wasn’t. I’m saying I might have been giving someone else a tissue, I don’t remember. But I do know the phone was on the floor.’
I said, ‘I think you took Selena’s phone out from behind her bed and found a good way to ditch it. The lost-and-found bin, that was smart. It worked well. It almost worked for good.’
Holly’s mouth opened, but I held up my hand. ‘Hang on a sec. Let me finish first, before you tell me if I’m right or wrong. You knew there was a chance we’d search the school. You knew if we found the phone, we’d be talking to Selena. You knew what police questioning is like; let’s face it, there’s better ways to spend your day. You didn’t want Selena put through that, not when she was already traumatised about Chris’s death. So you binned the phone. Does that sound about right?’
It was an out: an innocent reason why she would have wanted the phone gone. Never take the out. It looks safe as houses. It takes you a step closer to where we want you.
Mackey said, without glancing up from his new toy, ‘You don’t have to answer that.’
I said, ‘No reason why you shouldn’t. You think we’re going to press charges against a minor for concealing something that might not even be evidence? We’ve got a lot more on our minds. Your da can tell you himself, Holly: if you’re after something big, you’re happy to let the small stuff slide. This is small stuff. But we need to clear it up.’
Holly watched me, not her dad. Thought, or I thought she did, about that moment when she had seen me understand.
She said, ‘Selena didn’t kill Chris. No way. I never worried that she did, not even for a second. She doesn’t work like that.’ Straight-backed, straight-eyed, trying to shove it into my head. ‘I know you’re thinking Yeah, right. But I’m not just being na?ve. I know with most people you don’t have a clue what they’re capable of. I know that.’
Mackey’s piece of clay had gone still. It was true: Holly did know that.
‘But with Selena I do. She wouldn’t have hurt Chris. Ever. I swear to God, it’s totally impossible.’
I said, ‘Probably you’d have sworn to God that she wouldn’t go out with Chris, either.’
Twitch of impatience, I was losing cred again. ‘Like that’s the same thing? Come on. Anyway, I don’t expect you to just take my word about what kind of person she is. She actually physically couldn’t have done it. Like I told you, sometimes I can’t sleep. The night Chris died, I was having trouble sleeping. If Selena had gone out, I would’ve known.’