The Secret Place

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.