The Secret Place

‘If anything had, we would have contacted you immediately. On which note, Detective, I should be asking you the same question.’

‘Yeah? Why’s that?’

‘I assume,’ Miss McKenna said, ‘that this visit is connected to the fact that Holly Mackey left school without permission, this morning, to speak to you.’

She was talking to me. I said, ‘We can’t go into details.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to. But, just as you have the right to know anything that might be crucial to your job – hence the fact that I have always given consent for you to speak with the students – I have a right, even an obligation, to know anything that might be crucial to mine.’

Just the right amount of threat. ‘I appreciate that. You can be sure I’ll tell you if anything relevant comes up.’

Glint off the glasses. ‘With all due respect, Detective, I’m afraid I’ll have to be the judge of what is and isn’t relevant. It’s impossible for you to make that decision for a school and a girl about which you know nothing.’

That test-vibe drilling in from both sides, this time. Miss McKenna leaning in to see if I could be pushed; Conway watching, leaving me to it, to see the same thing.

I said, ‘It’s not the perfect answer, no. But it’s the best we can do.’

Miss McKenna eyed me up some more. Copped there was no point in pushing harder. Smiled at me instead. ‘Then we shall have to rely on your best.’

Conway shifted, getting comfortable. Said, ‘Why don’t you tell us about the Secret Place.’

Outside, the bell exploded again. Faint yelps, more running feet, classroom doors closing; then silence.

Wariness curling like smoke in Miss McKenna’s eyes, but her face hadn’t changed. ‘The Secret Place is a noticeboard,’ she said. Took her time, picked her words. ‘We established it in December, I believe. The students pin cards on it, using images and captions to convey their messages anonymously – many of the cards are very creative. It gives the students a place to express emotions that they don’t feel comfortable expressing elsewhere.’

Conway said, ‘A place where they get to slag off anyone they don’t like, no worries that they’ll get in hassle for bullying. Spread any rumour they want, no tracing it back. Maybe I’m just too thick to get it, maybe your young ladies would never do anything that common, but this seems like one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time.’ Piranha grin. ‘No offence.’

Miss McKenna said, ‘We felt it was the lesser of two evils. Last autumn, a group of girls set up a website that fulfilled the same function. The kind of behaviour you describe was, in fact, rife. We have one student whose father took his own life a few years ago. The site was brought to our attention by her mother. Someone had posted a photo of the girl in question, with the caption “If my daughter was this ugly I’d kill myself too.”’

Conway’s eye on me: Razor blades in their hair. Still beautiful now?

She was right. It startled me more than it should have, a shock like a splinter jamming under a nail. That hadn’t come in from outside, like Chris Harper. That had grown inside these walls.

Miss McKenna said, ‘Both the mother and the daughter were, understandably, very upset.’

‘So?’ Conway said. ‘Block the site.’

‘And the new one twenty-four hours later, and the next one, and the next? Girls need a safety valve, Detective Conway. Do you recall, a week or so after the incident’ – small snort of laughter from Conway: incident

– ‘a group of students claimed to have seen Christopher Harper’s ghost?’

‘In the girls’ jacks,’ Conway said sideways, to me. ‘Fair enough; first place a young fella would go if he was invisible, am I right? A dozen young ones screaming their lungs up, hanging on to each other, shaking. I almost had to do the old slap in the face before they could tell me what was going on. They wanted me to go in with my gun and shoot it. How long’d it take to settle them, in the end? Hours?’

‘After that,’ Miss McKenna said – to me, again – ‘we could, of course, have forbidden any mention of Christopher Harper. And the “ghost” would have reappeared every few days, possibly for months. Instead, we arranged group counselling sessions for all the girls, with emphasis on grief management techniques. And we set up a photograph of Christopher Harper on a small table outside the assembly hall, where students could say a prayer or leave a flower or card. Where they could express their grief in an appropriate, controlled fashion.’

‘Most of them hadn’t even met him,’ Conway told me. ‘They didn’t have any grief to express. Just wanted an excuse to go mental. They needed a kick up the hole, not a pat on the head and poor-little-you.’

‘Possibly,’ said Miss McKenna. ‘But the “ghost” never made another appearance.’

She smiled. Pleased with herself. Everything back on track, nice and neat.