Something in my face, start of a grin.

‘What?’

‘You’re talking like these are girl gangs from East LA. Razor blades in their hair.’

‘Close,’ said Conway, and swung the MG off the main road. ‘Close enough.’

The houses turned bigger, set farther back off the street. Big cars, sparkly new ones; not a lot of those about, these days. Electric gates everywhere. One front garden had a statue thing made of polished concrete, looked like a five-foot mug handle.

I said, ‘So you fancied Selena for it? Or someone who was jealous of her going out with Chris, on one side or the other?’

Conway slowed down – not a lot, for a residential area. Thought.

‘I’m not saying I fancied Selena. You’ll see her; I wouldn’t’ve said she could get the job done, not right. Heffernan was jealous as fuck – Selena’s twice the looker Heffernan is – but I’m not saying I fancied her either. Not even saying I believed her. I’m just saying there was something. Just something.’

And there it was, probably: the reason she had let me come along. Something in the corner of her eye, gone when she looked at it straight. Costello hadn’t been able to pin it down either. Conway thought maybe a fresh pair of eyes; maybe me.

I said, ‘Could a teenage girl have done the job? Physically, like?’

‘Yeah. No problem. The weapon – and this wasn’t released either – the weapon was a hoe out of the groundskeepers’ shed. One blow, right through Chris Harper’s skull and into his brain. The Bureau said, with the long handle and the sharp blade, it wouldn’t have taken a lot of strength. A kid could’ve done it, easy, if she got a good swing.’

I started to ask something, but Conway spun the car into a turn – so sudden, no blinker, I almost missed the moment we crossed over: high black-iron gates, stone guardhouse, iron arch with ‘St Kilda’s College’ picked out in gold. Inside the gates she braked. Let me take a good look.

The drive swung a semicircle of white pebbles around a gentle slope of clipped green grass that went on forever. At the top of that slope was the school.

Someone’s ancestral home, once, someone’s mansion with grooms holding dancing carriage horses, with tiny-waisted ladies drifting arm in arm across the grass. Two hundred years old, more? A long building, soft grey stone, three tall windows up and more than a dozen across. A portico held up by slim curl-topped columns; a rooftop balustrade, pillars curved delicate as vases. Perfect, it was; perfect, everything balanced, every inch. Sun melting over it, slow as butter on toast.

Maybe I should have hated it. Community-school me, classes in run-down prefabs; keep your coat on when the heating went every winter, arrange the geography posters to cover the mould patches, dare each other to touch the dead rat in the jacks. Maybe I should have looked at that school and wanted to take a shite in the portico.