Conway nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. But what’s wrecking her head isn’t that she killed him. It’s that she knows something she can’t handle. She’s spacing out so she doesn’t have to deal with it.’

It was getting colder. Julia pulled her jumper tight at her neck. She said, ‘Like what?’

‘If we knew, we wouldn’t need to be having this conversation. I’ve got ideas, no proof. All I can tell you for sure is: you’re not gonna get Selena in hassle by telling me the truth. I swear. OK?’

Julia tugged her sleeves down, the pale smudges of her hands vanishing into the red. She said quietly, ‘OK. I texted you about the key.’

Conway said, ‘How’d you know where Joanne and them kept it?’

‘I’m the one who gave her the idea about the book.’

I said, ‘And the one who gave her the key.’

‘You make it sound like it was her birthday present. Actually, they saw us heading out one night, and Joanne said she’d tell McKenna what bad girls we’d been if we didn’t make her a copy of the key. So I did.’

‘And gave her advice on where to keep it?’ Conway raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re very helpful altogether.’

Julia matched the eyebrow. ‘When someone could get me expelled, yeah, I am. She wanted to know where we kept ours, which I wasn’t going to tell her because fuck the bitch—’

‘Which was where? While we’re at it.’

‘Down the inside of my phone case. Simple, and it was always on me. Like I said, though, I wasn’t about to give the Heifer Heffernan any more than I had to. So I told her the only way to be safe was to keep it in the common room, so if it got found no one could connect it to her, right? I was like, “Pick a book no one ever reads. Who’d you do your saint essay on?” – the common rooms are all full of saint biogs, no one ever looks at them except once a year for essays, and we’d just handed ours in. She went, “Thérèse of Lisieux. The Little Flower” – she actually got this holy face on, like that somehow made her into Joanne of Lisieux.’ Conway was grinning. ‘So I went, “Perfect. No one’s going to look at the book again till at least next year. Stick the key in there, you’re sorted.”’

‘And you figured she’d taken your word for it?’

‘Joanne has zero imagination, except about herself. No way could she have come up with a place. Anyway, I checked. I thought it might come in useful.’

‘And it did,’ Conway said. ‘How come you decided to tell us?’