The Secret Place
Also by Tana French
In the Woods
The Likeness
Faithful Place
Broken Harbour
The Secret Place
Tana French
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
The right of Tana French to be identified as the Author of the Work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 75559 6
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For Dana, Elena, Marianne and Quynh Giao,
who luckily were nothing like this
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Acknowledgements
Prologue
There’s this song that keeps coming on the radio, but Holly can only ever catch bits of it. Remember oh remember back when we were, a girl’s voice clear and urgent, the fast light beat lifting you up off your toes and speeding your heart to keep up, and then it’s gone. She keeps trying to ask the others What is it? but she never catches enough to ask about. It’s always slipping in through the cracks, when they’re in the middle of talking about something important or when they have to run for the bus; by the time things go quiet again it’s gone, there’s just silence, or Rihanna or Nicki Minaj pounding silence away.
It comes out of a car, this time, a car with the top down to dragnet all the sunshine it can get, in the sudden explosion of summer that could be gone tomorrow. It comes over the hedge into the park playground, where they’re holding melting ice creams away from their back-to-school shopping. Holly – on the swing, head tipped back to squint up at the sky, watching the sunlight pendulum across her eyelashes – straightens up to listen. ‘That song,’ she says, ‘what’s—’ but just then Julia drops a glob of ice cream in her hair and shoots up on the roundabout yelling ‘Fuck!’, and by the time she’s got a tissue off Becca and borrowed Selena’s water bottle to wet it and cleaned the sticky off her hair, bitching the whole time – to make Becca blush, mostly, says the wicked sideways glance at Holly – about how she looks like she gave a blowjob to someone with bad aim, the car’s gone.