We present an extract from When We Were Silent, the debut thriller by Fiona McPhillips.
Lou Manson is an outsider when she joins the final-year class at Highfield Manor, Dublin's most exclusive private school. Beyond the granite pillars and the wrought-iron gates is a world of wealth, privilege and potential. But Highfield is also hiding a dark secret – and Lou is here to expose it.
For years, I tried not to think about Highfield Manor. The pompous rise of its granite walls, the secrets hidden in its stone-cold shadows. The dark veil of cedars shrouding the school from the outside world. But still the memories fester in me, real as a disease.
Even now, as I watch the new students gather on the cobble- stones of Trinity's front square, I can’t help but think of the intimacy of teenage girls, their social hierarchies and my naive certainty I could conquer them.
It doesn’t take much for Highfield to trespass on my life. Just a whisper of chlorine at the gym or the groan of leather on bare skin and my heart picks up pace. The body remembers everything the mind wants to forget.
In my office, slatted sun brushes parallel shafts of light and shade on to the books that fan out across my desk. Beads of sweat gather on the bridge of my nose as I prepare the words I’ll deliver at my afternoon lecture, a revival of Irish female writers of the last century. It’s a crime, I think as I write, that these voices were suppressed for so long, always deemed too quiet to matter.
As I lose myself in my work, my phone vibrates on my desk and I glance over. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I hesitate and then grab it.
'Ronan Power,’ he says, and it only takes a second for the terror and guilt to find me.
And I know whatever happens next, one thing is certain: my story is about to be resurrected, more than thirty years after I tried to bury it.
Ronan’s at an outside table when I arrive, sunlit and tie-less, nursing an americano. He’s better looking than I remember, the greying beard only adding gravitas to the sculpted lines of his face. As he leans in to greet me, I catch sight of the ice-blue Power eyes through the tint of his Ray-Bans, and the soft edges of nostalgia ease my trepidation.
He was only fifteen back then, three years our junior. Shauna’s cocky younger brother, nothing more. I’ve kept an eye on him over the years, his litigation successes and society engagements. But Shauna, she has managed to live a life offline, without a trace left behind for the casual observer. The sole reason I’m convinced she’s still alive is that a Power surely could not die without mention. It’s only now, in the fluster of this formal summons, that I’m numb with the possibility.
‘I wanted to tell you in person,’ says Ronan.
And so it’s here, surrounded by fumes and footsteps and the blinding gaze of the midday sun, that it’s all finally going to come to an end. I’m almost as eager for the news as I am fearful of it. Shauna’s death would put our story back in the headlines, but it would mean the end of the fear that has gripped me all these years, the reason I can’t sleep at night.
‘It’s happening again. At Highfield.’
‘What?’
‘I’m taking a case on behalf of a swimmer.’
This is not what I was expecting. A return to Highfield instead of an escape from it.
‘Only fourteen years of age.’
‘Oh god.’ I put my hand to my head to shade it from the force of his words as much as the flare of the sun.
‘I need your help,’ he says, and the strength seeps out of me. ‘I want you to testify.’
When We Were Silent is published by Bantam
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