to slow swiftly to avoid running straight into her.
He hadn’t really needed to see her face as she turned round, rebellious and sheened with sweat. He’d known it was her as soon as he’d seen the design on the abandoned pullover. It had been confirmed over and over by the way that she moved, and by her speed.
He pulled the sweater off his shoulder, and said, “You could have made it a bit easier.”
He threw it to her, while she stood, bristling. It fell in front of her feet, and she glanced down at it and then back up, suspicious and tensed to run. He nodded to her and, still heaving for air, began to back away. “Thanks for the exercise, Jojo,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”
She didn’t say anything until he’d turned away and started to jog back. A slightly mocking, “You’re not too slow for a policeman, Copper Sheens!”
His sergeant had been waiting alone back by the car, twitchy with impatience.
“I lost him,” he said as Jonah slowed to a walk. “He ducked into one of those council houses and I couldn’t tell you which.”
Jonah shook his head. “Same here. Bloody maniac, that one. Over half the fences in the village and then vanished.”
His sergeant shook his head and opened the driver’s door. “At least there’s no arrest report to file.”
“Yes,” Jonah said, and looked over at the bold red slogan on the wall.
FREEDOM KNOWS NO DIVISIONS OF WEALTH OR
He supposed it would probably have said “class.” It was almost a shame not to finish it, but it would be gone within a few days. Painted over.
* * *
—
JONAH HAD DOZED off at some point on the way, lulled by Hanson’s sedate driving and the gathering dark. He woke up dry-mouthed and disoriented when his DC said, “Sir.”
“Sorry.” He remembered where they were now. On the way to Jojo’s pale-blue house. They were driving down some unrecognizable stretch of curving road. He reached into the back to find his kit bag and rooted in it until he found the water bottle from his bike. He took a long draft from it. “I didn’t snore, did I?”
“No, you’re OK,” Hanson said, smiling slightly. “And if you dribbled, you did it out of the other side of your mouth.”
Jonah shook his head, but still rubbed at his mouth to be certain.
“So, Jojo Magos,” Hanson said, and for a disconcerting moment Jonah imagined that she knew about that night in Lyndhurst and the chase and the sweater. But of course she just wanted information, because he had asked her to take the lead.
“She was a core member of the group, unlike Brett Parker,” he said. “Bit of a tomboy back then. Actually, still a bit of a tomboy as far as I can make out. Now a landscape gardener. Did you look her up?”
“Do we know what she did that night?” Hanson asked. “I mean, I know we’re waiting on O’Malley and Lightman going through the notes, but…”
“There was only a brief mention of her in the overview. She went to bed a bit before one, the same as the others. Though when I say went to bed, she passed out sprawled on the ground with a sleeping bag half over her. Says she stayed that way until Connor shook her awake sometime after five. He asked her to help look for Aurora, so apparently she did.”
Hanson nodded. She had slowed the car down to a crawl, either lost in thought or wanting a few more minutes to mull. The GPS told them it was only a mile until their destination.
“Were you one of the officers who investigated back then?” she asked abruptly.
“Only in the most basic sense.” He glanced at her. “I was recently off training, and I was a regular uniformed PC. I got sent knocking on doors like the rest of the local force, and I spent more hours than I can count searching through the woods. By two days after she’d gone, the area of woodland we were actively searching had been extended to cover twenty square miles. It was an extraordinary level of search. Like nothing I’ve seen since. I don’t think most of us slept for the first couple of weeks. It seems incredible that we missed her.”
“I assume they did all this stuff we’re doing? Interviewed the kids?”
“Endlessly,” Jonah agreed. “For months. I got used to seeing one or another of them dragged in most weeks. Particularly Connor Dooley.”
“Why him?” She