teenagers and one of Aurora’s teachers there on the night. But he was lying to her, and she assumed to all of the team. He was pretending that he hadn’t known any of those kids well.
She sat staring at her screen with nothing but nervous dread in her stomach.
And then Chrome flashed up an alert about a Facebook message, and she saw that it was from Zofia Wier. All she could see on the brief alert was the beginning of the message:
Hello, yes. I was Aurora’s friend. I would
Almost automatically, she clicked on the alert, and waited while Chrome loaded a tab with the Facebook Messenger app on it. She hadn’t looked at her messages in a while. There were several unread ones, which she ignored in order to click on Zofia’s. The full message read:
Hello, yes. I was Aurora’s friend. I would be happy to talking, but I did not see her for time before she died. The last time was a party. The next day, my mother took me away from the school and I was sent to Poland to my grandparents.
Hanson started typing a reply, hoping that she was making sense but partly not quite caring.
Hi Zofia. Thank you so much for contacting us. We have some other questions about Aurora that you might be able to help with, as well as the party. Would you be happy to have a phone call with me and DCI Sheens, who is in charge of the investigation?
She saw a tick and a “Seen” pop up next to her message. Zofia was online.
An icon appeared to show that Zofia was typing, and then vanished. She was presumably considering her response.
The typing started again, and then her message appeared.
I can but is that the police officer Jonah Sheens?
Hanson felt a strange little twist in her stomach.
Yes, it is. Do you know him? she typed back.
Another pause, and another typing symbol.
Yes but you can ask him about the party. He was there, too.
Hanson spent a good minute looking at that message before she managed to type a light reply saying that she would set up a call if Zofia gave her a phone number or Skype ID. And then she stood a little unsteadily and walked toward the DCI’s office.
34
Hanson’s tap on the door was so quiet that he barely heard it. He nodded her in, feeling unaccountably nervous.
She closed the door behind her, and then said in a tight voice, “I’m worried about a few things. You told me that you didn’t know Aurora. But one of Aurora’s close friends knows you. Beyond that, she says that you were at a party with both of them the week before Aurora went missing.”
Jonah felt more panicked than he could remember feeling. It wasn’t just that he felt like his career was about to drop down a precipice and never recover. He also felt shame in front of his newest recruit. The idea of telling her everything made him want to run a mile.
But he was beginning to notice that Hanson didn’t let things go. In the end he said, “I was,” wondering how he could push her interest aside. How he could distract her.
“And you didn’t talk to Aurora at all there? Even though her close friend seems to think you know all about what happened to Aurora that night?”
“It’s not about Aurora,” he said, and then he felt as though he’d reached a tipping point. There was only one thing he could do. “Come and sit,” he said hoarsely.
He saw Hanson hesitate and then draw up the chair on the far side of the desk.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t find Zofia, because of that party. It…I didn’t want to talk about it. It had gone wrong before I even got there.” His throat was dry, and he had to swallow before he could continue. “My family were…my dad was a traveler, and my mum married into the community. She was totally besotted with him, like a lot of people who fall for narcissists. She was pregnant by the time she started to see him for what he was: an abusive, manipulative bully who couldn’t stand anyone going against his control.”
He found himself telling her everything, even the really humiliating parts of it. He told her about the erosion of his self-esteem along with hers, and the way Jonah had been used as a tool to hurt his mother.
He told her how his mother had finally seen what was happening