he’d gone. Even if the idea of it sometimes woke him in the night, clawing to get out of his bedclothes and imagining that there were flames all around him.
“Everyone says he had a temper.”
Jonah nodded. “He had. And even when he wasn’t particularly angry, he was a nasty piece of work.”
“It was brave of your mother, leaving him like that. And leaving the traveling community. It must have been tough for her.”
Jonah struggled to imagine his mother as tough these days. It was hard to get beyond the fragile, paranoid alcoholic she had become. But Jojo was right. It was strange to be talking about it, after such a long time, to someone who seemed to understand it. Strange, and cathartic.
“It was hard for her for a long time. Divorces don’t happen among travelers. Leaving doesn’t happen. That’s what they told her. We left when I was seven and they were still coming round when I was fourteen, fifteen. Still threatening or cajoling. He came round sometimes too, but it grew rarer after she called the police.” There was a beat, and he said, “She left him for my sake. She didn’t care much about herself, but she cared about me a lot.”
“I hope my mum would’ve been the same,” Jojo said. And then she put a hand out to the door, and Jonah pressed the green button to let her out.
“It’d be good if you could stay by your phone,” he said before she could vanish. “I may well have questions.”
Jojo sighed. “I was going to go and get chalk and then try the Dagger-Edge climb again. And who knows? Maybe being grilled by you will give me the rage needed to make the final move.”
“Is it far away?” he asked.
“Maybe half an hour?” Jojo replied. “It’s near Burley. I’ll probably be a good hour getting into town and back and picking up a replacement pair of climbing shoes, and I won’t stay there that long. The climbs don’t catch the sun in the evening.”
“OK,” Jonah said with his own sigh. “That’s fine. Good luck.”
She cast him a last, sidelong look before she left, almost back to being the Jojo he had half known for more than thirty years.
He tried to hide from her the fact that, in spite of their conversation, he was still thinking of her as a suspect and still willing to assume that she was lying.
* * *
—
THE INTERVIEW WITH Jojo hadn’t helped Hanson’s anger. She left it with a deeply unsettling feeling that it had been entirely for her benefit, though she was positive by the end of it that Jojo hadn’t expected a grilling.
But then she worried that she was being ridiculous. They were in the middle of a case. Sheens was doing what a good officer did, and pushing a suspect hard.
She needed to talk to Zofia. Until she had some feeling of certainty about that incident, everything else felt like it was left hanging. It was impossible to think of working with a man who had committed a sexual assault.
She checked her Facebook account for what was probably the fiftieth time, but her message suggesting a time to Skype was still sitting there, unread. She felt like putting her fist through the monitor, but instead she rose, and told Lightman she was going to get some air.
* * *
—
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO be getting muddier and more complex instead of clearer, and Jonah wasn’t sure what to make of Jojo’s reactions, or Aleksy’s apparent coldness toward her.
He didn’t believe that Matt Stavely’s arrival, announced shortly afterward by Lightman, was going to help clear anything up. But he took a look at Stavely as O’Malley walked with him to the interview suite.
He looked wired and jittery. His eyes moved all over the station, and he pulled off his beanie to reveal his graying, uncombed hair. It was clumpy with sweat.
Jonah picked up O’Malley’s notes on his interview with Stavely and walked back into CID. He looked around momentarily for Hanson, expecting to find her watching him, but she wasn’t at her desk. He was shamefully relieved.
O’Malley was hovering outside Room One and messing around with his phone when Jonah got there.
“All ready?” Jonah asked him.
“Yup. Witness looks like he might burst if we don’t get on with it.”
Jonah had to agree. Matt Stavely was shifting his position every few seconds and jiggling his leg up and down between times. He pulled a cigarette out as Jonah watched, rolling it between