he thought. Connor and Topaz had moved seven years ago, and Coralie just afterward.
“And you have no other information on him?” Jonah asked. “You never saw him?”
Stavely shook his head. “I wasn’t curious enough to risk the deal by hanging around.”
“Do you still have the phone number?”
Stavely shook his head. “He used to call my landline, and then it was texts that I deleted.”
There was a pause while Stavely’s fidgeting increased. “That’s all. Can I go now?” he said in the end.
“Of course,” Jonah replied.
He stood to let Stavely out, and watched his slightly jerky movements thoughtfully.
“Was he that agitated when you saw him Monday?” he asked O’Malley.
“No,” he said. “I guess you’d say he was wary, but calm. Did you see in my notes that he called someone after?”
“You think the call has changed things?”
“Could have done,” O’Malley said. “Or could be that police stations put the fear of God in him.”
“I’d like you to see if any of our suspects are connected with that place,” Jonah said. “Or have been in the past. He might have been put up to it, or he might not. My suspicion is that there’s more he’s not telling us. A reason why he thinks it’s linked. Maybe the buyer said something that suggested he’d committed a crime against a young girl. Or maybe he knows who it is.”
“I’ll look into it, all right, so.”
Jonah smiled at the very Irish turn of phrase. “Thanks.”
* * *
—
HANSON MADE IT back to her desk ten minutes before the time she had suggested to Skype Zofia Wierzbowski, and saw immediately that there was a message waiting for her.
Zofia was happy with the suggestion, and had sent her Skype ID. Hanson loaded up Skype on her phone and added Zofia as a contact, and then went to find a free meeting room where she could still get Wi-Fi.
It took a lot longer than she’d expected. For a modern station, Southampton Central was frustratingly low on signal. She ended up calling three minutes late, but Zofia didn’t seem worried.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak to me,” Hanson said, speaking into the phone that she’d placed on the meeting-room table. “I’m not recording this for now, but would you be happy to go on tape if needed?”
“Yes,” Zofia said, her accent rich. “That is fine.”
“I need to ask you, first, about the party that you went to,” Hanson said, and wondered why she was quite so nervous. Perhaps because she hoped, with the DCI, that he hadn’t done anything. “Can you tell me about how you got there?”
“Yes, no problem. I go to the party with Aurora,” she began, and proceeded to tell, in very awkward English, the same story that Jonah had told Hanson. “I should not have drunk,” she said. “It was not right. I make myself sick, and he—Jonah Sheens—he had looked after me. He put me in a bed.”
Hanson took a breath. “Could you tell me if anything happened between you that night?” she asked.
“Between me and Jonah?” she asked, and then she paused. “I—I haven’t told anyone this before. I should have…I was attacked that night.”
* * *
—
DANIEL BENHAM LOOKED pensive as Jonah and Lightman entered the interview room. His solicitor, on the other hand, looked steely.
“Thanks for coming in again,” Jonah began.
“That’s all right,” Benham said.
“There are quite a few things I need to ask you, but I’ll try to make it quick.”
Benham didn’t react and neither did his solicitor, so Jonah carried on.
“To begin with, having identified and spoken to the dealer who supplied you with the Dexedrine, we need to know whether you showed him where the drugs were hidden, or mentioned them to him.”
“God, no,” Benham said in a low but intense voice. “I might have wanted to help him out, but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. You don’t tell a drug dealer where you’re hiding their product if you don’t want it stolen back again from under your nose. It’s not like you’d have legal recourse if they took it back, and you’d be on dangerous ground threatening them.”
“He didn’t ask any questions about what you were going to do with it?” Jonah persisted.
“No, he didn’t. And I wouldn’t have told him,” Daniel said firmly.
“OK. And to go back to the topic of any drugs purchases since,” Jonah said. “The dealer has suggested that he did carry on supplying one of you. We’re looking into it, but it would be