a form of payback, and how he’d frequently said the harshest possible things to her before suddenly apologizing and telling her how much he loved her—and how good she was for standing by him when he was so damaged. How he had used the tracking on her phone to keep tabs on her.
Jonah felt a sense of satisfaction that that, at least, had been used against him in the end, because it had let her track him, too. That if he had managed to harm Jojo, they would have been right there to pick him up.
After the interview with Anna, there had been one with Stavely, who had handed himself in late that night. He had given Jonah a slow nod as he had been brought up to CID, and Jonah had almost smiled back at him. The drug dealer who had taken thirty years to do the right thing.
In fact, Stavely proved to be a godsend. They made an early agreement to waive charges against him for obstruction of justice and breaking and entering in order for him to give them everything he had on Brett Parker. His account had been succinct and convincing, and had told Jonah a great deal.
Matt Stavely had been drawn into Brett Parker’s world several months after Aurora’s death. Brett had turned up at Stavely’s old flat on a drizzly November evening, and told him that the drugs Daniel Benham had bought were sitting in a hole in the ground, almost all of them still there, and that Benham was never going to go and get them. He told Stavely that he could take the lot, and that Brett would pay him to do it, too, if he retrieved them.
“I want them gone,” Brett had told him. “And, ideally, if any traces remain, I want them to very clearly be someone else’s.”
He’d handed Stavely a crushed can of beer in a plastic bag, which he’d told him had Connor Dooley’s fingerprints on it.
“If you leave it there, then I’m safe, even if they do realize there were drugs there.”
Stavely, who had made bad decision after bad decision over the preceding months, and who had owed his supplier a terrifying amount, even with Benham’s money, had agreed to it. Thousands of pounds’ worth of Dexedrine and a couple hundred upfront had been lifeblood to him.
So, with a series of directions and on Brett’s suggestion, he had waited until the early hours of Christmas Eve, when there would be nobody out in the forest and the roads were utterly dead. He’d taken a series of lights and a shovel, and had made his way to the riverbank, where he had begun digging until he’d found the first packets.
It hadn’t taken him long to find Aurora.
He’d spent an hour wondering what the hell he should do. He’d paced around the freezing woodland and thought that he should go and call Brett Parker, or the police. But how could he explain this? This midnight drug recovery? He’d be in total shit.
As, he realized, Brett Parker had known.
It had been a nightmarish experience, the rest of that night. He had dug around her decaying remains, saved from full exposure to the smell only by the frozen ground. He’d loaded packet after packet into a holdall, and tried not to touch her. Some of them had fluid on them, part of her. He couldn’t even think about it now without feeling sick. He’d broken the ice in the shallows of the river and washed them, and put them in the bag anyway.
As the sun came up, he’d tipped the beer can out of its bag into the hole, and then shoveled the soil back over it until there was only a heap of earth to see. He’d left, and driven home without even remembering the journey.
He’d called Brett, who had told him coldly not to be an idiot. That he was part of this now, and that Brett wasn’t going to let him suffer. That Brett could do him a lot of good if Stavely was on his side.
He’d been terrified of discovery, and hungry for the funds Brett was offering him. And so he had become a periodic employee of Brett Parker, and had become more and more entangled in the terrible things that he did. He had supplied him with coke, with some of the Dexedrine, and then, later, with Rohypnol.
“Did that worry you?” Jonah had asked him.
“Of course it fucking did,” Stavely had said