this evening,” she said with a questioning glance at Jonah.
He nodded, and told Jojo, “We’ll see you tomorrow, then. At eleven.”
“All right. I was supposed to climb but it looks like it’ll be stormy anyway.”
Jonah found himself watching her, curious. “You still climb?”
Jojo nodded. She gave a slightly defensive shrug. “It was either that or lose something else I loved.”
She followed them to the door, and watched them as they returned to the car. She shut the door only once they had climbed in.
Jonah should have gone to pick up his bike from Godshill and cycled it the thirteen miles to his house in Ashurst. He hated leaving it locked up anywhere out of his sight, even in low-crime Godshill. But it was almost eleven now, and he still needed time to read the overview again in preparation for the press briefing tomorrow.
“Drop me at home,” he told Hanson. “I’ll sort my bike out tomorrow.”
“Sure,” she said, and then, after a pause: “Where’s home?”
He sighed. “Sorry. I’m in Ashurst.”
“Can you…?”
She waved at the GPS, and he dutifully took it down and punched in his postcode.
“So the drugs…” Hanson began, once they’d pulled out onto the road.
“Are an interesting feature,” Jonah agreed.
“How much did they find there?”
“A fraction of that amount,” he answered.
“It sounds like Daniel Benham went back there,” Hanson said. “And if he saw her, and didn’t report it, in all probability he killed her.”
“Somebody, at some point, removed a large quantity of Dexedrine from around the body of Aurora Jackson,” Jonah corrected her, “and afterward failed to report it. We don’t know that it’s one of them, never mind being certain that it was Daniel Benham.”
“But it’s the likely answer, isn’t it?” Hanson pressed.
“Likely isn’t good enough,” he said.
He heard a small out breath from Hanson, but she said nothing. A silence grew as they drove, and Jonah inwardly went back over the interview with Jojo. He found himself circling around that conversation over the photograph, remembering what Jojo had said about her boyfriend. It took him a while to notice that Hanson was looking at him whenever she could get away with it.
“You were friends with her, weren’t you?” she said. “Jojo. That’s why you wanted me to take the lead.”
“Only in the very loosest sense,” he answered. “I was really friends with her older brother. I sometimes went to the house or hung out with both of them at the recreation ground. There was a lot of that in my childhood.”
“So you aren’t worried about a conflict of interest? You’re not close?”
“No, we were never close,” Jonah said, feeling slightly defensive again. He was beginning to recognize that Hanson didn’t like letting things go. “I’ve probably only bumped into her four or five times since, and never done more than say hello. None of those times has been recent. I stopped hanging out with her brother once I started training college, too. It was a conscious choice, in part. He had so many friends who broke the law as a matter of course, and I know he did it himself, too. Though I think he’s cleaned his act up now.”
Hanson nodded thoughtfully. And then she volunteered, “I’ve cut ties with a few of those myself.”
It surprised him to hear it. He’d read her résumé, and thought of her as straight-laced, from a very different background from his. Though he knew well enough that a résumé didn’t tell you everything.
“Well, anyway, that’s good,” she added with a smile. “Knowing someone in a half-arsed way isn’t going to complicate things.”
“No,” Jonah agreed. “It isn’t.”
And he tried not to think about all the things he wasn’t telling her.
12
Aurora
Friday, July 22, 1983, 9:25 P.M.
She was shivering with cold as she picked her way back to the campsite. It was almost fully dark, and her hair was still dripping wet from the river. It had started soaking into her top the moment she’d pulled it on, turning it translucent in patches. She kept her eyes on the luminous red of the fire through the trees as she walked. She hoped it would be warm enough to dry her off.
Topaz, Benners, and Brett were standing in a bunch in front of it. She could hear Topaz’s voice, high-pitched and aggressive, before she had cleared the trees.
“Well, she shouldn’t have told her to! For fuck’s sake. She’s probably got lost swimming down the river.”
Aurora could feel the desire to hide overcoming her again. She often retreated inside herself when her sister