to leave it to me, and as time went by I didn’t want to admit that I’d left it. So I never went back, and that meant I never found her. And isn’t that a big irony? I was thinking about her all the time and she’d have been found years ago if I’d just got on with the job.”
Jonah nodded slowly. At the front of his mind was the fact that the stash had been lifted, whatever Benham said. Either he had taken it, and thought they were unaware of the size of the original load, or he had no idea that it had gone.
Jonah decided to keep that little piece of information to himself for a while. He sat back, considering. “Would you mind telling me about your friendship with Aurora? How well did you know her?”
“Not very well,” Benham said. “Not as well as I knew her sister. And the group of us was really just me, Topaz, Connor, Coralie, and Jojo. But I’d go round their house now and then, and Topaz and Aurora took the bus back to Lyndhurst most days as well. I’d talked to her enough to think she was a nice girl.”
“Hmm. So you hadn’t ever been involved with her?”
Benham gave him a mystified look. He glanced at his solicitor once again. “No, I hadn’t. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend. Though she didn’t exactly tell me everything about herself.”
“Nothing happened between you?” Jonah asked. “Even on that night? I mean, there was alcohol flowing and you were all taking drugs. Sometimes these things happen.”
“No, it really didn’t,” Daniel said firmly. “I never had that kind of interest in her. I liked her, but that’s as far as it went.”
“You weren’t worried about her finding out about that Dexedrine, were you?” O’Malley asked, pausing in writing his scrawled notes. “It must have been a concern.”
“I wasn’t worried about her at all.” Benham sat upright. He gave O’Malley a firm look. “I was pretty uncertain about Brett, who loved to pretend to be more of a bad boy than he was. But not Aurora.”
O’Malley tilted his head. “You had reason to believe that Aurora was good at keeping secrets, then?”
There was a long pause, in which his solicitor watched him, on the verge of interrupting. And then Benham said, “Yes, I did. I had reason. She knew quite a bit about me. Not because I’d told her. She stumbled across…I’m not one hundred percent…straight, you see.” There was a tension in his voice and in his expression. “I’ve had the odd relationship with a boy here and there. One of them was a sixth-former. A drummer in the jazz band. Aurora…happened on us. While Topaz was doing dance classes, Aurora took herself for a wander. Waiting for their parents, you know. We were down in the old allotment that backs onto the school sports field. People don’t generally go there, so…” He trailed off.
Jonah was genuinely surprised by this little confession. He had for some reason always thought of Benham as the guitar-strumming ladies’ man. He’d definitely fooled around with a fair few women.
“Did you discuss it with her?”
“Yes. Well, not exactly discussed it.” He grimaced a little. “She just nodded and left, and I didn’t get to see her until the next morning on the bus. I don’t think I slept at all. My…my father was against all of that. Disgusted by it. He told me once that if I ever came out, I’d be out of the house. That would be it. And of course my mum wouldn’t have argued with him.”
He leaned forward to the glass of water on the table and drank a large gulp of it.
“But Aurora was supportive when you spoke to her?” O’Malley asked. “Said she’d keep it quiet?”
“Yes,” Benham said with a nod. “I went and sat next to her on the bus. She was usually on her own, so she was…She was so obviously delighted that I’d chosen to sit there. Which made me feel pretty terrible. I mean, I’m not giving myself airs, but I’d never really thought about how it felt not to be…popular. I tried to sit with her a few times after that. But anyway, when I asked her about it, she was surprised. Honestly, it had never occurred to her that she might tell anyone. Or that anyone might think of doing. And she didn’t breathe a word. Long after the drummer and I had