Jonah said, rising. “Thank you. You’re both free to go for now.”
He paused outside the door to confer with Lightman. “Was there much in the statements about her teacher?” Jonah asked over his shoulder. “Mr. Mackenzie? Her English teacher?”
“I think Topaz asked if they’d talked to him,” Lightman said. “But nothing more concrete in the first few interviews.”
Jonah nodded, and now remembered what it was that rang a bell about Mackenzie. It had been Topaz, bursting into the old police station, almost hysterically.
“You’ve already asked me everything.” She had been almost shouting at the DC who was showing her up to CID. “You’ve asked me over and over and over. Why aren’t you asking Mr. fucking Mackenzie, hey? He’s been carrying on happily with his lessons. Why are the rest of us the ones suffering?”
He should have remembered this. He’d even gone and asked his patient DCI about it.
“Look, I’m not involved,” he’d told him. “Anything I do know is the shortest of updates from the super. Mackenzie is apparently a total nonstarter. He had an alibi for the entire evening.”
And yet Topaz had been determined he should be a suspect. There had to be a reason, however flimsy. Unless she had latched on to him as an alternative suspect, to take the heat off her friends.
He let himself out into CID, and glanced around vaguely until he found Hanson, who was standing alongside the big black-and-white printer as it spewed out pages.
“Can you look into something for me, please?” he asked her.
“Sure,” she said, glancing down at the printer display and then back up with a smile.
“There was a schoolteacher of Aurora’s. An Andrew Mackenzie. I want to know if anything was said about him in the original reports, and what lines of inquiry were pursued.”
Hanson nodded. “I’ve got ten more pages to print, and then I’m on it.”
16
Aurora
Friday, July 22, 1983, 11:30 P.M.
It was somehow the loneliest she had ever felt, despite the music and the laughter and the occasional cajoling. They wanted her to dance, to drink, to enjoy herself. She knew why. She was a constant irritation. A nagging sense of non-fun. But the more they pressed, the more she could feel herself retreating inward. The more she became rigid and isolated.
She’d rarely had anyone to talk to at school parties, either. Her closest friend, Becky, was never allowed to go to any of them. Her mother, who looked after her alone and generally seemed to confuse love with feeding up, wanted her home safely as soon as school was done, in spite of Becky’s desperation to join in.
Earlier in the year, it had seemed like her loneliness had been solved. Kind, lovable Zofia had arrived like a ray of sunshine into Aurora’s life. She’d come with Aurora whenever she was going to be dumped somewhere with Topaz, and she’d chattered away to her in her strange English and made her feel like she was liked.
And then Zofia had been snatched away again. All because of one stupid night.
The thought of all that was still too fresh and too painful. She closed her eyes against it briefly, and against finding herself alone again, and feeling like she was separated from these friends of Topaz’s by hundreds of miles.
When she opened them again, it was all still the same. She was still here.
She found herself watching Jojo after that, reassured by the difference between her and the other girls. Jojo chose to dance on her own, and to lose herself in the rhythm without ever worrying how she looked. Once or twice, Aurora found herself envying her. She wondered if she could be like her if she tried: capable, and wild. Aurora thought Jojo was quite beautiful in her wildness.
Perhaps that was the only way to be, when she could never be like her sister and her hip-grinding sexuality.
Even Benners was dancing: head back, bouncing on his heels, one hand tucked into his chest so that he could hold his hip flask. He’d stopped looking like the Benners she knew.
But it was Benners who eventually tired of the movement and came to sit with her. He dropped down next to her heavily and then had to use a hand to steady himself. He laughed, and swigged from the hip flask.
Aurora could smell the alcohol on him. She wondered if she smelled of the lemonade she was making her way through.
“I’ve felt like that before,” he said with a grin.
“Like what?”
“Like I wasn’t part of anything.