a glance at the reflective glass. Did she think she had a larger audience? “Topaz was fixated on him. He was attractive and sporty, and pretty much everyone at school wanted him. Topaz was used to being the desirable one, so she decided to go and get him. Only Brett proved to be tricky. He’d been…interested in someone else.”
“One of the group?” Jonah asked, curious about how awkward she suddenly looked. Had there been something more between Coralie and Brett?
“No, no,” she said quickly. “Someone at school. We’d all been at the same party, a week or two before, and Brett…kissed someone else. Even though Topaz was there, and looking gorgeous. He went after a blond girl from the year below.”
“The year below him?”
“The year below us,” Coralie said in a quiet voice.
He watched her thoughtfully. “So he was interested in someone who was, what? Fourteen at most?”
“Yes. She didn’t look fourteen,” Coralie replied. “She was really tall and skinny, and looked like an underwear model or something. Nowhere near as sexy as Topaz, but still.”
“So you think Brett didn’t know the girl’s age?” he asked.
“I guess not,” Coralie said. “But next time Topaz talked to him, he didn’t seem interested. I think he was still keen on the blonde.”
Jonah took a note of that, thinking that if eighteen-year-old Brett Parker had liked younger girls, then he might have pursued Aurora that night, in spite of what everyone said.
“So what happened that night?” he asked, moving the conversation on.
Coralie pursed her lips and chewed a fragment off her nail. “Topaz wanted Brett to want her. So we did our usual thing. She kissed me in front of him, and then let him join in when he got excited.”
Jonah wondered why Daniel Benham hadn’t mentioned this. Perhaps he hadn’t felt it was his secret to tell. Or perhaps Coralie was nothing more than a fantasist. But he got the impression this was more about telling tales on her friends in reaction to some perceived slight.
“So Aurora knew?” he asked.
“She saw us going off together.” Coralie was nodding.
Jonah made another note. He wondered exactly how concerned Topaz might have been about her parents finding out. Concerned enough to kill her sister? That would have been a pretty extreme reaction.
“And Aurora wasn’t involved at any point,” he said. “She wasn’t a fourth member.”
The instinctive curl of Coralie’s lip was almost comical. “Are you serious? Topaz would have run a mile. And Aurora wouldn’t have gone near that whole scene. She looked like she wanted to throw up as it was. Bloody prude.”
Jonah had to work quite hard not to suppress a smile. It was refreshing to hear someone talking about an exotic sex life without shame. For some reason police interviews always made people want to underplay everything.
“Was Aurora still there when you returned?”
“We didn’t come back to the camp,” Coralie said, shaking her head. “We were all of us drunk and we passed out. We didn’t see her after that.”
“So you were asleep from then until morning?”
Coralie’s mouth tightened. After a momentary pause, she said, “No. No, I wasn’t. I got up.”
Jonah glanced down, as if checking the original statement. “That contradicts what you said originally,” he said neutrally.
“I know it does,” she said. “Everyone told me not to say anything. They thought…they thought the police would grab hold of it. Because he was already being grilled. And I suppose I felt sorry for him….”
He heard Hanson shift in her chair next to him, and was aware that she knew as well as he did whom Coralie was talking about. For the sake of the tape, however, he needed Coralie to say it.
“Can you tell me who you’re talking about?”
“Connor,” Coralie said, and there was a real intensity to the way she said his name. Jonah could feel her antipathy. “Connor Dooley. He told the police he went to sleep next to Jojo and didn’t get up again. But he did. He got up, and he was sitting by the fire on his own when I got up.”
“You saw him there?” Jonah asked her quietly.
“Yes. I needed to pee.” She fidgeted slightly and dropped her gaze, making him wonder whether that was really what she had been doing. Had she got up to take more drugs? To be sick?
“What time was this?”
“Oh…I’m not sure.” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “It was later on. I’d been asleep for a while, and then woken up again.”
“Brett and Topaz were both