rooms, in a group of four. She was almost at the top of the wall when he walked in, roped up but with her short hair uncovered. He watched her traverse sideways, moving constantly but carefully, her wiry arms and legs working. It was graceful, and a touch hypnotic, her hands and feet always finding tiny purple holds and not touching any of the others.
There was a pause for a short while as she hung off one hand and dipped the other into her chalk bag.
“I think you’re going to have to dyno it,” one of the men at the foot of the wall called. “Your arms aren’t long enough.”
Jonah thought he could see why she’d stopped. There was a final purple hold, way off to her left and higher up.
“Fucking dyno it,” Jojo called, shaking her head. “Do you ever have any less-shit advice?”
Instead she leaned gradually to her left, balanced on what looked like a single toe, her weight shifting over her knee. Then she lifted her right foot and tucked her toe into a hold that must have been at her waist height, her left hand still loose and all of her weight poised between that right arm and that left foot until the toe was lodged in place. Her body set, she shifted, somehow removing her weight from the left leg and reaching upward, pushing herself steadily off that right arm and leg.
Her left hand closed on the hold, which he had thought must be too high for her. She swung off it, letting go with her right hand, and then called, “Coming down.”
The rope tightened and her belaying partner—Jonah remembered enough about his climbing to get some of the terms right at least—lowered her down.
“Not bad,” the belayer said. He was more the build Jonah would have expected of a climber: tall and rangy, with shoulders wide enough to make him look triangular. He had slim legs beneath, with muscles so defined that Jonah could see them when the guy was just standing there at rest.
“Better than dynoing anyway,” Jojo said with a grin, and began to unhitch herself from the rope.
Jonah moved forward, and she glanced up at him. Her face did a funny little twist as she recognized him. It was somewhere between a smile and a grimace.
“When I said I was going climbing,” she called, “I meant I was busy.”
Jonah gave her a shrug and a small smile. “It seemed like a much better idea than sitting in a room with no windows. Can I just have a few minutes?”
He could feel the other three watching him. The wait for an explanation.
Jojo gave him a slow look, but she was smiling slightly as she did it. “All right. A few minutes. Come on.”
She led him back through three of the rooms, and then through a dusty archway into a harshly lit seating area with a series of vending machines around it. There was nobody else here.
Jojo walked to a table in the corner, pulled up one of the hard plastic chairs, and settled herself onto it with one foot up on the edge.
“There’s crap coffee in the machines if you want it,” she said.
“That’s OK. I have all the crap coffee in the world back at the station.”
He sat opposite her, aware that she was watching him.
“What do you want to know?”
“A few things,” Jonah answered slowly. “To start with, I thought there was something that was bothering you. Not just Aurora’s death, but perhaps connected with it.”
He watched Jojo’s gaze fall to her hands, and how she started fiddling with some tape she had round her middle fingers. She said nothing.
“Was there anything you wanted to say? Something that’s difficult to talk about?”
He knew that he had been right. He could read the urge to talk battling with a fear of consequences in her expression.
“I just…” And then she breathed in, an unsteady inhalation. “I told you that we all left the stash alone. But it wasn’t that simple. When we realized she’d gone, and that we’d have to call the police, we panicked.”
Jonah nodded at her. “There were fifteen kilos of illegal substances a third of a mile from the camp. I’m pretty sure I’d have panicked, too.”
Jojo’s cheeks lifted in a small grin, but she looked at the hand tape, not at him. “So we…discussed it, and somewhere in the panic we realized we had to hide the Dexedrine. So Brett and I went down there