will be all.”
Jojo did so, sounding even more hesitant than she had. She finished up with an impatient sigh. Jonah reached forward to turn off the tape. He gave her a smile.
“Thank you for doing that. It was an important thing to get on tape.”
Jojo nodded, and then gave him a slightly quizzical smile. “Anytime, Copper Sheens.”
* * *
—
LIGHTMAN ASKED HIM, once they’d seen Jojo out, about the questions regarding her late boyfriend.
“Is he of interest?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” Jonah replied. “There’s no particular reason to think so, but he was part of the group for a while, and his is the second unexpected death to happen among them. I think it would be an omission not to ask questions.”
Lightman nodded. “I’ll look into the police reports on it.”
“Good man.”
* * *
—
JONAH FOUND HIMSELF thinking about the past again as he sat at his desk. About that beauty of Aurora’s, and what she could have achieved in her life. How she might have been seduced, perhaps before that night.
Aside from that, he was bracing himself for Tom’s call. For the name he hoped not to hear. Whenever he thought about it, it was like standing on the edge of a steep drop. He couldn’t afford to be drawn into memories that threatened to undo him.
He gave a sigh, and decided that it was time to go over his team’s notes on the original interviews. It was immediately absorbing, not least because of the gross difference in the number of interviews. Coralie had been brought in only twice, with Jojo interviewed four times, Brett five, and Topaz seven.
And then there had been a big jump to the number of transcripts for Daniel Benham, who had come second to Connor Dooley in the number of interviews he’d been given only by three.
Daniel had been brought in fourteen times to have things checked and double-checked. They wanted to know why he’d been the one to go for help. Why he hadn’t looked for her. What time he had last seen her, because his account wasn’t quite like everyone else’s. Though, in fact, everyone else’s account had proven to be false, too, and none of them was quite like anyone else’s.
And yet they’d kept on at him, the bright young son of a well-known and wealthy local businessman. The kind of boy who usually got away with whatever he wanted. The kind of privileged male who breezed through life.
Jonah could find no reasoning behind this apparent distrust. There was nothing stated in any of the interviews or notes to point the finger at Benham above any of the other kids. So had it been his attitude that had been wrong? Something that never made it into those clinical transcripts? Or had it been the way he liked to argue every point and was known to be a pot-smoking anarchist?
He tried reimagining Daniel Benham’s life. He thought about how it might have been shaped by murder.
At fifteen he had been a vocal socialist. He had been champing at the bit to be old enough to vote, and to join the Labour Party. He was going to stand up against the prime minister he thought was killing the vulnerable by removing support. He had been a humanitarian on a grand scale, and if his socialism had been of the champagne kind, it had been heartfelt. It had driven him to attend rallies and to make him found a socialist group at the school.
But his principles had fizzled out somewhere. His socialism had changed to a centrism that, with age, had slowly turned to downright Toryism. Had his own actions as a killer changed him? Or was it a reaction to the disappearance of the girl he had liked?
He found it difficult to place Benham in the role of killer, somehow. But that was true of all of them, he thought.
At a little before twelve, Tom Jackson called him back with the list of Aurora’s friends.
“There are two of them,” Tom said. That fact alone gave Jonah both a twinge of fear and a twinge of sadness.
“Topaz says the only person she really talked to much was Becky Morris,” Aurora’s father said. “She came round here a couple of times. Very quiet girl.”
“Did Topaz know where we might find her?”
“Yes, she said she’s found her on Facebook and she’s accepted her friend request. She says if you give her an email, she’ll send you a link to her profile.”
“That would be very useful, thank