had of Aleksy’s belongings.
Jonah had put a call through to the uniformed police in Southampton, and then dropped his team a message telling them that their killer appeared to be attempting to threaten witnesses, and that they ought to take particular care. He decided to leave other explanations until the morning.
The uniforms, when they arrived, asked Jojo a few questions and took photographs while the firefighters soaked the place. It became clear that the blaze had been started in a pile of Jojo’s tools and supplies, all of them piled up inside the outbuilding and doused in petrol. The police had taken a further look around, too, and called Jonah to look over the greenhouses, which had been methodically smashed.
Jojo had walked down there after them wordlessly, expressing no surprise at what she saw. Jonah had focused half of his attention on the damage and half of it on her. He was trying to read something into this dazed acceptance, but was failing.
The night had felt both endless and strangely brief. He’d found himself largely unable to look away from the initial spreading of the blaze, and then at its slow decline into almost nothing.
He and the other officers had eventually suggested that Jojo find a hotel. She’d nodded, with that same glazed look, and started searching on her phone. Before she left, Jonah looked down at the box of Aleksy’s possessions she had picked up to carry with her. “Do you still have Aleksy’s phone?” he said.
Jojo gave him a confused look. “Why…?”
“Your house has been set on fire, and your partner died suddenly. Those might be unconnected, but it would be madness to conduct a murder investigation without looking at those things, too. I think we need to spend some time talking about Aleksy, and what happened to him, just to make sure we’ve covered everything.”
Jojo’s eyes fell on the box. “Will you look after it?”
“Of course,” Jonah said quietly.
She hefted the box awkwardly, half opening the lid. It was a shoebox, he saw, that had once held hiking boots.
Jojo rooted until she came up with an old Motorola, and handed it to him. And then, wordlessly, she closed the box and walked over to her Mitsubishi.
Once she had driven off, Jonah conferred with the uniforms and agreed with them that he would be the one to speak to her about the blaze in the morning. He had finally driven home without his bike.
Despite his tiredness, sleep had been a long time coming. It had been almost impossible to shake a sense of threat, even after he’d left Jojo’s, and he had become tense every time he’d seen headlights on the road behind him. His tired brain had protested that this wasn’t how cold cases went. That investigating old crimes never felt present and urgent like this.
He had intended to be in the office by seven, before anyone else arrived, to give himself the space to think. But that had gone out the window when he’d snoozed his alarm from six onward.
He eventually dragged himself out of bed at seven forty, and went to make coffee. For some unknown reason he pulled two mugs out of the cupboard instead of one. The moment of realizing that he had been alone for months now was not a pleasant one. He put both cups away and poured the coffee into a thermos instead.
* * *
—
JONAH DROPPED ALEKSY’S phone with the tech team and asked for a rundown of all the messages and calls on it, and then made his way up to CID slowly, and let himself in. Hanson swung round in her chair as soon as he was inside. She looked well settled behind her desk, a nearly empty disposable coffee cup next to her and her jacket slung over the back of her chair. It was only eight fifteen. There were a couple of other DCs and DSs in, but no sign of Lightman or O’Malley yet.
“Sir,” she said. “I saw a crime report for Jojo Magos on the system.”
Jonah gave a half smile. “Good news travels fast.”
Hanson shifted in her chair, clearly ill at ease. “You were on scene, it said….”
“Yes,” he said. “Which was a stroke of luck. I went to get my bike from Godshill, and I could see the blaze from the road. It was quite some fire.”
“Right,” Hanson said, nodding. “Right. Well…that wasn’t the only report I found.”
He gave her a small smile. “Tell all.”
“It’s not the first time it’s happened,”