She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  “Well done,” he said, nodding. “Not everybody would have realized.”

  Jessie nodded, gave a small smile, and stood up. Her mother pulled her into a brief hug.

  “I’d like them not to talk to their school friends about this for a few days,” Jonah said to Mrs. Miller, once she’d let go of her daughter.

  “It’s OK, they’re not seeing any for a few weeks. We thought we’d carry on the trip, but somewhere else.”

  Privately educated kids, he realized. They were already on vacation, a good month before the regular schools broke up.

  “Good. It would be better if this wasn’t talked about just yet.”

  “Of course.”

  He heard Dr. Miller’s footsteps.

  “Are we done? It’s a beautiful day and I don’t think we have much to add.”

  “Yes, we’re all done. Thanks for your patience.”

  Jonah stood, and the doctor was already giving his children orders to get packed up.

  He hurried them over to the tent, and Jonah found himself watching until Mrs. Miller rose and began to pick up a few half-eaten packs of raisins and a cup.

  “I’m sorry your vacation got interrupted,” he said.

  “It’s fine,” she said with a brief wave of her hand, and glanced at her husband. “Martin’s just…It’s not great for him.” This in a low voice. “This was supposed to be a time where he could forget…He’s been very unwell. They only gave him a fifty percent chance of living past Christmas.”

  Jonah nodded, wondering whether she was used to apologizing for her husband. But he understood that she meant cancer; that those bones had been a little handful of mortality. He felt a trace of sympathy.

  * * *

  —

  AN HOUR AND a half of excavation. Dozens of photographs. A tent set up and eight bags of carefully labeled bone fragments.

  Everyone was getting hot and irritable. Jonah’s mouth was beginning to taste like bitter, hours-old coffee. His feet were fractious, impossible to keep still. And he had the kind of energy-sapping hunger that made it hard to focus.

  “Anything yet?” Hanson asked, after wandering up to the car park and back a few times.

  Excitement had turned into boredom, the one reliable constant in the emotional range of every detective.

  “I think it’ll be a while,” Jonah said. “It’s an old corpse…time-consuming job.”

  “Is there anything we can be…?”

  “We can be here when they want to talk to us,” he said with a half smile.

  Some twenty minutes later, Linda McCullough, the scene-of-crime officer, stepped carefully up out of the dip and approached him. He was glad it was McCullough. You needed someone obsessively careful on a site that would have only the barest traces of data left.

  “How goes it, Linda?”

  “We’re going to be bagging this up for some time.” She lifted her mask and let it sit on the top of her white hood. Her weathered face was wet with sweat, as anyone’s would have been if they’d been wearing overalls in that weather. But McCullough seemed not to notice it. “But as initial feedback, it’s a pubescent female, in an advanced state of decay.”

  “How advanced?”

  “Rough estimate only, but more than ten years. Fewer than fifty.”

  Thirty years, he thought. Thirty.

  He found it hard, momentarily, to believe that so much time had passed. A feeling that he must be Rip Van Winkle, and have slept through much of his life, ran through him. Rip Van Winkle must have felt this strange mixture of anger and guilt, too.

  “Linda!”

  McCullough turned, shielding her eyes from the sun. Another white bio-suit was leaning out of the tent to call to her.

  “I’m uncovering other materials. Can I get your opinion?”

  “Sure.”

  She replaced her mask and climbed carefully back to the site, disappearing into the tent.

  “So if it’s murder, it’s an old one,” Hanson said, and Jonah was half-blinded by the white of the paper as she flipped her notebook to write in it. She sounded disappointed. Unaware of the huge implications behind those numbers. “And a teenage girl.”

  “It’s thirty years old,” he said. “And it’s Aurora Jackson.”

  2

  Aurora

  Friday, July 22, 1983, 5:30 P.M.

  Light, dark, light, dark.

  Every tree was a shadowy pulse as they flashed past it. It was a soothing rhythm. She rested her head on the car door and watched her hair flicking and snapping out. She thought about drifting on the hot wind, away from here, to somewhere the light was golden-orange all day.

  “Where were you last night? I tried calling your house a few times.” It was Topaz, sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair as she leaned forward from the backseat. She wasn’t talking to Aurora, of course.

  Aurora wished Brett hadn’t been kind to her and let her ride shotgun. She could tell that Topaz wanted to be there. Her sister was angry that she’d been relegated—angry with Aurora. Connor had been angry, too. He didn’t like that Brett had offered to drive the three of them while he’d been left to cycle with the others.

  “Huh? Oh. I went to a film.” Brett shifted gears as he spoke. His hand brushed Aurora’s flimsy skirt. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  Aurora moved a little, shrugging. “My fault. I’m in the way.”

  “What film? Something scary?” Topaz asked, almost over the top of her.

  “Blue Thunder.”

  “Again?” Topaz laughed, and pushed his shoulder lightly. “You must have seen that twenty times.”

  “Just three,” Brett replied. “It’s a great film. It knocks a lot of the stuff this year out of the water.” A brief pause to overtake a caravan. “What kind of films do you like, Aurora?”

  “Huh?”

  It was a knee-jerk response. The pretense of being elsewhere. It happened so often that even though she’d been listening, she couldn’t help it. She heard Topaz mutter, “Airhead.”

  She looked at Brett, who was smiling warmly enough.

  “What kind of films do you like watching?”

  “I don’t know. Anything…where I get to see another world, I suppose. Things set in strange countries, or space, or fantastical places. I like romance, too.”

  She heard Coralie snort, and wondered if she should have lied and told him she liked action movies. Topaz always pretended to be into them, and rolled her eyes at “girly girls” who only liked soppy films. Aurora had always let her do it, even though she knew Topaz’s favorite films were all period dramas or romantic comedies.

  “So you must like Star Wars, then?” Brett asked. “That’s got all of that. Have you seen Return of the Jedi yet?”

  Aurora shook her head. “I was going to wait till it was out on video. My parents didn’t like the last one….”

  “Ah, you have to see it in the cinema,” he said, shaking his head. “All the effects, the Star Destroyers, the rumbling that comes from the speakers—and it’s going to be ages till the video. We should sort that out, Topaz.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Go as a group.”

  “Sounds good,” Topaz said, and Aurora could tell from the set of her mouth that she wasn’t happy.

  I shouldn’t have mentioned our parents. She told me not to talk about them.

  Aurora felt a knot of tension in her stomach. She never knew what to say in front of Topaz’s friends. Whatever she came out with was always the wrong thing. And getting it wrong in front of Brett was worse. He was the older one everyone had a crush on. The star sportsman who could draw a dozen girls as an audience just by turning up to train in the school pool.

  Her feelings about being here were such a mixture of gratitude and anxiety. Everyone in her year—everyone in the school really—would have killed to be sitti
ng here. Brett Parker was right next to her, close enough to touch. And more than that, she was with the group. With Benners’s gang of strange, anarchic, brilliant, and beautiful friends.

  It was a group she didn’t fit into at all; one she had only been invited into because of her sister. And, in one of those ironies, Topaz didn’t want her there at all.

  She looked back at the trees and the sunshine, imagining that she could be lifted by that breeze and placed gently in a pair of strong arms. She gave the arms an owner and a head of dark hair.

  She imagined him speaking to her. I’ve never met anyone like you before. You’re all the world to me.

  “Hey.” Coralie was leaning forward to point. “That’s where you pull in.”

  She added a strange little laugh onto the end of it. It was a habit of hers. It made her seem even more childlike. Another thing to add to the pink clothes and the wide eyes and the cultivated confusion at the world.

  The car slowed and Aurora watched, regretfully, as the flickering subsided into a slower rhythm and then became just the shadow of overhanging trees. She tried to hold on to that feeling of being cradled and lulled, but Coralie was opening her door, and Brett was pulling the keys out of the ignition.

  Reluctantly, she climbed out of the car and watched Topaz get out and walk round toward Brett, who was unloading a few sleeping bags and backpacks. Topaz stretched upward, her crop top riding up to show her tanned stomach, and then turned round to face away from him. She leaned forward to touch her toes.

  Aurora saw Brett’s eyes drop to Topaz’s backside, where some of her buttocks and the very bottom of her lace underwear were visible.

  “I’m soooooo stiff,” Topaz said. She straightened up slowly, and looked at Brett over her shoulder. “Coming?”

  “Uhhh…Sure.”

  Coralie hurried round the car and took Topaz’s hand. The two of them swayed ahead down the forest path.

  3

  Jonah took Hanson with him to the Jackson house outside Lyndhurst. He could have left informing next of kin to a couple of community-support officers, but he felt a powerful need to be there. Perhaps to comfort; perhaps because he’d waited thirty years for a conclusion.

  The Jacksons had never left the New Forest. It was the more common outcome in disappearance cases. Where a murder often drove a family away, an unresolved missing person bound them to the place where the missing one had been. There was always that dwindling hope that they would one day arrive back home again.

  The half-mile driveway was almost impassable now. The sand-and-hardcore surface had disintegrated into a minefield of potholes. Hanson swore when the front-left tire dipped deeply enough into a pothole that the bottom of the car scraped the hard-baked mud. She pulled the wheel sharply to avoid another, and Jonah steadied himself against the dashboard.

  “Doesn’t the council resurface this?” she asked.

  “Private road,” Jonah replied. “The Jacksons have never believed in tarmac. They’re a bit alternative. Though I’m not sure if it’s about a love of nature or just laziness, to be honest.”

  “I don’t mind nature when it keeps its hands off my car,” Hanson muttered.

  She pulled up in a half-cleared area in front of a single-story house. Jonah opened his door over a dried-mud crater. Stepping into it, he felt corners of stone press into his foot through the sole of his shoe.

  He had half emerged from the car when the battered front door opened. A round, uncertain figure in a thick-knit cardigan and home-dyed dress stood in the doorway, blinking into the sun.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Jackson. Sorry for bothering you, but is it all right if we come in?” he said as neutrally as he could.

  “I…Yes. Yes, I suppose so.” She emerged further from under the shadow of a scorched-looking wisteria. Then she stopped. “It’s not Topaz, is it?”

  Jonah shook his head, but Hanson answered for him.

  “Your daughter’s just fine, Mrs. Jackson.” She said it with a warm smile, and Jonah was glad he’d brought her along.

  “We just wondered if we might chat about some developments in Aurora’s disappearance,” he added.

  Joy Jackson’s head turned back toward the house briefly, and her hands reached for her cardigan pockets.

  “Yes. Yes, of course. Why don’t you—”

  She stood shifting as Jonah and Hanson navigated the overgrown stones of the path. Two of them tipped under Jonah’s feet.

  Up close, Joy was ruddier and more lined than he’d remembered her. Round cheeks underscored by webs of red; eyes that constantly shifted in creased sockets.

  Lavender came off her clothes as she turned. “Come in. I’ll find Tom. Tom!” Her voice was shrill as she dipped into the shadow of the hall. “Tom!”

  The hallway was barely possible to walk along. Most of the floor was covered with assorted coats, shoes, boxes, and eclectic outdoor items. Joy picked her way past without looking at her feet, long practiced at this arrangement.

  “Come into the kitchen. I’ll put some tea on. Tom!”

  The kitchen was no less cluttered. There were two or three spare feet of clear space at one end of the huge oak table, and a mountain of newspaper, letters, and shrapnel on the remainder.

  “Don’t trouble yourself over tea unless you want one,” Jonah said as Joy opened three cupboards in turn before finding a box of tea. She turned round with it, and came to a stop again.

  He moved around the edge of the table and let his eyes scan the kitchen. The work surfaces were under a layer of visible grime, with dirty crockery spread out like ornaments. Larger objects interspersed them at intervals. An old piece of plumbing. A table-tennis racquet. A hammer.

  The stooped figure that emerged from a doorway brought Jonah up short. If it hadn’t been for the wild gray beard and hair, he would never have known him for Tom Jackson, the arrogant, well-bred, decidedly eccentric oddball. He could barely see any traces of the argumentative man who had clattered in and out of Lyndhurst in his battered Volvo and engaged in periodic feuds with the council or post office. This was no more than a fragment of him. A poor sketch.

  “Police, is it?”

  The voice was lifeless, too. Jonah remembered the fury in him after Aurora had gone. The aggressive finger-stabbing as he told them what they were doing wrong, and why they couldn’t find her. Perhaps thirty years of fury could burn the life out of a man.

  “Yes, Tom.” Joy had begun moving again, filling an ancient stovetop kettle from the sink. “Will you…? I’ll make a pot.”

  Tom pulled a wooden Carver chair out. He sat heavily in it and looked first at Hanson, then at Jonah. He seemed to lose interest in both, and began to gaze at a dim painting of the sea on the uneven wall.

  The silence as the kettle boiled stretched into awkwardness. Jonah’s patience wore through before it had finished.

  “We wanted to speak to you first. There’s been a development this morning.”

  There was a flurry of activity from Joy. She shoved cups down and turned, reaching into her pockets for something, her hands coming up empty.

  “They’ve got some news on Aurora, Tom,” Joy said.

  “Yes. I assumed so.”

  Jonah met a gaze from Tom that was full of profound uninterest. He found himself looking away.

  “Although formal identification is to follow,” Jonah said, “we’ve discovered remains not far from the campsite where Aurora disappeared. The age and gender are right, and they look to be thirty years old.” He waited for a response. Tom only flicked a strand of hair out of his eyes, while Joy waited with her gaze on Hanson for some reason.

  “We believe it’s your daughter,” Jonah finished as gently as he could.

  Joy stared with her mouth hanging slack for a moment, and then reached to put a cup down, clumsily.

  “She…Oh, Tom.” She drew in a no
isy breath, and then sobbed. She turned away, hiding her face. “Tom. Oh, Tom. She’s—”

  Hanson moved immediately to put a comforting arm round her. Tom Jackson remained motionless, that empty gaze on his wife now.

  “Well, she wasn’t going to be alive, was she?” he said, his voice harsh. “Thirty years of not a blasted word. Of course she’s dead.”

  * * *

  —

  EIGHT FORTY ON a Sunday. Connor Dooley should be taking his weekend, but he’d still had to come in early for marking, and to prepare for their interdepartmental meeting. It happened increasingly: vacations and weekends being gradually absorbed into meetings and paperwork and conflict resolution. And his rooms were being absorbed, too. Once pristine mahogany was now hidden beneath folders and envelopes, its occasional revealed corners dusty and dull.

  Today, he was preparing himself to fight. It was a frustrating, unnecessary fight based on the intractable cheapness of the bursar. A new post had been created a year ago out of need. The history fellows had long been overloaded, the college taking on ever more PhD and MPhil students. Even with the extra support of that new post, they were 8 percent below target contact time with their students. He’d thought this fight at least partially won.

  And then Lopez had taken a professorship at Glasgow, and the bursar had announced no plans to reappoint. He’d told Connor point-blank that the extra fellow had been a luxury they could no longer afford. That the existing three history fellows could cover it among them.

  So Connor was here, on Sunday morning, before the coffee shops along West Nicholson Street were even open, ready to print out tables and charts of the time commitments of his faculty. Ready to beat the bursar down with facts, in the full knowledge that if the bursar agreed on the need for a new appointment, the principal would accept it. If that tactic failed, he might just invite the bursar home for dinner. Fighting was sometimes rendered unnecessary when his wife moved toward a colleague, wearing a little black dress.