She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  He couldn’t help being impressed by the ease of movement, by the speed with which the small form had vanished. He knew he would be slower, but jumped for it anyway. He had trained himself hard for pursuit, and rarely had a chance to use it. He couldn’t help smiling to himself as he slung the sweater over his shoulder and heaved himself up. He got one foot over the fence and then jumped down into a small, leafy garden.

  He heard running steps retreating beyond the house and followed them at a headlong sprint down a small passage beside the house. He was provided some illumination as he emerged into the front garden by a light being turned on.

  She had emerged onto a side street, one he vaguely recognized but could not have named. He was certain it joined up to another road farther up, though. He kept his pace up as he followed the retreating figure, which had opened up the lead a little.

  They didn’t stay on the road for long. Within a hundred yards, she was off again, vaulting a gate with apparent ease and finding a gap down the side of another house. He began to lose track of how many fences they had jumped and gardens they had run through, and was no longer certain where they were. He suspected they had looped back on themselves at some point.

  He began to grow tired, the constant sprint and climb murder on his lungs. He was sweating profusely into his uniform, uncomfortable and hot. But he was also a hound on a scent, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

  The fleeing figure made a mistake in the end; she turned down the side of the renovated Stag Hotel and met a sheer wall with unforgiving brickwork to either side. He had to slow swiftly to avoid running straight into her.

  He hadn’t really needed to see her face as she turned round, rebellious and sheened with sweat. He’d known it was her as soon as he’d seen the design on the abandoned pullover. It had been confirmed over and over by the way that she moved, and by her speed.

  He pulled the sweater off his shoulder, and said, “You could have made it a bit easier.”

  He threw it to her, while she stood, bristling. It fell in front of her feet, and she glanced down at it and then back up, suspicious and tensed to run. He nodded to her and, still heaving for air, began to back away. “Thanks for the exercise, Jojo,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  She didn’t say anything until he’d turned away and started to jog back. A slightly mocking, “You’re not too slow for a policeman, Copper Sheens!”

  His sergeant had been waiting alone back by the car, twitchy with impatience.

  “I lost him,” he said as Jonah slowed to a walk. “He ducked into one of those council houses and I couldn’t tell you which.”

  Jonah shook his head. “Same here. Bloody maniac, that one. Over half the fences in the village and then vanished.”

  His sergeant shook his head and opened the driver’s door. “At least there’s no arrest report to file.”

  “Yes,” Jonah said, and looked over at the bold red slogan on the wall.

  FREEDOM KNOWS NO DIVISIONS OF WEALTH OR

  He supposed it would probably have said “class.” It was almost a shame not to finish it, but it would be gone within a few days. Painted over.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH HAD DOZED off at some point on the way, lulled by Hanson’s sedate driving and the gathering dark. He woke up dry-mouthed and disoriented when his DC said, “Sir.”

  “Sorry.” He remembered where they were now. On the way to Jojo’s pale-blue house. They were driving down some unrecognizable stretch of curving road. He reached into the back to find his kit bag and rooted in it until he found the water bottle from his bike. He took a long draft from it. “I didn’t snore, did I?”

  “No, you’re OK,” Hanson said, smiling slightly. “And if you dribbled, you did it out of the other side of your mouth.”

  Jonah shook his head, but still rubbed at his mouth to be certain.

  “So, Jojo Magos,” Hanson said, and for a disconcerting moment Jonah imagined that she knew about that night in Lyndhurst and the chase and the sweater. But of course she just wanted information, because he had asked her to take the lead.

  “She was a core member of the group, unlike Brett Parker,” he said. “Bit of a tomboy back then. Actually, still a bit of a tomboy as far as I can make out. Now a landscape gardener. Did you look her up?”

  “Do we know what she did that night?” Hanson asked. “I mean, I know we’re waiting on O’Malley and Lightman going through the notes, but…”

  “There was only a brief mention of her in the overview. She went to bed a bit before one, the same as the others. Though when I say went to bed, she passed out sprawled on the ground with a sleeping bag half over her. Says she stayed that way until Connor shook her awake sometime after five. He asked her to help look for Aurora, so apparently she did.”

  Hanson nodded. She had slowed the car down to a crawl, either lost in thought or wanting a few more minutes to mull. The GPS told them it was only a mile until their destination.

  “Were you one of the officers who investigated back then?” she asked abruptly.

  “Only in the most basic sense.” He glanced at her. “I was recently off training, and I was a regular uniformed PC. I got sent knocking on doors like the rest of the local force, and I spent more hours than I can count searching through the woods. By two days after she’d gone, the area of woodland we were actively searching had been extended to cover twenty square miles. It was an extraordinary level of search. Like nothing I’ve seen since. I don’t think most of us slept for the first couple of weeks. It seems incredible that we missed her.”

  “I assume they did all this stuff we’re doing? Interviewed the kids?”

  “Endlessly,” Jonah agreed. “For months. I got used to seeing one or another of them dragged in most weeks. Particularly Connor Dooley.”

  “Why him?” She stopped the car altogether and gazed at him keenly. Her eyes looked a great deal harder than usual in the dim light.

  “Because they thought he was white trash,” Jonah replied. “And because he was Irish by descent. We were in the midst of the Troubles, and the suspicion toward anyone with an accent was enormous. Plus he was covered in tattoos, and known for getting into fights. He was the obvious choice.”

  “But they didn’t find anything?”

  “No.” He glanced behind them, where a pair of headlights had swung into view. Hanson put the car into first and moved off again a little hurriedly. “Not as far as I know. Which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anything to find, obviously. It also might mean they were looking in the wrong place.”

  Jojo’s house appeared out of the darkness ahead of them. Now, at nighttime, it looked more white than powder blue, and the tumbling plants in the front garden that grew up and over half of the house seemed colorless instead of cheerful.

  Jonah knew it fairly well from the road. An old school friend had pointed it out to him, and on many of the occasions he’d driven this way since, he had slowed slightly to take in all the colors. He had even seen her here on one occasion, working away in the front garden in a vest top with mud smudged across her face and a gleam of sweat over her. She hadn’t looked up, and he had driven on feeling uncomfortably like some kind of voyeur.

  “So they stopped investigating after a while?” Hanson asked, as she signaled and then turned slowly into the driveway.

  “Things moved on,” Jonah replied. “A group of IRA angries plotted to blow up the Grand Hotel in Brighton in the fall of ’84. All of our focus was suddenly switched to finding them instead of a missing girl. Aurora’s case stayed open, though, and occasionally there would be a resurgence of interest.”

  He didn’t add that he had volunteered to be part of the task force each time the inquiry had reopened. That he had never really stopped looking for Aurora.

  Hanson turned off the engine, her expression thoughtful. “And it’s further
in the past now, too.” Then she added, “But we have a body. And a defined list of suspects, I suppose.”

  “We’ll see how much that counts for,” he said, climbing out of the car.

  It was late for them to be calling. Past ten o’clock. An antisocial time. He hoped she hadn’t already gone to bed. They would have to retreat if so, and try again tomorrow. Though perhaps by then he would be less dazed, and struggle less to distinguish between the person he had been and the person he was now.

  He edged past a tatty, dark red Jeep Wrangler with its soft top down and bamboo plants standing up in the back. Despite the dominant and almost wild-looking presence of plants all around the driveway, the paving was immaculate, with clean cement between cream tiles.

  They ducked under a vigorously healthy clematis on a trellis to make their way to the door. It was already ajar. Behind it was a lean, tanned form in loose cotton wrap-around trousers and a vest top.

  “Can I help?”

  Everything about her spelled wariness. Jonah could see a hard ridge of muscle standing up along her forearm, and her fingers were pressed hard into the door, ready to close it in a moment. The pose was so profoundly like the cornered figure that night in Totton that it was disorienting.

  “We’re with the Southampton Police,” Hanson said. “I’m DC Hanson, and this is DCI Sheens. Can we come in?”

  Jonah was sure he wasn’t imagining the reaction at his name. There was a slight relaxing of the body, followed by a slow half smile. Jojo, unlike her friends, had recognized him.

  “OK,” she said, and then a little archly, “if you promise I’m not in trouble.”

  Hanson smiled, and Jonah gave her a tiny shrug. Her smile faded a little, but she backed away from the door and let them in.

  Hanson gestured for him to go first, and Jonah followed Jojo at a slight distance. She still walked like someone who spent most of her time moving, with an easy, loping stride that covered ground.

  The house was tidier than he’d expected, and the space was larger. It had looked like a doll’s house, but the hallway opened onto a large kitchen that had been extended on one side into a conservatory and on the other into a sitting room. The colors were cheerful, seaside-like. Blues and fresh yellows and bleached wood. One blue-and-white mug of tea was on a small oak coffee table with a book facedown next to it. No sign of anyone else living there, which was as he’d expected. As far as Jonah knew from the local gossip chain, Jojo hadn’t dated for years. Not since she’d lost her boyfriend to a climbing accident.

  “Do you mind if we sit?” Hanson asked.

  Jojo shook her head, and folded herself into an armchair opposite the sofa, watching them questioningly.

  “So. What’s going on?”

  It was Hanson’s turn to put into words the fact that a long-vanished girl was dead.

  “Some remains have been uncovered in Brinken Wood. They’re Aurora Jackson’s.”

  Jojo was quite still, and then she nodded slowly. She reached forward to grab her mug of tea with a hand that shook slightly.

  “I suppose she had to be dead, didn’t she?” she said, and took a large gulp. “But it’s not nice knowing it. What do you think happened? Was she murdered?”

  “We’re trying to establish what happened,” Hanson said with the natural evasiveness of a good interviewing officer. “We’d like to ask if you know anything about the location she was found in. It was a hollow underneath a tree.”

  “What?”

  It was whip-sharp, that word. Almost angry.

  “The location of the remains was alongside the river. A hollowed-out area of earth under a beech tree. Do you know anything about it?”

  Jojo gave a strange, harsh laugh. “Of course I know about it. It was our secret stash. Our repository for more drugs than we could have used in a lifetime.” She looked over at Jonah, a slightly pleading look in her eyes. “Do you need to know where they came from?”

  Jonah leaned forward slightly, telling Hanson that he would answer this. “We’ve been given that information by another witness, but it would be useful to hear what you’ve got to say about it.”

  “It’s so…so strange,” Jojo said, and Jonah could see her eyes moving left to right, right to left, recalling something. They focused on him again. “Was she put there? Was it deliberate? Because that would mean…it was one of us.”

  Jonah held her gaze, aware of the way her face had drained of color. “It’s quite possible,” he said.

  There was a pause, while he felt like Jojo’s gaze was piercing him.

  “We don’t know what happened yet,” Hanson said in the end, across their eye contact. “So we need you to tell us anything you can that might help.”

  Jojo shifted in her chair. She looked at Hanson now, and nodded. “It doesn’t make me look great. A friend of my brother’s had a problem. He’d purchased this big supply of Dexedrine for some rich prick in Southampton. And then said rich prick got picked up for cocaine possession right before the sale, and he was in real shit. I told Benners and asked if he’d like to buy it. I told him he could get it for nothing….” Jojo shrugged. “I don’t know if that counts as dealing or what. But it was me who set it up. I put them in touch. Benners’s parents were loaded, and it seemed like a great opportunity. We thought we’d sit on it and just use it little by little. We were big into Dexedrine then. It was our pick-me-up on party nights, and Benners sometimes used it to help him with essay deadlines.”

  “How much was there?” Jonah asked, remembering what Brett Parker had said.

  “Fifteen kilos,” Jojo answered, her mouth a little twisted. “An insane amount. It could have done us for years.”

  Jonah kept his reaction to himself. He remembered the cluster of packets. There had been nowhere near fifteen kilos. Nowhere near a kilo, even.

  “So how long before that night did the purchase happen?” Jonah continued. He could feel Hanson’s tension beside him. He wasn’t letting her take the lead like he’d suggested.

  “A few weeks. Really not very long,” Jojo said. “It was still a big, exciting treat.”

  “So I suppose you’d used only a few hundred grams by then.”

  “If that,” Jojo said. “We really weren’t heavy users, any of us.”

  “And after she’d gone missing,” Jonah said, “you decided to leave it there?”

  Jojo gave him a hollow smile. She placed her mug down with an audible clunk. “We had to kick off a search for her, and we knew the place was going to end up crawling with coppers. We were bricking it, and we agreed we’d have to leave it. Later, Aurora going like that left a…shadow, I guess. And none of us wanted anything to do with the stuff. At least, that’s what I thought, when I did think about it. We didn’t talk about the drugs afterward.”

  “None of you talked about them?” Hanson asked curiously. “Not at all?”

  Jojo hesitated.

  “No, not…I think Benners was pretty keen on us staying away from there. He was the one who was going to be in the shit if they were found, after all.”

  “Did he tell you to stay away?”

  “Not in so many words.” Jojo gave a slight shrug. “He just said we’d all have to act like that place didn’t exist for a while.”

  “He didn’t say how long for?” Hanson persisted. “He didn’t say he was planning on going back a while later?”

  “Like I said, I don’t think he said that much. At least, I can’t remember him saying anything. I assumed everyone felt the same way I did. It felt like they were tainted.” She took an unsteady breath. “Jesus. She was there all the time. Waiting for one of us to go back there, and none of us ever did.”

  Except one of you might have done, Jonah thought.

  A brief silence ensued, and then Hanson asked gently, “Did Aurora know about the drugs?”

  “Oh, she knew ab
out them,” Jojo said. “We all did, even Brett. Topaz was showing off to him, and because she wanted to show him, Aurora had to see, too.”

  “So Topaz was interested in Brett Parker?”

  Jojo gave a slight laugh. “Yes. Connor didn’t get a look in back then. Poor Connor. He had to watch her fawn all over Brett, who was just totally smug at that age. I guess that’s what happens when everyone adores you. I think Aurora vanishing made him grow up a bit, you know.”

  “Was Brett interested in Topaz, then?”

  “No, not really. She probably found it frustrating. There weren’t that many people who said no to her.”

  Jonah stood as Hanson went on questioning her. He could feel Jojo’s eyes on him as he wandered around the room, looking for clues to the last few decades.

  “How close are the six of you now?” Hanson asked.

  “Fairly close. We ended up having to lean on each other quite a lot back then. Brett was the first to move away, because he was two years above and went to Loughborough, but as soon as he had the money he bought a place back here, and that gradually became the center of everything.”

  “Did you talk about Aurora?”

  “Yes, of course. But we talked about a lot of other things, too. We were friends.”

  Jonah’s wandering had taken him to the point where the room met the new conservatory. He found a bookcase with six photo frames in it. He recognized Jojo’s younger brother, Kenny, who still lived in Lyndhurst and worked at the outdoor shop.

  “And now?” Hanson was asking.

  “We drifted a bit when Topaz and Connor moved away,” Jojo replied. “I mean, I still see Daniel and Brett individually. Coralie’s off in London now, and she’s never been that bothered about seeing me. The lack of feeling is fairly mutual.”

  Jonah was storing all of that as he looked at the other photos. There were two pictures of children: nieces and nephews who belonged to Jojo’s older brother, Anton, at a guess. One photo was of her father at a younger age, olive-skinned and grinning in his overalls as he repaired a roof.