by Gytha Lodge
“We’re trying to find out what happened to Aurora,” he said. “We need your help with that. I want to know how Aurora ended up with your friends. Was there anyone in particular who invited her? Was it you?”
Topaz did not answer for a moment. Jonah saw the swift cut of her eyes across to Connor, and the slight movement in her mouth, which she then stifled.
“It was all of us,” Connor said.
Topaz gave a slight sigh. “It was the others really. I didn’t want her to be there. I know it’s…it’s not nice. She was my sister. But at that point I found her embarrassing. I found my whole family embarrassing. A scruffy bunch of hippies who had no clue about the modern world.”
Jonah gave a nod. “Not wanting your sister there isn’t a crime.”
“No, I know,” Topaz said, her eyes on the table. “But I didn’t look after her, did I? I didn’t make sure she was OK. I was too busy having fun….”
Jonah let a brief silence ensue, and then asked quietly, “Do you remember who suggested it first? If anyone was particularly keen for her to come?”
Topaz shook her head. “I think everyone felt sorry for her. School was lonely for her.”
Jonah let O’Malley make a note while he asked, “You don’t think any of the boys had a particular interest? That they had any designs on her? I’m sorry to ask you in front of your husband, but I am including him in that.”
Topaz’s face was immediately full of revulsion. “No, I don’t. She was so…so goofy and childish. There’s no way.”
He was aware that Connor was watching Topaz, and not him.
“But she was a beautiful girl, your sister,” Jonah pressed. “Some might not have been put off by her naïveté. It might, to be blunt, have excited some of them.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say,” Topaz said. “Just horrible.”
“Well, what about Daniel Benham?” he went on. “He was two years older.”
Topaz was shaking her head, and gave a harsh laugh. “Look, you don’t get it. She wasn’t fanciable. She wasn’t in the least bit sexual. She’d never had a boyfriend and never been asked out. She just drifted around in her own little world, looking at plants and flowers. Up until, I don’t know, maybe earlier that year, when she stopped being so gawky and started looking pretty, she wasn’t even on anyone’s radar. Not even a little. And even then, once everything sorted itself out, she wasn’t sexy. She was pretty and spacey and a classic hippie love child. She was my baby sister. She wasn’t being preyed upon by anyone.”
Jonah didn’t respond immediately. He lowered his eyes to his notes, feeling a strange desire to argue with her. To tell her no, the boys had been fascinated with Aurora, even if they weren’t sure what to do about it.
The silence was all it took to show the cracks in Topaz’s certainty. “Did you find something?” she asked. “Had…had she been…?”
Jonah made a slightly noncommittal noise, his attention moving from Topaz to Connor, who had raised his hand to his hair in a jerky motion. Connor looked profoundly uncomfortable.
“We haven’t confirmed anything yet. Data analysis for the site isn’t back. More coffee?” Jonah asked, looking between the two of them.
“I think we’re OK,” Connor said, his voice tight. Jonah nodded slowly, and left them to each other for a while. He could feel the two of them watching him all the way out of the room.
* * *
—
BENHAM LOOKED STRESSED. More than any of them so far, Jonah thought. His face was pale, and his gaze darted from point to point around the room. He was sweaty, too. Sick-looking.
His solicitor, next to him, was calm. Her jaw was raised in slight belligerence. Fortysomething and stocky in a tailored skirt suit, with a Pandora bracelet and a diamanté watch. He didn’t know her. She was probably too expensive for most of the people Jonah interviewed.
The taped introductions done, Jonah let a silence elapse. The only sound was O’Malley’s periodic rustling of paper as he looked through a printout.
“You wanted to know about the drugs,” Benham said eventually, and his solicitor cast him a sideways glance.
Disapproving, Jonah thought.
“Yes,” he said, “among other things. We have reason to believe that they belonged to you. Witnesses have confirmed that you purchased them from a contact you had used previously.”
Benham was already opening his mouth to answer when his solicitor said, “Is this relevant to the current murder investigation?”
“It may be,” Jonah said. “After all, if the drugs were being sold, the owner stood to lose a great deal if they were discovered. Even as a minor, he’d have been looking at potential correctional time, and certainly expulsion from school and a permanent blot on his record.”
Benham shook his head. “That doesn’t mean I’d do anything to hurt anyone.”
“Mr. Benham is here voluntarily, in order to give information to you as a witness,” his solicitor said quickly and sharply. “If you wish to question him as a suspect, then you will have to do so under a separate interview.”
Jonah gave her a small smile, then nodded and carried on. “I’m not attempting to assert, at this point, that you did anything to protect yourself. But I’m interested in those drugs. The threat of being caught was a motive for anyone in the group. With that in mind, I’d like you to confirm that they were yours, and to indicate where you bought them from, and why.”
His solicitor leaned over to murmur to him, and Benham nodded.
“They were mine, but I’m not going to make any comment beyond that,” he said, “beyond affirming that they came from someone entirely unconnected with Aurora.”
“Did you intend to sell them?” Jonah persisted.
There was a pause, in which Benham’s solicitor shook her head.
“I never had any intention of selling drugs. Any connected with me were for the sole—and free—use of the people around me.”
Jonah couldn’t help smiling slightly. It was such a politician’s answer.
“What happened to it all afterward? The Dexedrine?”
“Nothing happened to it, as far as I’m aware,” Benham replied.
“So you left a hefty supply of drugs underground?” Jonah asked. “You didn’t think about the money it represented, or about the chance of it being found and you being in trouble?”
“Are we back to attempting to view my client as a suspect?” his solicitor cut in.
“Not at present,” Jonah said calmly, “but I do want to know whether you tried to go back there.”
“I think that’s connected—”
“It’s all right,” Daniel said, holding his hand up to her. “I’d rather…I meant to go back.” He looked up at Jonah. “I told the others I’d wait till she was found. I thought it’d be quick. And then as time passed, I decided I’d better wait until things were quieter. But it went on, and the longer it went on…the more I felt like I couldn’t. How could I be worrying about bloody party drugs when Aurora was gone? And there was a bit of me that blamed myself for her vanishing. I felt like I’d failed her. If I’d checked up on her, or slept nearer…”
Jonah let the silence extend, but Benham seemed to be done.
“So you never went back.”
“No.”
“And did the others know that?”
Benham pulled a face. “No, I don’t think so. I’d told them to leave it to me, and as time went by I didn’t want to admit that I’d left it. So I never went back, and that meant I never found her. And isn’t that a big irony? I was thinking about her all the time and she’d have been found years ago if I’d just got on with the job.”
Jonah nodded slowly. At the front of his mind was the fact that the stash had been lifted, whatever Benham said. Either he had taken it, and thought they were unaware of the size of the original
load, or he had no idea that it had gone.
Jonah decided to keep that little piece of information to himself for a while. He sat back, considering. “Would you mind telling me about your friendship with Aurora? How well did you know her?”
“Not very well,” Benham said. “Not as well as I knew her sister. And the group of us was really just me, Topaz, Connor, Coralie, and Jojo. But I’d go round their house now and then, and Topaz and Aurora took the bus back to Lyndhurst most days as well. I’d talked to her enough to think she was a nice girl.”
“Hmm. So you hadn’t ever been involved with her?”
Benham gave him a mystified look. He glanced at his solicitor once again. “No, I hadn’t. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend. Though she didn’t exactly tell me everything about herself.”
“Nothing happened between you?” Jonah asked. “Even on that night? I mean, there was alcohol flowing and you were all taking drugs. Sometimes these things happen.”
“No, it really didn’t,” Daniel said firmly. “I never had that kind of interest in her. I liked her, but that’s as far as it went.”
“You weren’t worried about her finding out about that Dexedrine, were you?” O’Malley asked, pausing in writing his scrawled notes. “It must have been a concern.”
“I wasn’t worried about her at all.” Benham sat upright. He gave O’Malley a firm look. “I was pretty uncertain about Brett, who loved to pretend to be more of a bad boy than he was. But not Aurora.”
O’Malley tilted his head. “You had reason to believe that Aurora was good at keeping secrets, then?”
There was a long pause, in which his solicitor watched him, on the verge of interrupting. And then Benham said, “Yes, I did. I had reason. She knew quite a bit about me. Not because I’d told her. She stumbled across…I’m not one hundred percent…straight, you see.” There was a tension in his voice and in his expression. “I’ve had the odd relationship with a boy here and there. One of them was a sixth-former. A drummer in the jazz band. Aurora…happened on us. While Topaz was doing dance classes, Aurora took herself for a wander. Waiting for their parents, you know. We were down in the old allotment that backs onto the school sports field. People don’t generally go there, so…” He trailed off.
Jonah was genuinely surprised by this little confession. He had for some reason always thought of Benham as the guitar-strumming ladies’ man. He’d definitely fooled around with a fair few women.
“Did you discuss it with her?”
“Yes. Well, not exactly discussed it.” He grimaced a little. “She just nodded and left, and I didn’t get to see her until the next morning on the bus. I don’t think I slept at all. My…my father was against all of that. Disgusted by it. He told me once that if I ever came out, I’d be out of the house. That would be it. And of course my mum wouldn’t have argued with him.”
He leaned forward to the glass of water on the table and drank a large gulp of it.
“But Aurora was supportive when you spoke to her?” O’Malley asked. “Said she’d keep it quiet?”
“Yes,” Benham said with a nod. “I went and sat next to her on the bus. She was usually on her own, so she was…She was so obviously delighted that I’d chosen to sit there. Which made me feel pretty terrible. I mean, I’m not giving myself airs, but I’d never really thought about how it felt not to be…popular. I tried to sit with her a few times after that. But anyway, when I asked her about it, she was surprised. Honestly, it had never occurred to her that she might tell anyone. Or that anyone might think of doing. And she didn’t breathe a word. Long after the drummer and I had broken up, nobody had ever got to hear about it. She was a kind person, Aurora.”
His eyes were leaking tears, and he picked up his water and finished it.
Jonah waited, watching until the witness’s eyes had dried a little. “I’m sorry to bring up a lot of unpleasant memories. But it is important that we ask.”
“I understand.”
“Could you tell me whether you believe any of the other members of the group were interested in Aurora? Whether anyone might have become involved with her that night?”
“I…” Daniel shook his head. “I didn’t think so. There wasn’t necessarily much opportunity. We were all together, and then peeled off to sleep. And Aurora went to bed pretty soon afterward.”
He could feel the sudden tension in O’Malley.
“According to all six statements from the day after the disappearance,” the DS said, “Aurora went to bed first. Before any of the rest of you.”
“Sorry, I suppose…Right. Right. Well, I’m…It wasn’t so much that they went to bed. People sort of…paired off.”
Jonah gave him a steady look. “So there was sexual activity occurring between members of the group before her disappearance.”
“I don’t know about sexual,” he said hastily. “You’d have to ask them. Just kissing, from what I saw. And then people drifted off toward the woods.”
“Can you clarify who we are asking?” Jonah pressed.
“Well, the others. I mean, Topaz, Brett…and Connor and Jojo were cuddled up, though I don’t think it was any more than that.”
So the media hadn’t been far wrong, some of them. Drugs and alcohol and sex, and most of the kids only fifteen. It gave Jonah an uncomfortable feeling to hear it, despite his own memories of being that age—parties where couples had disappeared and then re-emerged, clothing on all crooked and a dazed look to them.
“So to clarify,” Jonah said flatly, “Topaz left the campfire with Brett Parker. And Jojo left with Connor.”
“Yes. Yes, I think so.”
“And you were left with Aurora and Coralie,” O’Malley said.
“No, Coralie…Coralie left to go to bed when Topaz did. She wasn’t much interested in talking to the rest of us. And Aurora decided to go to bed, to sleep, when she realized that the others were getting up to things. It wasn’t really her scene. And I suppose with her sister being involved…”
“So, in fact, you were on your own,” O’Malley stated. “You were left alone, by the fireside, with Aurora. And nobody saw her after that.”
A pause, while Benham’s forehead drew into lines. And then he said, “But someone did, didn’t they? Someone killed her and put her in that bloody hole in the ground.”
* * *
—
LIGHTMAN HAD FOUND a comfortable position in the observation room, his weight back on his heels and his arms folded. He’d grown used to this pose, and he didn’t resent being the DCI’s eyes, ears, and memory.
There had been a short silence in the interview room while Topaz sat back in her chair and folded one leg over the other. Connor had stroked her shoulder at first, and then risen and stretched.
“What if she was raped?” Topaz said, breaking the silence abruptly. “How are my parents going to deal with it?”
“Maybe they won’t need to know,” Connor answered, his hands in his pockets, his head turned to look at her.
“They’ll have to know,” Topaz said shortly. “I don’t…But she can’t have been, can she?” she asked, turning to him. “I don’t see how it can have happened. The chances of some stranger coming along and somehow doing that…And…she was with us. And it was just us. And Benners and Brett would never have done it.”
Connor shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Come on,” she said more forcefully. “Benners wouldn’t hurt a fly. And Brett was unconscious.”
Connor turned his head away from her sharply. One hand came up to his mouth.
“And it was Benners who put her to bed, wasn’t it?” Topaz went on. “You said so. And he wasn’t gone long.”
“No,” Connor said shortly.
“And you just chatted with Jojo, after that?” she said. Her eyes were on him intently. “That’s what yo
u said, isn’t it? You didn’t try to follow—”
“Topaz,” he said sharply. And then he glanced over toward the window, where Lightman was watching. It felt to Lightman as though he and Connor were making eye contact for a moment, though he knew Connor could only see himself in the glass. And then Connor turned away again, and started to take short, erratic steps around the room.
Topaz watched him for a while, and then looked instead at her hands, her fingers picking at each other.
* * *
—
“SHE WAS CHECKING up on her husband,” Lightman said quietly, once Jonah had returned to the observation room. “There’s clearly doubt there. She’s not entirely sure that nothing happened between Connor and Aurora, or that he didn’t follow her away from the campfire.”
“I’m going to talk to them again. Come on in with me,” Jonah said.
“How do you want me to play it?”
“Cold.”
Connor, who was still pacing, swung round when they entered. Jonah found himself subjected to a piercing gaze, and knew that Connor was looking for signs that they’d been watched. Topaz simply stared at them, her gaze level.
Jonah sat down swiftly. “Sorry for the wait,” he said, deliberately brisk. “It’s been a busy morning.”
“Do you have a suspect?” Topaz asked immediately.
“We have leads. That’s all I can say right now.”
Jonah settled himself back and considered her for a moment. And then he said a little tersely, without turning his head, “If you wouldn’t mind sitting, Mr. Dooley.”
Connor approached grudgingly. He made a big deal of adjusting his chair until he was comfortable.
“It seems that parts of both your original statements were less than true,” Jonah said the moment Connor was still. “Both of you maintained that there were no occurrences of a sexual nature that evening. But we now have evidence that there were multiple instances.”
