She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  He saw Topaz’s cheek twitch. Connor cut his eyes sideways to his wife and then stared straight back at Jonah. Neither of them spoke.

  “It seems that you had some involvement with Brett Parker that night,” he said to Topaz, “and left the campfire with him.”

  Topaz’s color rose. Jonah was aware that she kept her gaze well away from Connor’s.

  “Yes. Does it matter?”

  “At the very least,” Jonah said, not bothering to pull his punches, “it tells us where you were, when, and with whom. Quite vital information in a missing-persons investigation. Why did you lie about it, consistently, at the time?”

  Topaz gave him a slightly disbelieving stare. “We live in a small, gossip-manufacturing community. Do you think I wanted my parents knowing what I was doing? It’s bad enough that I didn’t look out for Aurora. How do you think they would have reacted to the fact that she went missing while I was having sex with the school jock?”

  Jonah let his gaze slide over to Connor. “And it seems you slept with Jojo Magos that night.”

  Connor held up a hand. “I didn’t even come close. Jojo comforted me when I got drunk and emotional, and she cuddled up next to me to sleep because she’s kind like that, but there was nothing sexual about it.”

  “What did you get emotional about?” Jonah asked.

  “Topaz,” Connor said shortly. “And Brett.”

  Jonah let a long pause elapse. Connor held Jonah’s gaze, his chin slightly raised and his mouth hard.

  “Ask Jojo,” Connor eventually said. “She’ll tell you exactly the same thing.”

  Jonah gave a very slight lift of his shoulder, and shifted in his chair. “So you didn’t have any sexual interaction with anyone that night? Not with Coralie? Not with Aurora?”

  “Of course not with Aurora!” Connor said aggressively. “And Coralie and I pretty much hated each other.”

  “Nothing’s changed, has it?” Topaz broke in, in a high-pitched, bitter voice. “We’re right back where we were. The two of us being torn to shreds, and the police not looking anywhere else. Why didn’t that happen to any of the adults in her life? Like that creepy English teacher of hers? I told dozens of you that he was the one you should be asking. He was right there!”

  Jonah was momentarily thrown off balance. “What do you mean by ‘right there’?”

  “Seriously?” Topaz replied, lifting her hands. “You’ve read up on our sex lives, and missed the only significant thing I saw?” She leaned forward and spoke loudly, as if to an idiot. “Mr. Mackenzie. Her English teacher. The one who used to give her extra lessons. He was out camping in the woods, too. I spoke to him on the riverbank, and he said he had to walk another couple of miles. And then took a path straight past our stash.”

  Jonah had nothing to say to this immediately. He recognized the name, and thought he could remember the man, but that was all.

  “Jesus,” Topaz said, sitting back. “Have you even read what we said back then?”

  “We’re wading through it,” Jonah said with a wry smile.

  “He could easily have seen where the drugs were. Easily.”

  “That’s useful,” Jonah said, rising. “Thank you. You’re both free to go for now.”

  He paused outside the door to confer with Lightman. “Was there much in the statements about her teacher?” Jonah asked over his shoulder. “Mr. Mackenzie? Her English teacher?”

  “I think Topaz asked if they’d talked to him,” Lightman said. “But nothing more concrete in the first few interviews.”

  Jonah nodded, and now remembered what it was that rang a bell about Mackenzie. It had been Topaz, bursting into the old police station, almost hysterically.

  “You’ve already asked me everything.” She had been almost shouting at the DC who was showing her up to CID. “You’ve asked me over and over and over. Why aren’t you asking Mr. fucking Mackenzie, hey? He’s been carrying on happily with his lessons. Why are the rest of us the ones suffering?”

  He should have remembered this. He’d even gone and asked his patient DCI about it.

  “Look, I’m not involved,” he’d told him. “Anything I do know is the shortest of updates from the super. Mackenzie is apparently a total nonstarter. He had an alibi for the entire evening.”

  And yet Topaz had been determined he should be a suspect. There had to be a reason, however flimsy. Unless she had latched on to him as an alternative suspect, to take the heat off her friends.

  He let himself out into CID, and glanced around vaguely until he found Hanson, who was standing alongside the big black-and-white printer as it spewed out pages.

  “Can you look into something for me, please?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” she said, glancing down at the printer display and then back up with a smile.

  “There was a schoolteacher of Aurora’s. An Andrew Mackenzie. I want to know if anything was said about him in the original reports, and what lines of inquiry were pursued.”

  Hanson nodded. “I’ve got ten more pages to print, and then I’m on it.”

  16

  Aurora

  Friday, July 22, 1983, 11:30 P.M.

  It was somehow the loneliest she had ever felt, despite the music and the laughter and the occasional cajoling. They wanted her to dance, to drink, to enjoy herself. She knew why. She was a constant irritation. A nagging sense of non-fun. But the more they pressed, the more she could feel herself retreating inward. The more she became rigid and isolated.

  She’d rarely had anyone to talk to at school parties, either. Her closest friend, Becky, was never allowed to go to any of them. Her mother, who looked after her alone and generally seemed to confuse love with feeding up, wanted her home safely as soon as school was done, in spite of Becky’s desperation to join in.

  Earlier in the year, it had seemed like her loneliness had been solved. Kind, lovable Zofia had arrived like a ray of sunshine into Aurora’s life. She’d come with Aurora whenever she was going to be dumped somewhere with Topaz, and she’d chattered away to her in her strange English and made her feel like she was liked.

  And then Zofia had been snatched away again. All because of one stupid night.

  The thought of all that was still too fresh and too painful. She closed her eyes against it briefly, and against finding herself alone again, and feeling like she was separated from these friends of Topaz’s by hundreds of miles.

  When she opened them again, it was all still the same. She was still here.

  She found herself watching Jojo after that, reassured by the difference between her and the other girls. Jojo chose to dance on her own, and to lose herself in the rhythm without ever worrying how she looked. Once or twice, Aurora found herself envying her. She wondered if she could be like her if she tried: capable, and wild. Aurora thought Jojo was quite beautiful in her wildness.

  Perhaps that was the only way to be, when she could never be like her sister and her hip-grinding sexuality.

  Even Benners was dancing: head back, bouncing on his heels, one hand tucked into his chest so that he could hold his hip flask. He’d stopped looking like the Benners she knew.

  But it was Benners who eventually tired of the movement and came to sit with her. He dropped down next to her heavily and then had to use a hand to steady himself. He laughed, and swigged from the hip flask.

  Aurora could smell the alcohol on him. She wondered if she smelled of the lemonade she was making her way through.

  “I’ve felt like that before,” he said with a grin.

  “Like what?”

  “Like I wasn’t part of anything. Like I was totally alone and unnoticed, and the more I thought about it, the more alone I became. Actually, it happens to me quite often.” He nodded at her obvious surprise. “Too much thinking. If you think and think and think, then it becomes like a barrier between you and ev
erything else. You can’t enjoy anything, and all you’re focused on is how wrong it all feels. How much you wish you were somewhere else.”

  “I suppose so.” Aurora nodded.

  “But I’ll tell you something,” Benners went on, leaning toward her to speak earnestly. Puffing fumes into her face. “And it’s important, Aurora. Because you’re this smart person and you’ve got a lot to give. A lot more than most of these.”

  He paused, waiting, and Aurora dutifully asked, “What?”

  “You should never wish you were somewhere else,” he said, picking up her hand and squeezing it for emphasis. “Never. No matter what you’re doing, embrace it. Being away in your world and your head is important sometimes, but so is living. You need to let real life into your experiences. You need to feel all this and let yourself get caught up in it. And that’s about making a decision. A decision to enjoy it.”

  Aurora shook her head slightly. “It’s just not really my thing.”

  “That’s not what you should be saying,” he said, for a moment almost aggressive. “You should never say that. You haven’t tried it. How the fuck do you know if it’s your thing? You need to tell yourself that everything is your thing. And if you want to get joy out of your life, you should launch yourself into everything that happens. Because once you’ve done that, and…committed to it, and embraced it, it will be your thing. There’s nothing out there that isn’t for you. You just need to give the world a chance.”

  She studied his fierce expression. She had a strange sensation of being poised on the edge of something. She wondered whether he was right, and she had a choice. Whether she could be more things than she believed. Whether she was losing out on some part of herself.

  Benners swigged again from his polished silver hip flask, and then paused. He looked at it, and then held it out toward her.

  “It’s your choice,” he said with a level gaze.

  And then Aurora took a breath in and held out her disposable plastic cup. She let him fill up her cup with whatever it was he was drinking. It went into the lemonade like oil into water.

  Benners smiled at her. A real, warm smile. He held up the hip flask. “To giving everything a chance,” he said, and she drank as he did, almost appreciating the burning tang in her drink after so much sickly sweetness.

  17

  The phone-records clearance had arrived from the chief super by the time Jonah was back at his desk, and he immediately sent it over to Intelligence for action. Which meant, generally, filing an online form request through each network provider.

  It was actually laughably easy to request phone records. Only a very few carrier companies required proper authorization. It was an issue that Jonah had always found disquieting. It should take more than a simple online form to grant access to every call and text message someone had made for some months.

  Lightman had tapped on his door before he’d had a chance to catch up on the notes his team had logged on the system.

  “Coralie Ribbans has arrived downstairs,” he said. “She says she needs to talk to you.”

  Jonah was both curious and a little exasperated. He’d left multiple messages for Coralie to call them, and here she was instead, in person, without warning. But the timing could be worse. Jojo Magos wasn’t due for a while, and he could probably push her back a bit.

  “If you can find her an interview room, and we can see Jojo Magos later this afternoon, I’ll see Coralie Ribbans now,” he said, and pulled up the electronic versions of Coralie’s statements from 1983. The few paragraphs he was able to read were along the same lines as the others’ had been. She was adamant that there had been no excessive drinking, no arguments, no sex, and no drugs. Which was to say, she’d lied as much as the others had.

  But Coralie seemed to want to talk to them about something, and Jonah felt that she might be a useful resource. Her life had taken a different path from her friends’, and she had not remained close to any of them. In fact, nobody had so far mentioned Coralie as a good friend, and Jojo had said they didn’t get on.

  So perhaps Coralie, the one Londoner of the group, had become an outsider. Perhaps she was no longer as loyal to her friends as she had once been.

  After a few minutes, he caught sight of a blond-haired woman making her way through the office outside with Lightman. It took Jonah no time at all to recognize her. He might have missed her in a crowd, but with her in front of him there was no question that this was Topaz’s constant shadow.

  Topaz still looked like she had as a teenager, but Coralie seemed to want to look like a kid’s idea of a princess. Her jewelry was diamanté and sparkling; her hair in a braided bun. The short skirt she wore was flared and layered with netting between pieces of white fabric, and the top she wore was tight-fitting, sleeveless, and pink.

  He watched her until Lightman had shown her into the interview suite, and then glanced over at Hanson, who had returned to her desk.

  He opened his door, and called, “Would you like to sit in on an interview?”

  Hanson looked up and beamed at him. “I’d love to,” she said, turning her computer screen off immediately.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH COULD SMELL Coralie’s sweet, candylike perfume the moment he and Hanson were through the door. He felt slightly nauseated.

  “Ms. Ribbans,” he said, settling himself. “I’m DCI Sheens, and this is Detective Constable Hanson. Thanks for coming in.”

  “Whatever I can do to help.”

  He tried to remember whether the high-pitched, front-of-mouth lisp was new or had always been there. A strange thing in someone in her forties, whose face had laughter lines and furrows under the makeup.

  He could tell she didn’t recognize him. Jojo had been the only one to realize he’d been at school with them. He supposed he had been unimportant to the rest of them. Peripheral.

  “We’d like to hear from you afresh what happened the night Aurora disappeared,” he said. “We’re reopening the investigation, and that means starting again. I’m hoping you’ll have some information that was missed the first time round.”

  “Yes, I…I said a lot, but I think there are some small things. Things we didn’t want everyone to know in case we got in trouble.”

  The phrasing and her manner, which was of a sheepish child instead of a fully grown woman, was a little uncomfortable to hear.

  “We’ve heard a few things along those lines,” Jonah said carefully. “I’d like to take you through that evening and just clarify a few things.”

  He brushed over the arrival at the camp, and got quickly on to the argument between Topaz and Benners.

  “You went with Topaz, I think?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I did. I calmed her down, and then she said she wanted to sit by the river alone for a while, so I headed back to the campsite.”

  “Did you also see Andrew Mackenzie, an English teacher from your school, at the river?”

  Her expression turned to confusion. “Mr. Mackenzie? The young guy? He wasn’t there.”

  “You mean he wasn’t camping with you?”

  “No, I mean he can’t have been nearby. Or at least none of us saw him. We all talked about it a lot afterward and nobody ever said anything about him being there.”

  Jonah nodded, glancing through his notes as if moving on to the next point, while his mind was on Topaz. She had seen Mackenzie, and gone on to point the finger at him. But for some reason she’d decided not to tell her closest friend. And none of the others had mentioned Mackenzie, either. Which implied that Topaz hadn’t told anyone except the police. It was a very interesting omission.

  “Let’s look at the later part of the evening now,” he said. “Despite your original statements, we’ve learned that Topaz and Brett Parker paired off. They went to have sex together, is that right?”

  Coralie’s expression t
ook on a strange sort of amusement. “Is that what Topaz told you?”

  “It’s been commented on by more than one of your group,” Jonah replied.

  “That’s interesting. Because it wasn’t Topaz and Brett who had sex. It was all three of us, which was how Topaz liked to play it.”

  Hanson, next to him, drew in a slightly sharp breath. But when he glanced over at her there was no visible reaction. He approved.

  “It was all about seducing Brett,” Coralie went on. She tucked her hair behind her ear and shifted with a glance at the reflective glass. Did she think she had a larger audience? “Topaz was fixated on him. He was attractive and sporty, and pretty much everyone at school wanted him. Topaz was used to being the desirable one, so she decided to go and get him. Only Brett proved to be tricky. He’d been…interested in someone else.”

  “One of the group?” Jonah asked, curious about how awkward she suddenly looked. Had there been something more between Coralie and Brett?

  “No, no,” she said quickly. “Someone at school. We’d all been at the same party, a week or two before, and Brett…kissed someone else. Even though Topaz was there, and looking gorgeous. He went after a blond girl from the year below.”

  “The year below him?”

  “The year below us,” Coralie said in a quiet voice.

  He watched her thoughtfully. “So he was interested in someone who was, what? Fourteen at most?”

  “Yes. She didn’t look fourteen,” Coralie replied. “She was really tall and skinny, and looked like an underwear model or something. Nowhere near as sexy as Topaz, but still.”

  “So you think Brett didn’t know the girl’s age?” he asked.

  “I guess not,” Coralie said. “But next time Topaz talked to him, he didn’t seem interested. I think he was still keen on the blonde.”

  Jonah took a note of that, thinking that if eighteen-year-old Brett Parker had liked younger girls, then he might have pursued Aurora that night, in spite of what everyone said.