by Gytha Lodge
That empty bed sent a surge of unease through Jonah, coupled with the lights being off and her car being parked outside. She had to be here somewhere. Unless she was where the fire was…
He moved back out as quickly as he could, feeling the slight bite of smoke in his throat.
“Jojo!” he yelled again, and ran down the stairs and along the hallway until he was in the large space of the sitting room and conservatory at the back of the cottage. And suddenly he could see the fire through the glass. It was tearing through the outbuildings that adjoined the house, a ferocious, hungry blaze. Silhouetted in front of it was a short-haired figure.
He moved toward the garden door, slightly light-headed with relief. Jojo turned as he opened it, her eyes wide and her arms folded across her, almost as if she were cold in spite of the heat coming off the blaze.
He had a moment to take in the scene: that she was fully dressed and unmoving, and that there was a plastic petrol can next to her. And then he heard the sound of oncoming sirens.
32
Jojo
Saturday, July 23, 1983, 7:00 A.M.
She wasn’t exactly quick that morning. It was an obvious idea to solve a very big problem. But at least she’d got there.
“Where are you going?” Brett was calling after her. “It’s this way.”
“You can start hiding the stash, but making sure it’s not visible isn’t going to be enough,” Jojo called back. She paced forward, scanning the ground. It had been somewhere here.
She smelled it before she saw it. A pungent, sweet-sour reek. Even this early in the morning it was humming.
She followed the stench off the path and tried not to retch. Closer to, the stoat’s remains were almost unbearably foul.
She put her left shoulder across her nose and mouth and crouched down to grab at its hind legs, which were relatively whole. She got quickly to her feet, keeping it as far away from her body as she could.
She half jogged toward the river. Brett was waiting for her outside the shade of the tree, clearly not having taken the initiative to start without her.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked as she drew closer.
The smell must have hit him hard. He’d turned an awful color. He moved away from her, down the bank, but Jojo jumped down too until she was right next to the water. She lowered the stoat until its bloated head and half-rotted back were on the ground, and then she dragged it, swiftly, toward the tree with the stash in it.
Behind her, Brett made a gagging sound, and then full-on vomited into the river. It was a revolting sound, though she had to admit that she felt for him. The stoat reeked.
She kept moving until she had ducked under the tree and gone just past it, and then let go of the stoat with her lips and nose curling up involuntarily. Brett stopped being sick and came toward her, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes were bloodshot and watery.
“Why the hell…?”
“It’s for the dogs,” she said. “Because if they don’t find her, there are going to be dogs, and we need a reason for them to be interested in this area, and something for them to fixate on that isn’t the stash.”
Brett pulled his T-shirt up to cover his nose.
“You could have waited till we’d hidden the fucking stuff,” he said. “If I vomit into the hole, it’s not going to make anyone look good.”
Jojo ignored him and climbed up one of the roots until she was crouched above the hole, with banked-up loose earth below her. The entrance to the cache was invisible from up here. All she could see was the top of the sapling that had grown up out of the beech’s roots. Soon, she thought, it was going to be invisible from everywhere.
She kicked at the earth below her. It was dry, and it started to crumble and then to fall in layers.
Brett was below her, near the entrance, still trying to cover his face from the stench.
“Come on,” Jojo said. “You need to kick it over the hole or they’re going to see it.”
He was still protesting as he moved the sapling aside. He pulled some of the earth down with his hands, and then shuffled his feet and stamped earth down below her.
“That was in my fucking face!”
“Is that enough?” she asked. “Is it covered?”
“Yeah,” he said, stepping back and letting the sapling move back into place. “I don’t think anyone’s going to see it.”
Jojo jumped down and peered critically at where the entrance had once been. They were lucky that it had been hidden well to begin with, behind the sapling. And lucky, too, that the hole was low down and easy to press earth over.
Looking hard at it, she could tell that the soil had been recently moved, even through the leaves of the sapling. Parts of it were darker, less dry. But it was already hot, and the rest of it would have time to dry out before anyone else arrived.
“OK,” she said. “That’s going to have to do.”
Brett nodded, and finally pulled his T-shirt back down from his mouth. He still looked green. Jojo might have felt like mocking him in other circumstances. He’d been pretty confident he could drink more than she could.
“Thanks for…for sorting it,” he said after a minute. “I’m no good to anyone today, and I know I probably stand to lose the most.”
Jojo gave him a long look. “That’s OK,” she said eventually, in a low voice. “I’m used to covering things up for these guys. And you’re one of us now.”
33
Hanson gave up on sleep at five. She’d woken pretty much every half hour, and on two occasions had been so drenched in sweat that the sheets were wet through.
She felt angry with herself. She wasn’t really sure what she was afraid of. What was Damian actually going to do to harm her? If she’d gone home, what would he have done, other than repeat some of the awful things he’d said to her?
She was equally angry with herself for reading all of his messages until they had eventually stopped after midnight, and for checking her phone every time she woke up from then on. She should ignore him, but couldn’t.
She washed, put on the clean shirt and underwear from her overnight bag, and made herself a coffee using the kettle in her room. It was too early for breakfast, but she couldn’t face eating anyway, with her stomach squeezing with anxiety every few seconds. She drank some of the coffee while she checked out, and then took the rest to the car.
The roads were clear and sunlit. It took no time at all to reach the station and park up. She was at her desk and finishing the second-rate coffee before quarter to six. There was nobody else in yet, and she found the quiet soothing somehow.
She switched on the desktop and spent a while looking at the records of the suspects, starting with Brett Parker. She scrolled through the various interviews in 1983 but found nothing else. She tried Connor Dooley next, and found his name mentioned in relation to a complaint in 1982.
When she opened it up, she read with a feeling of unease that it was actually Connor’s father who had been the subject of the complaint. Neighbors had reported him to the police for hitting his son. A couple of uniforms had visited the next day and remarked that Connor had bruising to his forearms. But the dad had denied everything, and Connor had insisted mulishly that he’d hurt himself climbing a tree. He’d kept it up when he’d been interviewed on his own, too. The officers had asked him to call them if anything happened in future, and left it.
There was nothing else about it, and the remaining entries were all notes on interviews about Aurora’s disappearance. Nothing since. She wondered whether Connor’s father had continued to abuse him, and how profoundly that had affected him. Enough, maybe, to make him treat others with the same level of violence?
She wrote a note about it, and then searched for Jojo Magos.
There was nothing recent, but eight years ago there had been a fire at her property. H
anson found herself reading with increasing interest. Aside from the fire, there had been a great deal of vandalism, which implied that Jojo had really pissed someone off. But the insurance company, she read, had been unwilling to pay up, because the fire had been started using Jojo’s own mower petrol, and she had no proof that anyone else had been on the property.
She scribbled herself a series of notes, and then, as she was exiting, saw a whole new file pop up. She opened it, and suffered a momentary disappointment as she assumed it was a duplicate. And then she saw DCI Sheens’s name appear, and the date, and her disappointment turned into a strange sort of anxiety.
What the hell had he been doing at Jojo Magos’s house late last night?
* * *
—
IN SPITE OF the anxiety that had gripped him the night before, Jonah struggled to surface in the morning. He hadn’t got to bed until past three, by which time the firefighters had got the blaze fully under control. In the few minutes it had taken the crew to arrive and get set up, the blaze had spread to Jojo’s cottage.
Before their hoses had been ready, Jojo dashed past him and into the house. Jonah had yelled after her, and gone toward the door before being told to back away by one of the fire crew.
“One of the lads can go in once they’re suited,” he said.
But then Jojo had appeared again, clutching a box and a stack of photographs. She’d gone back, he realized, to rescue what she still 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,” she said significantly. “She had a major fire in one of the outbuildings at her house just over eight years ago. It spread to the garden and she lost a large number of tools, including some pretty pricey things like mowers and generators. It also took a swipe out of the kitchen.”
Jonah stared at her, trying to process the description. It was all but identical to what had happened last night.
“That doesn’t sound accidental,” he said slowly.
Hanson shook her head. “The insurance company suspected foul play and put an investigator on it. It looked like she’d done it herself. There was a can of petrol for the mower, which was sitting open, and it had clearly been used on the fire. They found a set of Jojo’s overalls bundled behind one of the greenhouses, and they stank of petrol. There was a long wrangle, but they eventually paid out. Her solicitor did a good job, I think.”
“That’s interesting,” he said with a nod. “Well done.”
He felt a little disconnected as he remembered the can of petrol, and Jojo beside it. Jojo, fully dressed, her bed not slept in, doing nothing to stop the spread of the blaze.
“It seems more than convenient that it’s happened again just as Jojo is being investigated for murder,” she added. “She gets to play the victim when we’re looking for a killer. And I’d want to have a good look at what was being burned, too.”
“Agreed,” he said, trying to smile. “We should take a good look. As long as you’re prepared to accept that it might just turn out to be a peculiar coincidence, of course.”
In his office, he slowly lowered himself into his chair. He thought further: from Jojo’s lack of reaction to it all to her love for her garden. He wondered whether she could bring herself to damage it in order to distract them, or whether she’d angered somebody enough to do this. And that creeping sense of threat resurfaced. He had to restrain himself from going back out to warn Hanson to be careful. She wasn’t going to come to any harm in CID. But, he decided, the team had better know that their thirty-year-old case had reared its head into very modern-day activity.
* * *
—
HANSON FELT UNEASY. It was profoundly unli
kely to be a coincidence that Jojo had suffered vandalism twice, and the petrol threw a very suspicious light on the current damage to her property. But the DCI didn’t seem to be excited about that. Which could have been caution, or could have been something else.
DCI Jonah Sheens was on scene….
She couldn’t help thinking about the way he had interacted with Jojo, and about the trip to the climbing wall to interview her alone. She wanted to feel enthusiastic about solving this case, and instead she felt a weight of worry descend.
She could tell that the slight ache in her head was going to step up into a full-on throb soon. She pulled up the various reports into the arson, and pressed the Print button, and then sat and kneaded her temples for a while.
She was still in the same pose when she heard a cheerful “All right, Juliette?” from beyond her shoulder, and realized that O’Malley had arrived.
She looked up, slightly disoriented, and tried to smile at him. “Fine. But painkillers definitely needed. Have you got any?”
“Oho! Rough night, was it?” He beamed at her, bent to open one of his desk drawers, and threw a packet of Tylenol at her. “Knock yourself out.”
“Tempting,” she replied, and rose to find water.
She met Lightman leaving the kitchen with two mugs, and felt a rush of embarrassment as she realized that he’d probably come into the office while she’d had her head in her hands.
“I got you one,” he said, holding up one of the cups.
“Oh…thanks.” She took it with a vague smile.
“You look like you’ve been in a while.”
“Yeah. I woke up early, and I figured I might as well.” And then she added, on impulse, “I’ll send you some stuff about Jojo shortly. It’s interesting. A previous arson, probably deliberate.”
