by Gytha Lodge
Jonah nodded, and Jojo gave him a thoughtful look.
“I wasn’t thinking that it was one of us really. I mean, I know logically…I just wanted us to find the killer, and for it to be someone else. That’s all.” And then Jojo’s eyes became distant again, and troubled, too. “I’ve spent eight years thinking I drove Aleksy to fall off the rock face with my calls and texts,” she said eventually, her voice unsteady. “But might he have died because…because he’d worked something out about Aurora?”
“There’s a strong possibility,” Jonah said. “So if anything occurs to you at all about Aleksy and any strange conversations, it would be good for us to know.”
Jojo nodded, her eyes fixed on a point on the wall. He wondered what she was remembering, but she said nothing.
“Tell me something,” he said, eventually breaking the silence. “When you hid that stash, did you do anything else that might have kept sniffer dogs away?”
“Oh,” Jojo said, and Hanson saw a flush creep across her face. “Yes. I’d…I dragged a dead stoat along past the tree and then left it a short distance away. I figured anyone searching would think the dogs had just found that, and would drag them away. It reeked, so…”
“You did that alone? Not with Brett?”
Jojo nodded, looking uncomfortable. “I told him to get on with hiding the stash, but he was hungover, and a bit useless. So I got the stoat and laid a scent, and he was still hanging about looking ill when I got back. And then after that we both went to cave the stash in.”
The DCI looked at her thoughtfully. “It was definitely your idea?”
“Yes,” Jojo said. “I wasn’t…I was only trying to stop them finding the drugs. I never meant to stop them finding Aurora.”
The DCI let a silence elapse, and then said, “Thank you for all of that. If you think of anything else, please just let us know.”
He turned off the tape, and Jojo rose with obvious relief.
“I’ll show you out,” he said, and gave Hanson a brief nod.
* * *
—
THEY WERE HALFWAY across CID when Jojo looked sideways at Jonah. “I’m glad you’re back to being nice again. I didn’t like my experience of Sheens the policeman back there.”
It was an uncomfortable feeling, being reminded that he was essentially a bully at times. Tommy Sheens had taught him well.
He gave her a slightly tired smile. “I’m always Sheens the policeman,” he answered. “But that doesn’t mean I’m an arsehole all the time.”
Jojo’s smile widened slightly. “Oh, I don’t know about that….”
Jonah couldn’t help a small laugh.
“Do you remember chasing me down?” she asked abruptly. They’d reached the door, but she paused in front of it, and he stopped, too. “You probably don’t. Life of a copper. But I do.”
“Yes, I do,” he said. He gave a small smile. “Most irritating person I’ve ever tried to catch up with.”
He saw her mouth lift slightly at the corner. “You should have given up.”
“I wasn’t going to leave you without your sweater.” He looked away for a moment. “And besides. I don’t give up. Not unless I absolutely have to.”
He saw her nod from the corner of his eye.
She shifted as if she might leave, and then said, “I heard about your dad. I know it was a long time ago, but I wanted to say I was sorry.”
Jonah shook his head. “I wouldn’t be sorry. Best thing that could have happened for my mum.”
Even if it had been horrific, the way he’d gone. Even if the idea of it sometimes woke him in the night, clawing to get out of his bedclothes and imagining that there were flames all around him.
“Everyone says he had a temper.”
Jonah nodded. “He had. And even when he wasn’t particularly angry, he was a nasty piece of work.”
“It was brave of your mother, leaving him like that. And leaving the traveling community. It must have been tough for her.”
Jonah struggled to imagine his mother as tough these days. It was hard to get beyond the fragile, paranoid alcoholic she had become. But Jojo was right. It was strange to be talking about it, after such a long time, to someone who seemed to understand it. Strange, and cathartic.
“It was hard for her for a long time. Divorces don’t happen among travelers. Leaving doesn’t happen. That’s what they told her. We left when I was seven and they were still coming round when I was fourteen, fifteen. Still threatening or cajoling. He came round sometimes too, but it grew rarer after she called the police.” There was a beat, and he said, “She left him for my sake. She didn’t care much about herself, but she cared about me a lot.”
“I hope my mum would’ve been the same,” Jojo said. And then she put a hand out to the door, and Jonah pressed the green button to let her out.
“It’d be good if you could stay by your phone,” he said before she could vanish. “I may well have questions.”
Jojo sighed. “I was going to go and get chalk and then try the Dagger-Edge climb again. And who knows? Maybe being grilled by you will give me the rage needed to make the final move.”
“Is it far away?” he asked.
“Maybe half an hour?” Jojo replied. “It’s near Burley. I’ll probably be a good hour getting into town and back and picking up a replacement pair of climbing shoes, and I won’t stay there that long. The climbs don’t catch the sun in the evening.”
“OK,” Jonah said with his own sigh. “That’s fine. Good luck.”
She cast him a last, sidelong look before she left, almost back to being the Jojo he had half known for more than thirty years.
He tried to hide from her the fact that, in spite of their conversation, he was still thinking of her as a suspect and still willing to assume that she was lying.
* * *
—
THE INTERVIEW WITH Jojo hadn’t helped Hanson’s anger. She left it with a deeply unsettling feeling that it had been entirely for her benefit, though she was positive by the end of it that Jojo hadn’t expected a grilling.
But then she worried that she was being ridiculous. They were in the middle of a case. Sheens was doing what a good officer did, and pushing a suspect hard.
She needed to talk to Zofia. Until she had some feeling of certainty about that incident, everything else felt like it was left hanging. It was impossible to think of working with a man who had committed a sexual assault.
She checked her Facebook account for what was probably the fiftieth time, but her message suggesting a time to Skype was still sitting there, unread. She felt like putting her fist through the monitor, but instead she rose, and told Lightman she was going to get some air.
* * *
—
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO be getting muddier and more complex instead of clearer, and Jonah wasn’t sure what to make of Jojo’s reactions, or Aleksy’s apparent coldness toward her.
He didn’t believe that Matt Stavely’s arrival, announced shortly afterward by Lightman, was going to help clear anything up. But he took a look at Stavely as O’Malley walked with him to the interview suite.
He looked wired and jittery. His eyes moved all over the station, and he pulled off his beanie to reveal his graying, uncombed hair. It was clumpy with sweat.
Jonah picked up O’Malley’s notes on his interview with Stavely and walked back into CID. He looked around momentarily for Hanson, expecting to find her watching him, but she wasn’t at her desk. He was shamefully relieved.
O’Malley was hovering outside Room One and messing around with his phone when Jonah got there.
“All ready?” Jonah asked him.
“Yup. Witness looks like he might burst if we don’t get on with it.”
Jonah had to agree. Matt Stavely was shifting his position every few seconds and jiggling his
leg up and down between times. He pulled a cigarette out as Jonah watched, rolling it between his fingers.
He jumped when they walked in, and shoved the cigarette back into the pocket of his hoodie. He was barely able to keep still as they went through the introductions for the tape, and he looked anywhere but at Jonah.
“So, Matt,” he said, to kick things off. “You have something you want to talk to us about.”
“Yeah,” Stavely said immediately. “I was…I was thinking after the sergeant came to see me. There’s some stuff that I think might be relevant.”
Jonah gave him a small smile as he glanced up. “To do with your work?”
“Yeah,” Stavely said. “There’s a guy I got set up with in ’89. It was through another dealer, because he wanted…well, he wanted stuff that dealer didn’t offer. Flunitrazepam.”
“Rohypnol,” Jonah said with a small twist to his stomach. He had worked through the ’90s, when the prescription drug had hit the recreational scene. He’d heard about men acting weirdly in bars who’d had packets of it on them, and there had been the much-publicized cases of date rape.
What the media hadn’t commented on so extensively were the many cases where victims had been drugged and then robbed, with no sexual assault having taken place. The amnesiac effects made it as much a winner for thieves as it had been for rapists.
And more common still had been the addicts, forging prescriptions to keep the oblivion going. Some of those had ended up as suicides.
Rohypnol had been made a controlled substance in the late ’90s, for all of those reasons, and Jonah and his colleagues had seen its use in crime drop off. But it still surfaced now and then as an aid to assault and robbery. Rape was actually, surprisingly, much rarer.
“Yeah,” Stavely said. “Rohypnol. With coke on the side. Interesting combination.”
Jonah nodded slowly. A flunitrazepam addict was unlikely to be a coke user. They were very dissimilar drugs, one inducing a state of deeply somnolent oblivion, and the other creating an energetic high. Cocaine was a party drug, and if someone who liked to party wanted to buy Rohypnol as well, then there was an implication that it was for somebody else. A victim.
“Do you have a name for this buyer?” Jonah asked.
“No,” Stavely answered. “It was set up so he’d call and say how many he wanted, and leave payment at the drop point. Later on, he switched to text messaging. I’d take the payment and leave the drugs. The other dealer said that was how he worked with him, too. He didn’t want anyone knowing anything about him. Which is always a bit fucking annoying. It’s not like anyone dealing is going to go and talk about it.” He gave a big sniff and shifted on his chair.
“How much did you supply him with?”
“It was usually a strip of twenty-eight two-milligram tablets.”
Jonah could only remember a few of the specifics of Rohypnol use. How many tablets would someone give a victim?
“As far as I know, you’d want three or four tablets to do the job,” Stavely said, as if he could tell that Jonah didn’t know. “Plus alcohol. And I want to say here and now, I supplied the stuff, but I’ve never used it on anyone. And I always kind of hoped the guy was just sedating himself after bad nights or something.”
“How often did you supply him?”
“It was generally every month or six weeks. Sometimes he’d just ask for coke, so I don’t reckon all of the Rohypnol was getting used that quickly.”
“Where did you leave it?”
“It was originally under a bench in Southampton, and then from the mid-’90s it changed to a salt box outside the town hall in Waterlooville. Which was an arse to get to, but it was worth it. He paid twice the market value for the trouble.”
Jonah nodded. He’d been hoping for somewhere that pointed to one of his suspects, but it sounded like this buyer was a careful man.
“It stopped a little while ago,” Stavely added. “Which was a shame. It was good, steady income.”
“So when did it stop?”
“Couple of years ago,” he said with a shrug.
“No more than that?”
“Definitely not more than three,” Stavely said.
It had been a long-running arrangement, then. Right through from 1989. That made him curious about why it had stopped in the end.
“There wasn’t any reason for it stopping, as far as you knew?” he asked.
“No, other than he said he didn’t need it now. I guessed he moved or something.”
That didn’t tie in with any of his suspects, he thought. Connor and Topaz had moved seven years ago, and Coralie just afterward.
“And you have no other information on him?” Jonah asked. “You never saw him?”
Stavely shook his head. “I wasn’t curious enough to risk the deal by hanging around.”
“Do you still have the phone number?”
Stavely shook his head. “He used to call my landline, and then it was texts that I deleted.”
There was a pause while Stavely’s fidgeting increased. “That’s all. Can I go now?” he said in the end.
“Of course,” Jonah replied.
He stood to let Stavely out, and watched his slightly jerky movements thoughtfully.
“Was he that agitated when you saw him Monday?” he asked O’Malley.
“No,” he said. “I guess you’d say he was wary, but calm. Did you see in my notes that he called someone after?”
“You think the call has changed things?”
“Could have done,” O’Malley said. “Or could be that police stations put the fear of God in him.”
“I’d like you to see if any of our suspects are connected with that place,” Jonah said. “Or have been in the past. He might have been put up to it, or he might not. My suspicion is that there’s more he’s not telling us. A reason why he thinks it’s linked. Maybe the buyer said something that suggested he’d committed a crime against a young girl. Or maybe he knows who it is.”
“I’ll look into it, all right, so.”
Jonah smiled at the very Irish turn of phrase. “Thanks.”
* * *
—
HANSON MADE IT back to her desk ten minutes before the time she had suggested to Skype Zofia Wierzbowski, and saw immediately that there was a message waiting for her.
Zofia was happy with the suggestion, and had sent her Skype ID. Hanson loaded up Skype on her phone and added Zofia as a contact, and then went to find a free meeting room where she could still get Wi-Fi.
It took a lot longer than she’d expected. For a modern station, Southampton Central was frustratingly low on signal. She ended up calling three minutes late, but Zofia didn’t seem worried.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak to me,” Hanson said, speaking into the phone that she’d placed on the meeting-room table. “I’m not recording this for now, but would you be happy to go on tape if needed?”
“Yes,” Zofia said, her accent rich. “That is fine.”
“I need to ask you, first, about the party that you went to,” Hanson said, and wondered why she was quite so nervous. Perhaps because she hoped, with the DCI, that he hadn’t done anything. “Can you tell me about how you got there?”
“Yes, no problem. I go to the party with Aurora,” she began, and proceeded to tell, in very awkward English, the same story that Jonah had told Hanson. “I should not have drunk,” she said. “It was not right. I make myself sick, and he—Jonah Sheens—he had looked after me. He put me in a bed.”
Hanson took a breath. “Could you tell me if anything happened between you that night?” she asked.
“Between me and Jonah?” she asked, and then she paused. “I—I haven’t told anyone this before. I should have…I was attacked that night.”
* * *
—
DANIEL BENHAM LO
OKED pensive as Jonah and Lightman entered the interview room. His solicitor, on the other hand, looked steely.
“Thanks for coming in again,” Jonah began.
“That’s all right,” Benham said.
“There are quite a few things I need to ask you, but I’ll try to make it quick.”
Benham didn’t react and neither did his solicitor, so Jonah carried on.
“To begin with, having identified and spoken to the dealer who supplied you with the Dexedrine, we need to know whether you showed him where the drugs were hidden, or mentioned them to him.”
“God, no,” Benham said in a low but intense voice. “I might have wanted to help him out, but I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. You don’t tell a drug dealer where you’re hiding their product if you don’t want it stolen back again from under your nose. It’s not like you’d have legal recourse if they took it back, and you’d be on dangerous ground threatening them.”
“He didn’t ask any questions about what you were going to do with it?” Jonah persisted.
“No, he didn’t. And I wouldn’t have told him,” Daniel said firmly.
“OK. And to go back to the topic of any drugs purchases since,” Jonah said. “The dealer has suggested that he did carry on supplying one of you. We’re looking into it, but it would be a lot better for you to be open about that now if it involved you.”
“I’m not sure of the relevance,” his solicitor said.
Benham gave a short laugh. “I’ve had nothing to do with the dealer since that deal. Not just because I wanted nothing more to do with him or drugs after Aurora went. I became a politician, for Christ’s sake, and Mary would have killed me.”
“Perhaps a reason to be covert about it,” Jonah said.
Benham shook his head. “It wasn’t worth the risk, and the whole idea seemed…revolting, after that summer.”
