by Gytha Lodge
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re going to die either way.”
She couldn’t help grinning again as he looked around for a close-by hold. He scanned and scanned for something to grab on to, before eventually fixing his eyes on that final jug, separated from him by three and a half feet of clear space. And, of course, a full three feet higher up.
“That’s the one,” she said cheerfully. She moved a little until she was standing right above it. “All the way over here.”
Brett took his right hand off and reached out a little, before putting it quickly back on again.
“Is Brett a little scared?” she asked.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” he said.
He didn’t look up at her again. He was too busy preparing himself. Shifting his weight further to his right, and pulsing slightly. He was counting down to himself.
“Jesus, will you hurry up, Parker? I’ve got things to do.”
He didn’t say anything. He was primed for that move, and Jojo felt herself tensing with him. She crouched slightly, willing him to move for it. Willing him to jump.
He sprang suddenly. But she could see as he did it that he’d doubted himself even as he’d jumped; that he hadn’t really committed to that leap.
He’d gone barely a foot upward and across. His right hand reached out, but he was nowhere near the hold.
A strange sort of a spasm ran through his body as he started to fall. When she had time to think about it later, she wondered if it was disbelief.
He fell quickly, and she watched him all the way to the unforgiving stone and hard mud of the ground.
* * *
—
JONAH’S PHONE RANG as they were pulling up along the roadside. There were two squad cars there, too, but the officers were only just climbing out. They’d been no more than seconds ahead of him.
“Jojo,” he said sharply, as he answered. “Are you all right?”
“Don’t stress,” he heard her say, in a voice so sarcastic and laid-back that he felt like he might have been tricked into coming here. “Brett Parker is dealt with.”
“What do you mean?”
“He chucked himself off the cliff face,” she said. “Not deliberately, I should probably add.”
He still ran the whole way to the climb. O’Malley was just behind him, and the uniforms followed behind the sergeant. When they cleared the trees, and came into view of Brett Parker’s body, he slowed, and O’Malley bumped into him and then apologized.
Jonah found it hard to look away from the strangely angled pile of limbs, and the large spread of blood. But he was aware that he needed to find Jojo.
He shielded his eyes and looked upward. Jojo was sitting right on the edge of the cliff, swinging her feet gently. She waved at him.
“Are you all right?” Jonah called.
“You already asked that,” she shouted back, and clambered to her feet. “I’m fine. Really. I’ll come down. It’s a bit of a scramble down the back. Give me a minute.”
Jojo disappeared, and then reappeared a minute later round the right-hand side of the cliff.
She nodded to the other officers, who were now standing somewhat lamely around the body. She gave Jonah a slightly crooked grin. “I made the last move on the bloody climb,” she said quietly. Triumphantly. “Seems like it’s easier when you think someone’s going to kill you if you don’t.”
“Well done,” Jonah said, a little wryly. “I take it Brett failed, then.”
“Yeah. Probably for the best,” Jojo said thoughtfully. “If he’d made it, I’d have kicked him off the edge.”
41
Jonah called the Jacksons on the way back to the station. There was a feeling of victory at finally having an answer, but it was more than usually marred by the pain they were going to feel at how their daughter had died: alone, overdosing on drugs she hadn’t wanted to take, having been raped by a boy she’d probably trusted.
Joy answered this time with the rather endearing, old-fashioned habit of reciting the phone number.
“It’s DCI Sheens,” he said. “I’m sorry I’ve left you waiting, but we’ve got some very important developments to tell you about. Would you and Tom be able to come into the station? I think it would be best if you came and talked to me here.”
“Oh,” Joy said breathlessly. “Tom, can we…can we go to the station? I’m sure we can. They’ve got something important to tell us. Do you…do you know who killed her?”
“Yes,” Jonah replied. “Yes, we do.”
* * *
—
“HE THOUGHT I saw him.” Jojo’s voice was unusually straightforward. It was strange listening to her without any sarcasm; without seeing any half smiles or mockery. But he was fiercely proud of everything she was saying, and of how well she would come across in her statement. “He saw me looking over, and didn’t realize that he was too far outside the firelight. He thought I was keeping it quiet for years.”
“Why would he think you would cover for him?” O’Malley asked, being the thorough copper.
“I think he connected my willingness to go and hide the stash with my silence about seeing him. And he told me today that he thought I’d seen her in there, too. You know he puked, when I was dragging a dead stoat around to mask the scent? I thought it was the smell, but he’d just seen her body and realized what he’d done.” She gave a very slight shiver. “He kept repeating that he’d never meant to kill her when he was climbing after me. And he really thought she’d enjoyed it when he raped her….”
“He never talked about you seeing him after the murder?”
“No. I think there was a lot going on in his head that had nothing to do with reality. He claimed he’d been keeping us all safe for thirty years by not framing one of us. He’d taken on this role of keeping us together for some reason. It was…controlling, I think, but maybe he really did think he was the good guy. When I got together with Aleksy, he made a huge effort to be friends with him, too. To keep him onside.”
“So that friendliness,” O’Malley asked. “It maintained right up until recent events?”
“Yeah,” Jojo said. She stopped looking at O’Malley. She glanced over at Jonah and then away from both of them. “I thought so. But there was…there was a row with Aleksy. I told you about that, didn’t I? I could tell something was wrong, but I didn’t guess that he’d figured out Brett’s dirty secret.”
“Did anything else come of it?”
“No,” Jojo said. “Well…yes, actually. Brett was quiet for a bit, and a few days later, my sheds, and most of my garden, were burned down. And then, straight afterward, suddenly Brett was my best friend, and all charm. Flirting. Making me feel…like he cared more than Aleksy, who had barely helped me with the clear-up. It all got a bit messed up.” She paused, and then said slowly, “It seems obvious now that he thought I knew something. He was warning me to keep my mouth shut, with that fire. And then, once he’d warned me, he wanted to reel me back in, didn’t he? To say ‘Here’s how bad it is when we’re not friends, and here’s how good it is when we are.’ ”
She let out an unsteady breath. “He told me he killed Aleksy. And he tried to say that it was Aleksy’s fault, because he shouldn’t have snooped. I don’t even know…I don’t know what he found.”
“Did he tell you how Aurora died?” Jonah asked quietly.
“Yes. Well…he said she should have gone for help instead of crawling into that hole. Was she…was she definitely dead when we filled it in? He thought so, but…”
“We’re still looking at tox reports,” O’Malley said.
Jojo shook her head. “I can’t believe he could be so stupid. Giving her drugs he didn’t understand and leaving her to die without even realizing it…And then in the morning he was raging at everyone because she’d vanished.” She nodded bitterly. “Raging
at us because he couldn’t get to her and mess with her head.”
* * *
—
LATER, ONCE THEY were done, Jonah offered to show her out. They walked silently out of CID and down toward the street, Jonah very much aware of her bare arms and legs, and of her closeness.
At the entrance, Jonah paused: a signal for her to wait, too.
“If it helps,” he said quietly, “forensics are positive she was dead long before anyone woke up. The Dexedrine was in five-gram bags, and it looks like Brett fed her the whole thing. That’s between five and twenty times the typical amount to overdose, and she can’t have weighed more than sixty kilos. The pharmacologist thinks death would have been well within an hour.”
There was a silence while Jojo looked toward her feet. She nodded, then lifted her head once again and gave him a faint smile. “I suppose all of this will take a while to tie up,” she said.
“It usually takes a bit,” he said, nodding. “But not forever.”
Jojo’s smile warmed a little. “I’ll see you soon, then.”
* * *
—
TOPAZ CLIMBED THE stairs away from Connor, hoping that he would understand. It was Aurora’s room that she went to, once again, instead of her own.
She felt like Aurora had walked in there with her. She was seeing her sister’s pale, smiling face; her gold hair; her quick, shy movements.
She sat carefully on the bed, remembering what Connor had said to her when she had let herself back into the silent kitchen.
It was Brett. Brett killed her, darling. Your parents have been trying to call you.
She’d reached her father on his seldom-used cellphone, and he’d told them what the police thought: that it had been a sexual assault turned into an accidental murder. That Brett had drugged her, and killed her.
“But he’s paid for it,” Tom had added. “He tried to have a go at Jojo and fell off a cliff.”
She’d rung off, and felt a wave of desperate guilt. She had laughed with the man who had killed Aurora. Had hugged him. Had, thirty years ago, slept with him, on the night he killed her.
But as she had sobbed bitterly on Connor’s shoulder, another feeling had stolen in. One of release.
For the first time since Aurora had vanished she found that she could think of her sister without that burning lack of resolution. Without having to wonder what she’d suffered.
Sitting in her sister’s room, surrounded by its girlish butterflies and flowers, she could picture her infuriating, beautiful, spacy, wonderful sister sitting next to her. And it made her smile.
* * *
—
IT WAS THE conversation with Anna that had been the hardest. As Jonah had softly explained her husband’s crimes, her breathing had become shallow and she’d tried to stand up. To leave the room.
Hanson had accompanied her to find water, and to get fresh air. It had been a good twenty minutes until Jonah had been able to tell her that her husband was dead.
When she finally spoke, her story had been one of the most painful accounts he’d heard. It had swung wildly between fierce protection of her husband and admissions of his bullying; of the way he had constantly checked up on her and picked holes in everything she did. How he would look at her phone constantly and rage at her for saying things to her friends, and how she’d stopped saying anything to anyone in the end. How he had refused to talk to her for three days when she’d read his emails, as a form of payback, and how he’d frequently said the harshest possible things to her before suddenly apologizing and telling her how much he loved her—and how good she was for standing by him when he was so damaged. How he had used the tracking on her phone to keep tabs on her.
Jonah felt a sense of satisfaction that that, at least, had been used against him in the end, because it had let her track him, too. That if he had managed to harm Jojo, they would have been right there to pick him up.
After the interview with Anna, there had been one with Stavely, who had handed himself in late that night. He had given Jonah a slow nod as he had been brought up to CID, and Jonah had almost smiled back at him. The drug dealer who had taken thirty years to do the right thing.
In fact, Stavely proved to be a godsend. They made an early agreement to waive charges against him for obstruction of justice and breaking and entering in order for him to give them everything he had on Brett Parker. His account had been succinct and convincing, and had told Jonah a great deal.
Matt Stavely had been drawn into Brett Parker’s world several months after Aurora’s death. Brett had turned up at Stavely’s old flat on a drizzly November evening, and told him that the drugs Daniel Benham had bought were sitting in a hole in the ground, almost all of them still there, and that Benham was never going to go and get them. He told Stavely that he could take the lot, and that Brett would pay him to do it, too, if he retrieved them.
“I want them gone,” Brett had told him. “And, ideally, if any traces remain, I want them to very clearly be someone else’s.”
He’d handed Stavely a crushed can of beer in a plastic bag, which he’d told him had Connor Dooley’s fingerprints on it.
“If you leave it there, then I’m safe, even if they do realize there were drugs there.”
Stavely, who had made bad decision after bad decision over the preceding months, and who had owed his supplier a terrifying amount, even with Benham’s money, had agreed to it. Thousands of pounds’ worth of Dexedrine and a couple hundred upfront had been lifeblood to him.
So, with a series of directions and on Brett’s suggestion, he had waited until the early hours of Christmas Eve, when there would be nobody out in the forest and the roads were utterly dead. He’d taken a series of lights and a shovel, and had made his way to the riverbank, where he had begun digging until he’d found the first packets.
It hadn’t taken him long to find Aurora.
He’d spent an hour wondering what the hell he should do. He’d paced around the freezing woodland and thought that he should go and call Brett Parker, or the police. But how could he explain this? This midnight drug recovery? He’d be in total shit.
As, he realized, Brett Parker had known.
It had been a nightmarish experience, the rest of that night. He had dug around her decaying remains, saved from full exposure to the smell only by the frozen ground. He’d loaded packet after packet into a holdall, and tried not to touch her. Some of them had fluid on them, part of her. He couldn’t even think about it now without feeling sick. He’d broken the ice in the shallows of the river and washed them, and put them in the bag anyway.
As the sun came up, he’d tipped the beer can out of its bag into the hole, and then shoveled the soil back over it until there was only a heap of earth to see. He’d left, and driven home without even remembering the journey.
He’d called Brett, who had told him coldly not to be an idiot. That he was part of this now, and that Brett wasn’t going to let him suffer. That Brett could do him a lot of good if Stavely was on his side.
He’d been terrified of discovery, and hungry for the funds Brett was offering him. And so he had become a periodic employee of Brett Parker, and had become more and more entangled in the terrible things that he did. He had supplied him with coke, with some of the Dexedrine, and then, later, with Rohypnol.
“Did that worry you?” Jonah had asked him.
“Of course it fucking did,” Stavely had said furiously. “But I was part of his dirty game. I was deep in it, and I was afraid of what would happen if I said no. So I kept quiet and I did what he told me.”
Which, it turned out, had included setting two fires at Jojo Magos’s house eight years apart. Brett had been careful not to do anything himself from start to finish.
But as careful as he’d been, he had made a few mistakes along the way. He’d let Stavely into his study when he’d sh
owed up for payment, in order to pretend to Anna that it was normal business. And in a moment of bizarre pride some years later, he’d showed off some of the messages he was exchanging with one of the girls he was grooming. He’d thought they were on the same side. He hadn’t recognized the loathing in Stavely’s face.
Stavely had eventually seen his opportunity to reveal the truth when he’d been told to provide a distraction. He had to check that Hanson was out there, watching him, and then go through a series of actions. Except that he’d told the cabdriver to take him to Brett’s house, instead of Daniel Benham’s, where he was supposed to pretend to be trying to sell him drugs. He’d been told to play the innocent about the kitchen knife, which would stay in its packet, having done its job in luring Hanson in.
“I thought about that girl, under the ground, and the other girls being raped and all, and…well, I may be a fuck-up and a dealer, but I’m not a murderer or a fucking rapist, and I couldn’t let him do it anymore. I’ve got a niece the age of some of those girls. Jesus.”
He offered them all his communications with Brett Parker to help them, and Jonah was grateful. They needed to begin the hunt for the other rape victims.
They could start, he thought, with Zofia Wierzbowski. And there was Coralie Ribbans, too. He was dreading talking to Coralie, whom he believed had been Brett’s victim for decades, and who had been so entirely influenced by him that she had never realized it.
* * *
—
IT WAS ONE A.M. before everything had been wrapped up for the day. Before going home, Jonah returned to the meeting room and very gently pulled Aurora’s picture off the board, removed the Blu-Tack, and opened one of the evidence boxes. He laid the picture in it, and pushed aside thoughts of Aurora curling up underground to die alone. She deserved to be remembered differently.
There would be more to do in the morning, and for a lot of mornings after that, but sleep had to happen, too. And families and friends and normal life. It was time to make the promised visit to his mother.
