His sergeant had been waiting alone back by the car, twitchy with impatience.
“I lost him,” he said as Jonah slowed to a walk. “He ducked into one of those council houses and I couldn’t tell you which.”
Jonah shook his head. “Same here. Bloody maniac, that one. Over half the fences in the village and then vanished.”
His sergeant shook his head and opened the driver’s door. “At least there’s no arrest report to file.”
“Yes,” Jonah said, and looked over at the bold red slogan on the wall.
FREEDOM KNOWS NO DIVISIONS OF WEALTH OR
He supposed it would probably have said “class.” It was almost a shame not to finish it, but it would be gone within a few days. Painted over.
* * *
—
JONAH HAD DOZED off at some point on the way, lulled by Hanson’s sedate driving and the gathering dark. He woke up dry-mouthed and disoriented when his DC said, “Sir.”
“Sorry.” He remembered where they were now. On the way to Jojo’s pale-blue house. They were driving down some unrecognizable stretch of curving road. He reached into the back to find his kit bag and rooted in it until he found the water bottle from his bike. He took a long draft from it. “I didn’t snore, did I?”
“No, you’re OK,” Hanson said, smiling slightly. “And if you dribbled, you did it out of the other side of your mouth.”
Jonah shook his head, but still rubbed at his mouth to be certain.
“So, Jojo Magos,” Hanson said, and for a disconcerting moment Jonah imagined that she knew about that night in Lyndhurst and the chase and the sweater. But of course she just wanted information, because he had asked her to take the lead.
“She was a core member of the group, unlike Brett Parker,” he said. “Bit of a tomboy back then. Actually, still a bit of a tomboy as far as I can make out. Now a landscape gardener. Did you look her up?”
“Do we know what she did that night?” Hanson asked. “I mean, I know we’re waiting on O’Malley and Lightman going through the notes, but…”
“There was only a brief mention of her in the overview. She went to bed a bit before one, the same as the others. Though when I say went to bed, she passed out sprawled on the ground with a sleeping bag half over her. Says she stayed that way until Connor shook her awake sometime after five. He asked her to help look for Aurora, so apparently she did.”
Hanson nodded. She had slowed the car down to a crawl, either lost in thought or wanting a few more minutes to mull. The GPS told them it was only a mile until their destination.
“Were you one of the officers who investigated back then?” she asked abruptly.
“Only in the most basic sense.” He glanced at her. “I was recently off training, and I was a regular uniformed PC. I got sent knocking on doors like the rest of the local force, and I spent more hours than I can count searching through the woods. By two days after she’d gone, the area of woodland we were actively searching had been extended to cover twenty square miles. It was an extraordinary level of search. Like nothing I’ve seen since. I don’t think most of us slept for the first couple of weeks. It seems incredible that we missed her.”
“I assume they did all this stuff we’re doing? Interviewed the kids?”
“Endlessly,” Jonah agreed. “For months. I got used to seeing one or another of them dragged in most weeks. Particularly Connor Dooley.”
“Why him?” She stopped the car altogether and gazed at him keenly. Her eyes looked a great deal harder than usual in the dim light.
“Because they thought he was white trash,” Jonah replied. “And because he was Irish by descent. We were in the midst of the Troubles, and the suspicion toward anyone with an accent was enormous. Plus he was covered in tattoos, and known for getting into fights. He was the obvious choice.”
“But they didn’t find anything?”
“No.” He glanced behind them, where a pair of headlights had swung into view. Hanson put the car into first and moved off again a little hurriedly. “Not as far as I know. Which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anything to find, obviously. It also might mean they were looking in the wrong place.”
Jojo’s house appeared out of the darkness ahead of them. Now, at nighttime, it looked more white than powder blue, and the tumbling plants in the front garden that grew up and over half of the house seemed colorless instead of cheerful.
Jonah knew it fairly well from the road. An old school friend had pointed it out to him, and on many of the occasions he’d driven this way since, he had slowed slightly to take in all the colors. He had even seen her here on one occasion, working away in the front garden in a vest top with mud smudged across her face and a gleam of sweat over her. She hadn’t looked up, and he had driven on feeling uncomfortably like some kind of voyeur.
“So they stopped investigating after a while?” Hanson asked, as she signaled and then turned slowly into the driveway.
“Things moved on,” Jonah replied. “A group of IRA angries plotted to blow up the Grand Hotel in Brighton in the fall of ’84. All of our focus was suddenly switched to finding them instead of a missing girl. Aurora’s case stayed open, though, and occasionally there would be a resurgence of interest.”
He didn’t add that he had volunteered to be part of the task force each time the inquiry had reopened. That he had never really stopped looking for Aurora.
Hanson turned off the engine, her expression thoughtful. “And it’s further in the past now, too.” Then she added, “But we have a body. And a defined list of suspects, I suppose.”
“We’ll see how much that counts for,” he said, climbing out of the car.
It was late for them to be calling. Past ten o’clock. An antisocial time. He hoped she hadn’t already gone to bed. They would have to retreat if so, and try again tomorrow. Though perhaps by then he would be less dazed, and struggle less to distinguish between the person he had been and the person he was now.
He edged past a tatty, dark red Jeep Wrangler with its soft top down and bamboo plants standing up in the back. Despite the dominant and almost wild-looking presence of plants all around the driveway, the paving was immaculate, with clean cement between cream tiles.
They ducked under a vigorously healthy clematis on a trellis to make their way to the door. It was already ajar. Behind it was a lean, tanned form in loose cotton wrap-around trousers and a vest top.
“Can I help?”
Everything about her spelled wariness. Jonah could see a hard ridge of muscle standing up along her forearm, and her fingers were pressed hard into the door, ready to close it in a moment. The pose was so profoundly like the cornered figure that night in Totton that it was disorienting.