Except one of you might have done, Jonah thought.
A brief silence ensued, and then Hanson asked gently, “Did Aurora know about the drugs?”
“Oh, she knew about them,” Jojo said. “We all did, even Brett. Topaz was showing off to him, and because she wanted to show him, Aurora had to see, too.”
“So Topaz was interested in Brett Parker?”
Jojo gave a slight laugh. “Yes. Connor didn’t get a look in back then. Poor Connor. He had to watch her fawn all over Brett, who was just totally smug at that age. I guess that’s what happens when everyone adores you. I think Aurora vanishing made him grow up a bit, you know.”
“Was Brett interested in Topaz, then?”
“No, not really. She probably found it frustrating. There weren’t that many people who said no to her.”
Jonah stood as Hanson went on questioning her. He could feel Jojo’s eyes on him as he wandered around the room, looking for clues to the last few decades.
“How close are the six of you now?” Hanson asked.
“Fairly close. We ended up having to lean on each other quite a lot back then. Brett was the first to move away, because he was two years above and went to Loughborough, but as soon as he had the money he bought a place back here, and that gradually became the center of everything.”
“Did you talk about Aurora?”
“Yes, of course. But we talked about a lot of other things, too. We were friends.”
Jonah’s wandering had taken him to the point where the room met the new conservatory. He found a bookcase with six photo frames in it. He recognized Jojo’s younger brother, Kenny, who still lived in Lyndhurst and worked at the outdoor shop.
“And now?” Hanson was asking.
“We drifted a bit when Topaz and Connor moved away,” Jojo replied. “I mean, I still see Daniel and Brett individually. Coralie’s off in London now, and she’s never been that bothered about seeing me. The lack of feeling is fairly mutual.”
Jonah was storing all of that as he looked at the other photos. There were two pictures of children: nieces and nephews who belonged to Jojo’s older brother, Anton, at a guess. One photo was of her father at a younger age, olive-skinned and grinning in his overalls as he repaired a roof.
Jonah picked up one of the last two pictures. It was of a slightly younger Jojo, perhaps age thirty, soaking wet on a drizzly day, her face pressed close to a man’s. He was all strong jaw and five o’clock shadow. Behind them was a rain-drenched view of the sea and cliffs, and both of them were grinning despite the abysmal weather.
He heard Jojo rising and coming to stand near his right shoulder. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot, agitated.
“That’s Aleksy,” she said. “He was my boyfriend.”
Jonah nodded. He’d recognized Aleksy Nowak, the New Forest’s adopted, celebrated free climber, from the photo of him in the paper. There had been a tribute from Jojo, too.
“I heard that he’d died. I’m sorry.”
Jojo shook her head, and rubbed at her forearm. “He didn’t know Aurora. I didn’t meet him until a lot later.”
“Sorry,” Jonah said, and placed the photo down. “I shouldn’t…I’m not here to pry into your life.”
“OK. That’s OK.”
Hanson rose before they had a chance to sit back down. “I think that’s all for this evening,” she said with a questioning glance at Jonah.
He nodded, and told Jojo, “We’ll see you tomorrow, then. At eleven.”
“All right. I was supposed to climb but it looks like it’ll be stormy anyway.”
Jonah found himself watching her, curious. “You still climb?”
Jojo nodded. She gave a slightly defensive shrug. “It was either that or lose something else I loved.”
She followed them to the door, and watched them as they returned to the car. She shut the door only once they had climbed in.
Jonah should have gone to pick up his bike from Godshill and cycled it the thirteen miles to his house in Ashurst. He hated leaving it locked up anywhere out of his sight, even in low-crime Godshill. But it was almost eleven now, and he still needed time to read the overview again in preparation for the press briefing tomorrow.
“Drop me at home,” he told Hanson. “I’ll sort my bike out tomorrow.”
“Sure,” she said, and then, after a pause: “Where’s home?”
He sighed. “Sorry. I’m in Ashurst.”
“Can you…?”
She waved at the GPS, and he dutifully took it down and punched in his postcode.
“So the drugs…” Hanson began, once they’d pulled out onto the road.
“Are an interesting feature,” Jonah agreed.
“How much did they find there?”
“A fraction of that amount,” he answered.
“It sounds like Daniel Benham went back there,” Hanson said. “And if he saw her, and didn’t report it, in all probability he killed her.”
“Somebody, at some point, removed a large quantity of Dexedrine from around the body of Aurora Jackson,” Jonah corrected her, “and afterward failed to report it. We don’t know that it’s one of them, never mind being certain that it was Daniel Benham.”
“But it’s the likely answer, isn’t it?” Hanson pressed.
“Likely isn’t good enough,” he said.
He heard a small out breath from Hanson, but she said nothing. A silence grew as they drove, and Jonah inwardly went back over the interview with Jojo. He found himself circling around that conversation over the photograph, remembering what Jojo had said about her boyfriend. It took him a while to notice that Hanson was looking at him whenever she could get away with it.
“You were friends with her, weren’t you?” she said. “Jojo. That’s why you wanted me to take the lead.”
“Only in the very loosest sense,” he answered. “I was really friends with her older brother. I sometimes went to the house or hung out with both of them at the recreation ground. There was a lot of that in my childhood.”
“So you aren’t worried about a conflict of interest? You’re not close?”
“No, we were never close,” Jonah said, feeling slightly defensive again. He was beginning to recognize that Hanson didn’t like letting things go. “I’ve probably only bumped into her four or five times since, and never done more than say hello. None of those times has been recent. I stopped hanging out with her brother once I started training college, too. It was a conscious choice, in part. He had so many friends who broke the law as a matter of course, and I know he did it himself, too. Though I think he’s cleaned his act up now.”