Jonah didn’t respond immediately. He lowered his eyes to his notes, feeling a strange desire to argue with her. To tell her no, the boys had been fascinated with Aurora, even if they weren’t sure what to do about it.
The silence was all it took to show the cracks in Topaz’s certainty. “Did you find something?” she asked. “Had…had she been…?”
Jonah made a slightly noncommittal noise, his attention moving from Topaz to Connor, who had raised his hand to his hair in a jerky motion. Connor looked profoundly uncomfortable.
“We haven’t confirmed anything yet. Data analysis for the site isn’t back. More coffee?” Jonah asked, looking between the two of them.
“I think we’re OK,” Connor said, his voice tight. Jonah nodded slowly, and left them to each other for a while. He could feel the two of them watching him all the way out of the room.
* * *
—
BENHAM LOOKED STRESSED. More than any of them so far, Jonah thought. His face was pale, and his gaze darted from point to point around the room. He was sweaty, too. Sick-looking.
His solicitor, next to him, was calm. Her jaw was raised in slight belligerence. Fortysomething and stocky in a tailored skirt suit, with a Pandora bracelet and a diamanté watch. He didn’t know her. She was probably too expensive for most of the people Jonah interviewed.
The taped introductions done, Jonah let a silence elapse. The only sound was O’Malley’s periodic rustling of paper as he looked through a printout.
“You wanted to know about the drugs,” Benham said eventually, and his solicitor cast him a sideways glance.
Disapproving, Jonah thought.
“Yes,” he said, “among other things. We have reason to believe that they belonged to you. Witnesses have confirmed that you purchased them from a contact you had used previously.”
Benham was already opening his mouth to answer when his solicitor said, “Is this relevant to the current murder investigation?”
“It may be,” Jonah said. “After all, if the drugs were being sold, the owner stood to lose a great deal if they were discovered. Even as a minor, he’d have been looking at potential correctional time, and certainly expulsion from school and a permanent blot on his record.”
Benham shook his head. “That doesn’t mean I’d do anything to hurt anyone.”
“Mr. Benham is here voluntarily, in order to give information to you as a witness,” his solicitor said quickly and sharply. “If you wish to question him as a suspect, then you will have to do so under a separate interview.”
Jonah gave her a small smile, then nodded and carried on. “I’m not attempting to assert, at this point, that you did anything to protect yourself. But I’m interested in those drugs. The threat of being caught was a motive for anyone in the group. With that in mind, I’d like you to confirm that they were yours, and to indicate where you bought them from, and why.”
His solicitor leaned over to murmur to him, and Benham nodded.
“They were mine, but I’m not going to make any comment beyond that,” he said, “beyond affirming that they came from someone entirely unconnected with Aurora.”
“Did you intend to sell them?” Jonah persisted.
There was a pause, in which Benham’s solicitor shook her head.
“I never had any intention of selling drugs. Any connected with me were for the sole—and free—use of the people around me.”
Jonah couldn’t help smiling slightly. It was such a politician’s answer.
“What happened to it all afterward? The Dexedrine?”
“Nothing happened to it, as far as I’m aware,” Benham replied.
“So you left a hefty supply of drugs underground?” Jonah asked. “You didn’t think about the money it represented, or about the chance of it being found and you being in trouble?”
“Are we back to attempting to view my client as a suspect?” his solicitor cut in.
“Not at present,” Jonah said calmly, “but I do want to know whether you tried to go back there.”
“I think that’s connected—”
“It’s all right,” Daniel said, holding his hand up to her. “I’d rather…I meant to go back.” He looked up at Jonah. “I told the others I’d wait till she was found. I thought it’d be quick. And then as time passed, I decided I’d better wait until things were quieter. But it went on, and the longer it went on…the more I felt like I couldn’t. How could I be worrying about bloody party drugs when Aurora was gone? And there was a bit of me that blamed myself for her vanishing. I felt like I’d failed her. If I’d checked up on her, or slept nearer…”
Jonah let the silence extend, but Benham seemed to be done.
“So you never went back.”
“No.”
“And did the others know that?”
Benham pulled a face. “No, I don’t think so. I’d told them to leave it to me, and as time went by I didn’t want to admit that I’d left it. So I never went back, and that meant I never found her. And isn’t that a big irony? I was thinking about her all the time and she’d have been found years ago if I’d just got on with the job.”
Jonah nodded slowly. At the front of his mind was the fact that the stash had been lifted, whatever Benham said. Either he had taken it, and thought they were unaware of the size of the original load, or he had no idea that it had gone.
Jonah decided to keep that little piece of information to himself for a while. He sat back, considering. “Would you mind telling me about your friendship with Aurora? How well did you know her?”
“Not very well,” Benham said. “Not as well as I knew her sister. And the group of us was really just me, Topaz, Connor, Coralie, and Jojo. But I’d go round their house now and then, and Topaz and Aurora took the bus back to Lyndhurst most days as well. I’d talked to her enough to think she was a nice girl.”
“Hmm. So you hadn’t ever been involved with her?”
Benham gave him a mystified look. He glanced at his solicitor once again. “No, I hadn’t. I don’t think she ever had a boyfriend. Though she didn’t exactly tell me everything about herself.”
“Nothing happened between you?” Jonah asked. “Even on that night? I mean, there was alcohol flowing and you were all taking drugs. Sometimes these things happen.”
“No, it really didn’t,” Daniel said firmly. “I never had that kind of interest in her. I liked her, but that’s as far as it went.”