Lightman had tapped on his door before he’d had a chance to catch up on the notes his team had logged on the system.
“Coralie Ribbans has arrived downstairs,” he said. “She says she needs to talk to you.”
Jonah was both curious and a little exasperated. He’d left multiple messages for Coralie to call them, and here she was instead, in person, without warning. But the timing could be worse. Jojo Magos wasn’t due for a while, and he could probably push her back a bit.
“If you can find her an interview room, and we can see Jojo Magos later this afternoon, I’ll see Coralie Ribbans now,” he said, and pulled up the electronic versions of Coralie’s statements from 1983. The few paragraphs he was able to read were along the same lines as the others’ had been. She was adamant that there had been no excessive drinking, no arguments, no sex, and no drugs. Which was to say, she’d lied as much as the others had.
But Coralie seemed to want to talk to them about something, and Jonah felt that she might be a useful resource. Her life had taken a different path from her friends’, and she had not remained close to any of them. In fact, nobody had so far mentioned Coralie as a good friend, and Jojo had said they didn’t get on.
So perhaps Coralie, the one Londoner of the group, had become an outsider. Perhaps she was no longer as loyal to her friends as she had once been.
After a few minutes, he caught sight of a blond-haired woman making her way through the office outside with Lightman. It took Jonah no time at all to recognize her. He might have missed her in a crowd, but with her in front of him there was no question that this was Topaz’s constant shadow.
Topaz still looked like she had as a teenager, but Coralie seemed to want to look like a kid’s idea of a princess. Her jewelry was diamanté and sparkling; her hair in a braided bun. The short skirt she wore was flared and layered with netting between pieces of white fabric, and the top she wore was tight-fitting, sleeveless, and pink.
He watched her until Lightman had shown her into the interview suite, and then glanced over at Hanson, who had returned to her desk.
He opened his door, and called, “Would you like to sit in on an interview?”
Hanson looked up and beamed at him. “I’d love to,” she said, turning her computer screen off immediately.
* * *
—
JONAH COULD SMELL Coralie’s sweet, candylike perfume the moment he and Hanson were through the door. He felt slightly nauseated.
“Ms. Ribbans,” he said, settling himself. “I’m DCI Sheens, and this is Detective Constable Hanson. Thanks for coming in.”
“Whatever I can do to help.”
He tried to remember whether the high-pitched, front-of-mouth lisp was new or had always been there. A strange thing in someone in her forties, whose face had laughter lines and furrows under the makeup.
He could tell she didn’t recognize him. Jojo had been the only one to realize he’d been at school with them. He supposed he had been unimportant to the rest of them. Peripheral.
“We’d like to hear from you afresh what happened the night Aurora disappeared,” he said. “We’re reopening the investigation, and that means starting again. I’m hoping you’ll have some information that was missed the first time round.”
“Yes, I…I said a lot, but I think there are some small things. Things we didn’t want everyone to know in case we got in trouble.”
The phrasing and her manner, which was of a sheepish child instead of a fully grown woman, was a little uncomfortable to hear.
“We’ve heard a few things along those lines,” Jonah said carefully. “I’d like to take you through that evening and just clarify a few things.”
He brushed over the arrival at the camp, and got quickly on to the argument between Topaz and Benners.
“You went with Topaz, I think?” he asked her.
“Yes, I did. I calmed her down, and then she said she wanted to sit by the river alone for a while, so I headed back to the campsite.”
“Did you also see Andrew Mackenzie, an English teacher from your school, at the river?”
Her expression turned to confusion. “Mr. Mackenzie? The young guy? He wasn’t there.”
“You mean he wasn’t camping with you?”
“No, I mean he can’t have been nearby. Or at least none of us saw him. We all talked about it a lot afterward and nobody ever said anything about him being there.”
Jonah nodded, glancing through his notes as if moving on to the next point, while his mind was on Topaz. She had seen Mackenzie, and gone on to point the finger at him. But for some reason she’d decided not to tell her closest friend. And none of the others had mentioned Mackenzie, either. Which implied that Topaz hadn’t told anyone except the police. It was a very interesting omission.
“Let’s look at the later part of the evening now,” he said. “Despite your original statements, we’ve learned that Topaz and Brett Parker paired off. They went to have sex together, is that right?”
Coralie’s expression took on a strange sort of amusement. “Is that what Topaz told you?”
“It’s been commented on by more than one of your group,” Jonah replied.
“That’s interesting. Because it wasn’t Topaz and Brett who had sex. It was all three of us, which was how Topaz liked to play it.”
Hanson, next to him, drew in a slightly sharp breath. But when he glanced over at her there was no visible reaction. He approved.
“It was all about seducing Brett,” Coralie went on. She tucked her hair behind her ear and shifted with a glance at the reflective glass. Did she think she had a larger audience? “Topaz was fixated on him. He was attractive and sporty, and pretty much everyone at school wanted him. Topaz was used to being the desirable one, so she decided to go and get him. Only Brett proved to be tricky. He’d been…interested in someone else.”
“One of the group?” Jonah asked, curious about how awkward she suddenly looked. Had there been something more between Coralie and Brett?
“No, no,” she said quickly. “Someone at school. We’d all been at the same party, a week or two before, and Brett…kissed someone else. Even though Topaz was there, and looking gorgeous. He went after a blond girl from the year below.”
“The year below him?”
“The year below us,” Coralie said in a quiet voice.
He watched her thoughtfully. “So he was interested in someone who was, what? Fourteen at most?”
“Yes. She didn’t look fourteen,” Coralie replied. “She was really tall and skinny, and looked like an underwear model or something. Nowhere near as sexy as Topaz, but still.”