During his time awake he found himself rehearsing a conversation with Wilkinson about Andrew Mackenzie. He wasn’t relishing telling his chief super about potential police corruption.
He showered at six thirty and drove to the station. The roads were clear, but it was still raining, and the surface was slippery under the Mondeo’s wheels.
He expected to be the first one in, but Lightman’s mop of hair was visible over the top of his screen as he let himself into CID.
Jonah made his way toward his office, thinking he would leave Lightman to whatever was occupying him. But as he drew closer, he could hear something like the sounds of a football match coming out of the speakers of the desktop, and realized that Lightman was watching Brett Parker in action.
“Barcelona Olympics in ’92,” Lightman commented. “The four hundred meters.”
The commentator’s voice rose in pitch, and Jonah watched Brett’s long, powerful stride pick up in pace. He moved past the leader in a matter of three steps, and crossed the line a few moments later.
“I hadn’t realized quite what sporting royalty he was,” Lightman admitted as the video finished.
“Royalty is probably fair,” Jonah agreed. “He was pretty unstoppable for a few years.”
“There isn’t much around after the late nineties,” Lightman commented, scrolling through the suggested videos. “Even though some helpful fans have uploaded a lot of stuff to YouTube.”
“He switched to triathlon,” Jonah replied. “At the point when he stopped being able to take medals at sprinting.”
“Think he’s still in any clubs?” Lightman asked. “They’d probably know him quite well.”
“It’s worth finding out,” Jonah agreed.
“Other obvious lines of inquiry are school friends of his and Aurora’s,” Lightman went on. “Particularly of Aurora’s. I can ask the Jacksons for their help.”
Jonah experienced a slight dropping sensation in his stomach. It had been an inevitable part of the investigation, but he’d still been hoping that it wouldn’t happen.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ve got to give them an update as soon as it’s a human hour. See if you can find any of Brett’s school friends without asking him about it.”
“OK. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Let me know when everyone’s in,” Jonah said as he made his way to his office. “We’ll have a proper sitrep.”
He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing, taking over talking to the Jacksons. The idea of one of the team doing it panicked him, but if they came up with one of the names he thought they would, there was nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t hide a potential witness from the team.
He sat at his desk and then rose again, too restless for sitting still. He put a call through to Wilkinson’s office on the off chance that the chief super was there, but wasn’t surprised that it went unanswered.
He started trying to get his head round the team briefing, but struggled to focus on that, too. And then, at a little after seven forty, McCullough rang, despite the forensics lab technically not being open for another hour and twenty minutes.
“Digital analysis is back,” she said without any greeting. “We’ve got a fracture to two metacarpals, and another to the sacral side of the left sacroiliac joint. It’s a pelvic joint, and it’s difficult to fracture. Taken together, they are strongly indicative of rape. Though sacral fractures are unusual.”
Jonah had a strange, cold sensation around his heart. The reality was that McCullough’s findings weren’t unexpected. Aurora had been fourteen and beautiful, and a probable murder victim. But he could still remember her as a gawky twelve-year-old, her hair falling over the pages of a book and her feet kicking at the stone wall outside the school while she waited for her sister to come to the bus with her.
“What does that suggest?”
“That one leg was leaned on and placed under a lot of pressure while the attack took place, by someone a lot stronger than she was,” McCullough said. “The fractures to her hands are likely to have occurred while attempting to protect herself.”
“Likelihood of any DNA retrieval?”
“Extremely slim,” McCullough said. “I’ll swab what tissue we have and start going through soil and fabric in detail, but there’s going to be a lot of data loss over thirty years.”
“OK. Thank you. Are you able to rule out animal interference in the removal of drugs? It looks like that stash of Dexedrine used to be a lot bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“Fifteen kilos.”
“There’s no way animals removed fifteen kilos of Dexedrine from underground,” McCullough said definitively. “That has to be human action. I’ll see if we can find any shovel marks or other signs of interference. The site’s still covered.”
“Thanks. Anything on toxicology…?”
McCullough sighed. “To clarify my earlier comments, we’ve got no hair or nails or eyeballs, meaning no testing there.”
Jonah could hear the lack of finality in her voice.
“But…?”
“There isn’t really a but. I’ve been as thorough as I can, and sent soil samples from directly around the body for column and gas chromatography, and if we’re really, really lucky, we might manage to separate out nonmetabolized Dexedrine from other compounds in the soil and confirm presence in sufficiently high quantities to indicate ingestion by the victim. But if there have been sufficiently high temperatures in that dugout, there is zero chance, and it was a hot summer.”
“Well, naturally,” Jonah said. “Common problem…”
“Piss off, Sheens,” McCullough said.
“Thank you,” Jonah answered on a laugh. “Genuinely. I know you’re busy at the moment.”
“I’m always busy,” McCullough said. “I’m going to start saying no more often, and go home at five, and all of you lot can complain to my voicemail instead.”
“But what would you do with all the spare time?” Jonah asked.
“Have a life? Maybe?”
“Yeah. I hear they’re overrated….”
He ended the call, and sat thinking about a violent attack in as unemotional a frame of mind as he could manage. From an investigative point of view, it clarified things quite a lot.
In essence, it was unlikely that any of the girls had killed her. It was extremely improbable that she had been attacked violently by a male attacker and then murdered by a separate female.