But that didn’t mean that one of the girls hadn’t been peripherally involved, or that none of them knew anything. If one of them had covered up for one of the boys, it wouldn’t be the first time. Not by a long way.
The other thing it meant was a difficult conversation with the Jackson family at some point. As a feeling human being, he wanted to make the revelation as easy as possible. But as the man tasked with finding out who had killed Aurora, he had an opportunity to use that information to shock.
* * *
—
O’MALLEY WOKE UP five minutes before his alarm. He felt vaguely optimistic about today. He’d done some good work yesterday on the drug supplier that might well help them. He’d gone to see Jojo Magos’s older brother, Anton, straight after the pub.
Anton hadn’t been exactly nonplussed when he’d opened the door. It was a rare man who liked having his evening interrupted by a detective, and Anton had the grudging, wary look of someone who thought cops were the bad guys. O’Malley guessed, as Anton sized him up, that the elder Magos brother hadn’t been automatically treated with respect by the force. His graying hair was dreadlocked and tied back, and he wore a wiry wool cardigan that smelled faintly of animals.
But O’Malley was good at coming across like a human being instead of a cop, and his accent generally helped him. Most people saw it as unthreatening. So Anton had let him in, and in the end had admitted that he’d been the one to set up the deal where Daniel Benham had bought fifteen kilos of Dexedrine. His contact had been a man called Matt Stavely, for whom he provided a current address on the Thornhill estate.
O’Malley had sighed inwardly at that. The Thornhill estate after dark was not his idea of fun. But at least he didn’t have a flash car or a uniform to worry about.
He’d climbed into his Fiesta and made his way there, which was at least a quick journey at this time of night. He found Spring Terrace, which was about as unspring-like as it was possible to be. There was a series of desperate-looking low-rise flat blocks and then one towering high-rise at the end with a recreation ground in its shadow.
Stavely lived in the last of the small blocks. It had a small car park outside it with no attempts at trees or flower beds anywhere.
O’Malley parked up underneath a streetlamp without any real hope of that dissuading anyone from damaging the car. Thornhill was increasingly gang-run and lawless. Though after having to come and talk to numerous residents over a number of years, O’Malley at least had a reasonable relationship with some of them, and understood that the root of gang culture was fear rather than aggression.
He took the flat block’s external stairs two at a time, determined to make this quick. Stavely was in Number 36, up on the second floor. The door had no number on it, but it had two faded patches where a three and a six had once sat, and four screw holes.
He could hear a TV from somewhere, playing something that involved shooting and yelling. A moment or two after he knocked loudly, the sound shut off. He thought he caught footsteps approaching. There was a pause, which he would have expected. You didn’t open your door without checking on this estate.
And then there was a click as the door was opened a fraction, the security chain still on. A thin, bearded face appeared in the gap.
“Matt?” he asked, as unthreateningly as possible. “I need a little help from you. Can I come in for a minute?”
“What help?”
O’Malley glanced up and down the empty hallway, and then drew out his wallet. He flexed it open, showing a few tens and twenties inside.
Stavely gave him a hard look, and then the door closed as the chain came off. He opened the door fully, and O’Malley got a full view of him. A loose gray hooded cardigan on a thin frame. A black beanie over hair that was almost all gray, and skin that looked like it didn’t get enough light.
“Here,” Stavely said, walking ahead of him down a very short, very bare corridor that had only two doors opening off it. They passed a bedroom that was in darkness. Little except a mattress and a cupboard were visible. The whole place smelled of stale smoke, though it was cleaner than O’Malley had been expecting. There was no moldering food odor, and Stavely himself was well washed.
Stavely led him to an open-plan kitchen and sitting room, which was dominated by a large screen and a PlayStation. The screen was a frozen image of a fierce gun battle. It looked like Russia from the buildings and weaponry, and it was uncomfortably realistic to O’Malley.
Stavely sat near the remotes, where a can of beer was waiting. “What are you looking for?” he asked in a very neutral tone.
“Nothing for my mood,” O’Malley replied, leaning against the kitchen counter. “It’s actually information. And it’s not the kind of information that’s going to get you into any trouble.”
Stavely went very still. He looked at O’Malley, and then reached for a cigarette from a packet stuffed between the cushion and the arm of the sofa. He shifted his hips in order to reach into a pocket and pull out a lighter, and then lit up without speaking.
“It’s information thirty years old,” O’Malley went on, “so it’s pretty stale. It’s about a large sale of Dexedrine you made to a boy called Daniel Benham.”
O’Malley caught a strange twist to Stavely’s mouth, but he still said nothing.
“You probably remember the missing girl, Aurora Jackson.” He waited for a reaction, and in the end Stavely nodded. “We’ve found her remains. The trouble for us is that she’d been buried next to a very large quantity of Dexedrine, and we need to rule those drugs out of any involvement. We’re not, and I need to be firm about this, interested in pursuing any dealing or distribution crimes against anyone.”
There was another silence.
“How does tracing them help you?”
“If they came from a fairly normal source, we can show that it wasn’t connected to Aurora being murdered. Which is what happened to her.”
He waited again while Stavely thought this over. He was a careful man, O’Malley thought, and possibly not stupid. O’Malley had low expectations when it came to small-time dealers.
“So you want to show that the Dexedrine wasn’t dangerous to know about,” Stavely said.
O’Malley nodded. “I don’t believe her death had anything to do with the drugs. But I have a DCI who is thorough as hell, and is going to be relentless about pursuing the drug connection until we can close it down. I want to close it down.”
Stavely took a long drag on the cigarette and then tapped it into an ashtray. “I don’t know, man,” he said slowly. “It sounds like trouble.”
Stavely was closed off in the way that people who survived by keeping things secret often were.