Lavender came off her clothes as she turned. “Come in. I’ll find Tom. Tom!” Her voice was shrill as she dipped into the shadow of the hall. “Tom!”
The hallway was barely possible to walk along. Most of the floor was covered with assorted coats, shoes, boxes, and eclectic outdoor items. Joy picked her way past without looking at her feet, long practiced at this arrangement.
“Come into the kitchen. I’ll put some tea on. Tom!”
The kitchen was no less cluttered. There were two or three spare feet of clear space at one end of the huge oak table, and a mountain of newspaper, letters, and shrapnel on the remainder.
“Don’t trouble yourself over tea unless you want one,” Jonah said as Joy opened three cupboards in turn before finding a box of tea. She turned round with it, and came to a stop again.
He moved around the edge of the table and let his eyes scan the kitchen. The work surfaces were under a layer of visible grime, with dirty crockery spread out like ornaments. Larger objects interspersed them at intervals. An old piece of plumbing. A table-tennis racquet. A hammer.
The stooped figure that emerged from a doorway brought Jonah up short. If it hadn’t been for the wild gray beard and hair, he would never have known him for Tom Jackson, the arrogant, well-bred, decidedly eccentric oddball. He could barely see any traces of the argumentative man who had clattered in and out of Lyndhurst in his battered Volvo and engaged in periodic feuds with the council or post office. This was no more than a fragment of him. A poor sketch.
“Police, is it?”
The voice was lifeless, too. Jonah remembered the fury in him after Aurora had gone. The aggressive finger-stabbing as he told them what they were doing wrong, and why they couldn’t find her. Perhaps thirty years of fury could burn the life out of a man.
“Yes, Tom.” Joy had begun moving again, filling an ancient stovetop kettle from the sink. “Will you…? I’ll make a pot.”
Tom pulled a wooden Carver chair out. He sat heavily in it and looked first at Hanson, then at Jonah. He seemed to lose interest in both, and began to gaze at a dim painting of the sea on the uneven wall.
The silence as the kettle boiled stretched into awkwardness. Jonah’s patience wore through before it had finished.
“We wanted to speak to you first. There’s been a development this morning.”
There was a flurry of activity from Joy. She shoved cups down and turned, reaching into her pockets for something, her hands coming up empty.
“They’ve got some news on Aurora, Tom,” Joy said.
“Yes. I assumed so.”
Jonah met a gaze from Tom that was full of profound uninterest. He found himself looking away.
“Although formal identification is to follow,” Jonah said, “we’ve discovered remains not far from the campsite where Aurora disappeared. The age and gender are right, and they look to be thirty years old.” He waited for a response. Tom only flicked a strand of hair out of his eyes, while Joy waited with her gaze on Hanson for some reason.
“We believe it’s your daughter,” Jonah finished as gently as he could.
Joy stared with her mouth hanging slack for a moment, and then reached to put a cup down, clumsily.
“She…Oh, Tom.” She drew in a noisy breath, and then sobbed. She turned away, hiding her face. “Tom. Oh, Tom. She’s—”
Hanson moved immediately to put a comforting arm round her. Tom Jackson remained motionless, that empty gaze on his wife now.
“Well, she wasn’t going to be alive, was she?” he said, his voice harsh. “Thirty years of not a blasted word. Of course she’s dead.”
* * *
—
EIGHT FORTY ON a Sunday. Connor Dooley should be taking his weekend, but he’d still had to come in early for marking, and to prepare for their interdepartmental meeting. It happened increasingly: vacations and weekends being gradually absorbed into meetings and paperwork and conflict resolution. And his rooms were being absorbed, too. Once pristine mahogany was now hidden beneath folders and envelopes, its occasional revealed corners dusty and dull.
Today, he was preparing himself to fight. It was a frustrating, unnecessary fight based on the intractable cheapness of the bursar. A new post had been created a year ago out of need. The history fellows had long been overloaded, the college taking on ever more PhD and MPhil students. Even with the extra support of that new post, they were 8 percent below target contact time with their students. He’d thought this fight at least partially won.
And then Lopez had taken a professorship at Glasgow, and the bursar had announced no plans to reappoint. He’d told Connor point-blank that the extra fellow had been a luxury they could no longer afford. That the existing three history fellows could cover it among them.
So Connor was here, on Sunday morning, before the coffee shops along West Nicholson Street were even open, ready to print out tables and charts of the time commitments of his faculty. Ready to beat the bursar down with facts, in the full knowledge that if the bursar agreed on the need for a new appointment, the principal would accept it. If that tactic failed, he might just invite the bursar home for dinner. Fighting was sometimes rendered unnecessary when his wife moved toward a colleague, wearing a little black dress.
The buzz of his phone was halfway welcome. It was an excuse to postpone the data trawling. A reason to put off thinking about grabbing the bursar by his jowly neck.
Topaz. Was she calling to tell him she couldn’t come for lunch with him? He half remembered being in bed this morning at fuck-knew-what-time, and her kissing him goodbye with her hair scraped back and her sports kit on.
He tried to remember what she’d been doing. Training earlier than usual, obviously. She’d been going to a coffee or something afterward. One of those meet-ups that was halfway between a business meeting and a social chat.
“Hey, T,” he said. “All OK?”
“They found her.”
It was an odd moment. He heard emotion in her voice, but couldn’t pinpoint it. He knew who she meant without needing to be told. He imagined, with a lurch, that Topaz was about to tell him she’d been alive all this time and in hiding.
“She’s—”
“She never left the campsite.” He could hear the edge to her voice then. “They found remains near the river. It’s her. She’s—”
The pause was long and awful. No chance for him to comfort her in any meaningful way. But he tried anyway.
“Oh, Topaz,” he said. And then: “I’ll come and pick you up.”
A watery breath.