She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  Mackenzie’s police record was pretty quick reading. There had been only one interview with him, in which he’d explained that he had been camping with his girlfriend a few miles away and hadn’t left her side all night. The account hadn’t, as far as she could see, been checked. Which went straight onto her list of bad original investigative work.

  Having finished that, she decided to google him, although with a name like Andrew Mackenzie, it wasn’t going to be all that easy. She decided to add in “teacher Southampton,” and found what she thought was the man. There were a few articles where he’d been interviewed about particularly successful students. The pictures showed a broad-faced, stocky man looking terribly posh in chinos and a shirt. There was also a page about a charity hike in Corsica, and he was the founder of a website dedicated to reading Yeats’s poetry in dramatic locations, which made her snigger.

  And then there was an article about the retirement party of a Roald Mackenzie, who had been a DCS at the Met. Curious, she clicked on it to find any reference to Andrew, and read a brief interview with “Roald’s nephew, schoolteacher Andrew Mackenzie.”

  “Jesus,” she said under her breath. So Mackenzie had been well connected with the police. No wonder he’d been deliberately missed.

  She found it difficult not to jump up and tell Lightman straightaway. But she could see that he was focused on his screen, a small frown on his face. And it was Sheens she needed to be telling this to really.

  So she sat and reread the article, her foot jiggling with impatience as she waited for the chief to reappear.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH LEFT THE interview suite full of the uncomfortable buzzing that filled him when he’d brought out the harsh questions. It was like the feeling when he’d had too much coffee. A tetchy restlessness that started to look for another target.

  It was at times like this—and only at times like this—that he thought he began to understand his father. He was filled with a sort of righteous fury at the lies suspects told, and with an urge to beat them down until they admitted the truth.

  What he’d said to Connor had been mild. He could go a lot further, though he didn’t like himself a lot when he did. And that was difficult when it was one of the things that made him really good at his job.

  It almost helped that Connor couldn’t quite seem to remember what he’d done. It was an uncomfortable echo from Jonah’s own past. He wanted to attack Connor for it, perhaps because he was tired of attacking himself.

  “I don’t know whether I believe him,” O’Malley said, catching up with him at the door to CID. “Part of me thinks that’s how I’d react if someone said that to me. And part of me thinks it’s how a guilty man would react.”

  “It’s a hard one to call,” Jonah agreed. “I want to give him some time to worry. And we need time to find further evidence. That’s got to be the priority now. If he got up and raped her, there must be some way of proving it beyond Coralie’s testimony.”

  He caught the swift movement of Hanson’s head and her scramble to rise as he walked back into CID.

  “What have you got?” he asked her.

  “Andrew Mackenzie,” she said with what was almost a smile. “He was only interviewed once, during which he provided an alibi. He explained that he’d camped overnight with his girlfriend, and never left her side.”

  “Did she agree?”

  “They never checked with her,” Hanson said with a note of triumph. “Which seems breathtakingly bad investigative work, but, in fact, may be worse than that. Mackenzie’s uncle was a DCS in the Met at the time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I am.” Her expression broke through into a full smile. “Good thing he gave an interview at the super’s retirement do, or I might not have got the connection.”

  He couldn’t share her excitement. Aside from the anger that he was still struggling to pack away, he’d seen enough corruption investigations to last a lifetime. They’d damaged both individual officers and the reputation of the force. If it turned out that there was a huge apology to be made for a killer remaining free for thirty years, Jonah did not want to be in the middle of it.

  But what he wanted didn’t really feature. There was no question that they needed to interview Mackenzie.

  “Did you find out where he is now?”

  “Yeah, he’s head of department at a private school in Bristol.”

  “Call the school, and tell them we need to speak to him,” he said. “Today.”

  He glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost two. Lunchtime had vanished somewhere into the cycle of interviews.

  “And can you please apologize to Jojo Magos, and ask if I can see her either this evening or tomorrow? Ben can come with me and talk to this teacher.”

  Lightman raised his head and gave an impassive nod. “Are we shelving the briefing, then?” The sergeant unplugged his iPad from his desktop machine and stood.

  “Yup, I’m moving it till later. If we’ve got to get to Bristol, I want to go now. I’ll update you on a few things from this morning and let the other two know later on. Oh, and we need to tell Connor Dooley he’s free to go.”

  “I’ll do that,” O’Malley offered.

  “Good.”

  “What shall I do after I’ve talked to the school?” Hanson asked. He could sense her disappointment. She’d been eager to go and interview another suspect. But he generally found it better to pull rank at expensive schools. A DCI and a DS were a good combination.

  “Follow up with McCullough on any new forensics, and update us while we’re driving. I want evidence against Connor Dooley if it exists. We’ll talk to Mackenzie and see if that one’s a runner.”

  She sat at her desk silently.

  “That was good work connecting him to the detective chief super,” he said. It was a slightly clumsy attempt to console her.

  She gave a small nod, and focused on her screen.

  * * *

  —

  THE RAIN WAS starting as they left the station, and it had become a real storm before they hit the M3, a wall of water battering the car roof. He’d grabbed a sandwich from the canteen to wolf on the way, but it was hard to control the car and eat, so he gave up and left it till later.

  He thought about talking through the case so far with Lightman, but it seemed like a mess at the moment. There were so many inconsistencies between all the statements that he didn’t know where to start.

  All they could be certain they had was a group of drugged-up, drunk fifteen-to-eighteen-year-olds and an innocent fourteen-year-old who had gone to sleep at some distance away. Plus one schoolteacher a few miles off and camping with a girlfriend. And a huge stash of Dexedrine.

  Aurora may or may not have been drunk. They all may or may not have been high. Some of the drugs had been removed later, maybe by arrangement, and maybe not.

  There were many apparently insignificant lies being told. The friends were trying to protect themselves. But they might well be masking the truth of what happened behind their lies. There might be more about Connor, for one. Coralie had waited thirty years to tell them about seeing him by the fire. It all needed breaking down, lie by lie.

  At that point, he remembered how Topaz had hidden her meeting with Mackenzie. Together with the failure to investigate him, there were clearly grounds for looking at Mackenzie.

  “What do you have on the teacher?” he asked Lightman.

  “Juliette sent through Topaz’s original statement. She did mention seeing Andrew Mackenzie,” he said, referring to his iPad as he spoke. “But it was quite briefly mentioned, and she stressed that it had been a lot earlier in the evening. She thought it might be worth checking up on him. She didn’t mention him again during those first few days.”

  Jonah tried to dredge up some of his own memories of Mackenzie. The Engl
ish teacher had joined only a term before Jonah left. He’d been young; Jonah remembered that much. He’d looked barely older than a sixth-former, broad-faced and sporty, in a slightly stocky way. More of a sprinter than a long-distance runner.

  Had it been Mackenzie that the girls in his year had been crazy for, he wondered suddenly? Or had that been the sports teacher? It had been one of them. And if they had been crazy about him, maybe Aurora had been besotted with him, too.

  The M4 junction suddenly loomed up on his left. Jonah realized that he had the audio switched off on the GPS and had almost missed it. He signaled left and started to pull into the inside lane. And then he slammed on the brakes and swerved as an Astra that had been behind him tore round on the inside and accelerated past.

  “Jesus,” he said, braking hard, and then, “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Lightman said, removing his hand from the dashboard, where he’d braced himself. He hadn’t looked up from the iPad.

  “Doesn’t that make you want to vomit?” Jonah asked curiously.

  Lightman glanced up at him. “What?”

  “Reading a screen in the car. I can do it for about five minutes and then I feel awful.”

  “No,” Lightman said thoughtfully. “I’ve never had that.”

  It was things like that, Jonah thought, that made people start to wonder whether Lightman was a man or a robot.

  * * *

  —

  HARFORTH SCHOOL WAS a walled-in series of gray stone buildings dating from sometime before the dawn of the twentieth century. Despite its dark-green welcome sign with its beautiful fonts, the effect was inelegant and depressing. Perhaps the weather, and perhaps the square grayness.

  They drove over a series of small but vicious speed bumps to reach the school reception. A sports pitch to the right was covered with thin, scorched-looking grass and a small cricket square.

  “God, I’m glad I never went anywhere like this,” Jonah said as they climbed the shallow steps toward a door labeled VISITORS’ ENTRANCE.

  “They look better in the sun,” Lightman said evenly.

  Jonah glanced at him. He remembered a St. Paul’s or something school on his résumé. He wondered if Lightman was actually a boarding-school lad. It wasn’t something that had occurred to him before.

  There was a glassed-in area behind a desk in the very square entrance hall. A hard-faced woman in her thirties sat behind it with a tag that read HEADMASTER’S SECRETARY in huge print. Her name was so small beneath it that Jonah couldn’t read it. Order of priority, he supposed.

  “Can I help?”

  Jonah didn’t sense a great desire to help anyone.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m DCI Jonah Sheens and this is DS Ben Lightman. I believe my DC phoned you earlier today. We need to interview Andrew Mackenzie.”

  “I’m sorry, my understanding of the outcome of that conversation was that it would have to be at the weekend,” the secretary said.

  Jonah did his best not to rise to the cold, pedantic way of speaking. “I’m afraid this is a police investigation,” he said with a smile as cold as the secretary’s. “It’s time-critical. We’ll issue an arrest warrant to speak to him if we have to, but I think that will look a lot worse for your school.”

  * * *

  —

  MACKENZIE FOUND THEM an empty classroom not far from where he’d been teaching. The private school was eerily quiet. The summer school clearly wasn’t using all of its facilities.

  Mackenzie had left his bored-looking class of American high-school students with a young woman who must have been another teacher. Mackenzie had seemed ready enough to come away.

  Jonah found himself sizing Mackenzie up as he walked. He looked the private-school part, from his pale-cream trousers and polished brown shoes to his dark-brown waistcoat and blue shirt. He was verging on stout, his forearms wide under his rolled-up sleeves. But Jonah thought there was power there.

  “So what do you need to ask me about?” he said once the door had clattered shut. Everything here seemed a little aged, Jonah thought. Once expensive and now run-down.

  Mackenzie perched on the desk, leaving Jonah and Lightman to draw up some of the slightly short chairs from the school desks. Jonah wondered whether Mackenzie’s assumption of the teacher’s position was habit or a deliberate statement of authority. The way the teacher folded his arms and took a few breaths was anything but authoritative. It was anxious. Perhaps frightened.

  “Do you mind if we record this?” Jonah asked, pulling out his portable tape recorder. “It’s a lot easier to check our facts if we have everything on tape.”

  “No, that’s fine,” Mackenzie said. “Go for it.”

  Jonah clicked it on. Introduced himself. And then launched in.

  “It’s about Aurora Jackson,” he said. “Her remains were found yesterday morning not far from where she went missing.”

  In Mackenzie, the reaction was as much in his body as his face. A downward slump of his torso, the slipping of one of his arms away from the other before he made an effort to return it.

  Jonah waited for him to speak, but Mackenzie said nothing but “Right. Aurora.” He breathed in more heavily and exhaled several times, and then turned away from them to look out the window.

  “This is clearly something of a shock,” Jonah offered. “But we need to ask you about Aurora herself, and about that evening. As much as you can recall.” He gave a shrug. “Obviously she was one of many students, so I don’t expect a detailed portrait.”

  “She was nothing like my other students,” Mackenzie said, a roughness to his voice that took Jonah aback. He fixed that flat gaze on Jonah, and for the first time he became aware of Mackenzie’s age. Of the lines and the tiredness. “She was nothing like them. And not just because she vanished, but because I thought I was looking at the next Márquez or Woolf or Faulkner. It was a god-awful waste. The worst possible waste.”

  Jonah could sense Lightman beside him, his body absolutely still. He could tell that the intensity of Mackenzie’s reaction had surprised him, too.

  “You’ve not felt that any of your other students since were a match for her?”

  Mackenzie shook his head. And then shrugged with one shoulder. “I’ve had bright sparks every other year. There have been lots I would have tipped to become successful, and most of them have. I’ve had only a few writers or essayists or journalists out of a lifetime of teaching. But none of them…I don’t know. None of them was original like she was. Or seemed to catch on to an idea as quickly. But maybe I’ve got a skewed memory of her because of what happened….”

  Lightman asked neutrally whether he’d known Aurora personally.

  Mackenzie snorted. “As much as you ever know any student personally. I was shit-scared of one of the girls misinterpreting any encouragement. I’d only had two proper girlfriends and I didn’t have a clue how to go about rebutting unwanted attention. I remember a sixth-former turning up at my classroom late on a Friday when I was marking, and I pretty much shouted her out of the place. Poor thing was probably only after some extra help, but I was paranoid about being on my own in a room with her.”

  “So there was never anything at all beyond the usual student-teacher relationship?” Lightman continued.

  “Of course there wasn’t,” he said, and sounded more disappointed in Lightman than anything. “You get excited about students. About their abilities, and where they’ll go in life, and how you can help them. You might like or dislike them as people, but you try not to let that affect you. I’ve had smart kids who I’ve thought were absolute shits before, but it didn’t mean I didn’t bend over backward to help them.”

  “Thank you,” Jonah said. “We also need to know about that night. When Aurora disappeared. We think you saw at least one of the group at the campsite. Were you aware that there were others?”

 
“I saw Topaz,” he said, nodding. “Aurora’s sister. I have to say that it never occurred to me that Aurora would be there. They didn’t really spend time together at school. Topaz was a very different person. She was smart, too, but she was obsessed with self-image. I assumed Topaz was with her usual crowd. Benners and…Jesus. I’ve…Connor, that was it. And Jojo. And Topaz’s little shadow…What was she called?”

  “Coralie? She wasn’t with her at the time?” Jonah queried.

  “No, it was just Topaz. Wandering along the riverbank. I’d joined the path there for a while and I think I scared her.”

  “What was she doing?” This from Lightman.

  Mackenzie gave him a blank look. He made a considering sound. “Well, she had a bag. She’d been walking the other way. I suppose she might have been going for a swim.”

  “You didn’t see where she’d come from?” Jonah asked.

  “No,” Mackenzie said, shaking his head and glancing between them. “Look, I…I know Topaz could be a bit of a cow to her sister, but I don’t think she had anything to do with her death. She was devastated after Aurora disappeared.”

  “That’s useful, thank you,” Jonah said. “You didn’t see anything later in the evening?”

  Mackenzie shook his head. “I was somewhere between two and three miles further on by the time I camped.”

  “With your girlfriend?” Jonah asked. “Is that right?”

  “Yes. Ex-girlfriend,” he added. “I mean, obviously, it was thirty years ago…I’m married, and not to her.”

  “What time did you meet up with your girlfriend?” Jonah asked.

  “Ahhh…To be honest, I can’t remember. I probably gave a statement at the time.” He rubbed a thumb across his forehead, his skin puckered in a frown.