She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  Still racked by shaking, she stood with her arms folded and tried to see which way to go. She tried to remember.

  She’d set her sleeping bag up with her head away from them all. She’d done that on purpose. So she needed to walk toward her feet to find them again.

  She took small, hesitant steps. She couldn’t see what her feet were doing. Why had they let the fire go out?

  Between the trunks, she eventually started to see a deep red light. Low-down, like footlights.

  She emerged into the clearing to find it empty, the fire nothing but pale-white ash and orange-red embers. There were no sobbing people. No music. No conversation. Nothing but the susurrating wind between ash leaves, punctuations to a profound quiet.

  And she was cold still. Really cold.

  Aurora approached the fire and ducked down next to it. She tried blowing on it to stir it, and then hunted around for more firewood. She found a bundle of sticks tied not far from the remaining beer cans.

  She decided to open a can. She drank three mouthfuls of it, but felt no less parched than before.

  The shaking was still running through her as she put it aside. Her fingers were heavy and useless on the string that tied the firewood. They slipped three times. Four. And she lost patience. She yanked at a long, thick branch until it came free. And then she did the same again and again until she had six of them ready to be fed to the orange embers.

  If the shivering hadn’t been so bad, she might have left the fire as it was. Left its luminous whiteness untouched so that she could watch it. It was beautiful.

  But she felt cold to her center. She threw the wood onto it jerkily. The last piece she snatched back, remembering that she would need to stir the flames up, too.

  She was leaning over it, using the long stick to turn it all over, when there was a sound. A crunching sound like a footstep on the dry ground.

  She looked behind her sharply, her heart a wild thing in her chest.

  She scanned the trees frantically, her vision overlaid by bright-blue blotches where the fire had left its mark. She couldn’t make anything out. She wondered if it had been her imagination, until she caught movement. There was somebody there.

  27

  Jonah didn’t approach the teacher as someone to be broken down. Mackenzie looked broken already, and he responded to pressure with despair, rather than anger or panic.

  His young, rather cold solicitor arrived shortly after Mackenzie. Jonah found him difficult, largely because his polished glasses reflected light every time he turned his head, and he did it a lot. The glare put him on edge from the start.

  He’d decided to bring up Becky Morris’s comments straight off, under the reasoning that Mackenzie wasn’t going to be lulled into any kind of security in the shell-shocked state he was in.

  “One of Aurora’s friends has suggested that Aurora told you she was going camping that night, and where,” he said. “She’s told us that Aurora actually told the whole of her class, but that it was clearly directed at you.”

  Mackenzie looked bewildered. “I don’t remember that at all,” he said. “Not at all. And Diana and I had arranged that trip weeks before.”

  “But you hadn’t established what the route was, had you?”

  “We…I think we had.” He glanced between Hanson and Jonah. “Did Diana say we hadn’t? I don’t…I don’t think I would have left it till the last minute. It was complicated. We had to meet up somewhere, and make sure she was walking as far as she wanted, and I was walking much farther.” He shook his head. “I’m sure I would have planned.”

  “You can’t confirm that?”

  “My client has already told you as much as he can remember,” the solicitor interjected.

  “Well, then,” Jonah said with a slight smile at Mackenzie. “Take me through your relationship with Aurora.” He took a more settled pose in his chair. He was signaling that he was here to stay.

  “I was her teacher,” Mackenzie said, a little hopelessly. “I told you yesterday how much I admired her intelligence.”

  “How do you think she regarded you?”

  Mackenzie gave a small, awkward shrug. “She probably liked that I liked her work. And she was lonely. I think…I think I was one of the few people who would talk literature with her.”

  “What kind of literature?”

  “A lot of classics, and the modern American greats,” he said immediately.

  “You seem to remember very clearly….”

  “Because that was what mattered to me,” Mackenzie said, leaning forward and spitting slightly with the earnestness of his speech. “I was her teacher, and I loved to teach. I still love it.”

  His momentary energy seemed to leave him, and he slid back into his chair again.

  “You do have some history of blurred boundaries with a pupil,” Jonah said, after a moment. “There was a complaint made against you by a concerned parent later in your career. You began a relationship with a pupil, who later became your wife.”

  “She wasn’t my pupil,” Mackenzie said immediately. “Nothing happened until after she’d left. And I promise you, I didn’t even think about it until I bumped into her in a pub that October. There was nothing wrong with any of it, and that particular parent reported it in reaction to her son being suspended.”

  “So she was, what?” Jonah asked. “Eighteen when you met again? Nineteen?”

  “Eighteen. Nineteen shortly afterward.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  Jonah nodded slowly. “And when you bumped into her, you were immediately interested?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” Mackenzie replied. “I was happy to hear what she was doing. Pri was out with uni friends, and I’d always expected her to do well. She’d gone to Oxford, and that was where I saw her. We talked about work, and what she was and wasn’t enjoying. And eventually arranged to meet up on another occasion.”

  “And you hadn’t had a sense of interest from her before?” Jonah asked. “You hadn’t felt that she’d been infatuated with you as a pupil?”

  Mackenzie’s mouth opened, and then he hesitated. His expression was more than pained. Jonah could hear Hanson shifting next to him in the pause.

  “Maybe,” Mackenzie said. “I was a young male teacher at a school. I was probably idolized more than I should have been.”

  “Do you think that was the case for Aurora, too?”

  Mackenzie’s mouth twisted. “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Probably?”

  Mackenzie brought a finger down to jab at the table. “You don’t understand what it’s like. You’re the only young man most of them know, at a time when romance is everything. The first year I taught, I got eight Valentine’s roses. I mean, for fuck’s sake. They were surrounded by thoughtless boys, and I was a fraction older and not a total moron emotionally. Add in that they were supposed to focus on me for an hour at a time, and of course they all thought they were in love with me.”

  Jonah glanced at Hanson, who was looking very thoughtful. “Do you think Aurora’s sister shared that interest in you?” she asked.

  Mackenzie gave a wry grin. “Topaz was a very different sort of girl. She just wanted to make me interested in her. She wanted everyone, man, boy—even her little shadow, Coralie—to want her.”

  Hanson was frowning. “You think her relationship with Coralie was more than friendship?”

  “Not in any real sense,” Mackenzie replied. “I don’t think they were ever an item or anything. But I’m positive that Coralie’s interest in Topaz was sexual. The staff were all fairly certain she was bisexual.”

  Jonah thought that decidedly interesting. If Coralie had wanted Topaz for herself, it would have been ample reason for her to hate Connor. Enough, perhaps, to point the finger at him to the police.

  “So wh
en you saw Topaz that night, at the river,” Jonah said, moving the conversation on, “nothing went on between you?”

  Mackenzie snorted. “Of course not. I may have been young, but even at that age I knew girls like that were pure trouble.”

  “It wasn’t a planned meeting?”

  “No!” Mackenzie said. “Like I said, I had no idea they’d be there, and I wasn’t all that pleased about it.”

  “You didn’t meet her to purchase drugs?”

  Mackenzie looked genuinely stumped. There was a brief pause. “Why would I be doing that? I don’t use, and Topaz wasn’t a drug dealer.” There was another pause, and Mackenzie said with what looked like genuine curiosity, “Was she?”

  “Well, let’s put it another way,” Jonah said. “Topaz saw you at the riverbank, and never breathed a word to any of her friends, even when they went over the events of that night over and over among themselves. Which tells me there was something not quite right about that meeting. Don’t you think?”

  The teacher looked at him and gave a very slight half laugh. Not, Jonah thought, out of amusement, but out of a sense of absurdity.

  “It’s not…” Mackenzie shook his head. “There was nothing odd about it, and no planning.”

  “So she didn’t show you any places of interest while you were there?”

  “What places of interest? It was a campsite.”

  Mackenzie looked genuinely mystified, and Jonah decided to leave it there for now, largely to give himself time to think.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH DIDN’T LIKE O’Malley’s expression. The sergeant started to stride toward him as soon as Jonah entered the floor of CID, his phone in his hand. He had the aura of a messenger with bad tidings.

  “The shit has hit the Twitter fan,” O’Malley announced, and Jonah took the iPhone off him with a feeling of immediate stress.

  It was the BBC News Twitter account. BREAKING: AURORA JACKSON’S TEACHER BROUGHT IN FOR QUESTIONING. The image link took him to an across-the-street but sharp photo of Andrew Mackenzie being escorted into the station.

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s what I said,” O’Malley answered.

  “That’s a press photo,” he said.

  “Not guilty, sir. But I’m happy to go and ask the constable who came to pick him up if he’s been a colossal prick and would like to explain himself.”

  “Do that,” Jonah said with depression rather than anger. Publicity like this meant pressure, and he was profoundly uncertain about Mackenzie. He was willing neither to charge him nor to release him at this point. He’d warned the teacher to expect an overnight stay. He had forty-eight hours to keep him for questioning before he had to charge him or let him go, and it looked like he would need to make full use of the time.

  He braced himself for a conversation with the chief super. Wilkinson was probably going to be pissed off about this.

  * * *

  —

  WILKINSON HAD ALREADY heard about the social-media storm. He was clearly displeased, but didn’t believe any of Jonah’s team to be responsible. Jonah was relieved, as it would have been easy for Hanson to take the flak as the new, unknown one.

  “On the plus side, switchboard says we’ve had one girl call in and tell us that she thinks Mackenzie sexually assaulted her,” Wilkinson went on. “And another girl’s mother has accused him on her behalf. The benefits of social media,” he added dryly.

  “Right. We’ll look into their statements,” Jonah replied.

  “Do. And keep doing it all properly. More resources on Mackenzie, if anything.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jonah left Wilkinson’s office, and approached his team thoughtfully. All three of them were sitting at their desks, and looked up at him expectantly.

  “We’re under a little media attention now,” he said, “as you’ll have seen. That, and the fact that we have only forty-eight hours to question him without charge, means keeping the focus on Mackenzie, even when there’s still good reason to look at Connor fairly hard. Ben, I’d like you to arrange for him to be housed overnight, and then get in touch with his wife and arrange an interview. Ring up all his former schools again, as well. Push and see if they’ve been covering their backs.”

  “Sure.”

  “I had a thought on the whole Topaz-selling-Mackenzie-drugs thing, you know,” O’Malley said. “In my look into the Dexedrine being sold, one of the guys mentioned a brunette who he’d never seen before who sold a small amount. My guess is, she’d lifted some Dexedrine from the stash and that’s why she didn’t want to admit to her friends that she’d seen Mackenzie.”

  Jonah processed that. “So she was the brunette,” he said.

  “She was the brunette,” O’Malley agreed.

  “That’s a bloody good thought. Give her a call and see if you can talk her into admitting it.”

  O’Malley grinned. “Sure. Pretty sure I’ll find a way.”

  “What about me, sir?” Hanson asked.

  “In the short term, I want you to call the Jacksons and update them about the as-yet-unnamed schoolteacher. Explain that there were reasons for bringing him in for questioning, but as yet we’re not at a stage to be certain of anything, we haven’t arrested him, et cetera, et cetera. I’m sure you know the score.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Once you’re done, let’s get you looking at Connor again.”

  “Yes, sir.” And then there was a brief pause before Hanson asked, “Will you want me to interview Mackenzie again with you tomorrow?”

  “It’ll probably depend on what Ben finds out,” Jonah replied as Lightman rose, presumably to organize Mackenzie’s accommodation. Jonah glanced at Hanson’s slightly troubled expression. “Did you feel there was more we should have asked him?”

  “I just think he’s the most likely candidate. He was there, nearby, knew she was there, and clearly has a predilection for young girls, or he wouldn’t have hooked up with an eighteen-year-old.”

  Jonah took a half seat against the edge of the desk opposite hers. “It’s hard to say that definitively, though,” he said slowly. “I could tell you several different stories about that. One is about a twenty-six-year-old teacher who is aware that many of his sixth-formers like him, but who likes one girl in return. He does nothing about it, because he knows he can’t. Later, they meet at the pub, by chance, and he realizes that they both feel the same. That it’s possible now. And having always known that they were right for each other, life proves that to be true. They marry, and have children.”

  “OK,” Hanson said.

  “And then there’s another twenty-six-year-old teacher, who really shouldn’t like his pupil but is a little weak about it. They flirt, though he knows it’s wrong. Maybe they even kiss once, while alone, though she promises to say that nothing happened, and she’s not allowed to say that they’re together until months later.”

  “Hmm. OK.”

  “And then…then, there’s a teacher who has convinced a series of young girls that they love him, and that he loves them. He has groomed all of them, and persuaded them to be silent. Because he’s picked his victims well, it’s worked. And then one of them grows up and is still interested in him, and he thinks he may as well marry her. Because who would suspect a man happily married to a beautiful young wife?”

  There was a brief silence, and Hanson nodded.

  “So we need to find out which is the true representation, don’t we?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Hanson agreed.

  “But bear in mind that one person is really a lot of different people. Back then, Mackenzie might have been both the man who wanted a family and a good career in teaching, and the lustful twentysomething who couldn’t quite resist getting together with a student. It would depend on the situation, and the difficulty is working out which v
ersion of Mackenzie was there that night. Which version of all of them,” he went on. “Was the Connor Dooley who was there the self-contained academic, or the angry teenager who regularly got into fights and was taking abuse from his dad? Was Brett Parker the conscientious athlete, or the libidinous jock who had previously hooked up with young girls?”

  Hanson put a hand up to fiddle with her lip as she thought. “Any of them could have been anyone, in some ways,” she said. “But I don’t see how we can find out what happened if we don’t push them.”

  “Maybe so,” Jonah said. “But there’s a right time for that. OK. I’d better go get my bike and then do the dutiful-son thing. Don’t stay too late or you’ll make me feel bad.”

  28

  Connor

  Saturday, July 23, 1983, 5:20 A.M.

  He could feel the hangover before he fully woke up. It was a full-on head crusher. He felt like he might vomit if he moved, and his body was on fire.

  He lay there for a while, feeling like he was really dying this time, but the need to urinate grew too strong to ignore. He opened his eyes and turned his head away from the light.

  It was early, probably not long past dawn. Jojo was lying next to him. She was on her side with one strong arm stretched out above her, the other bent so that her wrist covered her face.

  He had a momentary worry that something had happened between them. He had cried, he thought. And she had comforted him. He had ranted and raged to her about Topaz.

  It made him feel wretched. Humiliation fought with nausea. He tried not to think about it. He just needed to pee, and to drink something that wasn’t beer.

  He watched the ground as he walked clumsily in the opposite direction from the campfire. He stepped carefully over an empty sleeping bag when it appeared in his vision. One of the others had to be up, then.