She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  Lightman, at least, might think it was exciting.

  “Thanks,” he said, “send away.”

  * * *

  —

  JONAH REALIZED IT was almost time to brief his team, and he’d done very little to work out what they were focusing on. He tried to snap himself out of his unsettled daze by pulling his notes out. He’d been reading for only a couple of minutes when O’Malley knocked on the door.

  “Matt Stavely has just called,” he said. “He wants to know if he can come in and talk to us further. He says he’s got more to say.”

  “Interesting,” Jonah said. “And the answer is definitely yes.”

  “OK. I’ll see when he can make it.” O’Malley returned a minute later. “He says he has a Jobseekers meeting, but he could come in at three.”

  “OK,” Jonah said. “That’s fine. Let’s do our briefing.”

  O’Malley nodded, and called to the other two.

  Lightman picked up his notes and rose, but Hanson didn’t react at first. She had a five-mile stare that was focused somewhere on the desk next to hers. She looked about as zoned as he felt.

  “All OK?” he asked, taking a few steps toward her.

  She gave him a startled look. “Yes. Sorry. Just…processing.” She picked up her coffee mug and iPad and followed him inside.

  “So, a quick sitrep,” he said as Hanson closed the door behind them. “We have Andrew Mackenzie in custody for questioning until tomorrow at latest. I’d like to talk to his wife at the earliest possible, and then will probably want to interview him again. Ben, can you call her and book her in?”

  “Sure,” the sergeant replied, making a note.

  “In terms of where we’re at, we know that Aurora was raped, and that she had a crush on Mackenzie. Mackenzie knew she was going camping. So we’re pretty interested in him, but we’ve also had some developments with Jojo Magos. A fire on her property, which seems to be the exact duplicate of one that happened eight years ago. It’s unclear, as yet, whether someone else set the fire or whether Jojo did it herself for some reason, but I’m making talking to her a priority. She may not have raped Aurora, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t help someone else to.”

  He could see O’Malley nodding, while Hanson was simply watching him thoughtfully.

  “And, related to that fire, I’d like you all to be careful when out of the station. It looks like someone is angry, and willing to act,” he said. “Sorry for the slightly cryptic text messages last night, but I don’t want any of you putting yourselves in danger if someone’s feeling threatened. All right?”

  The three of them nodded, and he told them to carry on with the case and then went to grab his coffee mug, which still held his last half-drunk cup. Hanson was in the small kitchen already when he arrived, pouring herself a hefty slug from the pot.

  “Did you sleep badly, too?” he asked, emptying his mug down the sink. “There are a lot of unpleasant things to think about. After, what? Twenty-eight years as a detective, I still end up going over and over things when I should be sleeping.”

  Hanson gave him a vague smile, and took a large gulp out of the cup. “You must have seen worse things.”

  “Yes,” Jonah said, nodding. He finished up the pot, ignoring the printed sign that told him to make a new pot if he’d had the last bit, and put it back empty on the hotplate. Nobody ever refilled it unless they were after a cup. “But I’d seen Aurora in the flesh. That definitely makes it harder.”

  There was a brief silence, and when he looked up at her Hanson was giving him a very searching look.

  “Do you remember the last time you spoke to her?” she asked.

  “Aurora?” he asked. He gave her a small half smile. “I never spoke to her. I’d just seen her around at school. She was a lot younger.”

  He could feel his heart somewhere in his throat. It was the first time he’d ever had to lie to one of his team. He felt like the lie was all over him, and he turned away from Hanson and went back to his office with the back of his neck tingling. He could feel her watching him the whole way.

  * * *

  —

  BACK AT HIS desk, he pulled out the reports on the blaze at Jojo’s house eight years before, and tried to concentrate on them, even while his mind was full of dim lighting and the spin of a disco ball glinting off blond hair.

  None of that mattered right now. He told himself harshly. The only thing that mattered was finding Aurora’s killer.

  So, Aleksy, he thought. There was something wrong about Aleksy, and that fire.

  When he had asked Jojo for Aleksy’s phone, it had been about due care. But there was now a much stronger reason to look at her former partner’s death. Aleksy had died—what? A mere week and a half after the first blaze?

  That apparent coincidence meant that he needed to start thinking about Aleksy’s death as a possible murder. It was quite possible that someone had been warning Jojo and Aleksy off by setting a fire and trashing Jojo’s garden the first time, and that Aleksy hadn’t taken the hint.

  If it had indeed been murder, it had been a much more recent murder than Aurora’s. Which was a plus. Where investigating Aurora’s death was plagued by problems of data loss, poor memory, and incomplete initial investigations, this one looked a great deal easier to get to grips with. They now had Aleksy’s phone, for one thing, which was by far the best way to recover messages and call data. Standard phone checks only gave the traffic to and from a number, and not the actual message contents.

  Working on a murder from eight years ago also meant fresher memories that hadn’t been rewritten over time by repeated interviewing. And there was the added advantage that it was an unexpected line of inquiry. If Aleksy had found something out and died for it, then Jonah could potentially follow the trail left by one murder to solve another.

  He mentally ran over everything he could remember the group saying about Aleksy. There hadn’t been a great deal. He felt that there were a lot of questions to ask them on that score.

  He turned to his desktop PC and searched the database for Aleksy Nowak’s name. There was a single entry: a coroner’s report. It wasn’t long.

  The county coroner had concluded that Aleksy had died falling from a climb. He had not landed directly on his head, but on his back. The damage to his spine and the secondary impact on his skull indicated that he had fallen at a speed of between forty and fifty-five feet per second, which meant a fall of at least thirty feet. Death had been instantaneous. The coroner noted that a landing mat was usual when climbing without ropes, but that the deceased had not been in the habit of using one, and that from that height serious injury would have been likely regardless.

  The report went on to describe how Aleksy had been found, which had not happened until the following day. Jojo had alerted the police late on July 14, when Aleksy had failed to return home. She had explained that he had been climbing, and tried to suggest where that might have been, though the choices were fairly wide as Aleksy had been willing to travel all day for a few hours on the rock.

  It had therefore been a climber who initially found Aleksy at the heath in East Sussex. She had alerted the police. The climber had made a statement about finding him at the foot of a climb called Mechanical Vert.

  Jonah googled Mechanical Vert, and found a climbing site that gave details. It was a pinchy 6a, the guide explained. One that involved using fingers and toes a lot.

  The guide went on to detail the various moves. It assumed that it would be climbed roped, he noted. It was thirty-five feet, above rocky ground. The site described numerous challenging moves early on, but said there were no challenges after the twenty-foot mark. It advised climbers to push on through to the easier moves toward the top.

  He spent a while looking up more about Aleksy after that. There were dozens of YouTube videos of him on impossibly high climbs, with the
kind of drops that made Jonah feel like he was about to fall himself. He had been an extraordinary climber, it became clear, in quote after quote and film after film. He skipped through them, and confirmed Aleksy’s skill to himself.

  And yet, Jonah thought, he had fallen from a comparatively easy climb, once he’d got past all the challenging moves. He was more and more convinced that there had been foul play.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON FELT BADLY in need of something certain. Her personal life, with Damian’s messages, felt like an unmitigated disaster and a source of profound anxiety. And now her work life had become a huge worry, because she was certain that her boss had lied to her.

  What was the protocol for this? And what was it she suspected him of? Vested interest? Some kind of former interest in Jojo? Or in Aurora…?

  Which was ridiculous. She obviously didn’t think he was the killer, when there had been six teenagers and one of Aurora’s teachers there on the night. But he was lying to her, and she assumed to all of the team. He was pretending that he hadn’t known any of those kids well.

  She sat staring at her screen with nothing but nervous dread in her stomach.

  And then Chrome flashed up an alert about a Facebook message, and she saw that it was from Zofia Wier. All she could see on the brief alert was the beginning of the message:

  Hello, yes. I was Aurora’s friend. I would

  Almost automatically, she clicked on the alert, and waited while Chrome loaded a tab with the Facebook Messenger app on it. She hadn’t looked at her messages in a while. There were several unread ones, which she ignored in order to click on Zofia’s. The full message read:

  Hello, yes. I was Aurora’s friend. I would be happy to talking, but I did not see her for time before she died. The last time was a party. The next day, my mother took me away from the school and I was sent to Poland to my grandparents.

  Hanson started typing a reply, hoping that she was making sense but partly not quite caring.

  Hi Zofia. Thank you so much for contacting us. We have some other questions about Aurora that you might be able to help with, as well as the party. Would you be happy to have a phone call with me and DCI Sheens, who is in charge of the investigation?

  She saw a tick and a “Seen” pop up next to her message. Zofia was online.

  An icon appeared to show that Zofia was typing, and then vanished. She was presumably considering her response.

  The typing started again, and then her message appeared.

  I can but is that the police officer Jonah Sheens?

  Hanson felt a strange little twist in her stomach.

  Yes, it is. Do you know him? she typed back.

  Another pause, and another typing symbol.

  Yes but you can ask him about the party. He was there, too.

  Hanson spent a good minute looking at that message before she managed to type a light reply saying that she would set up a call if Zofia gave her a phone number or Skype ID. And then she stood a little unsteadily and walked toward the DCI’s office.

  34

  Hanson’s tap on the door was so quiet that he barely heard it. He nodded her in, feeling unaccountably nervous.

  She closed the door behind her, and then said in a tight voice, “I’m worried about a few things. You told me that you didn’t know Aurora. But one of Aurora’s close friends knows you. Beyond that, she says that you were at a party with both of them the week before Aurora went missing.”

  Jonah felt more panicked than he could remember feeling. It wasn’t just that he felt like his career was about to drop down a precipice and never recover. He also felt shame in front of his newest recruit. The idea of telling her everything made him want to run a mile.

  But he was beginning to notice that Hanson didn’t let things go. In the end he said, “I was,” wondering how he could push her interest aside. How he could distract her.

  “And you didn’t talk to Aurora at all there? Even though her close friend seems to think you know all about what happened to Aurora that night?”

  “It’s not about Aurora,” he said, and then he felt as though he’d reached a tipping point. There was only one thing he could do. “Come and sit,” he said hoarsely.

  He saw Hanson hesitate and then draw up the chair on the far side of the desk.

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t find Zofia, because of that party. It…I didn’t want to talk about it. It had gone wrong before I even got there.” His throat was dry, and he had to swallow before he could continue. “My family were…my dad was a traveler, and my mum married into the community. She was totally besotted with him, like a lot of people who fall for narcissists. She was pregnant by the time she started to see him for what he was: an abusive, manipulative bully who couldn’t stand anyone going against his control.”

  He found himself telling her everything, even the really humiliating parts of it. He told her about the erosion of his self-esteem along with hers, and the way Jonah had been used as a tool to hurt his mother.

  He told her how his mother had finally seen what was happening to her son, and had walked away. How over the next twelve years, his father had tried repeatedly to force her to come back. Tommy Sheens had made the fifty-mile trip to their home in Lyndhurst on numerous occasions, and when his mother had stopped opening the door to him, he’d started targeting his son.

  “He was furious with me that day,” Jonah told her. “He’d found out I’d become a copper. It had taken him pretty much a year to catch on, and he was incensed. There was no group he hated and feared as much as the police.”

  He could see Hanson growing impatient, and he skipped onward to how Tommy Sheens had turned up with an old friend of Jonah’s named Duke, and tried to force him into the car. How Jonah had ended up fighting both of them. He’d knocked Duke out, and kept walking to the party.

  He could see Hanson’s expression. She was unimpressed. And he almost found himself laughing, thinking that she hadn’t heard anything yet.

  “It only hit me that I’d done a really stupid thing when I got to Martin’s. I was covered in blood, my eye was swollen, and there was every chance that my dad would report me. Which would probably have been the end of my career in the police. So I did what a lot of people would have done and got blind drunk.”

  “And Aurora was at this party,” Hanson said flatly. “So, let me guess. You were drunk, and something you regret happened.”

  “Maybe,” Jonah said. “But not with Aurora.”

  He’d wandered over to talk to Aurora at what must have been nine or ten P.M., once the punch and the whiskey had gone down. She’d been standing awkwardly at the edge of the room, alone.

  “She was surprised I remembered her,” he said with a slight smile. He didn’t need to tell Hanson more, but he did. “And I said she was clever and funny. And really beautiful. Which I then decided was an asshole thing to say.”

  “Yes,” Hanson said coldly. “It was. To a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  “And then her friend Zofia returned from getting drinks,” Jonah pressed on, ignoring that dig. “I’d never met her before. She looked sixteen but explained she’d joined Aurora’s year after Christmas. Zofia saw the blood on me, and the swollen eye and lip, and she started clucking over me. She went to get me ice, and then got me to sit on the sofa with her and stroked my head while she put the ice on my eye. And it was such a nice thing, being looked after like that.”

  He stopped short of telling her more. About his mother, and how he’d turned into the one looking after her instead of the other way round. About the absence of touch and care in his life. It would have sounded like an excuse. Though maybe it was just that.

  “You slept with her?” Hanson asked.

  “In God’s honest truth, I don’t know,” he said, and found his mouth suddenly absolutely dry. He reached out for the dregs of his coffee, and drank the
remainder, even though it was utterly cold. “Someone got the tequila out, and a whole load of us started doing shots. I didn’t know half of them, but we were cheering each other on anyway. And then Zofia suddenly said she felt sick, and rushed outside. So I went to look after her, and then I found Aurora and asked how she was getting home.”

  “How Aurora was getting home?”

  “Zofia,” he corrected. “Aurora was really upset about it. She said Zofia was supposed to stay with her, but she couldn’t let her parents see her being sick as they’d be bound to tell her mum. So I said I’d sort it, and I talked Martin into letting her sleep in his absent parents’ room.”

  Jonah paused, his mouth dry again. There was no coffee left to help him through it. “I remember taking her upstairs, and sitting on the edge of the bed with her, and feeling like shit when the tequila suddenly hit hard. I think I lay down. And that’s all I have. There’s a vast gap between that point and finding myself halfway home at midnight, without my jacket and with blood still all over me. By Monday, Zofia had been removed from school and sent back to Poland. I tried to get hold of her through Topaz, and found out that the chance was gone. And then Aurora, who might have found out the truth for me, vanished, and there’s never been an answer for me.”

  There was total silence after he’d finished speaking. Hanson’s gaze burned into him, and he lowered his eyes to his hands, which were shaking badly.

  “Jesus,” Hanson said. “Do you have any idea how many men have tried to use that excuse? The ‘I don’t remember’ trope? And this is all aside from the stuff with Jojo. I assume you were at her house late last night because you were sleeping with her? With a suspect?”