She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  “What about the week before she went missing?” he went on. “You can’t think of anything between them then?”

  “No,” Becky said hesitantly. “No, but I was angry with him in a weird way. She only agreed to go camping because she thought it’d impress him. It was the kind of thing he always talked about doing. Big long walks, and camping in the wild…It wasn’t Aurora’s thing at all. She liked her room and her books.”

  Jonah felt a flicker of unease. “Did she tell him she was going?”

  There was another brief pause. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I remember she was terrified of the summer vacation coming up and not seeing him for six weeks. And she was a bit obvious about stuff like that…Yeah, I think she said it in front of the whole class, actually.”

  Jonah was very aware of his heartbeat as he wound down the conversation, and thanked Becky for her help. She apologized for not having more to tell him. As far as Jonah was concerned, she’d told him plenty.

  * * *

  —

  HE FOUND ALL three of his team at their desks when he returned. O’Malley looked up, and immediately said, “Ooh, look who’s got something to say….”

  Jonah couldn’t help grinning, in spite of the slightly sick feeling that had been with him all day.

  “We’re bringing Mackenzie in,” he said.

  “Come on, Chief. Dish the dirt,” O’Malley said, swinging his chair round and stretching his legs out. Hanson’s gaze was locked on him, too. “You look like you’re about to burst.”

  “Aurora’s closest friend has been telling me that Aurora had a crush on her English teacher,” he said. “She says Aurora’s decision to go camping was about impressing him, and she’s fairly certain that Aurora told him and her whole English class that they were going.”

  Hanson’s expression turned into a half smile. “So he knew she was there.”

  “That’s interesting,” Lightman said as neutrally as ever. “Taken alongside the relationship he had with a former pupil.”

  “Oh, well there’s more on that,” O’Malley said. “It turns out that the pupil and he are now married. They’ve got three kids. So her name is Pria Mackenzie these days.”

  Jonah wasn’t immediately sure what to make of that.

  “Wow, OK. She might be someone to talk to later. But for now, we bring Mackenzie in. Mackenzie, and Topaz, who I’m sure will have more to say about him.”

  * * *

  —

  TOPAZ ARRIVED QUICKLY, having been in town shopping. Once Jonah was in the room, she didn’t wait for any questions. She attacked first. “Have you started looking at Mr. Mackenzie yet?”

  “I can’t give any details, but yes,” Jonah replied. “It’s one of our main lines of inquiry.”

  “Along with me, I take it?” she asked.

  “Along with all six of you who were there when she vanished,” Jonah replied. “You’re all in a position to give us information about what happened. I’d like you to help us as much as you can.”

  “I’m already doing that,” she said.

  “Your help with Aurora’s friends is appreciated,” he said, nodding. “But we have more questions. About Mackenzie, first of all.”

  “Fire away,” she said, lifting her chin.

  “When you met him on the riverbank, you were close to the stash, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. I told you.”

  “But you didn’t tell any of your friends,” he said. “Which seems strange when you spent some while going over everything with them.”

  There was a slight hint of a blush to Topaz’s cheeks, but she merely shrugged.

  “Had you arranged to meet him?”

  “No!” she said sharply. “Of course I hadn’t. I had no clue he’d be there, and I had no interest in him.”

  “You weren’t selling him drugs?”

  “What? Don’t be stupid,” Topaz said, but the blush grew across her cheeks. He was either right, or very close to it.

  “You know that we aren’t interested in any drug-selling,” Jonah said gently. “Just in Aurora.”

  “I know, and I wasn’t doing that.” She shook her head, sharply. “Me being there was a coincidence. The important thing is that he was there, and after he walked on he could have seen the stash.”

  “All right,” Jonah said, making a mental note to press Mackenzie on this subject, too.

  “What sort of a sick fucker would rape her?” Topaz asked suddenly. “She was just a kid.”

  “Do you mind me asking if you were sexually active at that age?” Jonah asked.

  Topaz lifted her head with eyes that were shining and angry. “That was different! I was a different person. I knew what I was doing. I understood, and I…I wasn’t a child like her.”

  “But someone found her sexually attractive,” Jonah pressed. “You wanted us to look at Andrew Mackenzie, but I think it’s your husband that you’re not quite sure about, isn’t it? Did he tell you we’d questioned him about Aurora?”

  She folded her arms in what he took as a defensive pose, but then she took a deep breath, and said, “Yes, he did. He explained to you about trying to kiss her. But it was pure jealousy. I know it was. He wanted to prove to me that other people could like him, too. But she told him no, and left.”

  “Did he try…to force her to?”

  “I don’t think so,” Topaz said. “I mean…I think he was a bit pissed off that she made him look bad, but that’s all.”

  “And he didn’t try to follow her?”

  “Not as far as I saw,” Topaz said quietly. “I left with Brett. By that point, he was pretty into the whole thing and it was exciting. He was the one everyone wanted, so I guess…I guess I just went with it.” She gave a sudden, exasperated sigh. “Why does the focus have to be on the teenagers, instead of on her teacher?”

  “We will be questioning him,” Jonah reassured her. “I know that you feel strongly about him.”

  “You would, too, if you’d seen the way he looked at her,” she said with a twist to her mouth. “She only had to open her mouth, and he was already smiling and telling her how wonderful she was. It was all wrong. It was always all wrong.”

  * * *

  —

  JONAH SPENT A few moments syncing up with Lightman and Hanson, edgy with tiredness and the feeling of his thoughts being overloaded. He needed them to keep him on task, and make sure that nothing got forgotten.

  What he wasn’t so much in need of was Hanson’s cheerful “I’ve found Zofia Wierzbowski. She’s on Facebook, and calls herself Zofia Wier. I’m sure it’s her. She has Southampton College listed on her education.”

  “Right,” Jonah said, trying not to show a reaction. “Is she local?”

  “No, she’s in Wroclaw, or however the hell you say it. But I’ve sent her a message, and if I don’t get a reply, I’ll see if I can find a phone number.”

  “Great,” he said, feeling anything but. “Anything else for me?”

  “Not yet,” Lightman said, and Hanson shook her head.

  “I might need you in the interview room shortly, Hanson.”

  He headed back to his office and then diverted to make himself more coffee. He’d had too much already, but he was hoping it would somehow break through the boiling fog in his head.

  * * *

  —

  MACKENZIE’S EX-GIRLFRIEND ARRIVED before Mackenzie did. Jonah watched her being escorted past his doorway. Soft cardigan. Baggy tunic top. Round figure. Short, slightly wavy gray-brown hair. And when she turned to Hanson, who was ushering her in, a warm smile. An aura of overwhelming motherliness.

  An inevitable feeling of guilt toward his own mother, who had never been anything like that, surfaced. It was compounded by the guilt of not having seen her the night before, and not having managed to reach her yet today. He’d have to tr
y again. He picked up a board marker and scrawled “Mum” on the notepad on his desk, before walking after Hanson and the ex-girlfriend.

  He realized on the way that he’d forgotten her name somewhere along the line. He thought about asking Hanson when she paused outside the door with a questioning look, but he was pretty sure that the woman was going to hear through the open door.

  “Sit in on this one,” he said to the constable, and they went in.

  Jonah thanked the woman for coming, and spent a short while writing a date and time on his notebook, but by the time he’d finished, her name still wasn’t there.

  He wrote another note and leaned it toward Hanson.

  Can’t remember her name. Kick things off, please?

  Hanson shook her head slightly, a small smile on her mouth. “We’d like to record this interview, if that’s OK, Diana?”

  “Of course,” she said, that warm smile in place once again and her eyes creasing up behind her thick glasses.

  Hanson held her hand out toward the tape recorder hesitantly, and Jonah waved a hand. “Be my guest.”

  “This is DC Hanson and DCI Jonah Sheens, interviewing Diana Pitman.”

  Jonah wrote the name down, and then sat back to listen while Hanson started in with a few questions.

  Diana talked easily, and was happy to take them through the night of Aurora’s disappearance. What she told them synced up with what Mackenzie had said—they had camped together and slept from before midnight until seven A.M.

  Satisfied for the present, Jonah asked her to explain the history of her relationship with Andrew Mackenzie—a month and a half before that night—and then, from there, to expand on what had happened between them afterward.

  It was in the gradual breakup of their relationship that Jonah found the greatest interest.

  “It basically started going wrong after that night,” she said. “His student had gone missing. I understood that. We found out together when we got back to his house on the Sunday evening. We put the TV on to watch something. I’m not even sure what now. Probably a drama. He did like his dramas. And before it started, the news came on….I don’t think he was ever really my boyfriend after that.”

  “How so?”

  She took a breath, and swallowed. “Sorry. This is ridiculous. I’m a happily married woman and it’s thirty years ago, but talking about it is still…I suppose that’s wounded pride, for you, isn’t it?” She gave a small, slightly bright-eyed smile. “Lasts a lifetime. I still remember how…We were sitting there, half on top of each other on the sofa, both of us tired and a bit hungover. And then he was bolt upright and flinging me off. He was just staring at the TV. And he wouldn’t tell me what it was, so I had to work it out from the report she was a pupil at his school.”

  “He seemed upset?” Hanson asked.

  “More than upset,” she said. “He was shaking. And then he rang the headmaster at home, and wanted to know what the school knew, what they were doing. He ended up by asking what he should do, and I don’t think he got a very clear answer. I asked what the headmaster had said once he’d hung up and he just stared into space. He didn’t seem to hear me at all. And then he suddenly started walking out of the house.”

  Jonah waited a moment for more, but she seemed to have reached a sticking point.

  “He left the house?”

  “Yes.” She seemed to find some momentum again. “He didn’t explain…until I followed him out to the car. It was like talking to someone on drugs. I asked him three times where he was going and eventually he seemed to hear. He said he was going to join the search, and said I could come if I wanted. But I don’t think he cared what I did, to be honest.”

  “That’s a pretty strange way to react, wouldn’t you say?” Hanson asked.

  “I thought so,” she agreed. “But I suppose…I realized it would upset any of us. One of our students going missing. And he’d hardly been teaching any time. He probably felt responsible for her somehow.”

  “Had you heard about Aurora from him before?” Jonah asked.

  “Umm…Not that I can remember.” Diana gave a small shrug. “We didn’t talk about specific pupils all that often. Perhaps because we were too busy complaining about the management, or paperwork. But…he talked about almost nothing else afterward.”

  “To the point where it struck you as unhealthy?” Hanson asked.

  Jonah made a mental note to talk to Hanson about leading questions. It wasn’t the worst he’d heard, but they couldn’t afford to do anything wrong here. If Mackenzie had had anything to do with Aurora’s death, then the police and their practices were going to be under a lot of scrutiny.

  “I don’t know,” Diana said, clearly very discomfited.

  “Would you mind describing how his behavior continued?” Jonah said.

  Diana’s face had lost its motherly charm. She looked pained. Hurt.

  “I remember that he…stopped doing anything else,” she said. “For the next few weeks, if he wasn’t out searching for her, he was reading news articles or sticking posters up. He had a map that he stuck up in the kitchen, with pins in. One of them was the campsite. And one of them was where we slept. I remember that. We were reduced to a pin, and he never even referred to us when he talked about it. Just about how much he regretted not having heard anything. Not having stopped walking sooner and been closer to her.”

  “Was it your impression that he wanted to find her?” Jonah asked quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. “He was desperate to be the one who found her. He even made friends with the chief inspector who was put in charge of it. He would call up and suggest angles, and he took it upon himself to talk to her school friends.”

  “I suppose all this took a toll on your relationship,” Jonah said.

  “It ended our relationship,” she corrected him. “After three months of being essentially invisible to him, when spending time with him meant listening to his mutterings about where she might be, I was done. It didn’t matter how much I sympathized with him, or how sad I felt for that girl. You can’t be invisible to the man you love.”

  Jonah gave a nod. Her account was interesting. He had known killers to spearhead search attempts before. He had known boyfriends, fathers, wives, and even a daughter who had been the face of the public appeal before their house of cards had fallen down. But in those cases that kind of behavior had been reserved for public appearances. For moments when they felt visible as a poor, bereft family member. The hunt had not been the driving force behind every waking minute. Which had been part of what had tripped them up.

  And a small internal voice added to this. It told him that Mackenzie’s obsession with finding Aurora reminded him of his own. Had it gradually lessened for Mackenzie, too, but never quite died out?

  “The camping trip,” he said, thinking back to Becky Morris’s statements. “Can you remember how long in advance it was planned?”

  “Oh. Yes, I think…He’d spent a few weeks talking me into it. So quite a long while ahead of time.”

  “And had you picked a place to go?”

  Diana’s face creased into a frown. “I think we discussed that for a while. He wanted a really long walk, and I wanted something shorter, which left me some time to see my sister during the day. So I’m not sure. Maybe we pinned it down a few days before.”

  Jonah nodded. “Do you remember if you or he suggested the approximate area?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” Diana replied, “but I would have been keen on it being close by.”

  Jonah nodded again, thinking about the possibility of some kind of premeditation. Could Mackenzie really have intended to get his girlfriend drunk and then slip away? And had he really organized his whole weekend around seeing Aurora? He knew she would be with friends, and not alone.

  Or had he and Aurora arranged it somehow? Had her comment
to him been a coded message that the rest of the class hadn’t understood?

  “Can I just ask a final question?” he continued, aware that a silence had arisen.

  “Of course.”

  “In your honest opinion, as one who knew him well,” he said, “would you describe Andrew Mackenzie’s behavior as suspicious? Did you start to wonder if there had been anything…improper between him and his pupil?”

  He saw her face tighten. “I didn’t ever think so. I thought he was a good man. I still think he is, but I suppose…it’s been so long….” She shook her head. “It’s so hard to be sure! I wonder if I remember him as he really was, or whether it’s gradually changed.”

  “Nothing more definite?”

  “What can I say?” Diana asked, looking wretched. “I don’t want to believe that he was involved, and I never thought he was. But that’s all I’ve got.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  He stopped the tape and rose, letting Hanson show Diana out once again while he retreated toward his office.

  He was almost at his sanctuary when he saw the door to CID opening. O’Malley was standing aside to let Andrew Mackenzie in.

  Hanson was only yards away with Diana. The ex-girlfriend stopped without warning. She put a hand up to her mouth.

  Mackenzie saw her a moment later. The look he gave her was sick with fear.

  26

  Aurora

  Saturday, July 23, 1983, 2:50 A.M.

  It was the cold that woke her up. Or the shivering. Her whole body was convulsed by it, a teeth-chattering shaking that ran through her.

  Her mouth was so dry it made breathing uncomfortable. She didn’t want to get up from the warmth of her sleeping bag. Didn’t want to move. But the thirst was too much, and after she had tried to curl up and ignore it for a time, she unzipped the bag and scrambled out of it.

  She was disoriented for a moment when she realized that she was in deep darkness. The bright beacon of the fire behind the trees was gone, and the sky was moonless.