She Lies in Wait

by Gytha Lodge

  “In one of your original interviews you said that you’d been wading in the river, trying to find Aurora. But you were queried on your trousers being dry when the police arrived.”

  “Oh God,” Brett said, putting a hand up to his head. “I remember that. It was…I’d puked on my trousers. I was hungover and running around searching and it all hit me. There was a dead animal, and we had to go past it to get to the tree. When we…when we hid the stash. Jojo told you, didn’t she? It smelled so bad, and I was so bloody hungover that I puked. And I didn’t want anyone thinking I was drunk, so I changed into clean trousers. And then when I was asked…”

  Jonah gave him a smile. “You said you’d taken your trousers off? Understood. Thank you, Mr. Parker.”

  They let themselves out, and Jonah mentally added everything Anna had told him into the mix. The row had been about fraud, then. The business hadn’t even been started back when Aurora had died, and he could see no link between tax evasion and the murder of a young girl years before.

  The phone rang as he was turning out of Brett’s driveway, and O’Malley’s voice was loud over the Bluetooth.

  “We’ve had Coralie Ribbans on the phone,” he said. “She says she’s got something important to tell us. She can be in for six thirty.”

  “OK. That works. Tell her to come.”

  “And in other news, I’ve found a link to that place in Waterlooville that Matt Stavely was delivering to. Andrew Mackenzie ran a scout group there every Thursday evening for some years. I’m checking the dates.”

  “Bingo,” Jonah said with a grin. “Well done, Domnall.”

  “You can thank Google. Well, me and Google. Say you owe us both a pint and we’re square.”

  Jonah rang off, trying to absorb that new piece of information. So there was a chance that Mackenzie had a history of rape. He wondered if he could be wrong about Aleksy. Could the first fire at Jojo’s have been pure random vandalism? Could his death have been accidental?

  The feeling of confusion and fogginess was descending again. It didn’t help that he felt like his stomach had been hollowed out.

  “Can you open the carrot-and-hummus thing?” he asked Lightman. “And root around in the back and see if I’ve got any other food before I kill and eat someone?”

  * * *

  —

  JONAH WENT STRAIGHT to O’Malley’s desk once they were back, and pulled up a chair once again.

  “Right,” he said. “Phone records and Aleksy Nowak’s phone. What do we have?”

  “A few things,” O’Malley said. “Messages between Aleksy and Jojo.”

  “Great,” Jonah said. “Can you start with the day of his death?”

  O’Malley brought up a conversation between Jojo and her boyfriend from the thirteenth. Only it wasn’t much of a conversation. It had been one message from Aleksy at eleven A.M. saying that they needed to talk once he was back, and then a frightened, angry reply from Jojo.

  She’d sent him eight messages after that, asking him to answer his bloody phone. She’d phoned him twelve times, too.

  Jonah felt a little uncomfortable reading that. It had the look of someone who’d flipped out. Could that have been enough to drive Jojo to hunt him down? Could she have wanted to kill him because he was about to reject her? Or because she thought he was?

  But looking at the times of the calls, she’d still been ringing him after he must have been dead. Right into the evening.

  “Can you bring up some other messages Jojo sent to Aleksy?” he asked. “I’d like a comparison with our unknown sender who knew where he was going to be climbing.”

  O’Malley nodded. “She’s had the same number for seventeen years, so it’s easy enough.”

  So Jojo was telling the truth about that, then, Jonah thought.

  O’Malley scrolled back a few pages, to earlier that month. He opened up a message Jojo had sent on July 2.

  Jonah felt a little bit of a voyeur as he read.

  Hey, hotness! Was it a good session? What time are you back? Any energy left for me…? Missing you xxx

  Jonah nodded. “Try a few others.”

  O’Malley exited and clicked on another one, from a few days later.

  She’s now decided she doesn’t like the concept and wants me to take the alpine bed back out. Considering planting thistles and giant hogweed and leaving…If you have time to get wine on the way home, I’m going to need it. A LOT of wine. Love you, even if I am savage right now xxx

  The sergeant exited it again, and clicked on the very last one, which Jonah saw was from September. He only had a moment to wonder why she was texting Aleksy after he had been dead for two months before the message was open.

  Hey, hotness. I’m at Font. I made that 7a. Bloody finally! I really could have done with your advice on this one, but I got there in the end. I missed you a lot today. I wanted you there to celebrate with me. Actually, I just wanted you there to wrap my arms round, and kiss and hold. There still hasn’t been a day when I haven’t wanted that. Did I tell you I had a dream where I found you lying there, and I kissed you, and it revived you? I’ve never wished for a fairy tale to be true before. I miss you. I love you. I love you. Xxx

  “Poor bloody thing,” O’Malley said.

  37

  By early evening, Hanson was feeling like a failure. She had followed Stavely home to his flat. He hadn’t diverged or stopped to meet anyone, and hadn’t reappeared out of the entranceway either.

  In her tiredness and distraction, she hadn’t done as the chief had asked and brought a uniformed officer along. Which turned out to be a good thing when her phone buzzed, and she made the mistake of reading the next message from Damian.

  Did you sleep well? Was his bed nice and comfy?

  She took two deep, steadying breaths before replying.

  I didn’t get much sleep. I was working, like I told you. I didn’t stay with anyone.

  She could feel her heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest again. She didn’t start up the car. She knew she’d have another message in a minute.

  Sure enough, her phone buzzed again.

  Hahaha! Do you think I’m stupid? You didn’t come home. I was there. I was waiting up for you to try and make things right and you were off screwing some guy. You’re a pathetic slag.

  It was like her body lost all its strength in a rush. She found herself sitting with her head on the steering wheel, as minute after minute passed.

  She knew she needed to move. She needed to work. She had to throw herself into something and forget him. She had to succeed, too, and prove herself.

  Despite feeling like she was no longer on the same planet as the run-down block of flats in front of her, or the investigation, or even as her car.

  * * *

  —

  THERE WAS A little more in the recent phone records to interest Jonah. Daniel Benham had called Brett Parker the morning before. Coralie had then called Brett a few times after her arrival in Southampton.

  Just last night, Daniel had messaged Coralie, but she hadn’t replied. There was little else sent via text message, which was no real surprise. If Jonah had been under investigation for murder, he wouldn’t have sent anything in writing, either, even though they actually had no access to that information.

  And then there was a little flurry of communications, from Jojo to Brett, and Brett to Coralie, from the evening before.

  “Them arranging to meet at Brett’s,” Jonah said with a nod.

  Jonah thought about Coralie again. For some reason, she was the easiest of the group to forget. She didn’t seem to be central to anything. Everyone saw her as Topaz’s shadow rather than as a core member of the group of friends. And, in general, the others seemed to like her rather less than Topaz did.

  She didn’t come across as intelligent or domi
nant. Her career hadn’t been academic or impressive. But he couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was a hell of a lot smarter than she seemed, or that she had been persuaded by one of the others to help cover something up if not.

  He pulled a brief set of notes O’Malley had made on her off the system, and read through them. There was nothing particularly illuminating except for a relationship with her father that seemed a little overly close. Much of her life had been shaped by him. He had got her into university, and got her each and every job. She spent a great deal of her time with him, even now, O’Malley noted, which was evident from her social-media feeds.

  Contrastingly, despite liking to tag herself in lots of locations and with numerous friends, there were very few references to the friendship group from school. Jonah brooded on that, on her role as an outsider. It made her the most likely person to be truthful, but also meant there were things that were probably hidden from her.

  Lightman appeared at ten to seven, having finished his interview with a woman who thought she might have been assaulted by Mackenzie.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not a goer,” he said. “She’s almost certainly been assaulted, by a perpetrator who was slightly similar in look to Mackenzie, but given the location, which is somewhere Mackenzie is not known to have been, I think it’s likely to be someone else. I want to pass it to DCI Matthews’s team for a proper investigation.”

  Jonah nodded, thinking again of Zofia and a sexual assault that had gone unreported for thirty years. He needed to decide what to do about it.

  At that point, he saw Coralie finally arriving beyond Lightman’s shoulder. She was in sports kit, and Jonah sighed. He didn’t think being late for a police interview because of being at the gym was enough of an excuse.

  He took in her pink-and-gray running shoes, which had the exact same colors as her pink top and gray leggings. Over the top, she had a thin, gray-blue hoodie. Her blond hair was tied back in a high ponytail. It was an overwhelmingly young look once again. If it hadn’t been for the slight looseness of the skin on her arms, and the lines on her face, she could have been still at school. And there was a nervousness to her movements, too, that made her all the more girlish.

  “Come and sit in on this with me, will you?” he asked Lightman.

  As he entered the room and sat in front of her, Jonah remembered decades-old gossip about the parties held at Coralie’s house whenever her father had been overseas, which had been fairly often. He didn’t remember ever having been to one, but he’d heard about the drink, the joints, and the borderline sexual games. And he remembered Topaz discussing one of the bigger parties, and who would and wouldn’t be invited. Topaz had been making all the decisions, as if the house and the party had been hers and not her friend’s.

  “There was something you wanted to tell us, I believe, Miss Ribbans,” Jonah said for the benefit of the tape.

  “Yes,” Coralie said, nodding. “It was…You asked me about Mr. Mackenzie before. And whether or not…whether I’d seen him. I wasn’t expecting the question, so I wasn’t really ready to think.”

  “So you’ve had time to think now?” Jonah asked.

  “Yes. Yes, I have. I mean, not about that night. I still…I never saw him. He could have been there. I just didn’t see him. It’s about before that.”

  There was a sudden loud buzz. Coralie jumped slightly, and scrabbled in her shoulder bag. She pulled her pink iPhone out, which was continuing to buzz, and then, to Jonah’s surprise, she answered it.

  “Hi,” she said a little breathlessly. “Can I talk later? I’m just at the police station. Helping…helping them.”

  There was a pause, and then a male voice sounded faintly.

  “Yes. Yes, OK. Speak later. Bye.”

  Coralie hung up, looking somehow more nervous than she had.

  “Just Daddy,” she said as she put the phone away.

  “That’s fine,” Jonah said, despite wondering quite seriously about the relationship between Coralie and her father. “Please go on when you’re ready.”

  “Yes,” Coralie said, and she pulled her bag back onto her shoulder jerkily. “A few months before Aurora—before that night—I saw something at the school. I’d been late writing an essay, and Mr. Mackenzie had told me to drop it in after school. I had to miss a dance lesson to do it, and I went up to his office at five thirty. The lights were on, so I went in, and I saw…I saw Mr. Mackenzie and Aurora.”

  Jonah waited for a moment, and then asked, “What were they doing?”

  “He was right up close to her,” she said. “He was handing her a book, and smiling at her, but then he put his hand up to her face.”

  And he knew she was camping that night, Jonah thought. He knew she was there.

  “What was Aurora’s reaction?” Jonah asked.

  “She looked…uncomfortable,” she said. “Maybe a bit scared.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “Yes,” Coralie said. “Mr. Mackenzie suddenly caught sight of me. And he was all smiling and asking me to come in, and saying he’d just been recommending a book to Aurora, as if nothing was wrong, and I started…to doubt what I’d seen.”

  Jonah nodded slowly. He had heard that exact series of events before on numerous occasions, either from the victim of sexual abuse, or from observers like Coralie.

  And yet he felt doubt coursing through him. He needed to think about this piece of evidence against Mackenzie, which fought with everything that was gradually building in his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said suddenly. “I didn’t offer you a hot drink. Let me get you something. I’ll need a few more details from you.”

  “OK,” she said, still with that tension in her. “Coffee would be good. Thank you.”

  * * *

  —

  STAVELY HAD BEEN looking out of his sitting-room window every few minutes, squinting down into the car park. The waiting around was killing him. He’d tried playing some Doom to distract himself, but he was too wound up. Four cigarettes smoked one after the other hadn’t even put a dent in the edgy anxiety.

  On what was probably the fifteenth check, he saw a car pulling up. He waited there, absolutely still, to make sure he’d got this right. And then he went to pick up his phone.

  He sent a one-word message to the number that he had memorized, and then sat and waited. His leg was jiggling uncontrollably.

  His phone buzzed thirty seconds later, and he felt a slight crawling sensation up his spine as he read Daniel Benham’s name.

  It was time to go.

  He stood, shoving his cigarettes and his wallet into his pocket. He checked for his keys, and then let himself out onto the landing.

  The anxiety was still there, but there was a large part of him that was really looking forward to this.

  * * *

  —

  HANSON WAS STILL sitting outside the ’60s monstrosity that Stavely lived in. It was within what she knew was gang territory, and she found her heart racing as a group of boys made their way from the nearby parkland across the car park and past her. There was no need for her to be here. The chief had only told her to follow him, not to sit on stakeout. But she felt frozen in place. Or weighted down, maybe.

  Damian had texted her eight times since she had stopped replying. She’d been trying to gather herself together for the last half hour. She just needed to drive away, back to the station, but with every new message, the feeling of a wall between her and the world only deepened.

  She half saw a figure leave the flat block by the stairs ahead of her, and she had watched him for quite a while before she realized that it was Stavely, his beanie pulled low over his brow and a hunch to his shoulders.

  He was heading toward town, and in a sudden, flustered rush, she started the Fiat and began following him. His zigzagging route took him to a graffiti-covered pay phone
on Merton Road. She carried on driving, and saw him speaking into the mouthpiece. He looked around him as he did it, and she wondered whether he was afraid of attack, or of being watched. She was glad that his eyes drifted over her without apparent recognition through the side window, and snapped her focus back to the road.

  There was a three-car parking bay outside a fish-and-chip shop and a drugstore farther up, and she pulled in there. She could just see Stavely in the rearview mirror, and she made a point of looking in her bag beside her in case anyone else was paying attention.

  The phone call didn’t last long. Stavely hung up, and then immediately began moving down the road toward her. He didn’t glance her way as he strode past, head down. She was getting ready to start the car when he stopped at the bus stop twenty yards farther up.

  He propped himself against the seats, pulling out a cigarette. She let her hand drop from the ignition, pulled out her phone, and made a show of fiddling with it. She wondered if she was being stupid. Was Stavely likely to be going anywhere in particular right now? He’d been home several hours after being released, and hadn’t immediately gone to talk to anyone.

  The phone call was the bit that piqued her interest, though. Why a phone booth? He had a cellphone, surely. Who the hell used phone booths now? Or was that the standard MO when you dealt drugs, so nobody could ever trace you? But then, how did your clients ever get in touch with you?

  A bus trundled past her and pulled in alongside the stop, and Stavely climbed on.

  “You’d better not be going to bloody Tesco’s,” she muttered as she pulled out after it.

  * * *

  —

  JONAH HAD DRIFTED back to his office without noticing he was doing it, and found himself standing in front of his desk, staring at nothing. He needed to understand all this. To understand what was going on behind the scenes.