“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 English 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.