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