the time he and O’Malley had reached the door.
* * *
—
HANSON FORCED HERSELF to stop looking at Connor Dooley’s files after half an hour of browsing. He’d been in the interview room a good ten minutes, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that focusing on anything else was wasting time now.
But she needed to do her job, even if that meant filling time with pointless asides. She exited Connor’s entries in their file manager, and decided to search for Andrew Mackenzie instead, as the DCI had asked her to do. He’d insisted, firmly, that while Connor was a clear priority, there was reason enough to look at other people, and at the teacher in particular.
Mackenzie’s police record was pretty quick reading. There had been only one interview with him, in which he’d explained that he had been camping with his girlfriend a few miles away and hadn’t left her side all night. The account hadn’t, as far as she could see, been checked. Which went straight onto her list of bad original investigative work.
Having finished that, she decided to google him, although with a name like Andrew Mackenzie, it wasn’t going to be all that easy. She decided to add in “teacher Southampton,” and found what she thought was the man. There were a few articles where he’d been interviewed about particularly successful students. The pictures showed a broad-faced, stocky man looking terribly posh in chinos and a shirt. There was also a page about a charity hike in Corsica, and he was the founder of a website dedicated to reading Yeats’s poetry in dramatic locations, which made her snigger.
And then there was an article about the retirement party of a Roald Mackenzie, who had been a DCS at the Met. Curious, she clicked on it to find any reference to Andrew, and read a brief interview with “Roald’s nephew, schoolteacher Andrew Mackenzie.”
“Jesus,” she said under her breath. So Mackenzie had been well connected with the police. No wonder he’d been deliberately missed.
She found it difficult not to jump up and tell Lightman straightaway. But she could see that he was focused on his screen, a small frown on his face. And it was Sheens she needed to be telling this to really.
So she sat and reread the article, her foot jiggling with impatience as she waited for the chief to reappear.
* * *
—
JONAH LEFT THE interview suite full of the uncomfortable buzzing that filled him when he’d brought out the harsh questions. It was like the feeling when he’d had too much coffee. A tetchy restlessness that started to look for another target.
It was at times like this—and only at times like this—that he thought he began to understand his father. He was filled with a sort of righteous fury at the lies suspects told, and with an urge to beat them down until they admitted the truth.
What he’d said to Connor had been mild. He could go a lot further, though he didn’t like himself a lot when he did. And that was difficult when it was one of the things that made him really good at his job.
It almost helped that Connor couldn’t quite seem to remember what he’d done. It was an uncomfortable echo from Jonah’s own past. He wanted to attack Connor for it, perhaps because he was tired of attacking himself.
“I don’t know whether I believe him,” O’Malley said, catching up with him at the door to CID. “Part of me thinks that’s how I’d react if someone said that to me. And part of me thinks it’s how a guilty man would react.”
“It’s a hard one to call,” Jonah agreed. “I want to give him some time to worry. And we need time to find further evidence. That’s got to be the priority now. If he got up and raped her, there must be some way of proving it beyond Coralie’s testimony.”
He caught the swift movement of Hanson’s head and her scramble to rise as he walked back into CID.
“What have you got?” he asked her.
“Andrew Mackenzie,” she said with what was almost a smile. “He was only interviewed once, during which he provided an alibi. He explained that he’d camped overnight with his girlfriend, and never left her side.”
“Did she agree?”
“They never checked with her,” Hanson said with a note of triumph. “Which seems breathtakingly bad investigative work, but, in fact, may be worse than that. Mackenzie’s uncle was a DCS in the Met at the time.”
“You’re serious?”
“I am.” Her