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