A search for a heavy, CP-odd Higgs boson, , decaying into a boson and a 125 GeV Higgs boson, , with the ATLAS detector at the LHC is presented. The search uses proton--proton collision data at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb. Decays of CP-even bosons to or pairs with the boson decaying to electron or muon pairs are considered, as well as decays with the boson decaying to neutrinos. No evidence for the production of an boson in these channels is found and the 95% confidence level upper limits derived for \sigma (gg\rightarrow A) \times \mbox{BR}(A\rightarrow Zh) \times \mbox{BR}(h\rightarrow f\bar{f}) are 0.098--0.013 pb for and 0.57--0.014 pb for in a range of 220--1000 GeV. The results are combined and interpreted in the context of two-Higgs-doublet models.