A Private Haunting (12 page)

Eggers stared at Jonas as he crossed to the urinal and when Jonas tried to speak he said
shut it
so Jonas did. Psycho Dave laughed, ushering him towards the door with a deferential flourish. Jonas took the invite, listening to their raised voices all along the corridor until the door closed, how Pete and Jake saw him fiddling with Lacey's zip at the talent show... doesn't take Stephen fuckin Fry to figure out what the cops wanted... weird Viking cunt.

Eggers, though. Jonas had disappointed him. This was actually upsetting. He leaned against the corridor and noticed he was shaking, shaking as he stared at the opposite wall, the knit-and-natter and playgroup posters, health and safety notices, small ads. Normality always re-asserted. Jonas had learned long ago how to outlast judgement. The first step? Fall in line.

Suck it up, Mr
M.

Nothing to be done.

The only thing to do with fate was accept the damn thing. It was probably a deep genetic thing, evolved over hundreds of centuries. Think of the first people in Norway, stepping ashore from warmer climes. Now imagine that first Arctic winter, huddled and dying, horrified by the disappearance of the sun and screaming into the bone-cold. Then, over
looong
time, they figured out how to survive. They learned how to live with it. Nothing to be done.

So let them stare when Jonas came back into the hall. Let them frown when he joined a group mapping out a search of the woods. All aboard the Atonement Train, Jonas and Mark and all the others who'd voted no, now helping out, each with their own reasons to consent.

Even Fletcher, it seemed. Jonas hadn't noticed him until now. He was with another group, down by the stage. Then Mary appeared. She stood with her arms folded as Fletcher walked over. He spoke to her for several seconds, a frown creasing her forehead. When Fletcher straightened up and looked right at Jonas, Mary did too. She
scoured
him with that gaze.

His first thought was of a school assembly. Singled out by the head and made to stand.

The next was just as random.

His mother.

The incessant post-divorce questions when he came back from the fortnightly father weekend, a cross-examination of his dad's behaviour, movements and
does he
talk about me, son, does he ask about me
,
Jonas, does he?,
her sad desire for information as overwhelming as Jonas's was to know what Fletcher had said to Mary. She was still staring, then someone was asking him something and when he looked back Mary and Fletcher were gone.

The need to know, it could push you close to the edge, close and then over, down like a stone.

And when you finally did know, how did you know you did? How many times had you been truly sure you had all the information needed to be utterly certain? Never, it never happened. As with Eva and Anya, the hospital and the trial. Jonas had to know every medical and legal fact, poring over them obsessively because he was convinced that in knowledge there was comfort. There wasn't. But it didn't stop him looking for it in those details.

A few people were staring again. The Atonement Train was a relic, the engine rusted and seized. He thought about the magazines. Someone breaking in to The Hub and picking the lock on the drawer. Then a phone call. He saw a bearded man whispering in the half-light.

Jonas closed the front door.
A bearded man whispering in the half-light?
Where did he get all this nonsense?

They weren't waiting for him. No Fletcher sneer. No disappointed Mary shaking her head. He waited a bit longer then went up to the spare room and knocked on the door without thinking.

As if he was intruding.

Fletcher. He was settling deeper. The sleeping mat and bag had been left out instead of rolled up, clothes taken from the rucksack and folded into a neat pile under the window. The one-eyed doll seemed happy enough, peering back at him from the sleeping mat with strange and unknown significance. It had been carefully placed there, no casual pick-up-and-throw.

As Jonas had again been cast off. Big Haakon once told him
you're
nothing without roots, son, just a leaf
drifting on the stream
. You took those roots for granted until one day you noticed they'd come loose and
whoa
, you've drifted a long way, these surroundings sure are strange…

He found the will and the title deeds in a rucksack pocket. He could burn them but Fletcher would simply produce others. Those magician-like gifts should be appreciated. Despite Jonas now locking every door and window, Fletcher still found a way in. Changing the locks would make no difference, he was sure of it.

Archibald Hackett... leaving
the property known as End Point to my grandson, Adam
Fletcher.

Something in the different names. Jonas went downstairs and cracked a beer. Sat in the glooming kitchen and wondered. Something in the names, stopping him going to the cops and getting him evicted. ‘Something
fishy
, Holmes.' A terrible English accent that made him laugh.

‘What's fishy?'

He looked up, startled. ‘Where did you come from?' Mary was standing in the sun room doorway.

‘I was in the garden.'

‘How did you get in?'

‘You gave me a key. So I could do the cleaning?'

‘You were there all along?'

‘Sometimes you can't see what's right underneath your nose.' Her smile wavered.

Jonas set aside for later any thought about what that might mean. ‘You want a drink?'

‘Sure. In a minute.'

 

First of all she cleaned. A point being made. Jonas watched her hoovering until she waved him away and he went outside, into a poised emptiness, fans of cypress on a coal blue sky. Now and then a dipping bat.

Five minutes later she joined him. The dozen or so tea-lights he'd put on the grass between the deck chairs flickered in the shadows like questions. She sipped at her glass of wine and glanced at him, observing without catching his eye while Jonas did exactly the same.

‘I can't remember the last time I hoovered.'

‘Tell me about it.'

‘You were in there for five minutes!'

‘You can get a lot done in five minutes!'

‘I have allergies.'

‘And?'

‘That's why I don't use it, the hoover. Makes me sneeze.'

‘Right,
sure
.'

And still the surveillance. These interactions, where no one acknowledged there were two dialogues happening; the actual conversation with the other person and the hidden, underlying considerations. Maybe schizophrenia is our natural state, echoes of an old paranoia, one eye on the foraged berries, the other on the drooling neighbours a few caves along.

‘I love the summer sky,' he said. ‘It gets so much darker here than Norway.'

‘What's that like?'

‘Endless dusk.'

‘I don't know if I'd like that, it seems sad in a way. Like you're waiting for something that never comes.'

‘The darkness?'

‘Yes, the night. I like the night. Well, nights like this.'

‘You haven't seen the winters!'

A disguised formality to the conversation, he thought, a dance with awkward steps. He took her as she him, modest hands and cautious twirls, waiting for the right moment for a letting go, a calypso spin away from
nothing
truly said
and revealing, for a moment, what lay beneath.

She glanced up, up and away, a smile coming to her face. ‘The trees look like waves on a beach.'

He followed her gaze, up to the cypress fronds, lazy undulations against the light grey sky. ‘You know what? I never remember in motion, it's just snapshots, like photographs.'

‘How do you mean?'

‘There's no movement. I want to remember like a Chinese painting.'

A little smile now.

‘I'll show you.' He took her hand and she tensed, briefly, but let him lead her to the living room.

He pointed at the scroll painting above the fireplace. ‘Li Po. He was China's greatest poet. Well, I don't know if it's really him but I'm sure it is, I like to think it is.
Lifting my head I watch the bright moon, lowering my
head I dream that I'm home
. Look at the brushstrokes. Everything's moving, you can
see
the wind blowing in the trees. I want to
remember
like that.'

She looked at him, carefully holding his gaze this time. Those underlying considerations, bubbling up.

‘How did you end up here?' she asked.

‘The village?'

‘Yes.'

‘I worked construction. Few years back I was living in Bergen and signed up for an oil rig job in Scotland. I decided to stay.'

‘Simple as that.'

‘Not much to say. A few jobs here and there and then I came here. Eggers told me about the council job.'

‘What about your family? Don't you miss them?'

‘My mother's dead. I was never really close to my father. He lives in Larvik, south coast.'

‘No children?'

‘No.'

‘You like them though, don't you?'

‘Of course. I used to teach, once upon a time. In Norway. It's why I volunteer at The Hub.'

She looked at him. Away and back again, that way she
looked
. ‘Fancy going for a walk?'

Jonas said ok but wasn't sure. The world was ever impending, always something coming but who knows exactly what, a confetti of endings to this night falling from Mary's gaze.

They headed along the street, past Gladstone's café and then right, towards the village centre. By
The
Jade Dragon
their steps came into unison, a beat they noticed at the same time a few moments later, a quick look enough to break the rhythm, one again become two.

‘Disgusting.'

For a moment Jonas thought she was talking about him. The
magazines
, Fletcher, that's what he'd said to her.

‘Look at it.'

She was looking directly ahead and shaking her head.

 

The village square. Like a location film shoot. The residential cars parked beside the green had gone, replaced by Winnebago-style broadcast wagons that shouted
we are the TV, we are the NEWS!

Thick wires trailed to throbbing generators and floodlights. Even now, way past midnight, people milled around, half-cut drinkers from
The Mucky
Duck
, a few teenagers and a gaggle of media types in white shirts and skewed ties, sitting on a bench, drinking Corona beer with chunks of limes stuffed in the neck. Some of them were eating fast food from the vans parked haphazardly on the green itself, retail initiative on the sacrosanct
green
. Mrs Hawthorne would be appalled at the
Gourmet Chef
dishing up
authentic Turk-shish kebabs
,
Rockin Rocco
his
Pizza the Action
. Scowling over all was the church, aloof in its floodlights, the steeple following its Alpha course into the sky, reaching, as ever, for the universal.

‘It's all a show,' Mary said. ‘Look at them, stuffing their faces like they're at the pictures. Lacey's disappeared and it's all a big laugh. Like Saturday night TV, a bloody blockbuster.'

She stalked across the square, right up to the group of journalists. Jonas listened to her harangue as he followed. They turned to him, plaintively, he thought. He smiled and shrugged.

‘Do you have children?'

No reply.

‘Do you have
children?
'

Again the glances at Jonas, puzzled, like
, what's with your crazy woman,
control her
. One of the men stood up and Mary pushed him back onto the bench. He held up his hands, backing off.

‘You're a bunch of parasites!'

Someone whooped, over by the kebab van, someone else said
course
we are
but hey, dontcha know, the public wants what the public gets, so why not a few cold beers, a doner and chips to fuel the energy to find the fresh angle, we're on the other the side of the arc people, slippety-sliding from
breaking news
to
our top story
to the three-day interest peak to
in other news
and remember, there's lotsa competition out there, a new series of that God-awful talent show has just started so c'mon, its bread and circuses, raise the game
.
And one journalist did, stepping back to a safer distance and filming the incident on his mobile phone and there,
there's
the development to take the story back to the top of the news!

Mary's rant ended abruptly. She looked around as if she wasn't sure what to do then hurried away at a near run. Jonas followed. She was still furious, arms wrapped around herself and only slowing down when the streetlights ended and the darkness began. She stopped altogether midway along the river bridge, the traffic lights casting wan shimmers on the water.

‘I wouldn't mind at all,' she said. ‘If I thought for one minute it would help find her.'

‘Maybe it will.'

‘Yeah, right.'

And she turned quickly. Flint in the eye. He saw Fletcher again, whispering in her ear. She knew about End Point. She was going to ask what the
fuck
are you doing here? What's your
game
?

‘You seemed to know her.'

‘Lacey?' The night tilted a little.

‘That night at the talent show. I watched you. At your party as well. You seemed very close.'

The traffic lights changed to green, a colour to match his sudden nausea. Whatever Fletcher told her had nothing to do with End Point. This was something much more troubling.

‘I liked her a lot.'

‘Liked?'

‘I mean
like.
I think she sees me as a father-figure. Have you met her parents?'

‘They're not exactly... present.'

‘I've known people like that all my life, they shouldn't be allowed to have children.'

‘Shouldn't be allowed?'

‘No. They shouldn't. All they do is pass on pain and trauma, and the whole cycle repeats.'

‘We've all got the right to have kids!'

‘The right to inflict pain? They need to be protected from their parents, and kids like Spencer.'

‘Spencer? He's ok, he's just – '

‘He's a little pervert and he doesn't deserve her!'

‘And you do?'

He stared at her. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Something Adam said. Forget it.'

Jonas didn't speak. He was thinking of Big Haakon, and how if everything was interconnected then there was no way of knowing when something long buried might re-surface.

‘I'm going to tell you something,' he said. Very carefully, a voice he wasn't sure he recognised.

‘Do it then.'

And he was about to. And then he wasn't.
Do it then
. It sounded harsh, a bit too greedy.

‘Come round tomorrow night. After the search.'

 

At that exact moment, Fletcher was studying Mary's face in close-up, 14x zoom. For a second she seemed to look right at him. He held his breath, a familiar, animal response, feeling a dissonant prickle of vulnerability and security caused by clarity of the night-vision binoculars and the dark night. They called it
black light
in the Marines. It should be
green light
.

The Yukon Ranger binoculars were the best kit he'd used outside Marine-issue. The counsellor wouldn't be happy. He'd told him to avoid associative triggers: war films; news reports from warzones; anything military-related that
might
take you back to that place you don
't want to be
.

Later, long afterwards, middle of the day in some overheated shopping mall, middle of the night on the hostel sheets, Fletcher would want to track the counsellor down, scream at him that there was nowhere to go other than
back to that place
. It was at least normalising in its nightmares and its flashbacks,
that place
made so much more sense than here.

He focused on Mary's eyes. He knew who she was now. He'd probably known since he saw her at Mortensen's party. He looked away from the eyes and studied the mouth, the elegant curve of the chin and jawline, trying to remember, wondering what it would feel like to touch her the way Mortensen now did, a hand on top of hers and Mary now turning to face him.

He'd followed them from End Point. He'd been in the trees. He watched Mary's outburst in the square then lost interest, heading to The Skull and setting up the tripod, facing the binoculars out the left eye, east across the golf course. No particular reason other than why not, he liked the Black Light. Then Mary and Mortensen appeared on the road bridge. He had to force himself to stop staring. It felt too much like his aunt behind the net curtains. The counsellor said he was obsessive but that every compulsion was a symptom of something deeper and once those depths were uncovered the compulsion would fade,
like morning mist.