A Private Haunting (20 page)

The police were thorough. Quiet machines. Jonas waited in the kitchen. No one acknowledged him. It was perfectly feasible, he realised, to be the centre of attention yet completely invisible at the same time. They left at midday, leaving a small crowd on the pavement, nausea in his throat and a sense of exposure that reminded him of those last few months at the house in Christinegård when he returned to Bergen after being released from prison.

 

That day of return. A livid scar on his memory. Jonas wasn't doing well, back then.

All those white-painted wooden houses and oppressively neat gardens, it took so long to pass them, to get to his own front door, like in a troubling dream, that unknown something pulling you back. He was so tense, ready to apologise to anyone he saw, every neighbour known and unknown. But he met no one and the empty street seemed almost purposeful, as if word had been passed to stay out of sight, make sure Mortensen saw only ghosts.

He stood in the hallway, the house pressing, shrinking in, a quick falling of memories. He took off his shoes and socks. Then the rest of his clothes. And started slapping himself. Hard as he could on the face and body, again and again until his skin was red, singing with pain.

Still naked, he paced the rooms. The rugs too rough and the polished floorboards too cold, as if the fibres were curling away and the pine somehow frosting over as he walked, appalled by his touch. He opened every window but the bright August sun transformed at the sill to a yellowing that fell on him like jaundice, fetal-curled on the couch and looking up and out at such an epic blue, the blue of freedom, but this just one confinement swapped for another.

Even in the back garden he was trapped, the flowers planted by Anya now spread and colonising. He had to get out of there. To stay was to become a recluse, peered at by children who came creeping at night, spying through the windows at
Killer J
, head in his hands and
it's
such
a spooky living room, Kjetil, it's like there's
people in there only he can see
.

End Point felt the same. Compromised by Fletcher and now by the police. Trapped again.

 

He walked through to the sun room. Stood for a few moments, looking round at the surrounding houses. He turned his back to the garden, looking through the sun room and into the shadowed kitchen. Then he turned round again, looking up at the house directly opposite.

It was all a matter of trigonometry. Except he couldn't remember anything about High School maths. Still, he made the process relatively scientific. He pulled the kitchen table one foot back, one foot to the right, then sat at each chair. The angles said he could be seen through the kitchen window from the house on the left and from the second floor windows of the house opposite the sun room. Four more attempts and the table was now three feet back from its original position and two feet to the left. It was pushed almost up to the sink but Jonas couldn't be seen through any window, so long as he sat on the back right chair.

Crack open a beer. Crack another. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not watching. The photographers would also find the angles. No question. They would pay the neighbours to poke long-lensed cameras from the windows and maybe
catch him.

Doing what?

Didn't matter. Anything would make him seem guilty. A brief smile proof of the psychopath with no conscience.

He went to check the bedroom curtains were completely closed and did the same in the living room. He couldn't resist the urge to peek outside. A small crowd of peering locals had gathered on the opposite pavement, drawn by the search. And the media, of course, still circling, instantly recognisable by their bogus indifference; mobile-phoned and all a-strut.

Even Li Po was unsettled.

Jonas stared at the scroll painting. The little figure outside the temple seemed to shift in the half-light, as if looking over his shoulder, towards the distant mountains. Somewhere up there a refuge, as End Point had once been. He'd found it one morning when still bivvying down at Sycamore Camp, a quick recce all that was needed to tell him the house was long uninhabited. Three days later a rain-swept dawn allowed him to explore properly. Over the side fence and into the cypresses. The downpour hid the noise of the break-in.

And so much dust lifting from bare floorboards. It didn't catch his throat as back in Christinegård. This was the dust of someone else's past. The dirty marks on the kitchen lino when the light was right told stories he knew nothing about. Perhaps if he'd looked closer he'd have seen Fletcher's face in those shapes, the ghost that was yet to come. Not that there had seemed to be any danger of someone reclaiming that history anytime soon. The most recent letter in the pile under the letter box was nine years old. Clearly no inhabitant since.

So Jonas moved in.

A very private fitting of new locks and a very public cleaning of the ivy from the name plate beside the front door. Electricity? Jonas did as Asamoah showed him in that Harlesden squat he shared with seven others. On came the lights. Jonas started greeting his neighbours as the new owner of End Point, slipping himself into the village, another history emerging in the lino shapes, Jonas of the
Jonsok
parties,
the Viking
, an unfurling of a new life that was impossible in Bergen, where memories of Eva and Anya thundered like a winter waterfall and the neighbours all knew, whose contempt clung like leeches until he fled to Larvik once more.

 

That last home-coming. Thirteen months since the disastrous visit to Haakon, and thirteen months of avoiding contacting his father. Now Jonas stood outside his front door, winter-chilled and an even colder chill to come, feeling the slow fade of that final tenacious delusion, the thought he could build an elusive new life on the bones of another, more distant past.

It was why he stopped off en-route to buy a one-way ferry ticket to Denmark, leaving that evening.

His father opened the door and the performance began, a tour de force from the master: making his son face the sun so he had to squint; cupping his hands round the coffee mug, as if Jonas had brought an iciness to his home; a strained holding of his son's gaze after delivering the killer line,
how
many times in your life are you going to be
wrong... son?
There was genius in that pause, Jonas almost admired it. It held a lifetime, a
universe
. When the bells of Langestrand kirke began to toll he wondered if his father had somehow planned that too.

Nowhere to go but the sea, the fever roads of all Norway behind him and still pushing, into the salty water and in time, maybe, the salt would eat away at him, break him up to drift on blissful currents, away from Haakon's judgement and his father's incredulity, the same incredulity which leached from Mary the day before, there in the wheat with her head slightly angled, as his father's had been, face shadowed and an uncanny halo around his head, silver strands of hair so clear in the last of the light that Jonas could have counted them.

His father wanted Jonas to acknowledge his failure, he knew it, an apology to underline his inferiority. But because his father was such a manipulative bastard he didn't say anything, just seemed to project it, like a hypnotist, right into his hippofuckincampus. Jonas refused. There would be no forgive me for what I've done, father, for what I've become...

Any collapse would be for Big Haakon, not his father. It would pour uncontrollably if he happened to bump into Haakon, which was why he ran to the ferry terminal after leaving his father's house. No more traumatic an echo would there be to see Haakon in the streets of this emptied town, Haakon who would say
what
became of you, Jonas?
Haakon the true fulcrum of his childhood, not his ever-crestfallen and long-dead mother or the semi-detached father who studied him with the indifference of a scientist to the object of a failed experiment.

Yet Jonas
expected
Haakon. He watched from the stern as the ferry eased into the harbour.

Somehow Haakon knew he was leaving and would appear, wave goodbye from the dock, there at the end of the white churning line of the ship's wake that glowed like phosphorescence and connected present to past and Jonas watching, following the froth of time back across the black sea, back to the dock until it all broke up in the white caps of a sudden squall.

But it wasn't Haakon he saw in the grey vagueness but two dark figures. An adult and a child. Eva and Anya, standing but not waving, his father's words fogging his mind like the smirr that eventually obscured them.
How many times in your life
are you going to be wrong?

The words had goblin-squatted in his mind ever since, an epitaph for a grinning, clinging past.

Always the past.

Jonas needed and feared it. It followed him across Europe, to the building sites of Copenhagen and bunk-beds with Estonians who every night veered a drunken path through homeland stories and if Jonas never reciprocated so what, exile imposing a camaraderie but also an impatience to get back to your own tale. It followed him to the vineyards of France and intelligent, bashful men from West Africa, who kept their heads down, like Sunny D, who stood on Dakar's terminal beach and paid the fortune to leave his wife and take the six-month journey to Morocco and north; to the strawberry fields of southern England where he slept in a fetid caravan with two hulking Romanians with photos of their children on the walls and when they asked him one evening as they demolished another bottle of vodka if he had children of his own out came a desperate but unwanted
yes.
So they knew not to ask any more questions and from then on it was football,
football
and the pretty farmer's daughter who always wore tight jeans. It followed him to the London restaurants and dishwashers ten a penny, like Asamoah, no job for six years so he paid a gang all his money and ended up in Berlin, an abattoir, and always blood under his nails until he got across the Channel beneath a lorry to work the sinks in twelve-hour shifts but at least his hands were always clean.

So many circling faces, constellations so bright in his private universe he had to turn from the glare. Sunny D and Kiev Dimitri, Asamoah and Wakaso, men who worked the Euro shadows and sent back the wages. Those men kept their heads down. They didn't befriend fourteen-year-old girls. They understood that the window of self-preservation didn't stay open long.

 

Jonas left the living room and hurried up the stairs. His camping kit was in the loft, found again when he disinterred the one-eyed doll which was now gone with Fletcher to who knows where.

Twenty minutes later his rucksack was packed. Li Po was the last to go in, rolled into a cardboard cylinder. Jonas didn't bother with one last look around before exiting by the back door.

 

He took the same route as the day before when he met Mary. Through the cypresses and over the side fence.

Again, no one saw him. He kept his head low, hurrying through the housing estate to the woods, as if to look up would be to see whole families at their windows, staring back at him.

It took ten minutes to find Sycamore Camp. The sky darkened, deep lavender to grey-mauve, car headlights flicker-strobing through the leaves. He slung the fly sheet over a branch and pulled it taut with pegs stuck through the brass eyes of the fabric. He swept the ground under the tent free of twigs and stones and unrolled the bivvy bag, stuffing in the thermal mat.

Six years evaporated. Jonas lay on top of the bag, as then, head on the rucksack, looking through the open V of the tent, watching the lights, shapes, shifting shadows in quick-time.

The question, as ever, was where to go. London was the obvious choice and he still had Asamoah's mobile number. He could work the restaurants through winter, put some cash aside and then over to Europe for the fruit season. The world opened out and for a brief moment Jonas felt the lightness of freedom glimpsed. But when he tried Asamoah the phone told him the number was not recognised. Six years had passed, after all. He hoped that gentle Asamoah had made it home. That's what all the tabloid hacks couldn't comprehend, that the West wasn't some Shangri-La no one would ever want to leave but was full of men, women and children who only came because they desperately wanted to go home again.

There it was, the ever-troubling problem of home. You build it with such care. You give it stories. You tell others, time passes and your story takes root. Sunny D, Dimitri, Asamoah and all those stories, the common denominator was home, the need to get home, I miss home.

Except Jonas didn't have a tin shack in a Dakar slum or a breadline farmstead in the Romanian mountains. He climbed into his bivvy bag. He tried to convince himself he would be able to leave.

‘Are you screwing him?'

Mary turned over in bed. Tuesday morning. The alarm clock said 5.05. Her husband was looming over her. He seemed troubled. He might have been sitting there all night. Waiting for her to wake up until he couldn't wait anymore. She made him repeat his question.

‘What?'

‘Screwing him. As well as cleaning his house.'

‘Who have you been talking to?'

‘No one. Should I be?'

‘Give it a rest, Andy.'

‘You haven't answered my question.'

‘Don't be ridiculous.' She turned back over and listened. Listened to him sitting. Sitting and looming and thinking. A few minutes later he got up. Her husband never got up this early.

Her daughter once asked why she didn't leave. A sunny August evening and just the two of them. They were half-drunk on the back patio, Andrea remaining true to the promise made on her eighteenth birthday to make a cocktail for them every Friday. That day it was Mojitos and they were halfway down their third when her daughter said
you need to get
out of here
.

It was the gravity in Andrea's voice that upset her, something long considered that couldn't be contained any longer.
It's about faithfulness
, Mary said.
Not to marriage, and it isn't blind faith either,
but faithfulness to who we were. The world moves in
cycles. I want to be here when it spins round
again
. Her daughter was scathing.
You can't possibly believe
that crap.

Now Mary couldn't sleep either.

Downstairs her husband was drinking tea. He was wearing a dressing gown. A sure signal of an argument. She wished she had put on a dressing gown as well. You can't have an argument while wearing a pink pyjama top that says
my other bed is a hammock
. No authority in it.

‘I guess you've heard?' he said.

‘The search?'

She made sure she was in bed when he got back the night before. He'd been away all day, some sales event. Texts and voice mails told him he was desperate to talk about the search. Then the thumping about in the bedroom trying to wake her, give him an excuse to start on about it. Mary kept her eyes shut. But she too was lying there thinking about the search.

‘Yeah, the search. Be a lot for you to clean up after the cops turned the place upside down.'

‘Give it a rest.'

‘Just a matter of time till they find her.'

‘You're the big expert then?'

‘I'm just saying.'

‘But you don't know a damn
thing
, do you?' She paused. ‘Has he been charged?'

‘Don't think so.'

‘Well, don't go joining the lynch-mob just yet.'

‘How can you be so sure? How well do you know this guy, eh?'

‘For Christ's sake – '

‘You
are
screwing him. Aren't you? How long for? Must be a real kick with all this going on. I want you to chuck that job in.
Now
. I don't want you going round there again. I want –'

‘I want. I want. I
want
. You've not wanted anything for years and all of a sudden you're all demands. You know what I want? Eh? Do you know what
I
want? Go on then, do you?'

‘No, I really – '

‘Exactly!'

When Mary got upstairs she was shaking. She remembered the restless wheat. Jonas's lunging kiss. She'd slept with him and most enjoyed what she could only describe as the simplicity. She'd do it again, have sex with a man who killed his wife and child. The thought appalled her.

Now the search. She still wanted to believe him but something was resisting, something in a black hole, pushing back as she reached in her hand, refusing to let her find what she was grasping for. She hadn't told him about John Hackett and wondered if she could.