A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

  ‘I don’t have a TV.’

  ‘There’s darkness in the best of places and the best of places have the worst of shadows.’

  ‘Where did you read that?’

  ‘I didn’t. I made it up.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Nah.’

  And on and on with the speculation. He only shut up when the jack hammer was going.

  ‘Nowhere is innocent,’ he stated in the van at lunchtime.

  ‘Shut up, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Telling you.’

  But Eggers seemed genuinely affected. Didn’t even open the laptop and watch the usual lunchtime show. Just picked at his tuna and mayo sandwich and stared at the passing traffic.

  ‘It’s happened before, you know.’

  ‘Here we go again.’

  ‘It has!’

  Jonas left him to it. The obsession was typical Eggers. Here was an all-purpose addict of roving compulsions. Alongside the booze and the porn were the food fads. Like the pickled eggs a couple of years back, so strange that Jonas gave it an historical title: the Time of the Eggs. Every day for weeks they had to stop at a chip shop for a pickled egg. Eggers only weaned himself off with mini pork pies and yes, Jonas, they have to be mini. The Lacey mania would go on and on until Jonas seriously considered ending it with a clatter of the tar shovel.

  Instead of murder he fired up the jack hammer. No ear protectors. Pounding his thoughts to dust: Eggers; the detectives and the magazines; the stop-motion memories of Mary at the gig; Fletcher’s grin. But Eggers sought him out. When he switched off to a startling quiet there he was, hurrying towards him and waving a mobile which Jonas saw was his own.

  ‘I answered your phone. It was Mark and I figured Mark from The Hub and he might have some info.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We have to get back.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What’s with the demon hammering, you on commission?’

  Twenty, thirty cars crammed into the village hall car park. Eggers pulled up beside a Sky TV van. He lit a cigarette, settled the shades and swaggered towards the hall, Eastwood in a high-vis jerkin.

  Jonas watched him go. He leaned against the van and thought about the magazines and who might know. A paranoia flash saw it happen, the TV crew by the door swinging the camera his way, the microphone in his face and what do you have to say to these allegations?

  Inside, the hall was sweltering, much more male than the police briefing two days ago. He felt it, an excitement, all the more obvious for the attempts to hide it behind over-played frowns.

  People remembered the Viking with the drinks tray. Some nodded, some looked away and some stared, as if daring him to say something. Jonas thought about the guy in Vigeland Park, Oslo, who said he recognised him from the front page of Verdens Gang, then punched him in the face.

  So let benevolence and camaraderie light the sweaty face but hit the dimmer switch, keep the mouth shut. Jonas smiled a small smile he hoped was low-key but suddenly worried was too enigmatic. Or too jovial? Or just really irritating? He decided to stop smiling.

  ‘Jonas!’

  He flinched at the tap on his shoulder. Mark. Electric-pink Bermuda shorts and an anxious babble.

  ‘They want me to speak. I’m a community leader, apparently. The police want to stick with specialist search teams but they want to broaden it. I don’t agree, what do you think, the police know what they’re doing, don’t they?’

  Gone before Jonas could reply. He watched Mark climb the stairs to the stage, wondering why he chose those shorts.

  The same table had been set up on stage. Mark was sitting alongside several other local luminaries: district councillor Bacon; the chairman of the parish council; the high school headmaster; the chair of the Rotary Club... A consensus would have taken a minute but they each got three, the community should organise a parallel search… the police aren’t making use of local knowledge and almost five days have passed… why are they still focusing on the park..?

  And then Mark. He gulped. He was bold. He made the absent counter-argument, the police were the experts... they know their job... do we want to risk hampering the investigation?

  But as the disquiet rose, the more beet-faced Mark bumbled on. His voice took on a wavering shrillness and Jonas willed him to shut up and sit down. He reminded him of those out of place teachers back in Bergen. No gravitas. The kids were merciless, like the crowd in the hall. Jonas picked out an underlying edge to the hostility, the same he had felt in Gladstone’s look when the detectives left End Point that morning, an as yet unstated suspicion directed at someone who works with children and hasn’t a child just gone missing?

  Councillor Bacon brought the judo chop. The octogenarian Cabinet Member for Communities, ten times elected and a man of unswerving patrician certainty, silenced Mark with one line.

  ‘As elected district councillor, I am the authority, Mr Stephens, and I call for a show of hands.’

  ‘No’ was called first. Mark’s arm went up, along with a dozen others. The mutters rose, people turning to see who’d voted no. Some arms came down but Mark seemed to enter a state of stasis. His arm stayed up, palm out like a fascist salute, fingers strangely waggling.

  Jonas couldn’t help it. He watched his own arm rise up. Instinctive, an eccentric reaction from an eccentric man. Mark and Old Sam knew he was like this, Eggers too but Eggers had caught his eye and looked genuinely appalled. Jonas lowered his arm, down into the murmurs.

  ‘Yes’ won in a landslide.

  Councillor Bacon went full Churchill. Time is of the essence... community frustration will become community determination… The TV crew arranged people behind him, kids and adults, older people, the visual will of the community reflected in the councillor’s shiny bald head.

  Suck it up. That’s what the kids in The Hub said when someone screwed up. That’s what Lacey would say. Suck it up, Mr M, he could hear her, if only he could hear her now. So Jonas could do nothing but suffer the stabbing looks on his treacherous back as he headed to the toilet to splash cold water on his face that was scarlet for a reason and everyone surely knew why.

  He crossed to the urinals and chose the one furthest from the door, wondering if most men would do the same, even if no one was standing at any other. He directed his piss onto the blue disinfectant cube, which set him thinking about how long it would take to dissolve.

  Imagine it was your job, Lacey, that you’re a boffin working for Unilever? Would you wake at night, heart-sick at the degeneration of your cancer-curing idealism? Or would you be excited by building the ultimate, long-lasting disinfectant cube? And why blue or yellow? What’s the reason, Lacey? Why, in all the urinals of all the world, are they only blue or yellow?

  Lacey had started laughing now, a great sense of humour that girl. Jonas watched her laughing until she cried, he’d seen her cry a few times but that’s what hugs were for. He hoped she wasn’t disappointed with him. The no vote meant nothing. Don’t read anything into it.

  The door banged. He turned to two men, one he didn’t recognise but the other he did.

  Psycho Dave from the Jonsok party. ‘Well, look who we’ve got here, Dr No himself.’

  The other man laughed.

  ‘Heard the police said a little hello.’

  Despite the sense of threat, the words were actually a relief. The visit from the detectives was known about but not the reason, yet. On the outrage spectrum Dr No was infinitely better than something magazine-associated like look who we’ve got here, Mr Paedo himself.

  Jonas walked to the hand dryer and Dave stepped in front it. He turned to the paper towels but the unknown man moved towards him. He braced himself and Munich flashed, the three skinheads who jumped Kiev Dimitri when he went to the bar in Laimer’s beer garden. Dimi was big. He’d taken out two by the time Jonas reached him, just in time to get his nose burst.

  Then the door opened ag
ain and there was Eggers. Let it go, lads and the two men backed off.

  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.

  Twenty

  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.