‘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.
The counsellor was a liar or a fool. Those images were going nowhere, no matter all those conversations and all the milligrams of the drugs that made muddy shapes of the dying and a mumble of their animal screams, but the images all the more unsettling for being not quite visible and not quite audible. The counsellor was captivated, he wanted more.
So after telling him how he killed the Afghan girl Fletcher told him about his little sister.
The counsellor had flushed, trying to hide his exhilaration but obviously thinking conditions, syndromes. Fletcher helped him down the diagnostic path, gave him detail, easy-flow nonsense about searching for pictures of young girls in magazines which he would rip into pieces and bury in parks and woods, roadside verges. It was priceless, the way the counsellor’s concern mingled with his professional pleasure and touched on such hilarious self-importance.
It wasn’t too often the counsellor came across a Corporal Fletcher. He could see the bland consulting room now, sitting again in that chair, not a couch like in a film, just a hard black plastic chair and nowhere to put your elbows. Hands held up in front of his face, Fletcher was demonstrating how he ripped the pictures. The shreds fall like confetti, he told the counsellor.
The village teams were going to search this area tomorrow. He imagined the excitement of coming across a patch of disturbed ground, digging down to a pile of ripped up paper, obviously a picture of a girl, a teenage girl like Lacey. They would cluster round, thinking about a dark figure, stooped in the middle of the night, dirt under the fingernails. And the longer he thought about that crouching, digging figure the more familiar became his doubt.
Two hours later he finished the sweep. No paper shreds in the blackberry bushes, no tell-tale disturbances on the ground. He climbed back inside The Skull and checked the binoculars. Mary and Mortensen were gone. The only movement was the shifting colours of the traffic lights on the river. He swept east to west and back again, searching for a similar monochromatic certainty about something that might or might not have happened here. The edgy panic had gone. It was bizarre to think he could do something as unsettling as rip up pictures of young girls. And then bury them? No one passing him on the street would suspect this of him, as he wouldn’t think it of them. That’s the thing, we’re all so normal until we aren
’t.
Twenty-one
Jonas was in Big Haakon’s kitchen. Dirty dishes and his fat dog Freki. A howling wind drove hailstones against the window. Axel was standing beside him, shouting duck and dive, duck and dive as Haakon danced round him, boxing-gloved hands hanging loose then suddenly jabbing, Jonas always a moment late to protect himself. Mary appeared at the window. She was laughing.
‘You getting up today?’
‘Go away, Axel.’
‘Who the hell is Axel? You’re not in Viking land now, boy.’
Jonas flailed, surfacing from sleep and trying to re-root himself in space. Big Haakon kept on pummelling but the voice wasn’t his. He opened his eyes to Eggers’s grinning face, appearing and disappearing behind the white pillow that he was beating him on the head with.
‘What’s the deal, man, stop doing that!’
‘I’ll stop doing it when you get up. Or maybe I won’t.’
‘Christ sakes!’
‘Blas-phemer!’
And Eggers whacked him savagely, full on the face, forcing Jonas to roll over and get up.
‘You made it. Well done. I thought you were dead to begin with. First few thumps you barely moved.’
‘Is this punishment then?’
‘Eh?’
‘For voting no.’
Eggers threw the pillow at him. ‘If you like.’
‘Could have been worse.’
‘You saw Dave and his friend.’
‘Thanks for that.’
‘Don’t thank me, Jonas. I could’ve slapped you too.’
‘What are you doing here anyway?’
‘You still half asleep? You told me to pick you up.’
Jonas nodded vaguely. He looked behind Eggers at the open door. The chair he’d jammed under the handle the night before to prevent Fletcher getting in was over by the window. It had a pile of clean underwear on it, the pile he put on the floor when he moved the chair.
‘How’d you get in?’
‘Eh? The key, dumbass, the one you leave under the plant pot. That’s another dumbass thing to – ’
‘Not the front door. The bedroom.’
Eggers looked at him carefully. ‘Get the pills, will I dear? How did I get in? Through... the... fuckin... door.’
When Eggers went downstairs, Jonas pulled it open and shut a few times, making sure it still fulfilled its function as a normal and not a magic door. He moved the chair back under the door handle and pulled it down. The handle got stuck under the back-board and the door wouldn’t open. So how had Fletcher got inside? Had he come in the bloody window?
Across the landing the spare room door was closed. Maybe he was in there and maybe not.
‘You coming then?’
‘On my way.’
Jonas already hurrying down the stairs. No way he was hanging around for the bearded ninja in the red shorts to come swinging out of the loft and kick him in the throat. No sign of Fletcher downstairs either. Just his coffee mug on the table beside Eggers and an open sun room door. Eggers might have looked at him strangely, or maybe it was just Eggers being Eggers. He nodded at the open door. ‘Thought you were paranoid about another break-in?’
Councillor Bacon preened on the green. A tweed-jacketed peacock of grave demeanour. But the strap of his megaphone was rainbow coloured, a dash of Gay Pride which gave a fruitier counter-impression, the venerable councillor as a ripe old queen. He was helped onto a bench and waved his arms for quiet. The whole village seemed to have turned out, briefed by Bacon in the fizzing rain.
Jonas scanned the crowd, clusters of families and friends under a hundred umbrellas. A police officer in a yellow bib stared at him, the gaze locked on every time Jonas glanced up. He looked round but not too closely. Told himself no one else was staring, no other hints that the magazine story was out.
It would, of course, just like he remembered. Right now someone, maybe that staring cop, was firming up the cartoon snowball, ready to roll it down the hill and swallow him up.
His thoughts drifted to Lacey, Bacon just a buzz on the edge of his consciousness, avoidable, unlike the girl. His stomach turned when he thought of last night’s conversation with Mary. Heat in his cheeks now, hotter the more he turned it over. He kept his head low but when he looked up again there she was, twenty feet away and frowning, probably wondering about his big red face.
That British comedy show from the 1970s, his dad loved it. Jonas couldn’t remember the name. The one with the big finger that would come down from the sky. That’s what Mary’s appraising glance felt like. A comedy finger, pointing right at him. All it needed was a sudden klaxon and the crowd scattering, Jonas caught in the spotlight from a police helicopter.
The Day-Glo search teams straggled out of the village towards Ragley Woods, spilling like the rain onto the road. Jonas was in Group One, the western team. When they veered onto the muddy river path, Group Two kept on the road, heading for the 4x4 access, coming in from the east. Both groups would rendezvous at Smitty’s Leap in the dead centre of the woods.
At 9 am precisely a whistle blew sharply, spooking a flock of river ducks to flight. Left and right of Jonas at ten metre intervals were people he didn’t know. Team West headed into the trees to look for Lacey, who wouldn’t be found because when did that ever happen?
At least Jonas liked the woods. They were imperturbable. Made him think of druids in the cool dawn. He’d thought about bivvying down with them when he arrived in the village. But a car park notice-board told him Ragley Woods were used for academic research. The metal cages in the trees were for analysis of bird behaviour, the staked-off areas around badger sets to investigate territorial patterns. Chances are there were cameras. He didn’t want to be filmed building a shelter, a white-skinned Bigfoot with darting eyes. So he headed instead for the sickly copse of car-stained white-beam down by the dual carriageway.
Team West found nothing. Closest they got was a boiler suit. An excited shout after lunch brought everyone running to a stagnant pool. A piece of dark fabric was just visible under the murky water, a quick hook and grab with a hazel switch and.... Jonas chuckled, nudged the man beside him. Imagine what his wife said when he came home in just his boots. The man just stared. C’mon. Lacey had a great sense of humour! He decided it best not to tell him this.
The ghost men appeared soon after. He’d left the line for a piss and was zipping up when there they suddenly were. It wasn’t until they hurried closer that he noticed the black balaclavas.
Then Jonas was running and they were running and sometimes you slip and sometimes in the worst of places, like now, foot on a wet root and thaaar he goes, Jonas tumbling down a bank but savvy enough when he hit bottom to curl into a ball, brace for the kicks.
‘Watch your step there, Thor.’
He tensed.
Nothing happened.
A long minute later he sat up. Cautious like, but no one around. Beside him, rain pattered a magazine left open at the centrefold. A young woman in a cheerleader’s outfit lay with her legs spread, hands cupped round her breasts. He lay back down and whacked his head off the ground a few times. He should go running after the balaclava men with a Formula One safety flag, make a frantic T with his hands. Time out lads, time out, slow this all down!
He remembered the policeman on the village green staring at him. Off-duty down the pub. A few pints, a few loose words. Everyone but Jonas wanted to be the centre of something.
Twenty-two
Mary kicked at a rotten log. White shreds of dead wood spilled onto the wet grass, like maggots. Her thoughts of journalists were automatic, as was the nausea. She was all over the TV.
The morning shows of Sky, BBC and ITV all led with Mary. Each news anchor settled a straight-from-the-box sympathetic frown and delivered variations on the same theme, local anger… an overspill of frustration… And over the shoulder of each a similar freeze-frame of Mary’s angry face, the mobile phone footage of her outburst on the green repeated again and again.
Because of Mary a fourteen-year-old had gone missing all over again, the girl she was now searching the woods for. The rain made it worse, saturating the world in the melancholy reason for being there, her hiking boots leaking as the downpour met warm earth and created a steam-like haze that made vague coloured daubs of the searchers to her left and right.
Her husband had cried off from the search. She’d got in at 1 am the night before but he hadn’t appeared until three. He crept around in the dark then fell over. That’s how I must have tweaked my back, he said in the morning, his breath like something had died in his mouth.
Not that a bad back stopped him shoving a hand between her legs. Mary closed them tightly then opened them. She was thinking about Jonas, the look on his face as he watched her hoovering his living room. She liked it. She wanted that look. She’d been wearing her yoga pants, the ones that showed off her bum, and a loose white shirt. It was hot, natural to leave a couple of buttons open. Like an erotic movie, Emmanuelle the Maid. All so very, very English.
Her husband would probably be more appalled by the cleaning than the flirtation. She’d be demeaning herself, or rather him, bringing him way down in the estimation of his poker friends, his P-Buds, as he called them. The supermarket was bad enough, but cleaning? He’d hate it, which gave her a sense of satisfaction that was wildly out of proportion. She moved her legs further apart. Maybe he’d even be a bit jealous, his wife bent over in a strange man’s living room, lazily running a hoover back and forth, his eyes on her. She pushed her husband’s shoulders and he obliged, moved down, did what he was good at.
A Private Haunting Page 12