A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

  Remember, how spartan that cell was. Others had postcards, pictures on the walls, odd trinkets. One guy had a collection of miniature Mickey Mouses, neatly lined up on his desk. My little boy sends me a new one every month. All Jonas had was a perfectly round pebble, smooth, black dappled with grey. He found it in the recreation yard and took it with him when he was released. It now sat on his bedside table, a totem of reassurance. When Jonas smelled it he smelled the sea and when he put his tongue to it he thought he could taste salt.

  The pebble mattered. Like him, it belonged elsewhere. He picked it up and closed his eyes, seeing the churned grass of the back lawn where Fletcher had beaten him up. The detectives had noticed but didn’t ask about the divots and muddy ruts. He hefted the pebble, feeling the weight. Fletcher entered the scene. Half naked and lying down, basking like a snake.

  Imagine standing in the sun room. Throwing the pebble. Would Fletcher’s forehead crack loudly as it landed, like a gunshot, echoing around the houses? Or would it be more of a wet plop, the skull splitting like a watermelon? Maybe, who could tell, maybe this was the unknown future purpose that made him take the pebble with him when he was released. A near miss was more likely, a thud on the grass that had Fletcher looking up and seeing Jonas.

  Like that they would remain, two unyielding Samurai, a stand-off in time-lapse, summer accelerating into autumn, winter, the clouds shifting cirrus to cumulus, azure to weaker blue and gunmetal grey, now teeming rain and snow flurries, the two of them unmoved because to move was to give ground and to give ground was to be the one to leave.

  He hefted the pebble again, threw it in the air and caught it. You needed poise to make a direct hit. But a hit could kill and a killing meant the return of the detectives, more questions. Why’d you do it son, why? Jonas as Cagney, still defiant as they strapped him to the Chair.

  How many times in a life did we answer a question? Ten questions a day means seventy a week, 3000 a year, 200,000 in seventy years. Why this need to know? When the last motive is uncovered freedom is dead. The police should be told that all their questions are killing freedom. Why did Lacey come back after your party? She just forgot her jacket, that’s all.

  The bedroom was stifling, heat trapped by closed curtains, closed windows. He put the pebble on the bedside table and sat down on the bed again. Palms on the knees. Sweat on his naked body. The mobile phone on the bed blinked blue. Probably another voice mail from Mary. He wanted to go to her but didn’t. Big Haakon was holding him back, that epic miscalculation on the day of his release. No repeats, no do-overs, once was most definitely enough.

  10 am, a thin winter drizzle and a small backpack, the cliché of the prison doors banging shut behind him.

  He had walked into town, tyres on wet tarmac and the searching eyes of passers-by who knew where he’d come from, he was sure. Then a train to Oslo and on to Larvik, a bee-line for familiarity and Big Haakon – another outcast, who’d understand, who’d swing open a welcoming door and then a tear-filled bear hug, an overflowing glass, the sweet stun of oblivion.

  But Haakon’s garden had been tidied. There was a neat lawn, flowers in little rows. The doorbell actually worked and the stranger who answered had bought the place three years ago.

  Tore still had the shop on Haralds gate. Newsagents knew the news and Jonas’s conviction had made the nationals. Tore recognised him as soon as he came in. The shop was unchanged, the same mustiness that now smelled like the dusty values of the town itself. Jonas couldn’t shake the feeling in Tore’s gaze that by leaving he’d rejected those values, a first step on a corruption that had its inevitable full stop in the darkness on the edge of Bergen.

  Tore’s grudging directions took him to the northern outskirts, a house on a subdued, new-build estate. The woman who answered the door wore an oversized silver crucifix on a chain round her neck. She said nothing for a few moments, leaving him in the downpour, face set with triumphant disdain, as if she’d just won a long-standing bet that he’d turn up one day.

  Haakon sat in a high-backed chair in a spartan living room. A tiny TV set. No bookshelves. A coffee table complete with Bible. He must have told the woman all about Jonas Mortensen, a fallen son of Larvik, this town which proved its goodness by welcoming himself, Haakon of the drunken binges, Haakon of the Apologies, back into its forgiving embrace.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ said Haakon.

  Instead of that blank indifference Jonas saw a smile from another lifetime, Haakon peering over his shoulder at the orange ember Jonas had finally managed to create from the bow-drill.

  ‘There’s nothing for you here.’

  ‘This is my home.’

  ‘This hasn’t been your home for a long time. You can’t come back and pretend it is.’

  ‘I wanted to see you. It’s been so long.’

  ‘You wanted to hide.’

  ‘What? Hide where?’

  ‘In the past.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘That little girl. Your daughter. She never got the chance to remember where she came from. You robbed her of the nostalgia you come here to indulge. I suppose you think about me with a little smile. The drunken idiot from your childhood. I’m offended that you’ve come here.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how sorry I am.’

  ‘There’s a train at four.’

  Jonas walked back to the harbour. Stood for a long time with the bobbing yachts, the rigging singing, dark squalls moving on a barely lighter Skagerrak. The sea was viscous, as if time had externally slowed. Inside, it seemed to have sped up, a tumble of memories and somewhere nearby that precious hoard of childhood, he just had to remember where he’d buried it.

  The joujouka gulls cackled, and a lurch in the stomach told Jonas, finally, how much time had passed. He saw the arrogance in expecting the same Haakon. We shift, do we not, running waves in a blustery nor’easter, cross the watersheds but still wonder how our feet got so wet.

  One continuity was guaranteed, his father’s unshakable contempt. The house by Langestrand kirke wasn’t too far away. He had written to Jonas in prison to tell him you are no longer my son. The usual melodrama, like the way he left in a midnight blizzard to move in with the golf pro he was convinced looked like Gabriela Sabatini and who left him three months later.

  It was no day for another terminal visit. Instead, he headed for the station, a watery coffee, hesitation from the teenage girl taking his order, shrewdness in the eyes, blue eyes like Anya, following him onto the train, eight hours in the exile wagon, back to Bergen, to Christinegård...

  The water pipes suddenly coughed in the bathroom. Jonas’s head jerked up. Hypnagogic images shattering. He tensed his body and relaxed. Tensed and relaxed. Then forced himself to get up and get dressed in a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The memories became shadows, slipping away with an ease that was troubling. He stared at the phone on the bed, ever-blinking with Mary’s name, listening to a ringing he gradually realised was coming from the front door.

  ‘There’s interest, Jon - , Mr Mortensen. People want to know why the police have been talking to you.’

  He’d expected this sooner. A journalist. Pink-faced and too much aftershave. He looked across the street. Gladstone was sweeping the pavement outside the café. He stopped and leaned on the brush. Jonas waved and Gladstone waved back a few moments later, a significant few moments, sizing up the situation and what he made of it.

  ‘Mr Morten– ’

  ‘Go and ask the police.’

  ‘I’ll ask them too.’

  ‘So why bother asking me?’

  ‘I’m just interested in your take. Maybe I should come in?’

  Gladstone had been joined by the hairdresser from the ever-empty salon. She’d dyed her hair green, something to do in the absence of clients. They were talking as they watched.

  ‘You think I’m embarrassed?’

  ‘No. I think you’re terrified and don’t have a clue where this is going to end. I can help
you.’

  ‘That right.’

  ‘I can get you 10k for your story. Might come in handy later.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘Fifteen at a push. People have a right to know.’

  ‘No they don’t.’

  ‘Are you saying that – ’

  ‘What I’m saying is that you’re getting confused about rights. People might want to know. Doesn’t make it a right.’

  ‘What are you, the village philosopher?’

  ‘I studied it.’

  ‘And now you fix potholes.’

  Jonas made to close the door and the reporter stepped forward.

  ‘Don’t be a prick all your life, I’m only trying to – ’

  ‘You’re only trying to do what?’ Jonas grabbed him by the shirt. ‘What the fuck are you only trying to do?’

  ‘Look up the street!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The street. Look.’

  Jonas held his grip and looked to his right.

  ‘See that blue Ford? That’s the police. Red Golf on the other side? That’s my photographer. You really want the cops to come running and my buddy to snap it all for the front page?’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  ‘Look Jonas. Cops blab. A few quid here, there, piece of piss, mate. I know about Norway, your wife and kid. 10k. You can get ahead of the game and you better believe that this is a game. I don’t care if you really killed Lacey and you know what? No one else does. You’re the guy. You’re the bogeyman. You better tell your story before someone tells it for you.’

  Jonas let go of the journalist. Stared right at him. ‘Can I tell you something? Off the record?’

  The journalist’s eyes lit up. ‘Course you can.’

  ‘People like you. You’d take a picture of your dying child before you called an ambulance.’

  He slammed the door.

  Slumped to the floor. Above him the letterbox clacked and the reporter’s business card landed in his lap. Jonas immediately crumpled it, then, a few moments later, smoothed it out.

  His face grew hot. Gladstone, that pause before he waved, the green-haired girl, Tore the newsagent and Haakon of the Cross before them, Haakon who may at this exact moment be holding court after a prayer meeting, telling the whole damn group about this man he once knew, Jonas Mortensen, who’d grown in the repeated telling to become the reporter’s demon, the aberration in our midst who reassures us of our own goodness, our normality.

  Only then did he register Fletcher at the end of the hall. The sun from the kitchen doorway was dazzling and Jonas couldn’t see his face, just a black outline in quivering, silvery light.

  ‘Everyone’s got a story,’ said Jonas. ‘You haven’t told me yours.’

  ‘You don’t want to know my story.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘You know they’re going to search this place.’

  Jonas closed his eyes.

  ‘They’re going to have crime scene vans and flashing lights, police tape everywhere. Maybe even those white boiler suits, you know the ones. That the forensic people wear? It’s all gonna get a bit CSI, hope you’ve cleaned your bedroom. But they’ll know if you’ve done that and they’ll want to know why. You’re kinda screwed either way. People are going to stand on the street, watching it all happen. For hours, like the circus. Probably be an ice cream van.’

  ‘Just go. Go away. GO!’

  ‘What did you really do when she came back? For that blue jacket. It was blue, wasn’t it?’

  When he opened his eyes Fletcher was gone. He stared into the streaming light until his eyes hurt. Upstairs, his mobile was ringing. This was the hunt. This was what Jonas remembered.

  Thirty-two

  Lacey disappearance, arrest imminent? Mary listened to Jonas’s voicemail message, watching the black on yellow BREAKING NEWS tickering along the TV screen. She shoved the mobile in her pocket, annoyed he was still ignoring her calls. The TV cut to a montage of recent events; yellow-bibbed search teams, flowers outside the church. And Mary herself, shouting at the journalists.

  She closed her eyes, opened them to the endless boxes of breakfast cereals and their happy cartoon faces. How long would she have to stare at them before the world regained any sense? Daisy passed. At the end of the aisle she raised her head to the TV and looked back.

  Mary’s anger was sudden, the sod it just as quick. People could think what they liked. She’d lived here all her life. Sometimes the glaringly obvious went under the radar while carefully managed secrets might have been broadcast from the church steeple. 24-7 media speculation and reality TV was made for places like this, gossip and suspicion an antique instinct.

  When she went into the store room Daisy was there again, with Meg, whispers that abruptly stopped. They knew she worked with Jonas at The Hub and Meg had seen her going into his house. As deviant by association she had two choices. Go to ground or ignore the gossip. With typical decisiveness she chose the latter and with the same decisiveness changed her mind on the walk home.

  The change of mind troubled her. She felt she’d let Jonas down. If we were all in need of some solace, then some needed it more than others. Mary couldn’t imagine the awfulness of losing her daughter. As he’d been forced to tell her, so Jonas would tell the police the story he wanted to keep buried. The world was like that, every secret on borrowed time.

  From the entrance to the cul-de-sac she could see her husband’s Renault parked outside the house. Without thinking, she carried on past, heading for the trees that led round to the nature park.

  The picnic area was deserted but she still felt self-conscious. Sitting at a table in her supermarket uniform wasn’t normal. Only old people were allowed to sit and stare. Daisy and Meg would somehow find out. She imagined hurrying up to them, an excited whisper like theirs.

  John Hackett is back.

  Twenty-three years later, just as Lacey disappeared. Mary would be the centre of a sensation. Suspicion would swing lightning fast from Jonas to John. They would remember what John did, supposedly, to his sister who was never found. No smoke without fire, they would say again.

  As with his little sister, Mary didn’t believe John had anything to do with Lacey. Nothing she had ever known suggested the world moved in so neat and obvious a manner. Other people must know this but that was why they ignored it. They wanted certainty, the crowd outside Jonas’s house or the tabloid headline from May 1991, John Hackett’s haunted teenage face.

  What does he know?

  She disliked John’s assumption that she wouldn’t say a word to anyone. But she wouldn’t. Except Jonas.

  When she phoned again he finally answered. She was brief. They agreed to meet. She decided not to tell him how angry she was about him ignoring her calls. It seemed needy. The sun swelled and she raised her face. There was a heaviness in the air, a storm on its way.

  She hoped at this very moment that her daughter was sitting in a pub garden getting completely plastered, full of the certainty that life was a long, straight superhighway through ever-lasting happiness. Mary wanted that certainty too. Perhaps she would finally leave the village and its decrepit stories that were forever etched, like the old initials and I love so-and-sos carved onto the picnic table. She wanted a future, like the one Andrea saw when she looked at the boy she’d told her about on the phone, the one with the glacier-blue eyes.

  Jonas had green eyes. Mary couldn’t believe he’d stood her up in his own house. Or rather, John Hackett’s house. What a charade, the cousin thing, all of it. She wanted to know why Jonas was living there and was annoyed for not asking him on the phone. Now she had to wait, again.

  * * *

  Axel once told Jonas that girls liked to do this. Lie on their backs in a field and look up into the clouds, making shapes from the wisps and puffs. You’re right in there if you see a bunny or a teddy bear, girls love all that. Jonas was doubtful, even aged fourteen, when any stratagem, however desperate, was to be considered in the fevered effort to get hi
s hands inside a pair of knickers.

  Big Haakon brought more sophistication. Told them about the art of reading portents in the clouds, the shamen who spent lifetimes waiting for the map to reveal. Just a matter of knowing what to look for, boys. But lying there and looking up, Jonas didn’t want to find a damn thing in the clouds.

  Now and then he poked his head up above the wheat. Looked across to the road to see if Mary had appeared. She said she’d meet him at the end of the single-track to the west, out by the new housing development. The longer he waited the more likely he’d be seen. Round the village it would flash that the Viking, Jonas of the Porn, was hanging about in the middle of nowhere. Hence the field, a wade into chest-high wheat, skulking like an animal.

  Getting there had been problematic. The photographer’s car was still parked along the street from End Point and another had appeared a few hours ago. Two people inside. Then there was the man in the wraparound shades, who periodically appeared outside Gladstone’s café to smoke a cigarette and stare across the street. He made phone calls every fifteen minutes, turning away as he did, as if he knew Jonas was watching and might read his lips.

  So reassess, Mr M, no way you’re leaving by the front door. He’d seen it. You see it all the time. The stock in trade of the tabloids, a series of photos running across two pages: the hunted, peering over his shoulder as he scurries out of his house. The TV equivalent would be a hand shoved in the lens of the camera poked in his face, the inevitable no comment followed by a nervous glance back, always that glance back, and in that glance is only ever culpability.

  He left via the back garden. Into the cypresses and quickly over the back fence to the side-street, an over-exposed walk-cum-run through the deserted housing estate, into Panama Lane and the woods of Sycamore Camp, the canopy camouflage of white-beam and birch, beech and hazel, counter-clockwise to the westerly fringes of the village, quickly across open ground, a scrubby field mined with sun-dried cow pats, and there was the single-track.