A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

  Eggers frowned. He was still staring at Hogg. Then nodded, slowly then faster, a man in the process of making a decision. ‘That’s right. Personal use of the van. A few times he’s taken it out.’

  ‘You have to be joking!’ said Jonas.

  Hogg stood up and pointed Jonas towards the door. ‘You heard it. There’ll be a letter in the post.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The disciplinary.’

  ‘That’s what happens when you step out of line, mate,’ Eggers blurted out. ‘There’s consequences.’

  They followed him across the site. When Jonas crossed the lanes of traffic they were still watching, watching him all the way into the distance.

  Eggers. He was doing a Haroldson and Mikke. Two teacher friends from Skillebekk High who kept a similar distance when Jonas was released. Neither would meet him and no chance of a reference. Not that he’d have got anywhere near a teaching post. A warehouse job was hard enough. They wanted to know about the long employment gap so Jonas started to lie. He turned himself into a fish packer from Lofoten, a trawler jock from Hammerfest...

  It was startling, how it flowed, the details Jonas conjured. He almost convinced himself he had a gift for improvisation until he realised that most people weren’t listening. They wanted to hear but they didn’t want to listen. He could stretch his nonsense to higher planes of inanity before they finally twigged. It made him feel better about being shunned by old friends. In true connection was loyalty and forgiveness. In its absence there could have been no connection to begin with. He wondered what Haroldson and Mikke had heard when he had talked to them, joked with them, all those hours in the bar after parent evenings. What were they really thinking about when he was rambling on? And then he realised he couldn’t remember a damn thing about what they had told him. It was a liberating moment, to know that every face was a mask and behind every mask was a stranger.

  He headed back into town. To the bus station and a coffee while he waited for the B4, watching the orange scrolling digital destination screens, nine mins, six mins, two mins. DUE.

  One of the place names drew his eye, something there he suddenly remembered. Longworth, the village where the weapons expert, Dr David Kelly, was hounded to an alleged suicide after questioning Blair’s weapons of mass destruction claims. Twenty-nine co-proxamol and the heart-breaking pathos of a childhood pocket knife. But if there is despair in killing yourself there is so much more in wanting the bliss of an escape you know you can’t make.

  That December afternoon at Christinegård. Mad as the blizzard outside. Staring into the bathroom mirror and shivering with soul-deep cold, more profound than the harshest winter. Fifty paracetamol and a bottle of vodka. He swallowed twenty before Eva touched his cheek.

  Such forgiveness for what he had done to her and Anya. Or such pity for his lack of courage to follow through. He began to cry. Felt her stroke his head as he made himself throw up.

  The B4 rolled in and Jonas got on. Ain’t no one likes a killer. It’s just a thing. Made you think twice about a handshake, never mind sex. But c’mon, Mary, what’s a little killing between friends and lovers? Uncork that fine Burgundy and let’s drink! Drink to the last images of a wife and daughter, to the blood on the floor of an old Saab and rain like in the movies, Jonas on his knees and he’d only had two beers, two beers, he wasn’t drunk, the car skidded on slick moss at the side of the road is all, green and unseen but he was still over the limit.

  No one forgave. Not Eva. Not one of the people who stared as he walked from the bus stop to the supermarket. Not Mary, who Jonas told himself he wasn’t looking for as he walked the aisles. He just needed some food. Even the hunted needed baked beans. Baked beans meant normality. He picked up a tin and turned it in his hand. Supermarket brand. There was nothing as reassuring as a tin of beans. You may be lying in bed with the final fever but hey, be reassured that a few streets away there’s a tin of beans on a supermarket shelf as there always would be. A tin of beans could save a man. A tin of beans was normalising in a way that making five little fires with a bow-drill in the middle of the night could never be.

  He put nine tins in his trolley alongside the seven tins of tuna. Tuna was also normal though not as normal as beans, tuna being a little bit more aspirational. All in all, though, these were normal items. The abnormality came from the numbers, the till assistant would think it peculiar that he was buying seven tins of tuna and nine tins of beans. And why odd numbers? Why not eight of each? Jonas had no answer. The numbers were weird. He was weird.

  They knew that already.

  They peered at him round corners. Shop workers and shoppers, members of the public, he should call them, to distinguish them from himself, who was something else altogether.

  Some people he recognised and some he didn’t. They watched him choose his bread and meat and cheese, following it from shelf to hand to trolley, eyes lingering on each item, as if it could reveal something about him, or they were comparing themselves to him. He wondered if they put their own bread and meat and cheese back on the shelves after seeing that he’d chosen the same things. There could be no parallels with Killer J. Not even the most ordinary.

  He didn’t see Mary.

  She couldn’t be on shift. He gave up his hopeful dawdlings and joined the queue. Four assistants behind the tills. The man in front turned and stared. Looked away shaking his head.

  It took five minutes to shuffle to the sweets and newspaper shelves that were the barrier between queue and tills. He saw the headline on the front page of The Sun. Lacey suspect a killer! 2 am visit from missing girl. He picked the newspaper up and put it in his basket.

  ‘No,’ said the assistant, when Jonas stepped forward.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Not serving you.’

  The boy was about eighteen. Ginger hair. Jonas opened his arms wide. ‘You can’t just say no.’

  ‘Just did, mate.’

  Jonas moved to the till anyway and started piling up his items. The assistant glanced down at the newspaper. ‘It wasn’t murder, you know. Manslaughter.’ The assistant seemed unnerved. He looked at his colleague with the bleached blonde hair and bright red lipstick who was doing her best to be a thousand miles away. ‘And Lacey came round at midnight, not two.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  ‘Whatever I say. Don’t you think it’s important? Don’t you think that it’s important to know the facts?’

  The assistant reached under the counter and a bell started ringing. ‘You’ll have to leave.’

  ‘Yeah. Just leave!’

  Jonas turned to the woman with the pram who’d shouted from the queue. ‘They’ve got no right to do this.’

  ‘Go back home!’

  ‘This is my home.’

  Danny from The Hub appeared. He’d tell his colleague to serve him. He’d insist. Or make a point of serving him himself. He was with a fat man whose badge said Tim- Supervisor.

  ‘Sir,’ said Tim.

  ‘Don’t call him sir!’ shouted pram woman.

  ‘Sir. I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’

  Jonas stared. He wondered about the insistence on calling him sir. Then he looked to Danny, who looked him straight in the eye. No trace of embarrassment. No awkwardness at all.

  ‘Just fuck off, Jonas.’

  ‘C’mon, Danny.’

  ‘Fuck… OFF!’

  What do you do? There’s no manual. You stare stupidly at your items and leave them on the counter. You shuffle as Jonas now shuffled. Red-faced. Back to the no-man’s-land between queue and till, the supermarket revolving around him. Staring people and beeping tills.

  Pram woman shoved past. She was buying twenty-four jam doughnuts, one apple and a copy of The Sun. There he was again, Front Page Jonas. Close up. Hands on hips. He looked arrogant. The journalist at the door had warned him there was a photographer in that Golf.

  Norway’s Sun equivalent, Verdens Gang, managed to photograph him twice at Christinegård. />
  The first was the worst, two weeks after he was released. Telephoto shot and another front page. Sat in the back garden in his shorts, laughing, but no right of reply to say what he was laughing at and why it was all so understandable if they had taken a little time to find out.

  Thirty-seven

  Mary saw Jonas come into the supermarket. She was stocking fruit when the automatic doors opened. Hurrying through to the back shop, she spent five minutes in the toilet, then five minutes unpacking boxes from the new delivery. This gave her the excuse to go to the manager’s office, where they stacked the overflow. There was a bank of CCTV monitors in there.

  Jonas was still in the supermarket. She picked him up in the tinned foods aisle and followed him from camera to camera. He was dawdling, obviously waiting for her to appear. Then he suddenly looked up at the camera and for an unsettling moment Mary was sure he could see her.

  Tim the supervisor came into the office. She stared at him dumbly, unable to think of a reason for being there. Tim had a little crush and said nothing. A red sheen appeared on his forehead when he asked if she could help him check off the delivery. A moment later the counter bell rang.

  Tim said duty calls and headed for the floor. Mary watched Jonas’s humiliation and didn’t know what to think. She’d read the article in The Sun again and again. Footsteps made her turn around and there was Daisy, a pinched smile as she looked from the screen to Mary.

  She pushed past Daisy without a word and left the supermarket by the back entrance. The worst they could do was fire her. At least her husband would be happy. But Tim wouldn’t do that. He’d want to talk, a chance to be alone and sympathetic. Is everything ok, Mary?

  She walked and walked and wanted to run. 10k, 20k, further and further and still in her uniform, running in her tights with her skirt round her waist, shoes in her hands. They’d all be watching, a bemused little crowd. Tim, Daisy, Meg and Mary’s ever bewildered husband.

  Daisy, she was revelling in it. But she didn’t know a thing, neither about Jonas nor the fact that John Hackett was back. Surely she remembered John Hackett, what he did to his sister?

  Mary could bring little to mind about John other than the sensation of the police investigation. The teenage romance may never have happened. As with so much in her life it had left no trace. An awkward boy is all that came back, over-keen, the kiss of death for seventeen-year-old Mary. When she dumped him she probably had a good laugh about it with her friends.

  Two hours later, Mary turned up at End Point. She recognised a couple of the journalists she’d shouted at a few nights ago. They looked on impassively as a dozen lenses turned to her.

  Jonas was sitting cross-legged in the living room with his back to the door. Buddha among a scatter of LPs. A deep, fractured voice was singing, the voice booming from the surround-sound speakers.

  It’s up in the morning and on the downs, little white clouds like gambolling lambs, and I am breathless without you...

  She watched him stand up and put his arms around an imaginary partner, dancing with his eyes closed, slow spins and careful steps. A fragility of such perfection that tears came to her eyes.

  ‘Jonas?’

  He didn’t seem surprised to see her. ‘Nick Cave. Breathless. It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Are you ok?’

  ‘The album’s called the Lyre of Orpheus. A lyre. Like me eh? I feel like I’m in the underworld too.’

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  ‘I’d put it number ten or eleven on my list. Albums, not songs. Song-wise it’s in my top five. I’ve got a thing for Krautrock so I’d probably put Can and Harmonium ahead of it. And Neu, of course. In fact...’ Jonas crouched down to the record shelves and ran a finger along the spines.

  ‘Jonas – ’

  ‘You heard this? Neu, Isi.’ He sat back down on the floor and again closed his eyes, nodding along to the driving beat and delicate keyboard rises. He was smiling, a thousand miles away.

  When the track ended he lifted the needle into silence. ‘I had to buy all my records again after I left. I’m almost there. A few more to go.’ He cocked his head, listening. ‘Is that rain?’ His face brightened and he moved to the CD shelves, picking one out. ‘Right. Come with me.’

  She followed him into the kitchen. He put the CD into the portable player on top of the fridge.

  ‘Howie B.’

  The light was grey, becoming greyer as day became rain became dusk. He opened the sun room door as music filled the kitchen, an insistent bass line, off-kilter. She let him lead her, undone by his smile, out of the door and into the pouring rain, the music rising into each slackening, falling as the deluge returned. She was soaked and he was holding her so tightly, whispering the lyrics in her ear as they shuffled on the grass. Take your partner by the hand. She’s a woman, he’s a man. What’s so hard to understand? Take your partner by the hand.

  The affection she felt was very real. She thought of her honeymoon in Thailand, the rainforest cabin in the hills of Chiang Mai. Her husband couldn’t stand it, moaning about the humidity.

  Every night about seven there was a storm. On the third day she joined it, slowly twirling as he watched and laughed, refusing to join her. She was so disappointed as she walked away, down a winding path become a stream until she was alone in a secret monsoon, rain on a pond, quivering water plants edged in half-moons of ghost light, a lantern rocking in a tree and every shape with more depth than day, hibiscus dripping the night-beat.

  Then, in place of affection, came a deep, alienating sadness. She pulled away from Jonas and sat in the sun room, listening to the song. Wait a minute, where am I, on this elevator to nowhere. Still he danced in the rain, as she had, watching him as her husband had watched her.

  ‘Funny bugger, isn’t he?’

  She should have been startled but wasn’t. Adam sat down beside her and looked out at Jonas, shaking his head. She stared at him for a long time. ‘What did you do, John? To your sister.’

  He turned with a half-smile, eyes wide. ‘So you do think I had something to do with it?’

  ‘Did you?’

  The half-smile wavered and faded. He looked back at Jonas. ‘I did whatever you think I did.’

  She slapped him across the face and couldn’t believe she’d done it. Then she did it again. ‘What did you do?’ She hit him again. ‘What did you do to Lacey? What did you do, you bastard?’ Still Adam let her hit him, again and again until she slumped onto the floor, crying.

  Adam was gone when she sat up. Jonas was standing very still in the streaming rain, hair plastered across his face. He was staring at her oddly, a man returning from a far, far distance. The music was still blaring and she got up angrily, ran to the kitchen and switched it off.

  When Jonas joined her she had the download ready on her mobile. She handed him her phone.

  ‘Cold Cases?’ He was frowning.

  ‘It’s a programme about unsolved crimes.’

  ‘Why have you – ?’

  ‘Just watch.’

  They both did, Mary at his shoulder, the voiceover dramatic, interspersed with images of a dark-haired girl in a red and white polka-dot dress. A sleepy village and twenty-three years have passed. No one would have thought it could happen again. When Iris Hackett disappeared...

  Jonas looked at her. ‘Hackett was the name of Fletcher’s grandfather.’

  ‘It’s Adam’s sister. He changed his name. They arrested him but never found her. They had to let him go.’

  ‘I saw them filming this. I thought it was a reconstruction about Lacey. They’d got it all wrong.’

  ‘Lacey disappears in the same village. They roll out this old story. That’s entertainment.’

  ‘Is that what Eggers was on about?’

  ‘I don’t – ’

  ‘I thought he was talking rubbish.’

  Jonas frowned. Opened his mouth and blinked a few times. Then came the torrent of questions.

  She answered them all
and asked none of her own, all those questions which had been nagging for days. She kept thinking of the photographers outside, Daisy and Meg, her husband; are you screwing him? Later, when Jonas went to the bathroom, she decided to just leave.

  Thirty-eight

  A Welshman was the last person to punch Fletcher in the face. Big ugly bugger with a fist like a hammer. An argument in a Taunton bar after England beat Wales in the Six Nations rugby.

  Mary packed a fair whack as well. Fletcher stood in front of Mortensen’s bathroom mirror, touching the bruise on his left cheek. He opened his mouth and pulled back the lips, holding a wide smile. He’d seen a corpse like that once, curled up on the ground with a grinning death mask, as if dying was the best joke he had ever heard, as if he’d died laughing.

  He crossed to the window and peered out. The media crowd that followed the Norwegian across the street to the hairdresser had moved back to its usual position outside End Point.

  Fletcher had waited until he saw Jonas sit down in the hairdresser’s chair before he walked round the side of the house and jumped over the fence. He wanted to see how Jonas was getting on. The overflowing bins and stuffy, darkened rooms were a pretty decent guide.

  An intelligence officer he met at Bastion called it the pinch point. The point where optimum pressure has been achieved and the subject becomes pliable, this last word said with a little wink Fletcher found troubling. He’d taken insurgents in and seen them come out, defiance become defeat. He remembered when it was him on the other side of the table. But he remembered without empathy. He knew the pinch point. As did Mortensen. A Google search in the library told him that the manslaughter trial had been a Norwegian media sensation.

  The subject matter ticked all the boxes; Eva and Anya were beautiful, blonde and blue-eyed, Eva a well-known lawyer. It was the same back in 1991. His sister Iris was pretty and popular, his aunt a pillar of the community, chair of the Women’s Institute, leader of the church choir...

  Fletcher once read an article about how disappearances are reported, how race and class affect the vocabulary used in newspapers and TV reports, the length of prime-time exposure. A scale could probably be worked out. Two weeks for the Caucasian disappeared, five or six days for the black, less if you’re Asian. Exposure could still be gained, it depended on how offbeat and other you were perceived, say a young boy who was removed from a hospital by his Jehovah’s Witness parents, or a Muslim girl taken to a forced marriage in Pakistan.