A Private Haunting (19 page)

‘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.

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 his 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.

Mary appeared just after eight thirty, a light wind carrying the pad of her trainers on the road. He peered above the bobbing wheat, watching her run to the entrance of the building site. She looked good in her running gear. Tight Lycra running top and loose, mid-thigh shorts.

She stopped and looked around but Jonas didn't stand up and wave. He wanted to observe, just for a bit, taking his time with his impressions. This woman appeared. High noon in his ever-scrolling melodrama. Draw the gun and shoot the past, something ridiculous like that. Even Eva was rolling her eyes, like how can she be jealous of something as histrionic as this?

He didn't know why he ducked down when Mary stared straight at the spot where he was crouched. Eyes closed, he lay down and waited for her to come to him through the fussing wheat.

 

Mary stood for a long moment, looking down at him. Jonas's eyes were closed. ‘You hiding from me?'

Jonas said nothing and kept his eyes shut. The wheat crunkled as Mary shuffled on the ground and sat down cross-legged. His eye-lids were flickering. She studied the face, the lines round the eyes, wondering if she had ever looked at someone as closely as this. A tuft of hair blew across his face and she wanted to brush it behind his ear, with an affection she wasn't sure about. She looked away, into the sky. When she looked back he was squinting up at her.

‘You're awake,' she said.

‘I wasn't asleep.'

‘I know.'

‘I almost fell asleep.'

‘Bit uncomfortable. I've got something poking my bum.'

She couldn't help thinking about the magazines. Her smile wavered. ‘Why are you hiding here?'

‘Cops.'

‘You serious?'

‘Angry locals with pitchforks?'

‘Don't be stupid.'

‘You know how many people came to my party? Twenty-two. How many people do you think will come next year?'

‘C'mon. There'll be a few.'

‘A few?'

‘Maybe more.'

‘Doubt it. They came again. The police.'

‘When?'

‘This morning. They wanted to know why Lacey came back after the party and why I hadn't told them.'

‘She came back? What for?'

‘Her jacket. She left it in the kitchen. I gave her a glass of lemonade.'

Mary felt her stomach turn. ‘There's nothing wrong with that.'
But
of course there was
.

‘I know.'

She nodded vaguely.

‘I know,' he repeated.

She closed her eyes. She felt his fingers seek hers and grasp them tightly. She resisted the urge to pull her hand away. She wanted to scream at him that you don't
do
those things, Jonas. You open the door and you leave her right there and you go back inside the house and find the jacket that you bring to her and
good night
. You do not invite her in. You just don't and you know you don't. Otherwise you would have told the police in the first place.

‘What do you see up there, in the clouds?'

She turned her face. He was looking directly upwards. ‘I think you see whatever you want to see.'

‘I used to dream about this when I was a teenager. Alone in a field with a girl.' He sat up quickly and turned to her. ‘It was the expectation I looked forward to, I think, knowing something was about to happen but not knowing when. She'd look at me like you're looking at me and – '

He lunged at her and she let him briefly kiss her before pushing him away. He tried again and again she pushed him back, acutely aware, suddenly, of the remoteness of the field and her skimpy running gear. She wondered if she was frightened as she watched tears well in his eyes.

‘I'm sorry, Jonas. It's just... I better go.'

Jonas nodded. He pulled his knees up to his chest and hugged himself.

‘I think I need some space.'

‘Mm.'

‘It's nothing personal.'

‘I get it.'

She had waded a few metres back through the wheat when he called out.

‘I killed them, you know.'

When she turned she could only see the top of his head.

‘My wife and daughter. I was the drunk driver. I wanted to tell you before someone else did.'

* * *

The doorbell rang just after 6 am. The sad-eyed detective presented a warrant. Jonas was free to stay while they carried out the search and was not under arrest. He was accompanied upstairs to get dressed by a jittery constable in a short-sleeved shirt, who frowned briefly when Jonas paused on the landing to look into Fletcher's room. It was empty, no sleeping mat or one-eyed doll, just the few cardboard boxes that had been there for years.

The Skull was cool. Fletcher peered out the left eye at the overgrown golf course. The heavy green vegetation had thickened with the rain of the last few days. He imagined the End of Days to be just like this, weeds and plants pulsing unhindered in the ruins of civilisation. He used to read science fiction as a boy, projecting into the Apocalypse. But where he once fantasised about being the last human on earth, he now wondered about the vanity of survival.

He'd returned to The Skull the evening before, after removing all signs of himself from End Point.

The police were going to search the house. It would happen soon and it would be very early in the morning. He took no satisfaction in being right when he walked past End Point just after six that morning and saw a forensics van and three police cars pulled up outside.

Back in 1991 these tactics were bewildering, carefully designed – it seemed – to maximise his alienation: that odd way the police talked, a mix of procedural formality and exaggerated crassness, the occasional huddles in the corner and sometimes he heard those whispers, never sure if he was
meant
to.
Two minutes alone with him, two fuckin minutes is all
I need…

It would get so much worse for the Norwegian. The hostility would swell. If Mortensen had any sense, he would get out of the village. If he didn't then Fletcher could wait. His vicious little sister had taught him patience long before the Marines. He let her kick and nip and scratch and put the anger someplace for later. On that last day she went crazy because he laughed at her for being fourteen and still playing with that creepy, one-eyed doll.

The police kept on about those scratches until Fletcher admitted they hadn't been caused by crashing his BMX.
You tell me what brother
and sister don't fight
, he said, thinking that it sounded so grown-up to rationalise like this.
I can
show you a scar where she bit me, if you
want?

They didn't. They exchanged angry glances because their absolutism made him guilty and his evasion outrageous. He respected it, now. An absolute imposed a discipline. The desert had taught him, the relentless sun burning off the flim-flam, the dust in his boots the last of his doubt, crumbled away to nothing. It made the killing easier. Maybe he'd tell the priest about the Taliban soldier, a teenager cursing him and refusing to die, Fletcher plunging his bayonet again and again, over thirty times, still thrusting after the boy finally died because his eyes retained their contempt until Fletcher stabbed them to a final blindness.
There's
more than one absolute
, he would tell the priest,
and
even you with all your cosmopolitan guilt will, come the
end of your time, stress one truth to the detriment
of all others.

No one wanted McQueen's stories of traumatised, homeless veterans. They wanted Union Jacks by the side of the road as another cortege of heroes who couldn't be helped passed in the rain. They wanted red poppies on every lapel.

Fletcher lay down, drowsing to the distant thrum of the traffic on the bridge. He daydreamed of the girl in the blue jacket, saw her through murky water as he hovered overhead like a kestrel. When he opened his eyes a magpie was sitting on the eye socket of The Skull, looking at him. One for sorrow, and although he told himself not to, he couldn't help looking for a second as he crossed the golf course and walked into the village to
The Black
Lion
.

He wondered if this, at the end of the day, was what it came down to, a simple search for joy.

 

‘I'll murder the fucker!'

Fletcher saw the barwoman glance along the bar, where an old man pretended not to hear. He'd just opened the door. For an instant he wondered if John Smith was talking about him.

‘Watch your language, John, or that's your last,' said the barwoman.

The face beneath the fuzzy hair was red and outraged. ‘What, you
defending
him?'

She sighed and looked at Fletcher. ‘What'll it be?'

‘Bottle of Bud... and whatever he's having.'

‘Serious?' she said.

Smith's gaze shifted. ‘You're a gent!'

‘That's me.'

They sat at a corner table and watched the live news broadcast from the village green. Councillor Bacon was being interviewed, sweating in a tweed suit and canary yellow shirt. He made clear to the interviewer that he would not speculate and then proceeded to speculate.

‘There is mounting anecdotal evidence, it would seem.'

‘What would you anticipate next?'

‘I would expect an arrest.'

‘Do you know the individual in question?'

‘I know
of
him.'

Smith looked away from the TV. Leaned close to Fletcher. Told him Mortensen was responsible for Lacey's disappearance because he was a
foreigner, we
know fuck all about him, nothing.

When the TV anchor cut to the sports news Smith turned his attention to the old man at the bar.

‘What about it, Sam? Not seeing you watching much of this? You know him, don't you, so what's the score?'

Sam spoke without turning. ‘Never said a bad word to me.'

Smith was disgusted. ‘It's not about you, you silly old fart. It's about Lacey and what he did to her.'

‘So you say.'

‘Watch the telly! It's not just me. It's everyone else, the whole world apart from you!'

‘
Enough,
John, finish your drink and get out,' shouted Clara.

‘The hell is wrong with you people.' Smith's attention suddenly shifted to the window. ‘There's another, Mary Jackson. She's round his place all hours, probably gets a kick out of it, like those women who write to men on death row. What's all that about, eh?'

Fletcher watched Mary pass the window without glancing in. She was wearing her supermarket uniform. He thought about her childhood bedroom, the posters of those boy bands.

‘I'd bang it, though,' said Smith.

Later, when Smith went to the toilet, Fletcher made up his mind. When Smith woke up on the toilet floor with a hand trailing in the stinking gutter of the urinal he had no idea who'd crept up behind him and smacked his face off the wall as he stood with his cock out. His first thought was old Sam. He had no way of knowing that Fletcher was a man of absolutes.