A Private Haunting (22 page)

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.

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.