A Private Haunting (25 page)

It was the presenter's first question.

‘Jonas. Many thanks for having us. But tell me, why are our crew the only guests at your party?'

Jonas laughed, lightly, not too nervous, then told him about the challenge of belonging.

‘You seem to have thought about this a lot.'

‘No more than anyone else,' he said to the presenter. ‘I just float. Everyone floats.'

‘Everyone
floats
?'

‘We tell ourselves that we swim when in fact we're just getting carried on the current.'

‘Some people must drown.'

‘I suppose they do.'

‘Are you drowning, Jonas?'

‘I've been in deep water.'

‘You mean killing your wife and daughter?'

Jonas flinched. He saw those drinks in his hand. He saw his daughter, so peaceful on the back floor of the Saab, as if she was sleeping. ‘I rewind every night. Sometimes in the morning, when I'm not sure if I'm awake or still asleep, I hear my wife saying
everything will be ok.
'

‘Can you forgive yourself?'

‘That is a stupid question.'

‘Our viewers will be asking it.'

‘You should give your viewers more credit. Of course I can't forgive myself. Let me tell you why…'

And he took Morton on a long trip. Larvik to Bergen to the side-worlds of migrant Europe, the faces from past and present looming out with troubling judgement, whether they knew what Jonas had done or not, because something
must
have happened, that way he always held back, severing the deeper connections but only because he felt worthless beside Kiev Dimitri, Asamoah, Sunny, those with only dignified reasons for drifting the Euro shadows.

‘Don't misunderstand me, I am not seeking forgiveness.'

‘And Lacey Lewis?'

Another flinch. The viewers would see it. A quick-wince of the eyes and then Jonas was crying.

The director mouthed
advert
but Morton waved his hand, out of shot. ‘What was that mistake?'

The make-up woman watching from behind the camera put a hand to her mouth.‘What happened?'

Jonas blinked.

‘What happened, Jonas?'

‘There's always something that goes wrong, Mr Morton. Always something you can't quite believe. Something happened. Something happened in this village and it's happening again.'

‘Jonas Mortensen. A nation waits.' The presenter turned slowly, a grave look directly into the camera and then a pointing finger. ‘And we ask
you
to wait. We'll be right back after this break.'

The director said
all
clear
and the presenter leapt up from the chair. ‘Sensational.
Sensational
.'

He squeezed Jonas's arm and then, as if it was a favourite pet, carefully patted his over-coiffed hair, hurrying over to down a schnapps, pick at Jonas's
smorgasbord
and congratulate him on the
fab-u-LOUS
food. He said Twitter was going mad with
#JonasandLacey
and explained that when they came back from the break he would recap the story of the disappearance then
over to
you to bring... the... REVEAL
. He asked again for a hint and Jonas again refused.

‘You're a natural Jonas, you know tension. Let's hope the ending doesn't fall off a cliff, eh?'

The adverts went on for five minutes, leaching from the sound-man's headphones: cars, cosmetics, cleaning products, cold remedies... something different for each demographic.

The John Hackett bombshell was the ultimate commodity, everyone wanted a piece of that.

A brief internet search in the library told him what happened in the village in 1991. There was no vindictiveness here, Jonas wasn't a malicious man. Just someone doing a public service for his community and no blame attached to that. He'd walk out into the crowd, hands clean, head high. There would be another story in
The Sun
but a different headline this time, another man's picture on page two and they would thank him, slap him on the back and buy him a drink in
The Black Lion
and who knows, maybe even a syndicated story, taking it across the sea to Norway, to
Verdens Gang
and maybe Mikke would come across that too.

The director said
thirty seconds.

Then noise.

The front door had been opened. He could hear it in the carrying of voices from the crowd outside.

Another couple of shouts and a vague thud, the slam of the front door. Jonas thought Mary but Eggers appeared. Clearly drunk,
disorientated
drunk and a little stumble back against the frame of the living room door. He stared at the TV camera. Frowned. Then Buzz Cut shoved past him, followed by Buzz Cut's snuffling friend and several men Jonas didn't know.

The director flustered, the presenter beamed and ‘welcome, welcome gentlemen, have a drink.'

Eggers swayed, Buzz Cut sniffed and the snuffler giggled, swigging from a half bottle. Keystone Cop moments. They let the director shuffle them behind the couch and stood awkwardly behind Jonas. He looked round. Remembered snowballs in his face.
C'mon then, Thor, fight
back!
Buzz Cut said
smile for the birdy
and winked. Eggers wouldn't look him in the eye, drumming his fingers on the top of the couch as the director mouthed five down to zero.

‘Welcome back. My first question to Jonas Mortensen was about a lack of guests at the party. He appears to have been vindicated, as you can see from these gentlemen just arrived.'

The face abruptly changed. Became grave and graver, a close-up to camera as he summarised the story of Lacey's disappearance and the allegations that had been put to Jonas.

‘Jonas. Over to you.' He sat down again,
leaned in
. ‘What do you want to tell the nation?'

As Jonas opened his mouth Psycho Dave appeared in the doorway. The viewers would see Jonas look out of shot and hear a voice shouting
are we going to listen to anymore of
this bullshit?
Then the camera was on its side, showing feet, the bottom of the couch, shouts in the background and sudden black, a stuttering voice-over apologising for the loss of pictures.

 

Jonas thought about the viewers as he was dragged over the back of the couch. They would be frantic.
Let down
. They wanted to see this. The punches and the kicks. Pay per view was made for it. Public executions would have the biggest viewer numbers in history and this could have been the taster, Jonas Mortensen, the
Viking
, Jonas of the Parties getting the shit kicked out of him in his own living room, boots to the face, the stomach and most of all the balls, they were definitely favouring the balls and Jonas not even protecting himself anymore, his mouth bubbling with blood and maybe he was shouting something about John Hackett but maybe not, maybe it was all in his head, maybe Fletcher was a figment too and not actually appeared in the doorway, utterly nonplussed, arms folded and now grabbing Mary as she too materialised, horror on her face and lunging towards Jonas but held back by Fletcher.

She struggled so briefly.

That was the saddest thing. How she let herself be held back, the shoulders relaxing, concern becoming detachment as she just watched. He didn't think of anything then, he wasn't even aware of searching for something that he couldn't quite place. There was nothing.

Snow across the cypress. Thick, lazy fallings from epic black to yellow-orange; winter sky-glow.

He closed his eyes. Saw streetlights stretching into a silent white distance emptied of all people, past the subdued windows of Andrew Gladstone's café and the ever-empty hairdressing salon with the zebra-striped wallpaper, past the red-brick new-builds and the meandering lines of so many parked cars, hidden under snowy blankets, gone as if gone for good.

Midnight had passed. Hardly any lights in the overlooking windows, but a brighter glowing from the conservatory two houses down; imagine it lifting, a merry-go-round of fairground neon but no one on the plastic horses, spinning up and up and finally lost in black, dissonant Wurlitzer slowly fading. But the only sound was the occasional thrumming of a passing car, carrying over the roof of End Point to reach him where he sat in the back garden.

The fire was dying, dulling orange around the bony remnants of the beech logs, patterned in grey-white char like the ghost of the rainbow trout he'd wrapped in foil and cooked hours ago. The snow, too, was starting to falter. Soon, it would stop falling altogether.

He leaned forward on the deckchair. Poked the ashes with a stick. This was his third fire in just over a week, each lit only when the snow was actually falling. For obscure reasons it was necessary to simultaneously feel the heat of the flames and the cold of the snowflakes. This evening he'd thought about inviting people round. They would have only been confused by their host, who sat hunched and silent beside the fire, wrapped in an old blue puffer jacket, drawstring tight on the hood. He wore only a t-shirt underneath but was still sweating.

Today was the first in many he'd spoken to anyone. The connection was unsought. He just happened to be in the hall when the doorbell rang. Otherwise he'd have ignored it altogether. The man was collecting for the Red Cross Christmas appeal. Forty-five or so, kind eyes, an acne-scarred face that must have made adolescence an intolerable cruelty. He listened to the man's spiel then took his wallet from the hallway table and gave him seventy-two pounds, all the money he had. The man blustered, asking
are you sure, it's
so generous?

They talked about the weather then, the awkwardness of the interaction now over-ridden by his generosity. He thought about inviting the man in to sit beside his fire in the back garden. They could have talked some more. But the man would have refused, he was sure.

All these fires and still no decisions. He had even thought about becoming a postman. Everyone liked a postman, a postman was reassuring. He could join the football club too. His neighbour played. He'd seen him in his muddy strip, kit bag slung over his shoulder. It was because of football he'd switched on the radio tonight. There was a big Premiership match on somewhere. He couldn't remember the teams. But he remembered the news.

Lacey Lewis had come home. Five months to the day since her disappearance she walked into a London police station. A runaway and a return. A simple story, in the end. The news had played a clip of her mother.
It's
wonderful, a Christmas miracle, even the snow is falling.

Mortensen.

Pity the Norwegian.

He would have seen the report. In a boarding house maybe, a seaside bed and breakfast, standing at a window looking out on a black sea, Lacey behind him in vague TV reflection. Mortensen who spent three weeks in hospital, came back for a night then left again. He said nothing to Fletcher. Looked through him. Through the thin skein of this world into a troubled beyond.

He poked the fire again, sending orange embers dancing upwards, into the falling snow. He thought about getting up and going back into the house. It would be freezing. He'd left the sun room door open and the chill would have spread into every room. He didn't want to go inside. To go inside meant going to bed, knees to his chest under graveyard sheets. Instead, he threw another two logs on the fire, the bone-dry beech crackle-catching straightaway.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. The cold flakes landing on his eyelids were sporadic, then more regular, until he had to lick them from his lips, the snow coming down thickly again. He wondered if it would be possible to fall asleep like this. How long before hypothermia set in? Perhaps he would be smothered to death first, snow-clog in the nostrils. What about those last dreams, would they be cold and desolate or bask in longed-for heat?

When he sat up he saw them. Through the flurries and through the flames. On the other side of the fire. Lacey and his sister Iris in their blue jackets. The Afghan girl in her white qmis.

They seemed tired, made drowsy by the heat. They watched him throw on another log. Again the swelling sweetness of beech, flicker-flames wandering their faces, making shadows, their eyes that might be closed, might be open. He went to join them, undoing his hood and lying down beside them, looking up into the falling, settling snow that would bury all of them.

 

You have joined them
, you who were never lost. Three of you, a Trinity
, the triple aspect of a truth. Did any of you
find peace? On nights of predators in cold London town
, at that moment of abduction that became hours of terror
, during that fall to dusty earth that may have lasted
an eternity. What flashes of knowledge in those moments? Did
you learn something, desperately sought by desert imams and hedgerow
ministers, shamen and ascetics, pattern seekers in the digital flow
? Because there must be God and if not God then
explanation, hidden knowledge and transcendent esoteria that make a euphoric
but utterly practical sense of the world. You snigger, you
whisper and you will not tell. No reason you should
and I do not care. I am no seeker. I
know the opening of a hand to emptiness. I will
not ask for lessons learned. I will not ask because
you mock, you two become three, you of the soaring
kite that day in the Sangin bazaar, the red of
your blood as I shot you down, I know I
did, did I really shoot you down, you of the
miracle return and did I follow you home after Mortensen
's party when you returned for your blue jacket, to
hold you and touch you and make sure you were
not my little sister, the same age as you and
somehow returned, that other blue jacket that I followed twenty
-three years ago, I think, down to the river and
along by the woods where we fought again and I
finally lost it, years of frustration the police said, hands
on your throat, they said, arms straight out the way
they held the SA80 which tore apart the Afghan girl
. Is this what I did? I cannot tell now, the snow covers so much, it piles up like centuries.