A Private Haunting E-Book

Tom McCulloch

• Herausgeber: Sandstone Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 378

Beschreibung

Jonas Mortensen wants to be liked. Adam Fletcher wants to be forgotten. Jonas, a freewheeling Norwegian, has been living in a quiet English village for years, an eccentric everyone has an opinion about. Then the real owner of his house turns up. Fletcher, a traumatised veteran of the Afghan War, has come to claim his inheritance. The two men live side by side in an increasingly bizarre standoff, until a teenage girl goes missing and suspicion falls on Jonas. As the hunt intensifies, it's clear both men are concealing past lives that won't stay hidden much longer.

Leseprobe

Tom McCulloch is from the Highlands of Scotland. He currently lives in Oxford with his family. With his first novel, The Stillman

By the

Published in Great Britain by

Sandstone Press Ltd

Dochcarty Road

Dingwall

Ross-shire

IV15 9UG

Scotland.

www.sandstonepress.com

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored or transmitted in any form without the express

written permission of the publisher.

Copyright (c) Tom McCulloch 2016

The moral right of Tom McCulloch to be recognised as the

author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patent Act, 1988.

The publisher acknowledges support from

Creative Scotland towards publication of this volume.

ISBN: 978-1-910985-15-1

ISBNe: 978-1-910985-16-8

For my grandfather, Bert, and

the Good Doctor

You must let fall

Contents

Title Page

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3

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9

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11

12

13

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41

Epilogue

One

His dead aunt was a psychopath. Fletcher didn’t know this back then. She fitted the types he read later in the Hare checklist: grandiose sense of self-worth; cunning; lack of empathy and self-responsibility; short-term marital relationships (four times married). The village was still full of her. He tried to concentrate on the house across the road and the man within but all he could think of was her. A God-awful woman. He almost braced himself for the familiar slap.

Blasphemer!

Yet a religious hypocrite too, first in church and first to judge. She could piss right off. And Him too.

The changes didn’t bother him, Parker’s Ironmonger now the café he was sitting in, Donati’s chip shop a sandwich bar, the play-park with the treacherous Witch’s Hat roundabout in-filled with red-brick flats, so many aspirational conservatories built into back gardens.

Merry England-dom, his aunt called it. Fletcher could smell it, the pretentious pride of the petty bourgeoisie. He looked round the dreary café, wondering again what he was doing here.

His aunt wouldn’t like him staring out the window like this. Goggling, she would call it. Not that it stopped her. The image was bold in his memory: his aunt at the bleached nets, peering out. Fletcher would creep up on her but she was never ashamed at being caught, only annoyed he’d interrupted. Get away, she’d say, shoo, a greedy woman who couldn’t share.

He never complained. To complain was to invite another slap. He’d listen to his aunt’s surveillance report at the dinner table, his uncle barely listening, his little sister bored; Mrs Jones, what’s in all those packages...?Mr Soames was round at that tart Angie again… theBrowns were arguing, surprise, surprise... In this way Fletcher found out what he hadn’t been allowed to see, his imagination filling the gaps. Sometimes his whole life felt like that.

‘You want a refill?’

Fletcher looked up. The man was about forty. Behind the sagging face and disappointed eyes were echoes of someone remembered. The question was repeated, the words only now reaching him. Do you want another? He looked down at his long-finished coffee, eyes moving to the little black flecks in the sugar bowl. He wanted to count them again.

‘Well?’

The clock on the wall said ten fifteen. He’d ordered his coffee at eight thirty. One hour forty-five minutes ago.

‘Yes,’ he decided. ‘And a teacake.’

‘A teacake?’

‘No butter. Just plain.’

‘Dry?’ The man’s eyes flicked across his face, lingering for a moment on the untidy beard.

‘A dry teacake.’

The man ambled back to the counter. His trousers were black and a bit too short, Fletcher’s shiny grey and too long, as if he had shrunk. They made him angry and he made a priority of getting rid of them as soon as the opportunity arose. He fidgeted with the zipper on his black bomber jacket, buttoned right up to the neck. His head bobbed above and he wondered what it looked like. Maybe a sweaty red apple, on the turn, his cropped hair like grey mould.

Fletcher had time. The saggy-faced man didn’t know this. If he chose, and Fletcher might, he could sit in this café all day. He’d learned patience in a way the man would never understand. Nor the few customers, none of them, who came and drank and ate and pissed and left. They didn’t try to hide their stares at the bearded man with the bomber jacket and shiny trousers. It didn’t matter to him. They could point and laugh and none of it meant anything.

The patch he’d cleared on the window was steaming up but the house across the street still vaguely visible. The man was in there, crying maybe, he could be a secret depressive. Or on the toilet, a bad curry the night before. Fletcher hadn’t had a curry in a long time and considered having one later, there was an Indian takeaway up the road that hadn’t been there before. A newsagent’s too, and a scruffy hairdresser’s with a sad-eyed teenager.

The waiter returned with his coffee. At 11 am he bought another. He would buy twelve more over the next three days, sitting at the same table by the window. The longer he sat there, the more he assimilated the changes. It was all about reconnaissance and interpretation. He had a long-developed ability to easily step into a new scenario. Skilled, he thought.

By day two he was familiar with the new shops and houses, by day three the café felt reasonably comfortable and by day four he’d established the regulars. The man in the house across the street had also come into a clearer focus. Fletcher had seen him many times now, each sighting another reminder that his role in life was to offer his bollocks for a regular kicking.

The front garden was an overgrown mess. This didn’t bother Fletcher at all, unlike the living room light. It was always on, a fact that annoyed him almost as much as his shiny trousers.

There was no need for that light given the dazzling sun of this long, hot summer, the best infifteen years he heard the saggy-faced waiter say. He wanted to break in and switch the damn thing off. Instead, he wrote LIGHTS in big reverse letters on the steamed-up window. The coffee was good. Fletcher savoured it, counting how long it took the LIGHTS to fade, slightly unsettled that it didn’t completely disappear, a phantom lingering behind the fresh steam.

Two

Jonas Mortensen lay under the cold water. Both arms floated free. No bubbles from the mouth.

Say a stranger, a beautiful woman, a beautiful naked woman, was looking down on him. What a strange introduction. Never mind how this woman came to be in his bathroom, that was irrelevant, just imagine what she’d make of it. She was probably thinking about cause and effect, the series of unknown choices which could only have led to this moment. She’d study the face, wondering what his final thought might have been, perhaps his mother, his first pet, the love that got away. A one-eyed children’s doll? The possibility was remote.

Jonas decided to breathe, his corpse-like serenity erupting into splutters and coughs as he rose from the water in a near panic. Two minutes twenty-three. He had no idea why a forty-five-year-old man did this other than he liked the feeling of inordinate happiness that grew alongside the burning urge to breathe. And c’mon, he was a professional. He had a handle on it, control. Like free-divers who knew the optimum depth, Jonas always came up in time.

He sat breathing heavily, staring at the dripping tap. His head hurt a bit, maybe from these obsessive thoughts about the doll. A scuffed, grubby face, long black eyelashes around the right eye and the left eye missing. A ragged white dress with a lacy design around the collar.

It had been said, and Jonas wouldn’t disagree, that he was a man of eccentric impulse. It explained the decision to do the loft insulation at the height of summer and, by extension, explained the doll. At least, the appearance of the doll, not the reason, which was very different.

He’d seen the pile of carpets in the far corner of the attic many times. What he hadn’t done was take any notice of them. But today, to fit the insulation, he did, pulling them aside to find a shoebox. Clarks, said the lid. He hesitated before opening it. It was the setting. A dark loft, skylight sun angling through dust. It might have winked, lying there in its little cardboard coffin.

Despite the cold bath he was sweating within five minutes. Thirty degrees for over two weeks. High humidity. The whole village seemed edgy, a collective desire for a decent night’s sleep.

He padded naked into the living room and realised he’d left the lights on again. They frustrated him hugely, these forgettings, his complacent contribution to the dooming of the planet.

An exhibitionist urging took him to the net-curtained window, just as a group of girls from The Hub passed. None looked in as his gaze moved to the strip of cracked slabs and feral vegetation that was the front garden. He kept it that way deliberately. Told Gladstone in the café he liked to see what the weeds would do next. Gladstone just frowned; the dude lacked wonder.

‘How you doing, doll-face?’

He slumped down on the armchair beside the wood-burning stove. The doll stared back with its one good eye. He’d sat it on a stool, opposite the chair on the other side of the stove.

‘I’ve got you pegged as a pessimist but I don’t know why. I apologise if I’m doing you a disservice.’

Jonas stared for a few more moments then looked away, around the burglary scene that was the living room. Scattered books, wood shavings and bits of twine, dirty mugs and magazines, even a bit of old toast beside the log basket. The mess was so demoralising he fled into the kitchen, the stacks of dirty dishes making him back straight out. He’d have to clean up before he got a cleaner.

Back in the living room Li Po stared out from the Chinese scroll painting hanging above the mantelpiece. Quietly admonishing, as ever. What did a poor man have to do to please that guy?

* * *

The crew picked him up at midday. Eggers was driving the yellow Iveco tipper, Boss Hogg beside him. Davis and Johnson grinned in the rear seats, nudging each other like the school-boys they’d been until a few weeks ago. The day before, he’d caught them doing wanker signs behind his back. Daft lads, that’s all, Jonas’s nature as benign as mulled wine in the snow.

Eggers wanted to know why he’d taken the morning off, sparking a spirit-leaching conversation about insulation that lasted the length of the journey up to the works site. Eggers had all the answers, naturally. There’s grants available, you Norse plum, and if you’d come to me...

Potholes.

Always the potholes. The politician who solved the pothole problem would be more loved than Mandela.

Today’s fix site touched the sky. Flatlands-style, two hundred metres up! He smiled when people here talked about hills. He knew black tarns and eagle peaks. That spook in an empty valley. The tremors here were different. Limestone plateaus. Big sky and ghost winds.

And places like this.

The Rollright Stones. Three bows for karma, do enough terrible jobs and the diamond eventually sparkles. They peered back through hawthorn as Jonas set out traffic cones on the single-track. Two hundred metres away in the opposite direction Eggers did the same. Safe-zone set, Boss Hogg chain-smoked rollies until that mysterious moment of action.

Jonas waited. He lay in the middle of the circle, splayed like an angel and staring up into depthless blue. He had been to the stones a few times. Every visit made him think of Big Haakon, that childhood fulcrum, Larvik’s pre-eminent drinker in a town with more than its fair share. He pictured him, the maniac who revealed the old ways, six foot five and army surplus combat trousers, whirling a faded Black Sabbath t-shirt as he danced the Neolithic ring in bare feet, round and again, a sudden sense of falling upwards making Jonas close his eyes, the blue becoming ever-shifting kaleid-o-colours abruptly shattered by move your arse, you lazy fucker.

Boss Hogg put Davis and Johnson on the sweep and shovel, Jonas and Eggers on the stop-go lollipops.

Top result for the J-Man, too hot to be messing around with tar, so watch the cars and wave to the drivers, who all waved back but one. Souped-up Subaru, young male, braking to a last-second halt. Boy Subaru made the mistake of revving and Jonas looked over his shoulder. Way down by Eggers on the other end of the fix site a cyclist had appeared. So Jonas held the lolly on red, Boy Subaru rev-edging but impotent, stranded until the cyclist passed.

Somewhere on blue a red kite mewled. As if to remind him not to take the bait, to let go the contempt of Boy Subaru, whose eyes said, forty-fiveyears old and you’re holding a road sign inthe middle of nowhere? What happened? Well, young man, nothing had happened. I, Jonas Mortensen, have come to be. I have come to be here. That is enough and that is all. He smiled and closed his eyes. The southerly wind was warm and Boy Subaru’s after-fug was soon evaporating, the engine fading. The world re-asserted. There were elderflowers to be collected. Jonas picked them as the hours passed, twirling the occasional lolly.

When he got home the one-eyed doll hadn’t moved. Lazy swine, he thought, then realised that the doll could do whatever it damn well wanted. It belonged here, much more than Jonas did.

Six years he’d lived at End Point. And someone once told him the house had been empty for seven more before that. All of which meant One Eye had been skulking in the loft for at least thirteen years. He should be deferring to the doll, breaking out his best little tea-set and baking some tiny cupcakes. Maybe then she’d let on who hid her away in the old shoebox.

‘What do you say to that?’

The doll said nothing.

‘You want some dinner?’

The doll chose that moment to fall off the stool.

It made sense.

Jonas believed that everything, animate or not, was interconnected, a meld rather than separate elements, connected one to the next. The whole, essentially, was more than its sum, a unity in itself. But lower the highbrow and Jonas was a pragmatist. So, instead of a fraught existential struggle breaking out as he pondered the meaning of a one-eyed doll falling off a stool at this particular moment on eternity’s rollercoaster, he started laughing, so loudly that his neighbour missed the dramatic last line on Eastenders. Then he made dinner. For one.

* * *

Cleaner wanted. Call Jonas on07871 399747. Jonas had worked hard to be known only as Jonas but hesitated before he posted the advert through the Post Office door. The assumption. It nagged a bit.

Lee and Danny nodded hello outside the village hall. Through a set of windowed doors on the inside, another fifteen or so kids milled around. The noise increased exponentially as he opened them, a mix of laughter, shouting and pulsing ‘Grime’ (Danny had explained).

Mark waved flamboyantly from the kitchen. Long-time organiser of the youth club, The Hub, a man more camp than a field full of wigwams. Beside him were Wendy and Greg, fifty-something divorcees conducting a secret affair that everyone knew about. They had that usual justfinished off look. An auburn-haired woman Jonas hadn’t met before was drying cups.

‘You still on the plants?’ asked Mark.

‘Flora. Think of margarine.’

‘I prefer butter.’

‘Very funny.’

‘The old ones are the best, Jonas, like you.’

‘Time to give these damn kids some roots,’ said Jonas and let out a roar of ‘shuuuut UUUUUUP!’

Five years he’d been volunteering now. The accounts, some admin, and he organised the annual trip to an outdoor activity centre. But the bushcraft was the main event. As Mark once said:

‘You can make fire? How cool is that?’

What was even cooler was that the kids went for it without sarcasm. The present was app-ed up, dreaming in digital. Bow-drills and star navigation should be as appealing as Chlamydia.

Jonas was thrilled. He was still thrilled, five years on. He taught them and he taught them well, having once upon a distant time been a teacher. And while he’d never be their friend he kind of wanted to be. Better a friend than some cool uncle figure, trying to get down with the kids, although a whiff of either meant the credibility bomb went boom. Disastrous, no way back to the normality that was fifteen teenagers milling around on a Friday night, discussing the often toxic members of the Umbellifer family and their hollow stems.

‘Know the plants,’ said Jonas.

‘Dig it,’ said Danny, who’d recently blossomed from a fourteen-year-old gangle-kid to a fifteen-year-old Johnny Depp-type with just enough angst to blind him to the female appeals.

He passed Jonas a CD. DJ Fresh.

‘Why, thank you kindly, sir.’ Jonas scanned the room and picked out Eggers’s two kids, Laura and Eloise. Zero chance of seeing their father helping out at The Hub. Too many porridgy do-gooders, he once said. Lacey was down by the stage. She smiled his way, gave a little wave.

Jonas loved these kids, he surely did, that wonderful openness which should be bottled, sold as precious balm and the world instantly transformed. An ongoing project was wooden-spoon-making for crying out loud. How could that compete with iPhones and Instagram for teenage attention? But it did. Lacey still couldn’t get the crook knife technique and came over with an exaggerated pout. Jonas smiled and stood close behind her, leaning her forward and placing her elbows on her knees. Carve awayfrom the body, see, slow and easy.

Later, he ducked out for a smoke, looking up to a crescent moon. The kids. They knew how to find south now, just imagine a line connecting the horns and extend it down to the horizon.

But north, north was where it was at, whatever at might be. He moved his gaze to the Big Dipper, Merak and Dubhe, the two outer stars in the bowl, following a tick-tack line north to Polaris.

What an epic sky. Crammed with a trillion stars but never called messy. So why was his house? He pictured the mess growing and growing, his private universe expanding towards inevitable entropy. Again, Jonas regretted the cleaner advert. And once more he didn’t.

‘I should take responsibility.’

The auburn-haired dish-washer paused as she was stuffing the rubbish bag in the bin.

‘But I’m a lazy, lazy man.’

Jonas walked, round by the nature park. 10 pm passed, the moon through birch lighting the path. He sat down and leaned against the old yew and wondered about late walkers. There may be a few.

Hellothere!

They would be surprised, sure, but not spooked. It was summertime, people indulged. If coming across a smiling man under a tree at ten o’clock on a summer night was not exactly a given, it was at least much more explicable than on a winter’s night, when a meeting moved the threat from eccentric to sociopath. Jonas should come back on December 21st, wait for the walkers with a fire-torch, two lines of mud smeared under his eyes.

He laughed and clapped his hands. The night sounds immediately stilled. He counted sixteen before the creatures stirred again; a blackbird’s short burst of song, something in the rhododendrons to his left. The breeze rose and thin saplings moved in the darker distance on the other side of the reedy meadow. Like people dancing, witches making ritual preparations for tomorrow’s Jonsok. Did they know he was here? Did they watch? He’d raise a glass to them when he got to The Black Lion. The final part of his own ritual. The Hub, the nature park, the pub. Some would find banality in this but Jonas knew when to extend the parameters. Last year he’d bivvied in the woods when the first snow came in January, swum in the river in midnight July.

‘So, who’s coming?’

‘Open house as ever.’

‘You having a barbeque?’

‘When have I not had a barbeque?’

‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, why don’t you come one of these years then, Sam? Be good to get some new faces there.’

‘You Vikings like your meat, eh?’

‘Like a bit of meat myself.’ This last from Clara, a hand on Jonas’s shoulder as she passed, an exaggerated wink suggesting a history, a sometime affair that existed only in her head.

Old Sam missed it, lost in contemplation. Tiny sweat bubbles on his nose. ‘I remember that from Orkney. The war. There was always meat. Lamb or beef. Always a bite of meat.’

Jonas smiled. Five minutes for Sam to turn the conversation to the war, his posting to the northern isles for the Arctic convoys; bannocks and local hooch, farmers’ daughters in cold barns.

‘I liked it up there. Always felt at home, you know. I don’t know what you’re doing down here.’

‘I’m not from there, Sam. You should know this by now. I was born in Larvik. Worked in Bergen.’

The old man knew, of course he did. He just wanted Jonas to keep providing the cues, give him another way back to 1943. Jonas liked these rituals, the quick raise of Clara’s eyebrows, here we go again. Too much was flux. Time should be always found to circle back.

Sam’s eyes glittered. ‘Knew a fisherman in Stromness. Helluva boozer. He’d worked the Shetland Bus. You have to hand it to those boys, pitching across the Atlantic with guns and money for Norway. No protection, not like us on the convoys. Cold as Death’s bad brother but we had the Navy port and starboard. Nothing like that for them. I’m boring you again.’

‘No, you’re not, Sam.’

The old man went on, walking again the Stromness cobble, a sky even clearer than tonight’s, this young southerner who only knew hedgerows and hawthorn, the lap of gentle rivers, keen to stay awhile in a different landscape because he’d seen the connection between Rollright and the Ring of Brodgar, felt the satisfaction in knowing these stones were thrown up at the same time, all over northern Europe, warm with this comfort and whisky as he picked a way through the reels and outside to the cold, hunching his neck into the heavy jumper, Graemsay across the water, where croft-monsters castigated drunken husbands and belonging never ebbed with the tide, and what about him, could he make this place his home, as the Viking ships had come ghost-sailing round the point and made it theirs?

‘Those northern lights. You know them too, Jonas. Colours in the sky like God’s at the watercolours.’

He bought Sam another pint.

‘There was a girl too.’

‘Isn’t there always! I’ll see you at the party?’

‘Sure you will. Sure.’

But Sam wouldn’t come. Jonas glanced in the window as he left the pub. The old man in his usual chair. Walled in. The bar he never left and the past that wouldn’t let him be.

‘Jonas!’

Eggers weaved towards him from the smoking shelter. A few faces peered out. People he didn’t know and a couple of lingering looks. One of them turned away and spat on the ground.

‘Chinese,’ said Eggers.

‘Eh?’

‘Getting a Chinese.’

They walked. Eggers had managed eight pints in the four hours since Hogg had dropped him off at TheBlack Lion. He told Jonas he didn’t like going home, back to her and those crappy TV shows and sure, getting pissed didn’t help, made it worse prob’ly, but what was really worse, Jonas, hmmm, you tell me man, sitting there sober as and wanting to scream, or taking the fuckin initiative and off to the pub and I know, I know, it means an argument but an argument means I can get away, upstairs, and you’re lucky Jonas, lucky to live alone.

‘Maybe I am.’

‘You ARE!’

He left Eggers spring-rolling outside the Jade Dragon and wandered home, to stand in the living room as the eco-bulbs gradually revealed the bomb site. Yep, old Jonas sure was lucky.

What woman could resist?

JJ Cale helped him tidy. Steady background beat, the Roksan separates and Wharfedale speakers he hadn’t skimped on, Bose surround-sound like a blues-womb. This got him thinking about women again, or the lack thereof. He slumped in his pants and cracked a beer. How long had it been? Would there ever be another if they could see him now?

Clara crept into his mind and he contemplated for a while, got a bit hard before leaping up. Old JJ sure liked the women, songs like incantations that had him horny for Clara for crying out loud, so get over there and change the music. Had to be something less suggestive, Jonsok was coming so maybe something pagan-fringed. But Death in Vegas was too dark, DJ Fresh too frantic, the bass shaking loose his internal organs, gotta look after this old body.

He settled on the Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet, in honour of old Martinsson. He used to blare out The Stones when they were sitting in his kitchen knocking back the akevitt before heading down to the beach bonfires. Ah, Jonsok. The celebration of the summer solstice, the final defeat of winter’s darkness by the Sun God. Jonas’s parties were an import, sure, but some imports catch on. Jonsok would follow where boom boxes, breakdancing and the mullet had blazed a trail. Five years ago only three people came to his first party. That was fine, that was cool, no one really knew him then. The next year seven or so, a few kids from The Hub.

Then fourteen. A watershed. You can’t impose a tradition; it has to be earned. Look at Morris dancing. The foot-bells didn’t start shs-shshing overnight. Someone did it once, maybe for kicks. But do it again and again and you get a tradition. Hence Jonas’s open door and the midnight bonfire, the flames fanned until the dawn. Just like home, almost. At home he wouldn’t be the automatic figure of fun, or disdain, as he was to the men outside the pub.

At home, he would be something else altogether. They didn’t need to know about that here.

Jonas had almost blown it from the start, his September arrival too sudden and too keen. Blame the mushrooms. And the beech nuts and blackberries, the rosehips and rowans. So why not a foraging walk? He put out flyers, introduced himself at the supermarket, the Post Office, and the café, thrusting leaflets into one bemused hand as he shook the other. In a misjudged burst of enthusiasm, he handed some out in The MuckyDuck on a Friday night. A few young guys made fun of him. Asked what the fuck he was doing here.

Only Mark turned up, his interest genuine, as was his suggestion that Jonas do something at The Hub. And Jonas’s disappointment at the lack of interest in the walk evaporated.

He bumped into the guys from The MuckyDuck again, early December. Walking along the street a hard-packed snowball hit him full in the face. He tried to laugh it off but they followed him, shouting DownWith Thor, the snowballs hitting harder, laughter becoming cruel.

Thor.

Or the Viking.

Sometimes even strangers would shout out. How’s our local Viking? How’s it goin, Thor? One time a woman came up to him at the fete and asked him to show her his mighty hammer. The boyfriend was not best pleased and sometimes even gods have to make a swift exit.

But hey, some of the locals had nicknames: Crooner Joe, Randy Clara... It was a sign not of difference but of belonging. A nickname meant you were a character. If they wanted to call Jonas Thor or the Viking then what’s the problem? He was so much of a local he had two nicknames.

‘I should be flattered.’

The one-eyed doll was unconvinced. Sat there on the speaker, shifting with the throbs of Bill Wyman’s bass. He didn’t know what to do with the damn thing. Re-inter it in the loft? There were thirty new centimetres of insulation up there so at least it’d be snug. Dithering meant no decision and the doll would soon be subsumed into the mess. He’d have to hide it during the cleaner interviews. It was probably an HR rule. Prospective new employers and single men should not, repeat not, reveal one-eyed dollies to the interviewees.

‘Confucius said that. Does Li Po agree?’

Like the doll, the figure in the scroll painting above the fireplace said nothing. He and Eva had bought it on their honeymoon in China from a wizened old man outside a Taoist temple. That gleam in his milky eyes, Jonas had never decided if it meant ‘got you, round-eye sucker’ or ‘this painting will bring great merit’. He edged towards the latter. As had been pointed out, and as Jonas himself would likely agree, he was a trusting fellow, mystically-inclined.

He put his nose close to Li Po, who kept on sweeping the jetty in front of the lakeside pagoda. There were a few trees in the background, a hint of high misty mountains, and nothing to suggest that the figure was indeed the famous Chinese poet. Then again, there was nothing to suggest that he wasn’t. Jonas had never told Eva that he often stood in front of the scroll, imagining himself as a Taoist monk, living free and solitary with Li Po’s spontaneity.

Some things, truly, should remain unsaid.

Anyway, Jonas had long decided he wasn’t cut out to be a wandering Taoist poet. Cultural determinism was the final nail, the idea too quixotic even for Jonas, a man brought up in the land of salt cod and trolls. Not that he then shunned Li Po. That would be rude. As rude as having snowballs hurled at him. He’d turned the other cheek but one hit him on that side too.

Three

Fletcher was talking to a man called John Smith. Probably the most common name in the country.

He wondered if this was the man’s real name, or whether he couldn’t be bothered making up something more interesting, like Jean de Havilland Smythe. Then again, in this part of the world you could actually run into someone with that name. He’d heard a posh mother trilling for her children in the supermarket the other day: Zebedee, Xenephon, come along now!

He usually avoided pubs, or found himself escorted out as soon as he entered. Some had told him he stank. All granted themselves the right to stare. But tonight he felt confident and confidence was key. You had to decide that you belonged. Still, even though Smith had no way of recognising his name, his first instinct was to claim another. Taylor or Davidson, Brown. Instead, out came Fletcher. He told himself he was just imagining it, the hesitation before Smith said pleased tomeet you, the flicker in the eyes.

‘You want another?’

‘Sure.’

‘That’s what I like to hear!’

Fletcher watched him go and looked round. He’d chosen this table in The Black Lion deliberately. NW corner, 180⁰ sweep from the main door to the toilets, the bar in the middle.

The pub was busy, the heatwave driving people out of doors. None of them knew a thing about real heat, how it crawled across your body like ants and left a rash in the crotch. Their ignorance was like a test. Again, he told himself to relax, as they were relaxing, a few cold beers to cool down; women in cotton dresses bulging at the stomach, men with cargo shorts and Nikes, ankle socks white as their legs. Back and forth they went with their slopping trays.

Smith returned. Fletcher studied his close-cropped, military-style haircut and imagined a DVD collection of movies by bald Hollywood action stars: Bruce Willis, Jason Statham and Vin Diesel. His favourite film was bound to be Top Gun and he was probably gay. He talked incessantly about himself, as if afraid that when he stopped he might disappear. Fletcher had met many people like this, socially maladjusted and given to envy.

‘Look out, here he comes. The Viking.’

‘Eh?’

‘Guy by the door. He’s a Norwegian. Jonas Morten-something.’

‘What about him?’

‘He has these parties.’

‘What kind of parties?’

‘Wanky ones.’

‘Wanky?’

‘Thinks he’s popular.’

Smith burbled on. Then he started saying other things, insinuations that were much more interesting. But when Smith started repeating himself he decided to leave, Smith following him outside for a smoke. He headed up the street but as soon as Smith turned away Fletcher doubled back. When Mortensen emerged, he was watching from the shadows beside a plumber’s van. He saw Smith spit on the ground just as the Norwegian passed.

Fletcher followed Mortensen back to End Point. The dusk light gave a smoky poignancy to the house. Echoes of the long gone. Children who had once played, men and women who had died. In time he might uncover all these stories. No one else knew the house like Fletcher did.

Built in the 1920s, End Point had once been just that, the last house of the long terrace on the north-eastern side of Pound Lane. A road had now been built alongside its eastern wall, allowing access to a new, red-brick estate. On the other side of this access road, fifties semis and the occasional bungalow stretched down the remainder of Pound Lane.

When Mortensen opened the front door Fletcher continued on, following the pavement around the gable end. At the end of the wall was a low fence and behind that a line of thick Leyland cypresses hid the back garden. Fletcher looked round then vaulted the fence. Keeping to the trees, he turned two right angles until he was in the south-eastern corner. The cypress was thinner here but the dark heavy. Only a floodlight could pick him out. He peered through the fronds. A large stack of bonfire wood had been piled in the middle of the lawn. To his right was a ramshackle shed and a tall wooden fence, giving privacy from the neighbours. Crossing the lawn would leave him exposed to any overlooking window for about three seconds before he reached the sun room that led through to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later Mortensen opened the sun room door. He bowed deeply to the garden, almost as if acknowledging Fletcher, then stepped onto the grass and settled into the Lotus position. Fletcher remembered meditation once being described to him as positive distraction.

When Mortensen went back inside Fletcher stayed in the trees. He could pray, he thought, feeling his aunt’s squeezing grip on his shoulder, pushing him onto his knees before bed.

As I lay me down to sleep...

His little sister in the top bunk, peering down on his humiliation. A chip off the old bitch, Iris never had to be reminded to say her prayers. Fletcher saw her on the lawn. She sat down where the Norwegian had, a very serious look on her face but trying hard not to smirk. She lifted her hands up high, thumb and forefinger making a circle and the other digits splayed, a parody of Fletcher’s Buddhist gestures. She said ommmm and then came the laughter, as she had laughed at him last night in The Skull, like what on earth are youdoing here?

The cypress shifted in a quick breeze, his sister’s face hidden and revealed again. His stomach cramped, heat in the face. He had time to brace for the sinking. He had time to sit down and be glad of the dark and no one to see him but her, always her. He called it the Watching.

You cannot understand. My being here. All you know endedat the age of fourteen. You are trapped in childhood.Hopscotch and school-days. Holidays at the seaside. Two penceshuffle and crazy golf, you loved crazy golf, always pesteringour uncle. Up at seven and can we play now,can we? You’re delighted I’ve made camp atthe old crazy golf course down by the river. Oneof the best in the land, they said, once upona time. And I see you there as back then,club in hand. You’re aware of the older girls,hanging out with friends and not parents, but not tooaware, a year or so removed from full-on awkwardness,from going down to the beach, under the salty timbersof the broken down pier to smoke and drink cider,feel the hands of the boys wander downwards, down there,down there, that place you are not sure of, drowsingto the calm dazzle of the silvered sea and watchingthe pedalos, the pedalos like swans, beautiful swans. And thatother girl in a far-away land, she too deservescrazy golf and pedalos, surely everyone does! Although she wouldunderstand so little of it, being a child of strangecustoms, mud shacks and flies, stabbing winters and broiling summers.As I too understand so little of her, finding heronly in the familiarity of you. I see your childhoodin her eyes as she lies in the dirt ofSangin bazaar, I see your memories flicker in her eyeballsbefore they roll back that final time. Seaside and crazygolf. She’s remembered! She’s remembered those holidays. Sheloved them! So far away now it is painful, longbefore today, this cold winter morning, long before her darkhair fanned out on rust-coloured ground among the warmspilling grey of her brains and her bright, bright, fourteen-year-old blood.

Four

Orange light beyond closed eyes. Don’t open them, Jonas, don’t turn the soft glow into the hard yellow dazzle of the morning sun. He still wanted the dream. To let in the light was to lose it.

He was back in the Beaujolais, a cartoon-coloured return to his first job after getting sick of the building sites of Copenhagen and drifting south, west. Acres of Gamay grapes, an infinity. A blood orange sun like malevolence made visible. He was picking impossibly fast, his hands a blur, overflowing baskets lining up. As he moved along the vines he heard a whimpering, somewhere near. The noise began to put him off, hands slowing, trying to place the sound.

Axel Johansson appeared, ten years old, telling him to pick up the pace, it was being noticed. But Jonas had recognised the sound and stopped picking altogether. The klaxon started in the distance and he saw the black uniforms hurrying down his row. He ran into the vines, following the whimpers and found it, a rabbit in a snare, whimpering louder when it saw him.

Then the uniforms were beside him, laughing at the rabbit, great belly laughs like they’d never seen anything so funny. The rabbit’s tongue lolled as Jonas dug his fingers under the wire around its neck, blood on his hands and now an uncanny, human-like scream, little feet pumping the air as he finally managed to get the wire free. Leave it, the uniforms shouted, suddenly furious. But Jonas kept his eyes fixed on the rabbit because he knew if he even blinked it would not be an animal but a child, bloodied and dying on the ground.

Then, as ever, he blinked.

Jonas opened his eyes. He’d dreamed about the rabbit for decades, the one he had shot with Axel’s .22, wounding it horribly but not killing it. Axel had to finish it off, holding the rifle one-handed like Schwarzenegger, putting a slug right through its eye. For a long time the dream had locked into this gruesome metamorphosis from rabbit to child. Such was the price.

* * *

‘How’s the head?’

Eggers ignored him.

He’d picked Jonas up forty minutes late, said nothing on the drive to the stones and now slumped beside him like a bayoneted dummy. Boss Hogg had sent them to check the tar and clear the cones. 9 am they’d got there and now ten. Eggers’s fault they hadn’t left the truck.

‘Jackie.’

‘What! What do you want?’

‘How’s the head?’

‘Why? Why do you need to know that?’

‘Just concerned.’

‘The Nigerians are still partying,’ muttered Eggers.

‘Why Nigerians?’

‘They’re noisy.’

‘So are lots of people. You being racist?’

‘You think I’m being racist?’

‘Maybe. Maybe I think you’re being racist.’

‘Fine. Just leave me alone.’

‘Italians are noisy too.’

‘Oh for Christ sake.’

‘Swedes might be the worst though. I remember this one time on holiday down by Varberg when we –’

‘Shut up!’

‘So you don’t want it, then?’

‘What?’

‘A little pull-you-up.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Sorry, sorry, a pick-you-up.’ It amused him. Getting words wrong deliberately, just to annoy Eggers.

‘I’m not listening to you anymore.’

Jonas reached into his rucksack and, with a flourish, produced the bottle of akevitt. ‘But it’s Jonsok!’

‘The hell is Jonsok?’

‘Don’t you listen to anything I say?’

‘Give it here then.’

Eggers took the bottle. And soon as he did sip his face drained. For a while he sat very still and very quiet. Jonas awaited the barf but Eggers kept it down. He took another sip, another.

By ten thirty Eggers was drunk again. Jonas watched him clamber onto one of the stones, shouting I’m sitting on a standingstone, I’m sitting on a standing stone! He gave Boss Hogg a wide berth when he appeared in the pick-up around midday and told them to getthe fuckin site cleared this side of Christmas, ok? They nodded, watched him go and ignored him.

Jonas walked the hedgerows. He filled another bag with elderflowers and dozed in the circle, waking to the sure sense of being watched. Just echoes, no one there but the gnarly old stones and a reinvigorated Eggers, dancing alone on the far side of the circle, the truck radio blaring.

The dream drifted back. The rabbit and the child, the blood, all that was expected. But Axel Johansson? Jonas hadn’t thought of him in a long time. His first true friend. Inseparable at primary school, they drifted apart at secondary. By their final year they contemplated each other across a distance they would never again bridge. The poignancy was apparent even to a seventeen-year-old Jonas, whose default setting was ruthless condescension.

‘Meatloaf!’ shouted Eggers.

‘No. Too theatrical. Sounds like a West End show.’

‘Not the music, you twat! The food. Tonight. You making meatloaf?’

‘Wait and see.’

Jonas stacked the traffic cones. Neat piles of five. How satisfying it would be if every aspect of his life slotted away like that. It must be possible to achieve a generalised neatness. He had the ability. Take Jonsok, the care he took with the smorgasbord, the smoked salmon and pickled herring, Jarlsberg and knekkebrod. Each element was set out just so.

He learned this from his mother, who spent hours, days even, preparing the food then fled before the gannets descended. She’d head down to the beach to sit and watch the sea, the bonfires. His father would come staggering along drunk, or maybe just the loose pebbles giving way under his feet. He remembered watching them, hand in hand in silhouette, disappearing into blue falling night, a secret so open he had no way of grasping it. Their affection was embarrassing, a first glimpse of an unsettling universe he knew nothing about.

Axel once noticed them kissing. ‘Look, Jonas, look, do you think they’re going to have sex?’

Ah, Axel. A happy-go-lucky boy, stilled by adolescence like the night extinguished birdsong. Yet an unexpected teenage hit with the ladies. Jonas remembered him with girl after girl, arm in arm on the lunch hour promenade. Not the top level chicks but the Cs and Ds, the lesser-noticed, the plainer and the gauche, who Jonas found out would bloom late and well, streaking past those whose beauty peaked at sixteen and downhill ever faster from there.

A reunion was in order!

Follow the songline, revisit the tales. Get back home and onto Facebook, search down Axel Johansson and pick up the phone. Imagine the delight on the end of the line as memory’s flashbulbs began to pop: the farmer’s gate falling, falling, down