A Private Haunting by Tom McCulloch Page A

wondering if anyone was watching him from all these black-eyed windows overlooking the garden.
    Maybe just one of The Hub boys, messing with him. Jonas had done it himself. He and Axel once broke into Siggi’s house when he was on holiday. Siggi claimed his father had a great collection of girly mags but they turned that house upside down looking for them and found nada, settling for a video of National Lampoon’s Animal House and handfuls of corn flakes thrown around the living room, their contribution to the food fight started by John Belushi.
    Or maybe Spencer P, Lacey’s boyfriend. Jonas didn’t like the way that little shit looked at him. He could have put Lacey up to it, she and her friend Carly, messing about all soapy and bubbly. It was cheeky but almost proprietorial; you break in, make a snack and have a bath.
    The whisky did its job. The second had him laughing, the third leaping behind every door and opening every cupboard with a Miss-Piggy-like high-YAH , chopping his hand down like Inspector Clouseau going after Cato. I am a very philosophical man , he told the one-eyed doll. Just one of those things, a kink in the space-time fabric, as if some poor bugger in a parallel universe made himself a sandwich, walked out of his kitchen and found himself in End Point.
    It was a possibility, certainly, however unlikely and infinitesimally small. Quantum scientists would back him up. In an infinity of universes everything possible was happening. Somewhere light years away, right at this very moment, Jonas wasn’t sitting down in the back garden with a bag of foraged elderflowers and beginning the job of separating them from their stems but was instead watching a hamster in a top hat and tails do a merry little dance.
    Jasmine, though. Why out of all the oils did the mystery bather have to choose that one?
    * * *
    â€˜What would you do about it?’
    Eggers narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re serious?’
    â€˜Yes!’
    â€˜You haven’t been drinking?’
    â€˜Well, I have been drinking but I wasn’t been drinking then.’
    â€˜Hadn’t been.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜You hadn’t been drinking.’
    â€˜I know.’
    â€˜I mean the sentence, you don’t say it like... oh never – ’
    â€˜Gentlemen, would you be so kind?’
    Jonas raised a placatory hand. No one did sanctimony like Granny Hawthorne. She chaired the Village Hall Committee like a Nuremberg judge. Jonas and Eggers had been at the meeting for half an hour, waiting to present the annual reports of the Sports Club and The Hub.
    â€˜She should crack her face, make her arse jealous,’ whispered Eggers. ‘You better change the locks?’
    â€˜Too expensive.’
    â€˜Get a baseball bat then. You don’t want to wake up and find some psycho in a hockey mask standing over you. You don’t read the papers but I do. Bad shit has to happen to someone.’
    â€˜Would a maniac put jasmine oil in his bath?’
    â€˜Jasmine?’
    â€˜Jasmine.’
    â€˜You some kind of bufty?’
    â€˜A what?’
    â€˜Never mind. Hey, maybe it was a woman .’
    â€˜Gentlemen!’ Mrs Hawthorne peered over her glasses. ‘Given that the two of you have something terribly important to discuss, shall I suggest we move your items up the agenda?’
    Eggers galloped through his report. A quick clap on Jonas’s shoulder and I’ll see you in The Lion.
    Then Jonas. He reported on auto-pilot. The whisky had left his mouth dry. The committee made him think of zombies and he tried not to look at them, wondering if any of them had recently bathed. He watched himself, his hands with a life of their own, oddly flailing, thoughts taking him here, there and finally settling on the first time he smelled jasmine. Eva’s perfume. Some people don’t like it , she said. Jonas did. It was a scent that would tell him she was here and tell him she had gone: a