Hermit Read online

  ‘Of course. Does it offend your religious preferences?’

  ‘Not at all. Inasmuch as I still have them.’ He shrugged and paused. ‘No, it’s more . . . grew up in a household where Bibles and crosses were everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Iconography of every kind on every flat surface. Bad associations. I, uh, don’t need to be reminded of my parents’ bedroom when I’m in a cell.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you?’ He lifted his gaze quickly from foot to table-edge: his mannered facsimile of sharpness. ‘That’s the sort of thing people usually say as a platitude, I think. I believe you always mean what you say, Detective, so I’m intrigued that you say that.’

  She had to frame this right. Nathan wanted a quid pro quo from her; she wished to convince him she’d kept her end of that bargain without actually having to keep it. She had no wish to travel back in her own time. But she needed Nathan to regress at some point and explain what led to him leaving the family home. The pay-off wouldn’t come now, but later.

  ‘Well, religious iconography always carries hefty meaning, Mr Whittler. That’s what it’s for. There are certain households where every angle contains a vision of piety, or suffering, or pious suffering. Where every action is infused by a sense of being watched, judged and found wanting. Where ordinary events are smeared by moral finger-wagging, or worse.

  ‘However, I believe there are also households where such objects hold a different interpretation, or perhaps a further one. Places where it’s possible to see the objects as emblematic of how some people behave: more specifically, they are used to justify or explain such behaviour. If that conduct is a bad memory, then I’m aware that seeing those objects again, even in a totally different context, can drag you back to a place you wouldn’t like to revisit. Drag you back every single day of your life, without you being able to stop it, in fact. That’s what I understand, Mr Whittler.’

  He nodded slowly, reflecting on what she’d said.

  ‘Then you do get it, Detective. You understand very well. I knew you would.’

  His statement of knowledge, of certainty, jarred her. She disliked even the notion of being an open book to anyone, let alone to a suspect in an interview. It implied that insight was mutual, rather than her advantage over him. Even, it suddenly floated past her, as though he had a plan of his own for these conversations. But she had to give him some wins when he asked questions: the give-and-take built his confidence in her.

  Once again, Dana used the turning of a notepad page to indicate a change in the conversation’s trajectory. They had something of an easy rhythm now: Nathan comprehended the signal.

  ‘I’ve been thinking on some of the things you’ve been talking about, Mr Whittler. I’m very interested in what you feel you learned, out there.’

  Nathan smiled, staring at his foot. ‘Ah, yes. The wise man in the woods. Perhaps people will think I have some kind of dazzling awareness to offer – I’m going to be some sort of crystal-clear thinker. Ha.’

  Dana noted the sarcasm but continued. ‘Yes, Mr Whittler, many people will. Once your story emerges in the media – which, unfortunately, it eventually will – there will be people who feel your, uh, circumstances gave you some unique insight into the human condition.’

  ‘Those that haven’t met me.’ Nathan brushed at his jumpsuit: perhaps fastidiousness, perhaps just keeping his hands occupied.

  ‘But I’ve met you, Mr Whittler. And I believe you have an insight to offer.’ She noticed Nathan’s raised eyebrow and pushed on. ‘I believe that for two reasons. Firstly, you did step outside most human experience – you see much of our lives from the viewpoint of a genuine outsider, and I don’t think you should discount the importance of that. We can’t have that perspective: you may have it.’

  She waited for a response that was never coming.

  ‘Secondly, you’re an intelligent person who has had the time to think on these things. I know, if I’m alone, I can clear my mind of everyday concerns. I think better, I’m sharper; I’m more creative with my solutions. I believe you had those advantages when you reflected on the world. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Not sure I do, Detective Russo. Maybe I’m only a man in the trees, eating baked beans from a can. Maybe I wasn’t bright enough to begin with, and all this is a wasted opportunity for mankind. Perhaps I survived on bad food, good luck and stubbornness. Hardly a philosopher king, is it?’

  She tapped her pen against her pad. ‘One thing doesn’t preclude another, Mr Whittler. I imagine that not only did you think about life, but you also thought about the process of thinking. If you see what I mean.’

  They both let the silence ride. Nathan seemed to be weighing something up. Dana tensed for the shutdown she felt was coming: even though she agreed with Bill that Nathan was more forthcoming on the philosophical side. Maybe Nathan indulged her because he felt such discussions kept them away from specifics like his hideout location, his potential burglaries and whether he had knifed a man to death a few hours ago.

  Nathan considered, then adjusted his posture. He leaned forward, matching palm on palm and rubbing them together slowly, fixated on his shoes.

  ‘So let me tell you how my thinking went, Detective Russo. Because it’s not so mysterious after all. When I first went into the wide blue yonder, my only focus was on survival. It was a few weeks before the winter started in earnest: I had a small and closing window to get myself straight. I’d been living rough for a few days when I started to truly appreciate the importance of not getting wet.’

  He shook his head ruefully. ‘No great philosophy there, Detective, no remarkable insight: just don’t get wet, Nathan. I can’t emphasise enough – the cold when you’re wet is so much worse than dry cold. So my early time was centred wholly on shelter, on warmth where I could create it and on food. Who was it, Maslow? Food and shelter first on the list.’

  Dana nodded. Was there a cop in the Western world who hadn’t stared at that famous pyramid at some point in their training?

  ‘Once I had some kind of handle on where and how I was going to live, I found my brain creeping around, looking for work. I had that modern mentality that my mind must be busy. In your world – my former world – it gets engaged, stimulated, and deliberately so. You can’t even handle a day without it. You create a life where you have that relentless occupation – telephone, work, television, music, people – because you think your mind requires it. You believe your brain will turn to soggy mush without some kind of constant external intervention.

  ‘So my unprepared mind looked for work and found it. It had a rich vein of loathing on tap: looking back and criticising, damning myself over what I’d done or not done, said or not said. My mind liked the negative – it was sustenance. It fed itself by eating into me. I found I had to pay more attention to the practicalities of my new life, purely to shut my mind off from doing that. I recognised it was doing me harm to retrace the past, but it was like an addiction – my brain wouldn’t stop. That retribution had to be crowded out by current activity. I organised and reorganised, overdid the attention to detail, let myself become obsessive about things that didn’t matter. I did that deliberately, Detective Russo, to stop my mind from killing me.’

  Nathan stopped, as if seeking absolution, or forgiveness. It wasn’t Dana’s to give, even if she wanted to: he’d seemingly selected the most unreliable and atheistic of priests. She recognised the theory, though – trying to crowd out the negative by filling the dangerous mental space with activity. It was, she thought, exactly what she was doing with this Day.

  Despite her empathy, all Dana could do was nudge and listen.

  ‘At some point, Mr Whittler, you pushed through that phase?’

  ‘It lasted maybe two years. A horrible time – gruesome. I couldn’t see how it could end. I had no endgame in sight beyond continuing to live – this was it; and it seemed to be devouring me from the brain outwards. I was still trying to live at a modern speed, you see. Still thinking there was ur
gency, or requirement, or others who should be considered. I was scared of the idea of being bored. I mean, Detective, truly bored. Not simply at a loose end but with literally nothing to do that day, and comprehending that fact even as the sun rose. Days felt absurdly long; unnavigable.

  ‘But gradually, things began to shift. I started to experience periods of nothingness – whole hours, or afternoons, when I took no action whatsoever I could recall, had no thoughts I could remember. At first I was puzzled, and worried. Maybe I was losing my marbles, out there in the wilderness. Perhaps it was sending me crazy, and those “lost hours” were proof of that.’

  He took another sip of water then touched the bottle cap before continuing.

  ‘Anyone living in the rough has that as a prefix, don’t they, Detective? Crazy hermit, crazy man in the woods. I’d drifted into the notion that living without human interaction, without that all-consuming stimulus all the time, would drive me nuts. But no, I had that wrong. It took a while, but I came to recognise the good in it. That was the key.’

  He shuffled forward, warming to the subject. ‘We spoke about silence before, Detective; the silence was part of that blankness. I could never have done it with noise. Not even the noise of my own thoughts was tolerable: I had to have perfect peace. I began to organise myself to have periods of nothingness; timetabled spells when I could do nothing, think nothing. I started to understand the importance of that – how it healed my mind to let go of the chains and drift. It came to me how nourishing that was, how vital to my wellbeing.’

  Dana was thinking that this sounded like heaven. She wasn’t sure she had that relationship with seclusion; she both wanted it and feared it. Or perhaps, she feared others’ reaction to her wish for that much solitude: maybe their conditioning shaped hers. That would explain her envy – that Nathan had gone ahead and lived the kind of solitude that she yearned for but didn’t trust herself to grasp. Nathan’s world seemed to her almost idyllic; to be floating through isolation. Most importantly: to be absolutely certain that the absence of people – or the lack of any goals – were virtuous aims in themselves, and not signs of an abjectly failing human being. She caught herself: back to investigative mode. Nathan had induced a reverie.

  ‘So, Mr Whittler, those brief periods when you had to then engage, on some level, with the world you left behind: they must have been particularly painful.’

  Nathan looked again for his fate line. His voice dropped towards a whisper. ‘I don’t really want to talk about those . . . times. I know you’re a detective, and this is a police station, but all the same . . .’

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Mr Whittler. I’m not asking now about the what, where and how of those moments. I’m asking about the contrast between understanding how solitude can work for you, and having to spend any time in a world inhabited by others.’

  ‘Ah, I see. To be honest, Detective Russo, I’d struggled with that most of my life anyway, albeit in a different setting. As I assume you . . .’ He collected himself. ‘Well, anyhow, it wasn’t a different trade-off as such, just a different balancing point on the same set of scales.’

  For a moment she feared he’d clam up, just when she sensed he was revealing something deep inside himself. She felt her breath resume when he did.

  ‘I’d always wanted more solitude than my life could practically offer. Now I was much further along that spectrum: but the same spectrum, and essential issue, were there. I still had to engage with people in some way, at some point. This time the engagement was more about observation, planning. It was, what’s the word? More . . . anthropological, I think.’ He nodded to himself, as if the exact word had only now occurred to him. ‘I studied humans for a particular reason, for a particular end: how to avoid them for the few minutes I was in their world. I could choose, after a fashion, when and how.’

  ‘I understand, Mr Whittler.’ Dana paused then almost whispered, ‘And yes, you’re correct in the assumption you made.’

  Nathan nodded solicitously, and both were silent for a moment, almost as an act of commemoration for Dana’s admission. She swallowed hard as she realised this was a disclosable, legally usable declaration. People would know: it felt like cutting open a scar.

  ‘It’s impossible, you know,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘To get that kind of total internal silence. In the modern world, I mean. There’s too much in the world to allow it, too much stimulus. There’s noise, distraction, obligations, people, the need to earn money, the pressure to engage, the reactions of others. Too much. I mean, that’s what you’re reaching for isn’t it, Detective? I could tell, when I was speaking about it.’

  She had to judge swiftly. ‘I, uh, I can see the virtue of it. But I think most people wouldn’t be able to cope as well as you, Mr Whittler, with that degree of solitude. Both practically and emotionally. Some of us believe we need a ladder out of the pool, no matter how much we enjoy swimming.’

  Nathan inclined his head in a touché gesture.

  She was about to ask the next question when there was a double rap on the mirror, swiftly followed by another. Each officer had a distinct knock, so the detective knew who was interrupting. Two doubles was Bill’s call sign. She couldn’t ignore it.

  ‘Would you excuse me a minute, please, Mr Whittler? I need to speak to my boss.’

  Nathan nodded and sat back to examine his fingernails. Dana noticed again how fastidiously clean and neat they were. She confirmed to the tape that she was leaving the room.

  Bill was there when she closed the door behind her.

  ‘We found his home. Got video and everything. You need to see this.’

  Chapter 16

  Rainer Holt left the patrol car two hundred metres down the street from Pringle’s, on a herring-bone park with a needlessly steep pitch to the drain. Earlville’s inhabitants had plenty of observational skills, and the time to deploy them. Better to seem to be on a lunch hour and a little aimless than striding deliberately into any particular establishment. So he paused to window-shop in a place selling handmade leather boots, rain slickers and other paraphernalia it claimed was ‘vital for the wilderness’. He wondered if Whittler had much of that kind of gear; or whether he’d disproved the shop’s hectoring by surviving fifteen entire years with pretty much none of their stock.

  The main street in Earlville had been pedestrianised last year. He’d seen an old photo of this street with a line of momentous fig trees down the middle, planted to commemorate WW1 diggers. They’d been ripped out ‘for safety reasons’ and replaced with some shade-free human-sized saplings and silver waste bins with ads for flavoured milk. It didn’t seem to Rainer like a reasonable trade-off. An ugly multi-storey car park loomed over the back of the main shopping centre. Designed in the seventies with a deliberately brutalist air, the centre’s concrete now barked harshly at on-comers, the childish font over the entrance failing to impart joy. Off this main strip, older stores remained: the wilderness store, and larger units of pharmacy, grocer, baby clothing and shoes. Pringle’s had been there since the thirties, as the art deco lettering overhead implied. Hipsters from the city weren’t put off by the location. They found it ‘authentic’ and ‘old-school’: they treated the trip like a journey to a living museum.

  He strolled into Pringle’s Furniture, immediately spotting the old man himself. The store itself was unpretentious. The walls were the bare metal of a warehouse, the floor unpolished concrete. Furniture wasn’t laid out in ‘inspirational designs’ of fake rooms: this wasn’t a series of lifestyle scenarios and concepts. The items were placed individually and haphazardly, with enough room to walk around each piece, feel the wood and the fabric, and appreciate both the time and effort of creation. It was less a shop, more a space for admiring craftsmanship.

  Chatting to a spotty apprentice-type in a space between two expensively distressed armoires, Rufus Pringle flicked a double-glance at Rainer and dismissed the young employee. Rufus wore an old-fashioned b
rown overall with frameless spectacles peeking from a front pocket. Underneath the overall was a red tie and a collared, checked shirt. He had stubby fingers that toyed with a well-used pencil. Rainer tagged him as a ‘measure twice, cut once’ kind of man.

  ‘Mr Pringle? Rainer Holt. Police.’ He held out his ID and was unsurprised when Rufus retrieved his glasses, put them on, read every syllable of the card front and back and returned it with a quiet nod.

  ‘What can I do for you, sir?’ Rufus’s voice was slightly raspy – either the remnants of a cold or he was a reformed smoker.

  ‘To be honest, Mr Pringle, I’m not sure. I’m testing your dim and distant memory. Nathan Whittler?’

  Rufus reached within his mind for a second as he pocketed the spectacles, then shook his head and whistled.

  ‘Ah, Nate. They found him, eh? What happened?’ There was a disappointed resignation to his tone.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised he’s resurfaced.’

  Rufus shucked off the comment with a wave of the hand and leaned against one of the armoires. ‘Ah, well, he took off like that; always possible it wouldn’t work out. Where did they find the body?’

  Rainer paused. His first instinct was to disabuse the old man of the notion. But then he wondered if delaying might eke out something that would otherwise remain hidden.

  ‘Took off, you say? It was before my time, obviously. Could you talk me through his last few months with you?’ Rainer was just boyish enough for the wide-eyed ingénu shtick to work.

  ‘Sure.’ Rufus pointed to a bubble office up some rough-hewn stairs. Rainer followed him up, reluctant to touch the handrail for fear of splinters. The office was a repository of invoices with handwritten comments, some sawdust on the floor, a calendar still showing last month, a lousily made mug holding pens, and a crayon drawing of a stick man with Gradad written lopsidedly on the top. Rainer sat on the only other chair, feeling it tilt and groan – he hoped the furniture Pringle sold was more solid than the furniture he used.