Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  But Robert did as he was bid, and his paprika-rimmed eyes, wetter than a beagle hound’s, peered at the glowing screens as if cross-referencing, annotating, listing, footnoting: a rat scholar. He stopped typing after ten minutes. ‘That’s everything,’ he said, a show of contrived penitence deepening his tone.

  The father collected the items and removed the pins, slipped them all inside his rucksack. Robert would never give the father everything, not even on pain of death. He’d given him something, probably details of those men incapable of reprisals. There would be some sites loaded with visuals too, which the father would never have the stomach to trawl through. Scarlett Johansson would want it all. Her ‘associates’ would then sift through the materials on behalf of all of the other agents in the field.

  The father refilled his bottle of water in the kitchen and returned to the living room, sipping. It was really warming up inside, the heat now pushing its great bloat through the utility-room window that he’d left open down the hall. He thought about his car and knew it was time to go.

  Robert now looked as miserable as the faces seen at the windows of municipal care homes. ‘She was your daughter,’ he said, with what sounded like deep resignation and genuine woe.

  The father cleared his throat. ‘Your home is filled with memories, Robert. I can see that. But let me introduce one of mine. There was a little girl who was loved so hard . . .’ His voice started to break.

  ‘Don’t, please,’ Robert said, as if the father was being rude.

  ‘She was taken. Two years ago. Her family want her back . . . so much.’ The father’s eyes smarted and his throat began to swell enough to prevent much more talk. He rummaged inside the rucksack and moved further behind the easy chair, out of sight.

  Robert’s voice rose. ‘I can’t help you. You think I would keep information back from the authorities about this?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘I know what I have done was wrong. But it was in the past. Well before 2051.’

  The father bagged Robert’s head and pulled the drawstring tight.

  ‘Oh God, no,’ Robert said as if from down a well. He tried to get to his feet again.

  The father took a few steps back and killed the overhead lights. ‘Someone, somewhere, will be glad I’m doing this. Here’s one for the kids.’ The father shot the dart into the man’s wrinkled neck.

  Robert’s ankles were tethered but the rest of him shot forward and snapped off the plastic dinner tray and landed on the coffee table, hard, his elbows barely breaking his fall. His entire body convulsed.

  Eventually, after the first shocks abated, he turned his hooded head to reveal the outline of a nose and an open mouth, gasping. There was a muffled sob from inside the cloth bag.

  The father took out the final shit and pressed the handgun against the side of the man’s skull. And it seemed so simple, such a simple act to perform: just a short squeeze on the trigger and every memory of those small, pale bodies, the frightened faces, reddened and stained with tears, or mute with shock and confusion, would be gone from this man’s head forever. One more death, and the end of a man more deserving of death than most leaving the stage these days. This very man, with his head in a bag, could simply be shot dead one hot morning in his own home. The father believed he could actually do it now. Not before, with the others; murder had seemed too much for him. But we change, he thought, we change as we are aged by the heartbreaker called life.

  A murder, an execution, would bring scrutiny, eventually. And no, he would not kill Robert East, and he had to remind himself that he was a father with a broken heart and a broken head, but he was no killer.

  Nor did the father believe that this man had taken his daughter, though knowing he had put his hands upon other men’s daughters made it hard to ease the gun away from the skull below him. ‘If you warn your friends, if you breathe one word of my visit to anyone, I will come back. And, with God as my witness, I swear I will use this.’ The father dug the handgun into Robert’s temple hard enough to make him cry out.

  FIVE

  ‘Did you move?’

  ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘Back in my room.’

  ‘Good. Stay there.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Until I know if Robert East reports you.’

  Since the morning’s move he’d come to the conclusion that some detached part of his mind had overseen his seemingly effortless extraction – the removal of cuffs from Robert East’s pale wrists and ankles, the final threat of reprisals, the unhooding of the twitching man, the walk to the car through warm, dusty, yellow air, the slow drive through a sun’s brightness that carried false hopes of happiness, to transport him away from Cockington and to his dim temporary lodgings further down the coast in Paignton. Keeping him on the road, regulating the twitches, ticks and sighs that threatened to well up in waves and crash to panic or remorse, while adrenaline drained like sewage and made his hands shake: all such reactions and activities of body and mind were managed and governed by an unfeeling administrator of his functions. Perhaps part of his jittery inner parliament now relegated more compassionate impulses to the back benches of his mind. There they could only whistle and jeer, as the mover and shaker was driven home and put to bed without judgement.

  He was also getting fitter over the terrain and distance too. Not sluggish with aches, or anxious to the point of nausea, like he’d been on the first three moves; he was not so delicate now, or so skittish in the head, not quite an athlete, but a keener amateur.

  ‘What did you get?’

  ‘All of his gear. The usual stuff, passwords, names . . .’

  ‘Good. Leave it with the hotel reception. Someone will collect it today. Was he hurt?’

  ‘I used the immobilizer, gas too. I don’t think . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t think it was him.’

  ‘No, but there might be something, a connection, a trace, some small detail amongst what you have taken. We will be thorough. You did a good thing today, but you have to stay strong. We’re doing as much as we can.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And I have someone else.’

  ‘Who? Let me get—’

  ‘I have to go. But I’ll call you soon with all the details.’

  ‘Name? What’s his name?’

  ‘Bowles. Murray Bowles.’ She finished the call.

  The father called his contact Scarlett Johansson because he’d never met her and had become familiar only with her voice. The first time they had spoken her faint American accent had struck him as immediately distinctive and reminded him of an old film star in her younger roles. And because his handler only ever referred to herself as a ‘friend of the family’, in the early days of their association he told the woman who her voice reminded him of. She had laughed and told the father that he should call her that. His contact had remained Scarlett Johansson ever since.

  Over the last year few people had contacted the father; not even the colleagues he’d worked so closely with for fifteen years, nor his old friends from university. Whenever he saw an unrecognized caller on a screen, he picked up in case it was Scarlett. She contacted him at accounts that she provided; these, and her own idents, constantly changed.

  Who was she? He didn’t really know, but guessed that Scarlett was a police officer and a member of an overwhelmed Child Protection Team, somewhere in the counties of the south-west. He knew one protection team was still attached to every police force in the country, but the teams were rarely made up of more than two people. Sometimes, one man or woman now worked alone.

  Maybe Scarlett Johansson had handlers herself and had been chosen to contact some of the parents who had lost their little ones. Perhaps she had been told that he was the right kind of person for collaboration because he’d once been arrested for assaulting a convicted sex offender, a man who’d shrugged off his approach and his request for information about his daughter.
The man had not even been in the right part of the country when his daughter was snatched. But the father had needed to do something and the man’s indifference had been inappropriate. It had taken four men to pull him away and to hold him shaking against a wall until an auxiliary police officer arrived on a bicycle.

  Charges were pressed, but circumstances were taken into account and he’d been released with a caution. Scarlett Johansson had known about this incident and of the father’s need to do something. Somewhere, off the record, discussions must then have taken place about his suitability for making moves. If deliberations had happened between factions in authority, in times of so little restraint, he had been told nothing of them, nor of any assessment passed through the secretive processes that involved Scarlett Johansson.

  Handlers were probably politically motivated and working in collusion with the nationalists, long the most popular political movement. His wife thought so, and Miranda believed he was being used to harass criminal elements in certain areas of the country. She feared he would be asked to eradicate them too. Such clandestine strategies were not unknown. But it was also possible that these officers of the law were good men and women, helping a father find a stolen daughter because they could not make things right any more. Maybe there were a great many Scarlett Johanssons who offered parents a respite from the torments of waiting for news, the harrowing silence that inexorably moved parents further, and still further, and yet further away from the exact moment their worlds were rent by events that had nothing to do with heatwaves or storms. The father hoped so, though he didn’t really care where the information came from. He didn’t know how it all worked, he just wanted help.

  During one of those days deprived of his daughter, inside that sleepless blur of exhaustion and grief and terror, Scarlett Johansson had called him, and on the day his child had been missing for twenty months, one week and two days.

  Scarlett Johansson had called him many times since. Even though she had a tendency to speak quickly, as if afraid of talking to him, the father would ask her to repeat herself. He made sure he never made mistakes when he recorded information, because so much had already been overlooked or completely ignored. And he would record every fragment about these men who did not care about other people, or could not care, not really. This awareness had made his four moves easier. And he was still not convinced by the apparent remorse he had witnessed amongst those he’d interviewed. Nor did he believe that the people he hunted could change for the better. That assurance also made his dealings with them easier.

  SIX

  One week after his visit to Robert East, his lip-licking desire for strong drink enticed the father out of the hotel room and he ventured into Paignton town centre to buy a bottle of Welsh rum. He’d been locked away, living off bread, imitation cheese and real fruit, while waiting for Scarlett Johansson to call and give him an all clear.

  Even though the range of food dwindled, alcohol never failed to appear in stores and markets. No one in any kind of authority would dare take the alcohol away. Wine drinkers were sometimes bereft, but their privations were the least of anyone’s worries.

  In the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the rum was pricey, and stacked on the higher shelves, protected by cages. His funds were not being replenished, and nor was this a special occasion, but he needed to drink. And he was no longer drinking to forget but to remember, to access revelations arising from his outlaw deeds.

  The supermarket had once functioned as a hotel for tourists, three decades gone. The place once boasted a small pool and a ballroom. A sign for satellite television and the Jacuzzi was still attached to the car park wall, like graffiti made in bad taste.

  The upper two storeys of the building had been partitioned like most properties in what used to be a functioning town centre, appropriated by local government and now a seething ghetto of dysfunction, bordering a redoubt of beleaguered families, who maintained their own neighbourhoods’ security arrangements in the surrounding areas of Preston, Goodrington, Churston and Galmpton. This former hotel suggested it was now a ground-floor pharmacy for alcoholics and elderly residents unable to migrate like rare butterflies; those with no option but to flutter about their bleached, toxic habitat in the town centre, behind the vast concrete seawall of the esplanade.

  Every south-facing window upstairs blotted out the sun with blinds, curtains, blankets, duvets, faded sleeping bags and plastic sheets, suggesting a familiar hot, dark, unbreathable atmosphere, reeking of sanitation issues, bleach, tobacco, fried oil and sweat.

  Bottle in hand, the father returned to the car and unlocked it, instinctively moving his head in feigned nonchalance to watch for faces at windows. But as he made to duck inside the vehicle, he saw a large and strange figure, painted upon one wall of the parking court. On the way towards the store he’d mostly looked at nothing but his feet, and had somehow missed this mural. But it demanded his attention now.

  Striding, as if gripped by a purposeful haste, the long figure was depicted as if it were heading swiftly across the rendered cement wall towards the dented bins. Above the tacky rind of dried piss at knee level, an erect posture suggested the thing swept, wraithlike, on thin legs, through the variety of scrawlings, logos, statements, mad gibberish and gang taggings. Curiosity made the father pause and look more closely.

  The portraiture had been artful. The father could not fathom the true motives behind such a creation, though maybe the mural had been created in irony, amongst so much apelike vandalism.

  There might even have been a fire here once, a vehicle booming and fiercely roaring up the wall of the car park, during some sudden explosion of local frustration, and from out of the oily scorch marks, this rangy thing had subsequently been etched and extended across the grimy cement, as if it had appeared from soot and belching smoke, some grim abyss or coke-choked oven that fumed beneath the tarmac.

  The gown or cloak was tattered, frayed away from sticklike limbs, so loose and spare, that spiked the folds and billows. Like trailing rags of cloth around a disintegrating kite frame, a vessel flung aloft and battered in strong wind, a fluidity was also evident in the entirety of the picture: an effortless prance, or a leap in a ballet for the graceful dead preoccupied this figure, and the length of the stride was unpalatably feline.

  Ashy fragments fell away from the garment’s hem and great round sleeves, becoming a slipstream of finer dusts, or a black aerosol of dross. Pebbles or seeds drifted from the bone hands too, sifting through a metacarpal sieve to the littered ground.

  The father moved around the car for a better view, but soon recoiled at the sight of the impression of fleshless feet, vaguely sandalled.

  But there was something close to beauty as well as terror in this graffiti. A sense of a diminishing of the begrimed and overcrowded town around the blackened wall, as if the crooked world was mocked by this figure, or utterly absolved of . . . significance.

  There was no street lighting at night in the area, so it was doubtful the figure had been drawn then. By day it seemed unlikely that an artist would have remained unbothered for long enough to paint such a work. No council would have sanctioned it either. The father wanted to know why it was there and what it meant, because it really meant something to someone. His desire to understand became strangely urgent.

  No one had tried to embellish the figure with a cock, tits or a toothy smile either. It simply cut a swathe unopposed. And who would deface the figure once they’d glimpsed the partial head inside the cowl? The whites of the eyes revealed misery, even ecstasy, or maybe a combination of each. Within sharp sockets, the eyes seemed to stare upwards or inwards, an expression morbidly religious, or tragic. The father had not thought in these terms for a long while, nor been affected by anything artistic since the afternoon his little girl was taken. He was reminded of other times and experienced the slight disorientation that came with the sudden sense of better days.

  Now that he looked more closely at what there was of a face, it seemed tightly pap
ered in flesh, or perhaps it was a mask, the long features drawn and weary as if from the sight of epic suffering. One face for all. No strength remained to keep the jaw shut, and the mouth gaped beyond beseeching for mercy, a morsel of food, or a drop of water. The figure seemed beyond all of that and was still rushing further into . . . the father didn’t know.

  Around its unsightly feet a skilled hand had written: Usque ad mortem. Latin. Something from a dead language, and he didn’t understand what it meant, though the mural did remind him of the very little he knew of medieval art that celebrated death in old churches. And he briefly imagined that this was a sign, or metaphor, that it all had to end: this, us, the world. He imagined this was the figure’s true message. Let us all sit down exhausted and die in our unlit homes.

  The father climbed inside his car, shaken, though not sure by what precisely, and now wished that he had not looked upon the wall.

  That was the first time, his first sighting of the figure, but it would not be his last.

  SEVEN

  Heavy head, soft bones. He didn’t have a shirt on and was still slick all over. He dripped. Thoughts of the coming move against Murray Bowles punctured the father. His strength seeped out of a hole in his body that he couldn’t find. He had to repeatedly visit his ensuite bathroom to drink water.

  Moving to and fro made him feel weaker. It had been thirty-seven degrees that day and was not much cooler at night. Kent had had the highest temperature: forty-one, even hotter than predicted. The next day it was going to hit forty in Devon. For three months the lowest recorded temperature had been thirty-four degrees. You moved, you stayed hot.

  The room was too cheap to have air conditioning. Powering A/C was too costly for the near-defunct hotel chain, so he conserved his strength like the area conserved water and electricity. Until the three new nuclear power stations were finished, the whole of the south-west would sweat and spend more time in the dark. They got everything late except for refugees, that’s what the locals said. People should have been used to delays and power cuts, but they still watched keenly for progress, as if reactor readiness could be achieved by force of desire alone. People had learned that the power could not stay off for long. It wasn’t only darkness they feared; it was what the darkness did to other people and to them too.