Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  Through the evening the father obsessively checked the water meter in the bathroom, filling jugs from the cold tap. At midnight he ran another cold shower with the timer fixed at one minute. When he stepped out he didn’t dry himself. He lay on the bed with most of his body upon a towel. The room’s only window was open and the street below was quiet. No breeze. He’d kept the lights off to trick his mind into thinking the room was cooler. He could smell the sea.

  To distract himself from his nerves and the heat, the father looked for local news. He got national. All available channels had switched from the Gabon River Fever aboard the refugee ships drifting off the coast of Italy, and moved away from the new bug in Hong Kong, to continue the summer’s top story: the forest fires. Flashing into the darkness of his room came the onscreen pictures of the blaze in Spain, Portugal, and France, filmed from as close as safety would allow, and from space, where the smoke was visible as a black cloud over the Mediterranean. Subtitles ran across the bottom of the screen to tell viewers that more firemen were missing, fifty this time in Spain.

  He tried another channel, then another, but similar pictures continued to flicker across the dark walls and ceiling. There were long lines of black rubber sacks in a vast warehouse with grey walls. People wearing masks walking between the rows of dark lumps, like scientists waiting for pupae to hatch. The caption said Paris.

  That summer an expert called the heatstroke a ‘climate holocaust’. Like all bad things the phrase caught on quickly. As the father drove back to Devon two weeks before, he’d passed refrigerated supermarket trucks, taking their cargo out of Torbay Hospital and up the M5 at night, on their way to the makeshift mortuaries near Taunton. Airport buildings were now being used. So many had come to the coast to retire, but were retiring from life sooner than they’d anticipated. The care homes were emptier after three months of such heat, or at least the cash-strapped bedlams were. The refugee camps were not air-conditioned either, and the heat had cut a swathe through their elderly too.

  Every second summer now.

  There was not much worse than being old, the father had decided long ago. But he still wanted to be old, and when his time came he wanted his daughter to be there and to hold him in her arms like he was her baby.

  The father took the mute off.

  Reports cited a death toll of three hundred thousand across Europe, and climbing with the mercury. Old people, refugees, the homeless: the usual suspects. The summer records of ’29 and ’33 had been broken; ’47’s body count was now in sight. The European summer had been set a new challenge of how long it could smother, and of how many it could take away.

  Crop losses too of thirty-two billion euros across three months of heat and drought. Atmospheric carbon emissions had leapt again. Another positive feedback: plant stress. Plants and trees were throwing out what they were supposed to be sucking down. Another loop getting tighter, closer than the air, every second summer. At times, when the father struggled to breathe, he thought he could sense all of the dry, exhausted trees releasing their last gases like dying breaths.

  Pictures of river beds came next. They made him feel worse than the sight of flames shrieking through the tops of trees. Brown trickles in cracked mud: the Rhine, the Po, the Loire. Rainfall down ten per cent with poisonous algae blooming in depleted lakes. He tried to imagine what the algae looked like but didn’t have the strength. People were being told not to drink the water or bathe in it to escape the heat.

  White smoke above a forest in Germany. Them too now. Red coals smouldered beneath the plumes. The trees reminded the father of tall, thin people, all panicking and unable to move their feet. These pictures made breathing seem more difficult and he thought he could smell smoke again.

  An area as big as Denmark was already ash and black bones in southern Europe. People thanked God there wasn’t much wind. A small mercy. A land mass as big as Luxemburg had gone up in northern Spain a few years back and choked Barcelona. The father only briefly considered what the scorch mark would be like in ten years’ time, by 2063: a black smudge the size of France? No one could bear to think that way. Guesses and estimates were unwelcome in most company.

  Pictures of a rockslide, filmed from the air, followed. Mountains in Switzerland were falling apart. Glacial melt rates had also reached new records.

  When the news moved to North Africa he switched channels. No one could look at Africa and not believe that they were next in line. He flicked down two channels and waited for the local service to come on after the international links.

  The British nationalists’ shaky unity, The Movement, had endured a big rally earlier that day, followed by a sluggish, heat-battered march through Torquay. He’d heard them in the distance that afternoon: drums, muffled chants, the odd tinny blurt through a microphone.

  The Movement planned to walk through Paignton the following day. Progress would be slow because even The Movement’s determination would stumble in such heat, but there’d be more people than usual in the area, and the available police would gather further along the coast around the refugee camps, filling their boots with sweat they could ill afford to lose.

  Heat kept people indoors. A good thing because the recipient of the father’s coming move would probably be home, just like Robert East had been. He’d go in real early, when it was a bit cooler.

  The father turned the screen off and looked at the open window: a black square of hot night. He dropped the blinds as a precaution. An intruder would disturb them and the noise would wake him.

  His thoughts swam. The bottle of rum was empty. He hadn’t intended to finish it in one sitting. It used to take him three nights to go through a bottle. Half-asleep, drunk, feverish, then strangely chilly, always more dreaming than thinking, the father waited and waited for Scarlett to call.

  At eight in the morning, she finally made contact. The father believed he’d dropped off only for a few minutes in the night, but could now see the intense bars of light at the side of the blinds.

  ‘I have the address,’ she said. ‘You ready?’

  EIGHT

  The father peered through the windscreen at the sky. Glimmers of dawn’s thin light seemed more evident. Soon there would be a merciless clarity for early-morning eyes to squint into.

  If the heat was to last forever, he knew that everyone would go mad. Or maybe everyone had already gone mad without being aware of the disintegration, and not only the mutterers or head-slappers, the screamers or the too silent, who were plentiful. But perhaps those still shuffling through domestic routines, or frantic with some purpose, in what was called the war against the climate, were incapable of fully remembering what life was like before. Back when? When was it not like this. When was that exactly? He often wondered if the lucky ones were those who had known nothing more than this.

  When it had gone five, he was still sat in the car, slowly sweating and sipping at his water bottle. Public information about heatstroke stayed on repeat in the local media he had playing. He knew the health advice by heart like an old song: symptoms to watch for were quick, shallow breaths and a rapid pulse followed by dry skin, nausea, dizziness, irritability. Stay indoors, do not move during the hottest part of day, use cold compresses, stay in the shade, sip water. Stay, sit, sip.

  There had been no room in intensive care since June so good luck with an ambulance. With heatstroke, a coma might be only a stumble away. And a move could be a boisterous business, as was the retreat or extraction. If there were delays or tussles, he would need to periodically check his skin and make sure the sweat never stopped leaking.

  He returned his attention the house across the road.

  The last time the father saw his target, Murray Bowles, the man had been returning to this address, carrying two fabric bags packed square with cartons of food. And the man had managed to remain overweight, so he wasn’t eating only soya products, fruit and vegetables. He was probably supplementing his fare with sugary black-market victuals, and they weren’t cheap.

&
nbsp; Bowles didn’t work, but lived alone in a three-bedroomed terraced house that looked close to being condemned. In the frenzy of resettlements from flooded Liverpool and East London to a county already swollen by the surge from southern Europe and Africa, the father wondered how a rehoused sex offender had become the sole occupier of a three-bedroomed property, even one so poorly maintained. Benefits would never stretch so far. Bowles had friends.

  The bay windows of the street-facing rooms on each floor were permanently curtained, the window sills revealing a permanent litter of objects just inside the glass: plastic bottles, crockery, bunched-up clothing, the back of a circular mirror. The attic had been converted into another floor; its bays were also concealed by blinds.

  No one else had entered or left the house with Bowles during the three days the father had watched the property, parked outside, on the other side of the road. And each time the father had seen Bowles that week, the man hadn’t changed his shirt. He looked like an ogre from a fairy tale; he looked like the cliché of a child molester. The father had discovered that they often did. Longish, unwashed hair mopped his wide skull, the black locks forming greasy fronds across the broad forehead, and dangling over a rubbery-looking collar, unless they had been scraped tight behind his ears. The man’s round-shouldered posture was a result of a perpetual lowering of the head, chin dipped to sternum, as if he were a big, harmless, shy man: meek and self-conscious in collared shirts stretched out by a ponderous belly and slabs over his hips. Where they stumped from his shorts, his pale legs were thickly haired trunks.

  It was easy to imagine the creature’s outer flesh as soft and slippery, but the father detected a tough core in a large body; the doughy shoulders and arms suggested an unappealing strength. This was a man who might hold on tightly. A physical sense of the man grew the longer the father watched him, and as they inexorably drew closer to each other. Imagined textures, the weight and density of the body, taunted the father until the man’s dimensions began to seem entirely unassailable, the damp fleshiness unmanageable.

  Bowles would always close his front door without looking over his shoulder, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. Just in and out he went, short journeys, the small eyes shielded, half-closed.

  No lights had come on in the hallway during the evenings. The father had wanted lights. Perhaps it was the idea of being in a close, dark space with Bowles that appalled him more than the sight of the burly figure. And the longer he had waited, the more his imagination effortlessly refashioned the big man into an opponent light on his feet with the eyesight of a rat, aware of the father outside and simply waiting for him in a familiar darkness. Something about this move just did not feel right. A nervy suspicion endured, not helped when Scarlett gave the father notes and warned him ‘not to underestimate the suspect’. When in role as a sadist, apparently Bowles was fond of blood and a veritable master of the universe.

  Going in early Friday morning would have been ideal, but the father was still outside, watching, on Sunday morning. Plans had been made and remade. He had carried out more reconnaissance than normal. Lengthy preparations hadn’t reaffirmed his purpose, but only made it vaguer. More than heat was holding him back here.

  The sky faded to a treacherous Atlantic blue, with a promise of cool air that would never come. A dilution to a milky blue would follow, before a canopy of polished steel would burn unprotected eyes. He could not be here in daylight. There was barely the best part of an hour of semi-darkness remaining. He wiped the sweat off his face with a forearm, started the car and drove to the place where he’d decided to park in an adjoining street. He would enter through the rear garden.

  Fir trees covered the rear of the property, but he would break cover the moment he pushed between two leaning fence panels, rotted away from a concrete post. There was nowhere to hide in the garden. Even without ambient light, if anyone was to look from the rear windows at the back of the three terraced houses confronting him, they would see him.

  He’d need to move slowly because the back yard was an obstacle course designed by those who cared nothing for a rear outlook. The smell of desiccated grass by the broken fence clouded his thoughts and hampered a strategy that became even less clear in his mind, less convincing, until his plan entirely fell away. He was tired, had slept badly for months, was thinking too much but resolving nothing. His head was not right for today’s work. But would it ever be right again?

  Elderly private owners occupied the house on the right. Their garden featured an orderly array of crops around bleached stone paths. Two families shared the house on the left. He’d counted five children earlier that week and wondered if the parents knew who was living next door. He thought of the children playing outside their neighbour’s shabby house, and the father shivered with a sudden, mad desire to do the move fast, and at gunpoint, eschewing nerve gas or the police immobilizer.

  According to Scarlett, Murray Bowles had already served a three-year sentence in the early forties for the physical and sexual abuse of children, before appearing in court in 2046 on twelve new charges of indecent assault and the rape of minors. The latter abuse was sadistic in nature, though he served no more than three years. He was out in 2049 and housed at the seaside in Margate. In 2050 he moved west, to Torbay.

  In the late thirties Murray Bowles was a suspected affiliate of Ken ‘Santa’ Barret, a reviled paedophile and one of the last child killers to get the nation bristling for the death penalty, before such things were swept away by record rainfalls, European hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. In Nottingham ‘Santa’ Barret’s group had killed two brothers in care during a sadomasochistic ritual. Rumours suggested more children had been killed by the ring. Five of the twenty boys and girls that Santa’s secretive group had abused were never found.

  ‘Santa’ Barret was killed by other inmates in prison in 2043. Besides Murray Bowles, none of Barret’s associates had ever been traced, and Bowles’s connection to the ‘Santa’ murders never stuck due to lack of evidence.

  The father knew why Scarlett Johansson had made Murray Bowles available to him: he’d mainly groomed from care homes in the East Midlands, like his master, and they’d often moved the victims into rented flats. Two children were imprisoned for over a year, and Murray Bowles had arrived in Torquay the year before his daughter was taken.

  Bowles couldn’t drive, but may have been part of a group. Parole officers had kept an eye on the man once a month for thirty minutes since his release from prison, but he hadn’t been a suspect for anything since 2049. According to statistics and case histories, that didn’t mean much during the quiet periods of predators like Bowles, and all of the offenders were mostly off radar now; there were far greater priorities to occupy the police and social services.

  He should have been told about Bowles before. That bugged him. A notion that the four men he had made moves upon thus far had been mere practice, and that he had been surreptitiously tested and trained in advance of this hot morning at another stranger’s house, nagged him. As his wife suspected, maybe tendrils of the Home Guard scandal, created by factions in authority and their associations with paramilitaries, were now coiled about his neck. God knew he had reason to be here, but he didn’t want to be used for general organized harassment, or another paedophile cull. He did not want to engage in anything not directly connected to finding only those who took his little girl.

  On his way into the rear yard, the father passed a plastic water barrel, a bulging shed, soaked and dried out too many times. A trellis had sprung free from a painted cement wall. Weeds and tree roots extending for water made the patio uneven like the deck of a ship coming apart on black rocks. He stepped over a sink, its pipes plumbed into nothingness, and skirted greening sacks of sun-bleached refuse. At the kitchen door a taint of sewage wafted about his face. Only one first-storey window was uncovered.

  The father found the right tool in his rucksack and began working at the door, in the gap between the frame and the lock. A secondary gl
azed door, but cheap, the glass all tapioca bubbles and mist.

  He entered the kitchen soon after, stun spray and torch in either hand, and stood in a room long and narrow like a galley on a canal boat. A scrap merchant’s mound of mismatching pots and crockery and plastic formed a small mountain over the draining board, the sink and small kitchen table. Packets of soya meals for one were stacked in a precarious tower. The father could smell gas mingling with damp-softened wood. A silent, lightless house lay beyond an open door at the far end.

  What carpet there had once been in the hall was worn through to flattened threads, spider-webbing wooden floorboards. There were no decorations on the walls peppered with ancient Rawlplugs protruding like grubs; the interior had not seen paint or new wallpaper for decades.

  A front room was choked with boxes and cases and shadowy humpbacks of junk piled over dim furniture. A dining room facing the garden had mustard-coloured curtains, red lino peeling off the floor, pale but dirty walls. Someone had broken the brick fireplace apart with a hammer but left the rubble on the floor, as if work had been abandoned as strength failed and futility numbed good intentions.

  Moving up the narrow staircase, he felt the newel post and bannisters moving under his hand, and a sebaceous odour clung to the dark and warm space of the stairwell. The first-floor landing was the same, the smell even stronger, as if a hot animal had been driven indoors by the heat of the day and settled to its heavy respirations in the gloom.