Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  He shuffled between his room and the vending machine in the unmanned reception two floors down when he needed to eat. Every step made him gasp. The cartons of food were manufactured by his last employer, cultured micro-proteins he’d helped distribute years before, with a sense of urgency as world food prices rose and exports thinned. The dinners were flavoured and shaped to resemble foods once eaten in better days. Few improvements had been made to the product since he stopped working in logistics, a time he barely thought about now.

  When his company began distributing the product fifteen years before, the father had wondered if, one day, he’d find himself eating the food originally intended for the starving: a heavily processed nutritional substance designed to supplement overseas food aid when the grain reserves dropped, then all but vanished. Producing bulk over variety had quickly become essential. But every synthetic foodstuff, produced by the country’s untiring chemical plants, was now eaten domestically to replace meat and dairy products. Nothing reached the listless brown skulls of Africa, or the terrible encampments erected in southern Europe.

  The meals in the machine were three times more expensive than those sold in shops, but he bought them and ritually heated his dinners in one of two microwave ovens in the kitchen area, then made a careful return to his room. By the time he sat at the little table, the food was cool enough to eat with a plastic spoon, though even the bovine movements of his jaw sent little shudders of pain into his shoulder. Shifting to sit or lie sideways, and constantly rearranging the spare pillow upon the bed that his body dampened, he made attempts to ease the relentless aches. Movement in the fingers of his left hand was the only good sign, and on the strength of that weak fist alone, he delayed any attempt to reach the hospital in Shiphay. The hospital was close to where he and his family had once lived, and he could not bear to look upon that hill again, or to see the silhouettes of the old houses march back into his memory.

  When he managed to sleep, it was at odd times: noon, from six in the morning until nine in the morning, for half-hour stretches during boiling afternoons to awake sweat-drenched. Or he took naps during humid evenings in which his own animal smell polluted the small room. On the third night he fell away into a void so deep, he awoke in the middle of the following day as the sun pushed its fiery red surface against the side of the building. Only to fall asleep again, or maybe he just fainted, to wake after midnight.

  Whether patchy and broken, or long and seemingly comatose, his sleep came alive with things he feared were signs of a brain broken like crockery on a hard floor, then put back together in new sequences that barely resembled the original.

  Awake, he filled the hours by watching nothing but news on the stations the room’s media service offered. Old films and dramas, documentaries and comedies were available, spread across too many other channels as always, but for the last two years he’d allowed himself no entertainment, long ago deciding that he’d lost the right to leisure or pleasure. Anything composed of levity or trivia would somehow unbearably remind him of times he’d permanently lost.

  Day and night, coated in sweat and periodically groaning at the metronomic pulse of pain in his shoulder, the father simply lay as still as he could manage and watched the stricken world.

  Broadcasts told him that close to half a million people were thought to have now expired in the heat from the Mediterranean to northern Germany. The great fires had ebbed, then started again, then ebbed. The heat on the ground had made them impossible to fight from anywhere but the air, so they had continued to burn for a long time.

  Broadcasts told him that the Egyptians had bombarded the Ethiopians again, and that the Ethiopians had shelled the Egyptians. The vast foreign farms in Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia, the Congos and Algeria had been ransacked again by the starving and the Islamic militia groups. Saudi Arabian grain convoys leaving Sudan had been attacked and looted. Mercenaries had responded. In the broadcasts a lot of dead people were lying in the various reddish soils of the African continent. A loose and volatile confederacy of rebel leaders had accused South Africa of hoarding food.

  But what worried the father more than anything, what actually made him close his eyes, was the news that the sixty million hectares of arable land leased to foreign powers in Africa were now producing crop yields of grain that were down by sixty per cent.

  The number made the father feel sick. Even the abandonment of most foreign-owned livestock and biofuel farming interests, two decades before, in order to grow drought-resistant grains, had come too late for Africa. The quick and irreversible slide into starvation, collapse and evacuation, across the entire continent and beyond, seemed as contagious as the two new pandemics.

  A strain of SARS coronavirus was thriving in teeming Asia. They were calling the new bug SARS CoV11. Broadcasts switched between this and the Gabon River Fever in West, North and Central Africa, where cameras peeked through the side of shanty houses and viewed what looked like colourful sleeping bundles at rest on the earth. Towns of driftwood and corrugated iron were eerily still. Clumps of thin people lay against each other at the side of unsurfaced roads, unmoving. Men holding guns had rags tied around their noses and mouths. A child lay still against the depleted breasts of its mother. Bulldozers made great rents in red soil. Bodies inside plastic sacks were rolled into the pits. Black smoke fumed from pyres that men tended with long sticks like shepherds of old. An airport in yellow smog in Korea. Armed police and men in white suits gathered around grounded planes. Technicians squeezed liquid into trays from pipettes. Freight trucks idled at roadblocks. More face masks. China, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, the east of India: they were all coming down hard and fast with the bug.

  In other news, Russia and China expelled more of each other’s diplomats and imposed new sanctions upon one another over Siberia. Not too far away, there had been another coup in Pakistan, on account of the long-term fresh-water crisis, where men continued to stamp on Indian flags with sandalled feet, strike their heads with their own hands, and kick up the white dust from the ground of their arid country, while a large group of Indian generals crowded behind a podium to face the press.

  Eventually, by the fourth day of his confinement, the father preferred to sit in silence with the media switched off.

  ELEVEN

  Scarlett Johansson called the father at seven p.m. on the sixth day.

  Naked, he was standing at the foot of the bed and slowly raising his left arm away from his body, sideways first, then to the front, as if he was performing some slow semaphore for landing aircraft. From what he could gather from the myriad online sites that he’d visited, his shoulder was probably not broken but deeply bruised; at worst the bone was chipped. If there was no fracture his left arm would still need to rediscover mobility before it seized. Around his arm and back, the red and black flower was turning green and yellow. Progress.

  ‘The man you shot was called Nigel Bannerman. He and Bowles were tight in prison . . .’ Scarlett listed the man’s crimes and the father closed his eyes as they were recited. ‘We reached out to sympathetic individuals in your area to check on developments. There is some good news: the case will remain open, but it will be absorbed into a variety of unsolved murders going cold.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You better had. The murder squad’s caseload down there is unmanageable, so this will not be a priority. Possible causes of the double murder are currently revolving around politically motivated vigilante activity. Big nationalist support in the area. Organized crime hasn’t been ruled out either, but no one fancies a loner for this, and no one on the job is demanding your immediate capture for clipping Bannerman and Bowles. They’ve known for a long time that sex offenders and paedophiles began clustering around the refugee situation, so my gut tells me the police won’t be gnashing their teeth over a slight reduction in those numbers. Though I don’t think killing is something you will ever be comfortable with. This cannot happen again. You do understand that?’

&nb
sp; ‘It was never something I intended to do. What about Robert East?’

  ‘He never reported your intrusion so we needn’t fear a connection there. As for the others, Tony Crab now has dementia and no one is connecting this to Malcolm Andrews or Bindy Burridge, who still haven’t reported you. Above-national-average rates of the usual are massively in your favour here, public disorder, domestic violence, rape, alcohol-related violence, gang violence, drug running, you name it, so the local force has more than enough to keep itself occupied right now.’

  The father swallowed. ‘The two boys in the attic?’

  ‘Greek. No record of them entering the UK. Social services are going through the records of Greek nationals with refugee status, to see if they can trace any relatives. They may have been trafficked.’ Scarlett Johansson didn’t say any more. If his daughter had been trafficked abroad by a paedophile ring, his search was futile.

  Millions had been displaced from southern Europe alone, augmented by further scores of millions from the Middle East and Africa, and all pushing north into Europe. It had changed the continent. Every man, woman and child south of France was steadily fleeing drought, heat, starvation, the wars and innumerable diseases that accompanied each dilemma. The biggest migration of a single species ever known on the planet was underway, and it had never been easier for someone to go missing. One third of all the refugees were children.

  The father knew how criminal gangs had found people willing to do anything to escape their own countries, and then escape the refugee settlements they found themselves herded inside. Gangs had found an infinite supply of defenceless, weakened, frightened and confused people upon whom they could force their will. He also knew from his own exhaustive research that the UN and Interpol’s estimate of children being used in prostitution, in Europe, at the time his daughter was taken, was close to one million. It was anyone’s guess how many more children had since become subjected to sexual slavery.

  The father wiped the sweat off his face with a forearm. ‘This Rory Forrester, what do you have?’

  ‘He’d done hard time for rape and indecent assault as a youth. Got in with a gang in the south-east. And his last known occupation was trafficking. He was arrested and imprisoned for running Asian girls in London. Came out and drifted to Portsmouth according to his parole records. He’s been off radar for two years. The local force had no idea he was even in the area.’

  ‘But they’ll go and pick him up?’

  ‘Not likely if he’s with the King Death gang. As I said, the police have a full plate with this lot already. The county is crawling with King Death gang activity. Illegal tobacco and drug farms on Dartmoor. Illegal pork and poultry operations. Bootleg cider outfits and people trafficking because of the camps, which are the most sought-after refugee destinations in Europe. The Kings are into everything now, everywhere, and taking it all over. Construction of the camps, land sharking to take over property for redevelopment, false IDs, any kind of contraband, gun running to the jihadists and the nationalists, car theft on a massive scale, black-market meat. It just goes on and on and on. Some in government think the problems they’re causing should be a greater priority than the climate. And after the riots, the police and army abandoned the snatch policy in Torquay.’

  ‘So he just gets to carry on? Like they all do. No one goes looking for them. The precedents have already been set. Jesus.’

  ‘Not quite. He’ll be investigated for sure. Eventually. When the resources and timings are right, they’ll look for him. But you don’t set the pace here. And neither do I.’

  ‘But how long? When will this Rory be investigated? Are we talking weeks, months . . . or longer?’

  ‘I don’t know. King Death is a very nasty organization. Probably the worst gang now, in most parts of the country. They go back decades, as long ago as the fall of communism in Russia. Trans-national crooks to start with, smuggling imports with high rates of tax. They evolved into kidnap and ransom specialists years ago. You might even remember the kidnapped children of the solar field industry executives in 2036. That was them. There’s rumours of dozens of other high-profile targets kept out of the news, who paid significant ransoms to get their executives back, and their executives’ children back. That’s how they made their biggest paydays until drugs, arms, food and medicine expanded the franchise. But trafficking has been the most lucrative business for them yet, in combo with where it bleeds into the sex trade.

  ‘They’ve forged links with all the local elements that came in with the refugees, the Kurds, Serbs, North Africans. You name it. There is no single ethnic bias any more. When cross-border intelligence folded, it’s anyone’s guess how many of the hard core came here from eastern Europe. But Interpol believe they’ve upwards of eighty thousand foot soldiers in the UK alone now. These outfits are one of the few success stories from the last twenty years.’

  The father, like everyone else, had seen gang members around the coastal places where he’d drifted, and watched them strutting about the better harbours, often outside the large homes he had driven past, beyond the towns; buildings they took possession of with huge sums of cash combined with intimidation. Lots of fat men, foreign and home-grown, taking ownership of the lifeboat island of Europe, shouting communications at screens, or admiring their own clothes and cars. Standing on long driveways, opening and shutting boots, or playing with dogs, seemingly laconic men, lazy in expensive clothes, drinking wine in the better hotels sealed behind high fences, their feet spread too far apart in arrogant contentment; men on loungers beside swimming pools. Swine dressed in whatever the French and Italian mills could still produce and sell at grotesque prices. The wealthiest and most important were never even seen; they had private grounds, penthouses, subterranean mansions and compounds with walls the father would never scale.

  ‘I don’t get it. Why would they kidnap my girl? We didn’t have any money. Not real money. We didn’t count. I was a regional manager. This doesn’t make sense. For them to target us, we’d have to have something they wanted.’

  ‘You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. And your guess is as good as mine. But look, let’s not get carried away with hearsay from Murray Bowles. He probably only told you so he could intimidate you with his affiliations. If she was taken by a gang then she was taken for . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Something we probably don’t want to talk about. But that seems unlikely. It would be near-unprecedented for a gang to snatch a middle-class child from a middle-class area, with no prospect of a significant ransom. Your family does not fit the profile to lose a child to sex traffickers. It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely with far easier catches in the refugee and substance-addicted populations around the fronts.’

  Trafficked. She’d mentioned sex traffickers again. The father felt his soul slump to its knees at the merest suggestion of an international connection, of an impossible widening of the geographical area beyond that which he could hope to search.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe,’ Scarlett added, ‘but the police have almost no intelligence coming from inside the King Death organization, and they can’t verify what testimony they do get either. But if there’s a King connection, reprisals for snitching are very harsh. I want you to go and refresh your memory on the Bristol drug wars in 2047, so you can see what we’d be up against.’

  The father clenched his one good hand into a fist. ‘There are methods that are sometimes used to extract information. I have read about this. I know it happens.’

  ‘Torture? Sure. For suspects of political killings, high-profile assassinations, terrorist links. But nothing will be pulled out of the bottom drawer on a rumour about a sex trafficker and one missing child. Yours is a very old case now.’

  The father momentarily forgot the pain in his shoulder and ground his teeth. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘You won’t. You’ve done enough. This mess is containable, but anything else could see you caught, or worse. You cannot risk putting yourself anywhe
re near this group, because what happens then? You’d be risking everything, yourself, me, our work, and our assistance for others in your situation. This has gone far enough. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We’re close.’

  ‘No, we are not. We have nothing concrete.’

  ‘Bowles wasn’t lying. I know it. I know he wasn’t . . . He had this picture. It was horrible, strange. Not something a man like that would . . . I don’t know . . . have in his house. A picture of death, I think. But it seemed to suggest something else, a connection. To King Death? Maybe. And this Rory Forrester is in with them. There must be something in what Bowles said.’

  ‘How do you know? From pictures and some lowlife bragging about his mob affiliations? We’ll need a lot more than that.’

  I don’t agree.

  TWELVE

  For the following three days, the father stared at a screen in his little room, searching, filtering, speed-reading, occasionally pausing to sit back, light-headed and nauseous from both the heat and the impact of the pictures and films he’d found. It had not taken him long to realize that if there was a King Death connection to his daughter’s abduction, the odds had changed and the dangers had increased incalculably, perhaps enough to make him want to never leave the room again.

  Distant incidents in Bristol, London, Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds and Plymouth were refreshed in his memory: lists of casualties, and passport photographs of scarred, tattooed and emotionless faces of men who had done things to people that would not have been out of place in medieval battles. Deeds gradually accepted by the public with a numb resignation. Another unanticipated consequence of economic inequality, the refugee crisis, the repeated disruption from heatwaves, storms and floods; all opportunities for the gangs to fast-track their interests through extortion, bribery, kidnap, blackmail, intimidation and violence.

  A relentless spate of face-saving revenge killings and turf wars had raged during the forties: throttlings, burnings, head shots, and beheadings. Each method of murder becoming a gang signature in a grim competition to heap even greater horrors onto a world already weeping with horror. But above all others, the Kings truly were the reigning monarchs of ruin, vice, corruption and murder.