Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  He’d turned his face away from the screen at the sight of what they’d done in Bristol in ’47. Members of the public had found the bodies before the police, then taken pictures and posted them: images of eighteen headless shapes with their hands tied, photographed on the carpeted floor of a terraced house. The victims had been people traffickers reluctant to submit themselves to a more ruthless tribe that favoured decapitation to make its mark in a terrible decade: a never-ending carousel of flame, black smoke, glass-strewn streets, bodies under tarpaulins, riot shields glittering in sunlight, placards, aerial footage of felled buildings in other countries, churning brown water moving too fast through places where people had once lived, trees bent in half, tents and tents and tents stretching into forever . . . And King Death flourishing in chaos.

  A grinning bone figure fluttering in rags was a more aesthetic trapping the group boasted. And so insolent was their self-assurance, the foot soldiers even tattooed the figure upon their throats, or covered their entire backs with it, entwined with mortuary rolls, with deeds they’d performed cryptically scripted in Latin. On the street, or in prison, the ink was a better form of protection than body armour.

  Independent journalists had long claimed that the group had never been properly investigated. If they murdered their own and members of rival factions, but not the general public, the neutral but overwhelmed police had apparently maintained a policy of ‘containment and observation’.

  The climate, civil unrest and terrorism were being cited by the Home Office as the priorities of the times; every other year there were evacuations of civilian populations from parts of the country newly, or more severely, ravaged by the weather. The standing army had guard duties and relentless patrols around power stations, crops, solar farms, factories of the synthetic food industry, and the gated communities, whose own private security operations constantly lured police officers and soldiers away for more lucrative work. There was the processing and management of the vast influx of refugees to be taken into account, the roads to be kept clear during evacuations from flooded areas. All of these things preoccupied the protectors of law, order and security. A person only had to watch the news for ten minutes to be convinced by the official explanations for why the country had been engulfed by crime, both opportunist and organized. Not even the wealthy were immune.

  There was no escaping them now. They had been accepted, normalized, like too many other terrible things. And they were into everything, that’s what Scarlett had said, particularly private industry and politics.

  Always a folly, as well the father knew, to presume that people would forget the old world and make do with its salvageable, serviceable relics. Gangs supplied when others could not, or they hoarded the assets for themselves. To believe that ordinary people would go without meat and embrace grains and synthetics was a mistake; they’d known that in food logistics twenty years ago. Black markets were inevitable. People knew that what they wanted was available somewhere. People knew where they would rather be. People would pay anything for medicine if they had a sick child.

  After the father had returned his daughter’s things to the rucksack and the rucksack to the wardrobe, his hands were shaking. Closing his eyes and staring at a single point in the distance, he’d tried to wipe his mind clear of the images he had absorbed of King Death’s victims, and of his own: the two were uncomfortably similar, like symbols on converging routes of a critical path funnelling towards a distant rendezvous.

  When he felt better able to face an inspection of his equipment, he laid all of it out on the bed and reloaded the handgun. Then sorted out his last set of fresh underwear. After he’d dressed, he looked online at the satellite pictures of The Commodore, and the home of Rory Forrester, an affiliate of King Death.

  Before he left his room, he left a voice message for Scarlett Johansson. ‘I’m sorry . . . I am going . . . I need to speak to Rory Forrester, today. Whatever happens, no one will ever know that you helped me. I swear to you.’

  THIRTEEN

  As he walked to The Commodore, the father recalled the distant sight of the town and harbour, many years before, when he and his wife had first viewed Torbay from the sea while holidaying. They had boarded a ferry from Torquay to Brixham, and from the deck they had watched a vista of white buildings cover the cliffs and hills like a child’s blocks: an imagined city, startling in the glare, masquerading as an El Dorado, a Tangier, or Pegeia, the moored pleasure boats and yachts heraldic, their masts the lances of knights assembled in the bay.

  Distant crowds about the harbour might even now startle awake dim memories of old Cannes and Saint-Tropez, at least in those who once knew such things, from when this place had called itself a Riviera and had promised cold drinks to sip on shaded patios, bristling seafood platters, and the wearing of cool summer cottons upon salt-bleached decks. Even now, the many pillars of the former retirement and holiday apartments, all given over to the exodus from the flooded low-lying coasts, the swamped cities, and the first and most fortunate refugees, might still look grand from a distance, though from nowhere other than the air, or from far out upon the sparkling sea.

  With every footstep through the outskirts of what remained of Livermead’s little peninsula, nearly all washed away now to the kerb of the road from Preston, the father clung to the shadow behind the vast seawall and moved east.

  People milled and turned away, nudged the father, their faces challenging or unaware, constantly changing. One side of the long road, leading to the harbour, was black with shadow, and within such precious shade many figures huddled. They were mostly foreign and unwilling to spend more time than was necessary inside the camps, the crowded chalets further east, or in their noisy housing blocks inside the town. Old wheezy buses, and a few cars, passed slowly on the single carriageway.

  The crowds. Whenever he encountered them, the crowds added a sense of futility to his quest that was near-unbearable, and he would swallow his despair like a lonely seabird with trash in its gullet. Because no scene remained static, none was ever replicated in any exactitude. Streets and roads, towns, villages, cities, were endlessly repopulated, with more and more faces filling smaller spaces all of the time. People learned to look above so many heads, and inside themselves, to escape the burden of such numbers, this cognitive tonnage of multitudes. So where, inside such numbers, was one little girl with startled blue eyes, jet-black hair that she’d inherited from her mother, a skipping walk, and who was always so quick to cry when frightened? She was only four and so small when her feet left the soil of her home.

  How would one tiny face be remembered now? Hundreds of thousands wandered these paths every day, came and went, vanished. A mind could not store so many faces in an incalculable array of moments, left behind within so many days, weeks, months, and years.

  Two years.

  There had been no eye witnesses the afternoon she was abducted. Not one.

  No one else is looking for you now. Only Daddy.

  Someone had to speak up, either someone who had been present and helped sweep the small figure aloft, or someone with secret information. They needed to whisper soon, or spit the story from a reddish, tooth-splintered mouth, to lead him nearer to the one.

  Did you cover her little mouth, or drug her? Did her eyes ever open again? Did they open and see a monster? Did a heart no bigger than an egg break open, as the gulf widened between that garden gate and her dark eyes?

  For every tear she shed, I will pluck my retribution from your living flesh. Her terror and her anguish will be yours.

  The father walked deeper into the harbour and forced himself to put away those thoughts that still came most days, and which turned his head bloodless and wooden, like a carving that grimaced through the pain of old regrets. Everlasting was the agony of such remembrance.

  No coastal paradise here either now. The father might have become a wanderer in ancient times, put ashore in a sweltering hive of pirates, slaves, cut-throats, urchins and pickpockets, the dusty a
nd desperate, wide-eyed beseechers and apostles of mutating faiths, increasingly confirmed by the signs of the end of times; all driven here from places baked to clay and burned to dust, arriving at a town besieged and battered by a remorseless yet increasingly lifeless sea.

  Few but the young offered smiles to each other around the high-walled harbour, as they slipped and side-wound about the thoroughfare, beneath sun-desiccated buildings that the Victorians had erected and never envisaged so begrimed and peeling as they were now, two centuries after the coal furnaces and fires of the Industrial Revolution belched.

  Above the harbour he saw the long wounds of cliff erosion, interspersed with the white rubble of the tower blocks that came down years before, when the rains moved the topsoil in red gouts and gushes of clay rushing to the sea. Abandoned clifftop buildings, standing like potential suicides with toes aligned at the edge, gaped eyeless at the treacherous bay that had thrashed them with storm winds and tidal surges, so many times over so many years. The town had not been abandoned, not yet. Scarred and fragmenting, it still teemed, because there were fewer and fewer other places left to go. But when would all of this be finally washed away, he wondered, and its foundations bleached like beak-broken shells?

  Men watched the father from where they leaned against walls and beside doorways about the marina, surly sentries beneath holed signage that once offered discos, swimming pools, fish and chips. Above the signs reared the relics of neo-classical arches, cupolas, grimacing stone balconies and other bourgeois pretensions. When he met the eyes of the men, they turned their heads but left the father with the impression that they were not uninterested in his presence.

  Smells of fried soya, oil, home-grown sugars, beery carpets sun-warmed and aromatic, and sounds of vintage electronic music drifted about the crowds, the stifling air additionally thickened by sweat, sea salt, and sewage. Great gulls with horrid beaks and expressions reduced to simple, functional cruelties, seemed keen for those below to stumble and fall. Their guano created a messy stucco down the drainpipes and pebbledash.

  All around the inner harbour, and the vast concrete seawall that blotted out the murderous horizon of water, the father sidled and ducked through the drug sellers, the palms of his hands raised like closing doors. Offers of cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, mostly homegrown and cooked now, were whispered like forbidden, mystical words from a motley of teeth-flashing diviners and soothsayers: Arabs, Africans, Greeks, Spaniards, Turks, Algerians, Egyptians, the red-faced, heat-blasted English, all muscling and sweating about the sea front, before the pubs and ice-cream concessions, the cannabis cafes, and those restaurants still open and selling imitation meat and fish concoctions.

  Everyone was a farmer now. How much you could grow and how large the marrows, fruits and root crops were the new obsessions, and the new competitions now that designer baubles and flashy interiors were not an option for any but the two per cent. About the fringes of the legitimate market – offering fruit and vegetables, grown on front lawns, roofs and excavated patios, all local produce the wooden boards claimed, and a surplus from the country’s new breadbasket as the east coast slowly sank beneath the waves – bootleg booze, exotic prostitutes and drugs waited inside yet darker rooms.

  Clothes were recycled and sold here too. Remade, homemade, washed and heaped upon trestle tables, as were stolen and bartered electrical goods, and the agricultural tools made in the new industries of the Midlands. Stores had been commandeered, or leased through favourable terms by the belligerent, militant councillors, and now sold and resold the junk-shop fare of things no longer produced or imported. He’d seen the same in Totnes, Plymouth, Exeter, Brixham, Bristol and Bath: open-air markets encroached upon and infiltrated by black markets. Farm workers, itinerants, the resettled, foreign and domestic refugees, drug addicts, more alcoholics than he believed possible in any single place, had all now gathered where holidaymakers and retirees once flocked.

  The father wasn’t hungry but bought a sandwich, the filling burning with local mustard, and a bottle of orange juice squeezed fresh by Portuguese refugees in a distant grove on Welsh land where sheep had once grazed. And then he moved up the road into grimy Torre to find The Commodore.

  He’d tried to visit the place two nights before, but the streets were too busy with unpleasant antics. Earlier that morning, he’d driven through quickly too, as the sun’s fire licked the horizon, and he’d glimpsed the closed doors to the old hotel as he passed by, while trying not to look at the building. Up here, there was nowhere safe to leave the car, so he’d attempt an infiltration on foot, and he’d be unmasked until he was inside.

  In two hours the heat would make this climb up through the town near-impossible for all but the fittest, and would drive the irritable hustling crowds of the town and harbour back indoors, like wasps into the holes of a brick wall.

  When he arrived at the warm buffets of lingering waste, one mile above the town and sea front, someone with TB coughed as if in warning like the bell above the door of a shop. The sound gruffed from the innards of a boarded-up building with no front door, which had once sold gifts to families on holiday. Damage from the winter riots had not been repaired this deep into the town, or even been cordoned off. Charred bones of timbers protruded through the red-brick musculature of once-white hotels and local businesses. The sickly, chemical taint of an old blaze hung over the sun-dappled ruins. By the day’s relentless light, the father could see how the anger of the displaced and jobless, this purposeless mass, had punched itself drunk against the masonry and timber that tried to corral it here, before pissing up the ruins.

  From shadow to shadow, with his chin dipped, the father sluggishly nudged himself upwards, engulfed by fresher and fouler exhalations from the very buildings, alleyways and cramped pavements: a dying town’s breath that he could taste, emitted with an air of bitterness that could only become hate, sublimation, or the shame of a poverty that grew to madness. Under a peculiar gravity the father’s spine succumbed to a curve, as if in holy reverence of the wretchedness heaped about him. How could spirits ever raise themselves here? They all clung to life but gave it little value.

  The colony of addicts founded in Hele had long ago reached this far south and then swelled into every available room and beneath any vestige of shelter. To think he had crept down to the coast too, with a wife and baby, to start again, and to flee the human ruins deposited and multiplying in the cities as the economy collapsed. But the incapable, unemployable, transient, feral, vulnerable and hapless, the dispossessed and broken, the abandoned, had been barely contained by other regional authorities and they had already been taking up residence in much of South Devon before he arrived. They waited on the other side of every town now, just over the hill. They were everywhere, the wretched, and their numbers would only grow. And yet here he was, a tired man of no funded or legitimate occupation, sifting through human and structural debris, looking for a stolen child. He wanted to laugh loudly and freely and madly like the ragged pockets of intoxicated sots about him, who even now, in such appalling heat, burned themselves towards a new day’s sprawling confrontations.

  About the former hotels, restaurants and luxury apartments, all transformed into a grubby sprawl of hostels, the eyes that regarded the father seemed bereft of anything but cunning or resentment. Distinctions between men and women were not always clear. Faces had been carbuncled into unique formations of bone and scar tissue from falls, sun-blistering and fights. Baseball caps trammelled down unwashed hair above the rusticated, sunken faces of the drink-embalmed and weather-mummified, who were yet still living. Soiled clothes in the wrong sizes, caped by old jackets given out by the Red Cross, formed the uniform. A species successfully crossing with the rodent; perhaps a farsighted evolutionary leap towards becoming envoys for the future, when the planet’s aridity seeped further north.

  From either side of a front path leading to a former bed and breakfast, two desperate prostitutes who no longer made much effort offered pained smil
es made grotesque by missing teeth. But the father made sure not to meet any of the eyes that peered at him. Any twist of distaste around his mouth could ignite a rampage of dirty shoes, scuffling into the curious dances of mayhem. But nor could he appear intimidated. Indifference and preoccupation with other matters were the arts and wiles the less desperate had learned in order to avoid interaction in places such as this.

  As he neared a crossroads, a termite hill of cheap concrete high rises reared on his right: the Beach Haven Estate, thrown up ten years ago for London’s East Enders and the impoverished Spanish, but just as quickly maligned into one of the ten worst places to live in the country. The flats were his landmark and one he’d noted as an approach to The Commodore, now partially concealed upon a hill on his left side, amidst other former hotels, and the dusty, motionless palms.

  At the back of what had once been a Chinese restaurant, now trying its hand as a surgery run by a charity, he showed a collection of dirty children a carton of chocolate, while not at all insensitive to the irony of his tactic. If Bowles’s testimony had been correct, the local young may well be familiar with Forrester as a dispenser of praise and favours. And as the children brushed against the father’s pockets and his rucksack, offering cheek and challenges and lots of spit to plop near his shoes, he wondered out loud about his old mate, Rory, at The Commodore. Was he on the second floor or the third?

  ‘He’s first floor,’ one of them said, unthinking, as the father peered at The Commodore, a 1930s town house converted into a hotel, and in turn into a flophouse for parolees, then refugees, and finally used for new purposes the council and police had lost track of. And there it was again, upon a wall: King Death, rising in black rags, grinning, spray-can-etched between two ground-floor windows. Its long arms were flung wide, daring the foolhardy to come closer.