Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The sun got inside his thoughts and scattered them like the ruminations of the sun-blinded and heat-stroked. Images from news footage of the riots, all of the ones he’d seen over decades, came into his head: stripped bodies like inert seals on the sand, grubby and leaking black, face down in the streets; charred bones raising thin forearms from the skeletal interiors of cars, still asking for help in grinning death.

  The father looked to the hill above The Commodore’s roof, tiered with grubby white or red-brick buildings. Steep ground offered a variety of walls and gates that would have to be scaled with yards to run through, but at least there were trees up there to crouch behind, winded. The town was made of hills, so uphill then, and all the way in this heat, maybe under fire from below? To get where? The father caught sight of the sky, blue-white and silvery, reflecting the heat back at his face like a vast sheet of polished tin. His hat band was sopping. This was it.

  He had names . . . Alexis, Boris . . . was closer to her than he had ever been. Or was he? The information could all be bullshit from some old slags in their dung heap.

  But if Russians had snatched her up, then why? No ransom demand. To be trafficked? Child prostitution. Gone away forever across the sea. A chain, a tiny bed, and her little head too broken for tears. ‘God, no,’ he roared, and his voice seemed to frighten the youths more than the handgun that he waved in the air. You couldn’t mimic that kind of pain, the total mindlessness of it. The father started running.

  The men of The Commodore followed him out and across the car park to the rear wall, and then over the wall; in glimpses, the father saw the figures behind him, through tree branches, and through the burning sweat that ran from his hair and blurred his eyesight. A bald man, scalp nut-brown and shiny, wearing a white shirt open at the neck, pointed left and right, to direct the others after the father. There was another wearing combat trousers, another in shorts and a dirty vest. He could hear them kicking themselves up the second garden wall he’d just thrown himself over.

  Up and up and up he went on legs of cement, his hand enormous and thumping with damage, and his left shoulder now feeling like a repaired ornament come unglued from careless usage. Red handprints stained the walls he’d clambered over, whorls and wipes of scarlet glittered on the leaves he clutched at. Follow me. Just follow the trail. We’ll do the final bit up here amongst the broken fences and uneven patios, beneath the grey faces of alcoholics at windows, sweating behind thin, orange curtains.

  Hat down his back, the drawstring around his throat, the knees of his trousers torn through, he floundered through a third garden and cut his stomach on rose thorns as he came down to the patio of what might have been a private house. A back door slammed.

  In the next yard he fell into, he entered atop a trellis fence that splintered under his weight, and the father just sat to get his breath on the stone patio in the wreckage of dry timber, wiping his eyes with the back of a forearm. The air was too thick to get into his mouth and seemed to waft under his nose, but never come inside. His underwear was sodden with sweat, the front of his trousers were dark.

  A man called out, ‘Cunt’s ’ere!’

  A gun shot cracked off all the glass at the rear of the dirty white building. The father never heard the end of the bullet’s journey.

  Too exhausted to be frightened, the father looked about the boundary of the yard to find the shooter, and happened across the keen blue eyes of a pale face. On the far side of the yard, the man must have been standing on his tiptoes to hook an arm over the panels of the fence still upright. At the end of the arm was a hand, greened by faded tattoos, which gripped a handgun pointed directly at his stomach.

  The father rolled just before the gun barked. A bullet varoomed off the patio and smashed a hole in a cement-block wall in the neighbouring garden. Lying on his side, the father pointed at the wooden fence beneath the grimacing face and pulled off two shots. The fence splintered, the face vanished.

  The father got back to his feet like a sweat-sheathed prize fighter knocked delirious after fifteen rounds under sun lamps. Black spots speckled his vision.

  On the other side of the fence he’d fired through, he heard something like a hot and tired dog panting in the shade, followed by a whimper.

  The father lurched out of the yard, down a paved alley between the building and the fence. He came into a street and immediately saw a crowd about ninety feet away. They saw him at the same time he came gasping into the sunlight. Both sides paused and stared at each other.

  One of the figures broke from the crowd and came forward, the others formed an arrowhead behind the leader, who held some kind of rifle. The father fell to his knees, and with two hands he aimed his gun at the crowd. They scattered, all save their leader.

  The leader cringed, then let the shotgun roar from waist-level. A sapling ten feet in front of the father was stripped of its papery leaves. Parked cars dinted and pinged and spider-webbed on the left side of the road. The father ducked his head and felt something impact the rucksack on his chest, sting his belly and one ear like a piercing with no anaesthetic. He fired at the man with the shotgun and missed, as the shooter loped to the side of the road, doubled over, cussing himself for firing too quickly.

  The father looked about himself in a brief reprieve from the flailing of his limbs, this dragging of a heavy body, this skirmishing with sweat-filmed eyes. He might run further up the road to find cover behind a low wall, but if the others who had followed him up through the gardens were close, he’d be amongst them at any moment if he tried to get any higher. These buildings were terraced on each side of the road and that man with the shotgun could not be allowed to fire again in this cement gully, which now resembled a funnel for the exhausted to die inside.

  The father stood, tucked his purple hand under his armpit, teetered sideways to get onto the narrow pavement, then jogged downhill past the parked cars to where the crowd was peeking from behind wings and bumpers. Two faces were open-mouthed at the audacity of the father’s bandy-legged approach, right at their position. Others ducked or fled. Yet more came down the sides of houses behind him, from the garden he’d just fled, panting like old farm beasts put to the plough.

  Sirens wailed in the distance, or maybe down by The Commodore, or maybe further out, called to some other fuckup.

  Upon hollow feet, the father covered the last of the ground to where he had seen the man with the shotgun crouch. And the man stood up quickly, between a brown car and a yellow rubbish skip left to rust at the kerb. He came up from the dust spitting his ‘Fuck’s and ‘Cunt’s and ‘Shite’s in anger; a freckled red beast with meaty shoulders wearing an old tracksuit top; a sergeant of stoats with hands like red tubers. His florid face dripped milky sweat from his own nerves and exertions in pursuit of his quarry. This man knew all would be decided now, in mere moments, and he jerked the double barrels about.

  The father shot him through the mouth from a yard distant. He didn’t think, just let the frightened and wounded animal inside his head point and pull from an unmissable range, and the big man swung away from the waist, dropping the gun. Metal clattered on tarmac like an alarm trying to call time on such barbarism. The man dropped to his knees, then onto his face, his hands wavering about his head briefly, before falling limp.

  The father stepped over the broad, trembling back and tried to pick up the shotgun, but his grotesque and swollen hand could not have raised a spoon. The shotgun was old, the wooden stock broken. Something from a farmer maybe, or a clay pigeon shooter, but fallen into the wrong pair of hands, like all things that do harm. The father kicked the shotgun under the parked car and staggered away, down the middle of the road. If he could not make it into a side road he’d be trapped.

  He was cut off from behind, from higher ground, where so many men had now come into the street, out of an alley. Shots were being fired wild: one whined close, another thudded into a car door behind the father’s fatigue-drunken heels.

  The father turned right as soon a
s he could, but onto another narrow, steep slope. He believed he had another fifty yards in him before his heart gave out. Not even adrenaline would get him much further, or stem the agony in his punctured hand. Cars revved up the hill from below, roaring in his direction. This is why the police stayed away. You tried to stop them down here, you interfered with their dealings and affairs, and out smashing went the windows, and whoosh went the cars on fire, and pop-pop-pop went the guns from amongst the crowds.

  This is it.

  The father fell inside a small concreted front garden, another hostel with piebald walls. There he whinnied and shuddered; a workhorse who’d dragged steel artillery through a muck-filled trench, his flanks lathered with sweat. Kneeling down, he tried to control his breathing, and to still the thought fragments that showed again and again the last expressions and the wounds of the heads he had shot through that morning. It was never supposed to be like this, or end like this, but a perverse spirit inside himself looked upon him with admiration.

  What a place to die.

  There was a lot of shouting in the street he had run from, angry voices, barking, organizing, as if people were marshalling a rout. Nothing drove or ran into the side street where he crouched, but faces peered round the corner and eyed his position behind the low wall, on his knees, cornered, winded, wet through.

  He heard a car in the narrow lanes below, joining the fray. Its horn blared. There followed some banging of angry hands on a roof or bonnet, followed by kicks of feet against a door. A straining whir of acceleration seemed to arise in response and a black car turned into the side street where he hid. The father didn’t know what any of this meant, but assumed there was some disagreement over who got to kill him. But he wouldn’t be taken alive, and he acknowledged this with a clarity that both surprised and relieved him.

  The father stretched up, to shoot at the car, to shoot over the low wall, to shoot out the windows, and to shoot into the passengers. He had enough gas in his tank to fulfil the desire. They would know him here. In these final moments, on his knees, in this place that he despised, he’d share his burden with them today; a weight that had taken away everything he’d ever cared about. All here would know the black misery and rage, and the dousing of the warmth of the heart that was far greater than any shortages, poverty and disputes within this murderous heat. They would know that a man could lose his entire self in one afternoon and never recover it.

  The father said his daughter’s name and felt grief expand inside his chest, then surge up his throat, becoming near euphoric when it flooded his mind. He would fire empty then walk into their response. And he suddenly wanted the quick stabs of hot agony. He wanted their reprisals. He wanted to be free of wanting.

  The driver called the father’s name from the slowing car, then shouted, ‘Put it away.’ A hand reached from a side window, the palm outwards. ‘Get in!’

  The father hesitated. His gun hand lost tension, his focus blurred. Someone knew his name?

  ‘Get the fuck in!’ the man in the car yelled, decisively, but barely containing his own panic.

  FOURTEEN

  The car was driven at furious speeds. The father closed his eyes and waited for the reforming of metal, a snowstorm of glass blown into the car’s interior.

  There was no collision, not even a scrape.

  His getaway made a permanent cut in its speed only once they were several miles clear of the town and moving along a single-lane road, shielded on both sides by hedgerows. Beyond the road, drought-resistant wheat spread its golden blanket over the gentle hills and continued out of sight. The father guessed he had been driven north of Torquay.

  Whenever the man behind the wheel leaned forward in his seat, a cloud of sweat, darkening the entire rear of his shirt, became visible. A handgun was tucked between his legs.

  After the father stumbled out from behind the wall and fell into the rear of the car, it had sped away with the door still open and one of his feet hanging in thin air. As if stone chippings from the road had been flung up, three dinks sounded from the rear of vehicle in quick succession. Only when the car slowed to turn at the summit of the hill had the father been able to slam the rear door shut. More shots had been fired up the road from the junction without finding their mark. Someone had recovered the shotgun too. That went off in a dim, ineffective boom, but the weapon did not fulfil its potential that day.

  No one followed them. No helicopters arrived to buzz overhead.

  The father had collapsed across the rear seats and remained still and silent, mostly staring at the beige ceiling of the car, occasionally using his uninjured hand to wipe the sheets of sweat from his face. He drank a pint of water in one draught but could not look at the wound in his hand for long.

  ‘Your handler, the woman you call Scarlett Johansson, reached out. She said you were about to fuck everything up, for everyone, at The Commodore.’ It was all the driver had said by way of greeting once the father was inside the vehicle. The man said nothing more until they were free of the old housing stock on the fringes of town, and beyond the temporary settlements that formed a corral reaching off to Exeter.

  When the police officer stopped the car, he said a lot more. ‘I’d be a liar if I said there was no silent rejoicing amongst our lot when the likes of Murray Bowles, Nigel Bannerman and Rory Forrester get moved on, but there are too many of them for you to get through. I can’t let you run round the county executing the shite. You can’t play this kind of lottery for much longer before you buy it. By all accounts that’s nearly happened twice.

  ‘We’ve close to twelve hundred sex offenders we know of in the county. We’ve more people traffickers down here than doctors. We’re rife with indentured slavery. We’re the major producers of domestic heroin now. We’ve gun runners, amphetamine labs, meat smugglers, war criminals from Africa and the Middle East keeping their heads down in old holiday chalets right up to Ilfracombe. The nationalists have made us their home from home. We’ve forcible evictions by mobs, property scams and land grabs, and more unsolved murders than we’ve got men on the ground. We’ve over twenty homicides per officer. And you’ve just given us another handful.’

  The driver paused and swore under his breath, wiped the wet sheen off his face. ‘They’ve smashed the cameras out all over the town. You ask any of them kids back there to reel off the ever-changing plates of our unmarked cars and they’ll do it. We had the Royal Marines on the streets all last summer for the riots. Things have been very cagey since. And here’s you walking into the bloody Commodore, wearing a sun hat, and going mad with a shooter in some King Death clubhouse. You thought all this heat would keep our hands full and hide one man on a mission, eh?’

  ‘I’m sorry. It was never meant to happen.’

  ‘Heard that before.’

  The police officer was breathing rapidly, coming down from his own near-death experience and talking quickly. The father suspected he took crystal. ‘We can only hope that disorder, mayhem and chaos do you a large favour. There are more than enough home-grown head-bangers to keep us occupied. But with all the new arrivals, it’s bedlam. And we don’t anticipate it getting any better. Criminals like it here. We’ve the navy chasing their boats all through the channel and into the Atlantic off Cornwall. They’re having to commandeer anything with an outboard on it. The navy get called away to another hot spot and it’s a free-for-all down here. The shitheads know it. Think of it. Think of the numbers coming in and running through here now. What can you do? What can we do? The Dutch are running into Belgium, France and Norway with the sea lapping at their heels. The French don’t want any more Africans, so where do they go? Two guesses. The rest of the Greeks and Spanish got to go somewhere now too. They ever have elections here and I don’t need to tell you who will get in. The whole world is moving north, mate. The rules are changing and the tone is changing. Every country for itself. What comes next? Every man for himself? You think I jest? You’ve seen the news.

  ‘We’ve had to make a truce with
half the gangs round here, but it’s not really us you need to hide from. Not after this morning’s high jinks. We ain’t really got time for you, mate. Others have a longer reach though, and more eyes and ears than we can dream of. So, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this is no way to look for your kid down here. Things are too complicated. You can’t come back here. Not now. Not after this morning. Not for a long time. You know that? You gotta stop.’

  The father had let the police officer sound off. Like him, he could tell the speed of his blood was gradually slowing too. Their urgent, spiky thoughts were wilting inside the hard shell of the boiling car. Judgement was returning from exile, disbelief raising its head. They were sodden, haggard from adrenaline, from fight and flight, fight and flight again, until it was the same leaden sensation. They’d soon grown sluggish in the heat as if tired and sleepy after a large meal with wine.

  After he’d finished speaking the detective fell quiet for a long time and stared through the windshield. When he next spoke, he said, ‘I could use a drink,’ and removed a metal flask from the glove compartment. ‘Fuck, it’s hot. Forty-fucking-five. You haven’t got much to say for yourself either, eh?’

  The father knew all about the futility the man had spoken of. He knew all about odds too, and statistics, and remote chances, because 2051 had been a good year to steal a child. Back then, the father had learned to resent all that was going wrong in the world for his own reasons. He’d only possessed the capacity to go mad from the loss of his child. He’d no time for Bangladesh, even when eighty per cent of it was underwater. Greece, Spain and their fires, same thing. Africa, yet another bad year. China and its droughts, he had no head space left for imagining the numbers forced to migrate. Australia on fire, again. The Central Americans who died against the fence in the United States after the Mormons came into office. None of it had mattered to him but as a cruel diversion that took people’s minds away from one missing four-year-old girl in Devon. His solipsism had been planetary in size. He’d defy any mother or father of a small child to think differently.