Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The father finally gave his response. ‘In 2051 there were three hundred and eighty thousand cases of missing children recorded in this country.’

  The officer turned his head to the side and looked over his shoulder, his expression unreadable, save for a default wariness blended with irritability.

  ‘Seven out of ten came home in twenty-four hours. Lot of kids without parents in the camps were hard to keep track of, but most came home. Of those still missing, five thousand of the children were abducted. Half of these were also recovered in seventy-two hours. They were mostly taken by family members. Lot of pissed-off divorced fathers and mothers out there. My little girl didn’t come home. Many of the others who were abducted were found later, alive and well with extended family, relatives. My girl wasn’t found.

  ‘But one in ten of the five thousand abducted children were taken by strangers. Five hundred children in one year. Mostly snatched from the care homes and refugee camps. Three in ten were killed, and they were murdered within hours of their abductions. The rest were taken and kept alive for other reasons. There were three hundred and fifty children in this category, taken by strangers. Nearly half were eventually found alive, but in places they should never have been. And they had endured things that no child should have to even imagine.

  ‘I can only go on probability, and the probability that the majority of the outstanding one hundred and sixty-two missing children still being alive is good. Statistically, sex offenders would have killed forty-nine of them and hidden their remains. That leaves one hundred and thirteen children abducted, still missing, but maybe still living as captives. One hundred and thirteen children. My only hope is that she is one of them. It’s not much of a hope, is it? But it’s why I do this.’

  Once, in the early hours of another terrible morning when a special kind of clarity engulfed the father and his fidgeting and muttering ceased, he had sat up in his disorderly bedclothes and written a letter to his little girl as she smiled at him from a photograph at his bedside. To this day, he kept the letter in his wallet. He knew it by heart.

  Even though you were stolen from me and your mother, and even though our hearts are broken and we love you more than ourselves, you are not a priority to the authorities. The people who go missing, the people who are robbed, and even many of the ordinary people just like us who are murdered, are not priorities. Not now. Not any more.

  You will always be my priority.

  You will never be forgotten and I will never stop looking for you.

  I promise.

  The father cleared his throat. ‘We thought there would be reconstructions. A media campaign. Wealthy benefactors. Nationwide DNA screening. Exhaustive interviews with sex offenders to shake free a lead. These had been our hopes that year.

  ‘Don’t misunderstand me, a child stolen from the garden where she was playing still mattered to people. Maybe even to most people. For a while. It mattered to some for even longer. But for most, such a thing never mattered for long. These things don’t. They can’t. Not any more. Who has the thoughts . . . the space in their heart for a missing child in these times?’ The father closed his eyes, swallowed and composed himself. ‘Thank you . . . for helping me. But if you wanted me to stop, then you should have let them kill me, because the only thing that will stop me is my own death. I’ve come too far now. I’ve gone too far. And she’s still too far away from me.’

  The detective looked at his lap as if considering the use of his handgun, pulling the trigger out here amongst the silent fields as the father knelt like a penitent in the wheat.

  The father rose from the seat and opened the rear door, watched by the officer’s hard eyes in the rear-view mirror. Cradling his punctured hand beneath an armpit black with sweat, the father unlatched a gate and entered the wheat field. He knelt down at the edge of the crop and sobbed. He wept with pity at his broken body, the pulse and sting of his hand, the ache in every bone inside that arm, the dead weight of his depleted legs. He wept for himself because he had killed a teenager. Shot and killed someone not much older than a boy without being able to identify a shred of remorse inside himself. He felt even less for the others he’d left for dead: three men, he thought, but what had happened was too vivid, perhaps too vivid to be trusted, but then soon unclear too. Besides Rory, did any of them speak to him before he shot them? He couldn’t remember their last words, and had little sense of them but for quick flashes of their faces, their animate eyes. He wasn’t alarmed by his callousness, or maybe he was in shock. He hoped he was because he hated himself for the recognition of a trait that explained why so few cared about his daughter. This is how we are now. This is what the world was trying to tell him. The great dieback from drought, famine and disease was making inroads into the herd; the other animals were running wild-eyed with foam-lathered flesh. Their teeth were showing inside red mouths that cried out uselessly. There was panic. Clubs and rocks were being seized and hoisted aloft to defend what little was left, fences were being erected. Grieving mammals were thinning to extinction; their little ones went first. And it wouldn’t stop.

  The sun burned his neck red and made his thoughts swim. The magnitude of the loss all around him was sickening. He’d sooner take death than a permanent realization of how things were.

  The police officer touched his shoulder. Passed down the silver flask. The father nodded his head, took the flask and let the rum burn his throat. The officer knelt beside the father as if they were pious men and about to praise some capricious goddess of the fields for the bounty provided. ‘Bloody long wait ahead of you in A&E for your hand, but I’ll take you somewhere to get it looked at.’

  ‘Why?’

  The officer’s eyes became distant and he turned his head to partially conceal his face. ‘Cus I know what it’s like.’ He took something from his pocket. Held the screen out to the father, who looked down at an image of a laughing boy, no older than two, wearing blue pyjamas and surrounded by toys on a carpeted floor.

  ‘Yours?’

  The detective nodded, face stricken, his mouth hopelessly trying to smile as if at some fond but spoiling memory.

  ‘Taken?’ the father asked.

  ‘Flu.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  The officer slipped the device back inside his jacket. ‘Your wife know about this?’

  The father shook his head. ‘She isn’t doing so well. Not since we lost the little one.’

  The officer looked away and nodded as if this was what he had expected to hear. ‘Money?’

  ‘Not much left.’ The father sighed. ‘We sold the house. Spent the savings we put aside for our daughter’s future. My wife’s parents helped a bit too, as much as they could. There was a small fund once, some donations. That’s gone now. I haven’t worked in two years.’ He’d often wondered if he would find work again. There was no more money coming in. Welfare would amount to a miserable, static existence somewhere near his wife and her parents. If he made it back into logistics, and the work involved food provision and distribution, he would be classed as a key worker. The emergency coalition government only had to class something as key and a worker wasn’t left with much of a home life.

  He feared his time on the road and inside the houses of strangers was coming to an end. The idea of stopping should have brought guilty relief, but he could not identify a shred of it. To stop when he finally had a lead was an unbearable prospect. To have come so far and altered himself into . . . he didn’t really know beyond still being her father, but he’d lost sight of land in most other respects. He was committed. And he knew now that he would die as simply that, her father.

  The officer exhaled noisily, then drank from the flask. Passed it back to the father. ‘What you got?’

  ‘Not much. Until today.’

  The man stared at him hard, as if to bore out the information, and the father told him what Rory had said. After hearing the story, his saviour resumed staring into the distance, but at least he seemed to be taking the test
imony seriously. ‘It’s thin. But that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. Bowles grassed up Rory after you shot Nigel Bannerman?’

  The father nodded.

  ‘And if Rory said it wasn’t a sex offender who snatched your girl, you’d better hope he wasn’t bullshitting, because he’s no longer available for cross-examination. And you drew a blank on the others? Your handler told me about the first three nonces you visited, Malcolm Andrews, Bindy Burridge and Tony Crab. Were there others?’

  ‘A man called Robert East.’

  ‘He dead?’

  ‘No. He never reported me.’

  ‘A slow process of elimination through the most likely leads that your handler pitched out. You do realize that this whole area could be underwater by the time you’ve door-stepped the last of them?’

  ‘The names. The Russians. They mean anything?’

  ‘Nothing. But believe me, I’m very familiar with the outfit he’s talking about. King Death.’ The officer screwed up his face with distaste. ‘They’re like nothing we’ve ever seen before.’

  ‘That bad.’

  ‘Worse. With them, it’s . . . even a religion, you know? Some kind of religion mixed with the worst kind of human behaviour. Like the jihadists, but without an ultimate goal that we can see, besides filling their pockets.’ The officer scratched through his thoughts to find the right expression. ‘Bristol. Remember Bristol years back? Chantilly Road. All those people beheaded in a turf war.’

  The father nodded.

  ‘We’ve had it down here too. Decapitations, and the rival shite have been vanishing all over. These guys move in and local gangs move on, or are moved out of the land of the living. All the bodies of their enemies that we’ve found, or they have left for us to find, don’t have heads.

  ‘The symbol of King Death is part of some mumbo-jumbo mystery about where they draw their power from. But they mostly prefer to remain enigmatic.’

  ‘This symbol. A thing dead, but in rags. I’ve seen it. On walls.’

  ‘It’s in plenty of places. All over the coast now. Foot soldiers put it on their bodies to signpost membership too. They don’t worry about us. But that sign is a fuck-right-off in prison, and on the streets. Some of them completely cover themselves in ink. They’ve got a kind of philosophy going on too, or so we were told by serious crimes. It dribbled down to the street criminals from somewhere else, abroad maybe, the cartels in South America, with some old medieval stuff from here in Europe. It’s a mash-up, but they embrace chaos. That’s their bag. They claim to draw their power from chaos and death itself. And they like these bold gestures, these ritualistic killings. Sprinkling bits of Latin here and there as if their cause is holy, foretold, that kind of BS. Everyone’s at it, Temple of the Last Days, Church of the End of Days, same thing. All the traditional churches have had a field day too, a right old comeback. But some of these Kings are really big on superstition, omens, stuff like that. There’s this reverence they like to cultivate around themselves, especially in prison. They brought in an expert to help us understand them and he said it was all about the romanticism of death. Marks them out down here, makes them even more sinister.

  ‘They’ve mixed in Santeria, Buddhism, Catholicism, Satanism, witchcraft, all of it and more, even physics. And they reckon we’re destined for chaos, everything is, and they’re preparing to survive in it. They might have a point, eh? And they reckon that all of this, the world and us in it, right now, is the fin du monde, the end of time.

  ‘Most of these guys are thugs, but there are a few, the more dangerous ones, who are really into this philosophy, and they don’t fear death at all. They just think it’s some kind of passage. You know what the shaman nuts, their spiritual guides, want? They want to ascend to become the “special dead”, that’s what we were told, so that they have some insight after a “transcendence into the long night”. They want to still be around, in the everlasting “afterdeath”. But that’s already close, all around us apparently, and getting bigger by the day. Only some of them can tap into it. These seers. But afterdeath is going to swallow us all soon enough, while they’ll command some kind of privileged position in it. That’s the gist of it, I think. The murders are part-ritual. Signs, they say, that light up in another place, so their patrons, or something nasty over there in afterdeath, can bless them, or something like that. There’s no judgement, no heaven or God, not for them. Death itself is the entity and also the place that they’re connecting with. Something like a force, but cold, totally indifferent and as chaotic as deep space. But they’ll be all right over there. It’s all nuts. Can you believe what some chumps will kill for these days?’

  ‘You can’t do anything about them?’

  The police officer shrugged. ‘Not much. They’re like an army now. They’ll take the worst head cases from every nationality and there’s no shortage of volunteers. They’ve been giving the jihadists in the north-east guns and explosives, as well as the nationalists in the south. They’ve all the trafficking and the vice here, all franchised through affiliates. Men like Rory. It’s the disruption, the chaos, they like. Tactical, see. That’s what I reckon. Like politicians and terrorists, they create diversions, spread resources thin, then capitalize, exploit the weaknesses. And I don’t think they’ve ever had it so good as over the last decade.’ The officer looked at the sun as if to curse it.

  The father nodded. He’d read many of the same things online, but much of the information about their culture had seemed too fantastical for him to readily believe, so he’d skimmed it. ‘They really killed all those judges?’

  The officer laughed, but not pleasantly. ‘That’s not all they’ve done. They’re suspected of a shitload of high-profile disappearances. They’re getting into everything legit too. Politics, councils, the emergency government, law, refugee groups, food, transport, us. Lot of respectable people are watching their backs for them and are in their debt now, or so we assume. But you never heard that from me.’

  ‘Could they—’

  ‘Have taken your girl? They’d have no qualms if it paid well, or if it served their interests.’

  ‘We had no money.’

  The officer pursed his lips, rolled his head. ‘You got any enemies?’

  ‘Not that bad. Would . . . what about child prostitution?’ The father became faint, imagined Rory’s grinning face, Bowles’s attic, the thin silhouettes sitting up in bed, the lock on the door. All of the blood in his body seemed to run into the soil and leave him feeling cold on a day when the sun was hot enough for its surface to be nudging the earth’s troposphere.

  ‘They are certainly not above that, but she doesn’t fit the profile. They’ve snatched a few from the camps and care homes to top up the specialist brothels. But your case isn’t a fit for that profile. Too risky unless it was bespoke, so it’s doubtful. If they were involved, I’d say they were paid very well to do it for someone else. A contract.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  The officer shrugged, but not with indifference. ‘I . . .’ He stopped himself.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘When it happened. Your girl, when she was taken, I was drug squad. My gut told me it was a paedophile. Loner. Cased you and your family and then just couldn’t help himself. In and out. Biggest day of his life. Whether she’s . . . still with him or not is anyone’s guess. We don’t bloody know. But whoever took her would have to slip up, or get copped trying it on again, or suffer a breach in his security, to give you any chance at all of finding her. And his secrecy must be pretty bloody airtight if he’s kept her hidden for two years. That’s the angle your handler’s been working on too. Not saying I’m right, but that’s what my gut told me was probable. Child protection is the worst bloody job there is and they have no choice but to outsource.’

  ‘I thought the same, until I met Murray Bowles.’

  The officer nodded. ‘Stands to reason. But in the unlikely event this outfit are involved, the Kings . . .’ He held his hands up.

/>   ‘Where do I go? Who do I speak to?’

  ‘You don’t. You’d need to re-mortgage the house you don’t own any more, just for one of them to consider giving you information. And that was before you whacked Rory.’

  ‘Informers? Don’t you have them?’

  ‘Of course, but do they inform on this lot? Never. Where would they hide after they’d told us something we could use? In prison they blind snitches with toothbrush handles. If what Rory said was even half true, you and he would have got it in the neck, literally. Out here, they seal the leaks with machetes. Trademark.’

  ‘Someone would talk. They always talk. They always say something to someone . . . They can’t keep it inside their criminal skulls.’

  ‘Rats do squeak.’

  ‘It’s all I have.’

  ‘It ain’t much. And it’s a death sentence the moment you stick your beak in, or a very severe beating. Trust me, you’d never walk again. They’ll smash your vertebrae with a hammer. Seen it a few too many times. You’ll wish they’d cut your head off. Rory probably only gave that much up because he thought you weren’t leaving The Commodore alive. Did he go for you?’

  ‘Twice.’

  ‘Knife?’

  The father nodded.

  ‘He’s got form. He’s been fingered for two murders. We didn’t even know he was living in there.’

  ‘It’s why he had to kill me. Bowles had put him in the frame for my daughter, which put his gang connections in the frame for her abduction.’

  ‘Long shot. Real long shot. And let me be the detective, OK? How many others bought it down there today?’

  ‘A younger one, a teenager. About eighteen, nineteen. He was on a bike outside and had a gun. He nearly killed me. I don’t know how he missed. He . . . was standing right behind me. And there was a man . . . a man behind a fence in one of the yards on the hill. Who fired at me. I think I hit him. And then another one with a shotgun in the street near where you found me.’