Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The officer whistled. ‘I’m counting six on your account in two weeks. A spree, my friend. They saw your face too, dozens of them.’

  The father took a deep breath.

  ‘You’re done in this town. You can never risk setting foot anywhere south of Gloucestershire again. Even that’s no guarantee of your safety. Or your family’s. And there’ll be an investigation and that will eventually lead to Bowles and Nige, known offenders, both done with the same shooter as Rory and his mates. They’ll get DNA out of the blood you splashed everywhere. But I’m going to assume your daughter was also at the heart of the earlier discussions. So if those other nonces you visited pipe up, when your mug shot gets circulated, you’ll be charged for them too.’

  The father nodded.

  ‘Grief-stricken father starts knocking over sex offenders. The whole country will be cheering again. Nonetheless, you can see how this shit works. How deep you can get so quickly, and now you’re probably wondering if you need to go back and cover your tracks by whacking the first nonces you visited. And they’ll be thinking the same thing. Is he coming back, the man in the mask? I know your methods. I’ve been briefed by your handler, and you’re in the game now and the game never ends. This isn’t for you. This isn’t your game. But there’s little point in me confiscating your weapon because you’ll get another, won’t you? Maybe you got a taste for it too. Execution.’

  ‘I never . . . it wasn’t execution. Nigel Bannerman tried to kill me. That was self-defence.’

  ‘Bowles?’

  ‘He ran. I wasn’t thinking. I saw the kids in his loft and I lost it. Lost control. Rory I only wanted to speak to.’

  ‘How did you think that was going to work out? I don’t know whether you’re a good liar or a bloody amateur who’s been very lucky, though your hand may be telling you different right now. There might be nothing in Rory’s information at all. He was thinking on his feet, giving you something so he could add value to himself. And what was it, some hearsay from a pub that no longer exists, from two men whose second names we don’t even know? You’ve got to listen to your old movie star, Scarlett Johansson, because what you have is thin. Very thin, but four men died for it today. How many more d’you plan to rub out on a rumour?’

  ‘It’s something. More than I’ve ever had.’

  ‘Slightly more than fuck all, if I am going to be honest with you.’

  The father ground his teeth. ‘Why are we here?’

  The officer considered his answer for a long time. ‘Because if I was you I’d be sitting right where you are now. I wouldn’t take a break from shovelling the shite into hell, if I had the slightest chance of bringing my boy back.’ He looked away from the father. ‘I’m sure you’ve done your homework and I’m sure it’s made everything worse for you. The way you feel. You might have lost your mind because you know what can happen to a child. But I know more about what happens to these kids than you ever will. So let’s just say that I have sympathies at a time when it’s hard to see the lines that separate the good from the bad.’ The officer looked at the father again. ‘What’s the end game? Ask yourself.’ The officer swept his hand to indicate the field, the sky, the terrible sun. ‘It’s more of this, getting worse and worse every bleeding year. If we don’t blow each other up, the climate will see most of us off. Food and water, that’s what it’s all about now. That’s not going to change, is it? There’s the potential of another pandemic now too. Something very nasty. Difficult to treat. Inoculations are a long way off too, or so they say. As a public official, I have been told not to cause alarm, so I’m giving you that lead on the QT, but it’s already here. And it could be big.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘That’s who we need right around now. His face wouldn’t be unwelcome.’

  ‘How far has it spread?’

  ‘Springing up in Central Europe. The Continent. Maybe the south-east now too. First cases. Mostly just rumours, but something’s building. I think we all know that, and if this bug is a dead end, there’ll be another soon after, something big, far bigger than what’s already been doing the rounds the last twenty years, like the bug that took my boy. So I often have to wonder will anything matter for much longer, these bits and pieces that some of us still hang on to, like the law, rights. Maybe it’s all simpler than we think. Maybe it’s already happened, that final change inside us. The gloves are off. They are in Africa, South America, Asia, southern Europe, if we’re going to be honest. We’ve seen it on the news. And it doesn’t look so unusual now, does it, no matter how bad it gets? People in those places are not thinking like we are any more, because in those places people have it far, far worse than us. I do wonder how long we can give each other assurances.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They sat in silence for a long time and finished the rum.

  The police officer eventually stood up. ‘Let’s get your hand sorted. I don’t need to tell you that our conversation is totally off the record.’

  ‘Of course. What about your car? They saw it.’

  ‘Stolen.’

  ‘Your face?’

  ‘I was in Exmouth all day. I’m still there right now.’

  ‘But back there, what will be said?’

  The officer pursed his lips. ‘Initially, another head case with a shooter, business as usual. You picked the right place to do it in, unless you’ve started a riot we don’t know about while we’re sitting here chewing the fat. A dead teenager can still kick it off. Depends on the parents, if there are any. Then there’ll be harder questions asked, autopsy, ballistics, descriptions. Something worse is bound to crop up meantime and cause delays to our lot. Fingers crossed, eh? But Rory was a King, so they’ll pursue their own inquiries. They’ll be after you now.’

  They walked back to the car. The officer paused before he climbed in. ‘You know she won’t look the same. Not like you remembered. If you ever become one of the luckiest men on this planet, just remember, she’ll be six.’

  ‘I’d know her.’

  FIFTEEN

  After the hospital, his sedation and exhaustion were embraced by the unrelieved heat of the hotel room. Morphine pills for his stitched and bloated hand, antibiotics, rum, fatigue, sleep deprivation, and a fever quickly provided a surreal medium for his notions to swim through.

  Slippery with sweat, and falling in and out of sleep for two days and nights that became indistinguishable, the father talked to the figures of the air. Maybe his mind finally found the maelstrom it had been crawling towards for years: a blur of nonsensical visions, infuriating repetitions of memory, and the cruel torments that his dreams inevitably turned into, bedfellows of a madness he’d foreseen the very day his daughter vanished.

  The subjects of his second and third moves, Bindy Burridge and Tony Crab, appeared in opposing corners of his hotel room and whispered to each other. And in this delirium, Bindy was all bone from the waist down. Look at what they’ve done to me. Tony Crab had no eyes.

  Neither of the men fought back when the father had appeared in their tiny rooms, in what had once been a library and a clothes shop, respectively. Bindy, the mole creature, with the small, white, plump hands, had wept and pleaded for mercy when the father took away his glasses to spray his face. Tony had just started to shake, pale with terror, and wept. They had told him nothing of use and swore they knew nothing about his daughter. The devices they owned they handed over without resistance, along with their codes. Both men had suffered terribly in prison. Bindy had only partial use of one arm and wore a scarf to hide the scars around his throat. Once they were released their records were leaked by the local police forces and entire streets had turned upon each of them. They’d been relocated hundreds of miles from home when the father had caught up with them. Sex offenders in the slums were often doused with petrol and burned alive, and for doing far less than interfering with children.

  His own bitterness, his fear and rage, populated the room, appearing in different forms in the distance, before reap
pearing close to his eyes when he was no longer sure if they were open or shut. At one point, in one of the many wet hours of gibbering and writhing, or sitting up to speak to those faces beside his bed, the father came awake only to find himself as a doll in a tiny, cold bed. The walls of the room had reared up like cliffs. He’d closed his eyes and gulped water from a bottle. The liquid was warm and tasted of plastic.

  When he fell asleep again, fragments of his conversation with Malcolm Andrews, the first offender he’d ever visited, played on a loop accompanied by the distant cacophony of children in a playground. And then he dreamed of bones. Mountains of bones in rags, withered shanks, parchment-skin faces yawning silently, dusty and still, one piled upon the other, tier after tier, rising into the dying light.

  His wife was in the bathroom too, crying, always crying.

  Rory’s throat was shot out again and again, his ruptured cheek flapping like rubber. Nige Bannerman’s punctured skull littered the darkness wetly. Bowles was a whale harpooned on a patio, leaking black.

  A vast crowd of thin, naked people, their flesh dark, were then running through his room in fright. They kept coming and coming, kicking up vast clouds of salty dust. Something the size of a hill rose in the near distance and stared down. A fire in the surrounding trees changed direction again, and the father climbed out of his bed and ran amongst the thin people.

  His daughter had been knocked to the ground up ahead. She wailed, but he couldn’t reach her, was shoved to the side, pushed about before he could regain his balance and turn towards the sound of her cries. When she fell silent, he woke up.

  Eventually, the father lay face down on the bed to stem the sight of the people that came and went, came and went, through the room. The past, the present, and nonsense, all coming together in the same space. But sleep would only return him to their old home in Shiphay, where he was running through the front garden, leaping from one tiered level to another, before finding himself back near the patio doors. He couldn’t see his daughter but could hear her saying, ‘What’s that?’

  The black car pulled away, over and over again, and the father ran up the road through air as thick as treacle. The sunlight was blinding, the street made from white stone, its glare forcing him to squint. In the distance the car turned out of the street, and the father’s feet slid down the hill, back to the front gate of their house. Down there the world was grey and damp. His wife was on the lawn, sobbing, screened from him by the trees. The father saw that the street had become a cemetery filled with small headstones, tiny angels and sprays of brightly coloured flowers. His daughter spoke to him from out of the ground and said she was with friends and couldn’t come back, and he sat up with an anguished cry that must have been heard in the neighbouring rooms of the hotel.

  Finally, when sleep’s insistent torments released him, he could taste the sea’s brine in his throat. His eyes were swollen and the bed was sodden.

  Once the fever had broken, and he was able to stand easily, the father took a shower and spent a day propped up in bed watching the news, or just staring at the curtains.

  His ribs and hip bones were visible through the skin of his body. It had been a long time since he’d taken a hard look at himself in the mirror, but his weight loss still came as a surprise. All of his clothes in the room were soiled.

  He continued with the antibiotics, but stopped taking the morphine pills to avoid dreaming, and ate small meals from the hotel vending machine. The two days he’d waited in A&E to see a nurse, and picked up an infection, felt like a lifetime ago. The police officer had driven him to a hospital in Dartmouth where the queues were smaller, but the heat was everywhere and so were its pallid victims. But while he was recuperating, at least the temperature outside dropped to thirty-three degrees.

  In Spain, France and Portugal the fires were being contained in smaller areas too, but the new pandemics in Asia and North Africa were both being linked to the European ports and some UK hospitals. Like the ongoing famines in Africa and China, it was unusual for pandemics to supplant the relentless coverage of the fires, or the hurricanes and floods, wherever they were occurring, unless the bugs were getting out of control. The father’s thoughts turned to what the police officer had told him beside the wheat field.

  There had been at least a dozen pandemics the father could vaguely remember now, and all in the last three decades. Plague, legionnaires’ disease, E. coli of the blood, hantaviruses and various strains of influenza had killed millions, but labs somewhere had always investigated recognizable DNA and RNA and eventually detected the antibodies and antigens necessary for vaccines.

  Viruses flourished repeatedly, but briefly; many inexplicably died away, evolutionary dead ends, or they hit a volley of the latest antibiotics in the northern hemisphere. They always became footnotes to the bigger deals when continents were on fire, water filled city streets, mudslides took townships down slopes, or cities were blurred by hurricanes. But the news stations were claiming the new pathogen from Asia was SARS CoV, and that alone was enough to make Centre for Disease Control sweat buckets, and the story was persisting. Never good signs.

  The new Asian SARS bug had been listed as a worldwide health threat a few weeks before. He hadn’t known that. He did remember a report about a plane in China, sometime in the spring, before the onset of the hottest summer that Europe had ever endured. But that plane was now being cited as key in the latest pandemic. And China Airlines Flight 211 had carried three hundred people, from Zhejiang to Beijing, fifteen of whom were already running high temperatures and barking chestily at take-off. By the time the plane touched down, hours later, two hundred and ten other passengers had been infected. Within weeks, three thousand healthcare workers, their patients, and the patients’ visitors had been infected and died from the same virus across eighty of Beijing’s hospitals. By that time, the WHO in Geneva became aware that the severe, acute respiratory syndrome had already spread to Hong Kong and nine other Chinese provinces. Familiar statements of alarm had been issued, but he’d lost sight of it in other news because of the fires and what India and Pakistan were lumbering towards over water, again. But here were the latest reports of thousands of new cases of SARS in Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, the east of India, and South Korea. Decades of pollution, freshwater shortages, chronic overpopulation and a food crisis in half of its territories, civil strife, the gradual but certain economic collapse, the continuing desertification of one half of its land, with one tenth of its entire population estimated as still being homeless after the floods of 2038: there was always tragedy in China. But amidst the usual flux and chaos, there were claims that the new bug’s infectiousness, in combination with its lethality, had rarely been seen before. It was like an extreme form of pneumonia, with flu-like symptoms: blinding headaches, high temperatures and chills, crippling muscular aches, a persistent coughing of bloody phlegm leading to the degradation of the lungs.

  The Canadians were now reporting its appearance too, as were the Americans, the Japanese, and the Russians after weeks of denial, and nearly every refugee camp in and around China and India had it too. In Europe, however, it had not seemed to pass beyond a few thousand people, and mostly in the central countries.

  The Guangzhou Institute was now calling it the eleventh SARS coronavirus, but the first that boasted pre-symptomatic infection: by the time the affected felt unwell they had been highly infectious for days – they had gone to school and work, had shopped in crowded markets, helped fill public transport to capacity, breathed on international flights, queued for clean water, and slept in crowded refugee camps. Just scanning the reports made the father feel even weaker than the heat, the infection in his hand, and the drugs already had.

  The crisis is ongoing.

  He stayed in Devon for another week, but neither Scarlett nor the police detective called him.

  His hand became an ugly blue and purple colour but was healing and no longer so swollen. His shoulder ached and remained stiff, bu
t the worst of that injury had passed. More than anything, he was lucky to be alive.

  When he tried to contact all of the recent accounts that Scarlett Johansson had used, he found them disconnected, and the father suspected he would never hear from her again. Against her advice, even her orders, he had gone to The Commodore and he had killed four men. Nothing about that morning’s carnage had appeared on the local news service.

  If Rory was a King they’ll prefer to pursue their own inquiries . . .

  They blind snitches with toothbrush handles . . .

  Out here, they seal the leaks with machetes . . .

  They’ll smash your vertebrae with a hammer. You’ll wish they’d cut your head off . . .

  The hotel was costing him too much money and he knew he’d be incapable of making a move for a few weeks. When he did move again, he would probably need to take food or valuables from his victim. The downward spiral: you could always fall further, and there were no limits now.

  He would go back to Birmingham to see his wife, and he could not help feeling that he was going back to say goodbye.

  SIXTEEN

  ‘You’re hurt,’ his wife said.

  ‘Nearly better now.’ The father tried to conceal the stiffness in his movements caused by the shoulder, its pain revived by sitting for so long during the drive up to the Midlands.

  He took a seat in the garden chair beside Miranda, on the small cement patio. It was the only place to sit, because the entire lawn had been transformed into a market garden. The father nodded at the plots. ‘Your dad’s done well this year.’

  ‘Yes,’ his wife said, a faint smile playing in her eyes, and she turned her attention away from his bandaged hand, now supported by a sling that he’d bought to restrict the movement of the entire arm. ‘We’ve a surplus in the garden this year,’ she went on. ‘Even with the water shortage, I’ve read that the country has a surplus too. Three months’ grain, they’re saying. When was the last time anyone had that?’