Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The father placed the whisky bottle on the coffee table, sat down, cross-legged, before the blinking, sputtering upturned face and removed the gag. ‘This can all stop. Very soon. Your dad gets his medicine, your girlfriend gets untied. Everything goes back to how it was, if you help me. I am going to ask you some questions.’

  ‘Nothing!’ The man raised his head and spat onto the father’s legs.

  The father stood up calmly, collected the whisky bottle from the coffee table, positioned himself behind Yonah and smashed it across the back of his head, making sure the heavier base did not connect with his skull. Yonah’s hair was threaded wet and red.

  ‘Or we go on like this. We go on and on and on, all night.’ The father reintroduced the nerve agent to his hand and prepared to use it.

  Yonah grimaced and rolled away, his neck rearing like a serpent, his head twisting away from another incineration of his eyes and sinuses.

  The father followed him and rolled him back to the middle of the floor. Yonah was a big man, carrying at least thirty extra kilos in such lean times, and his gut hadn’t been built by cultured micro-proteins. The man’s breathing was now under severe strain too, twines were snapping from his cables; the bullock was sagging, poisoned and leashed.

  ‘You think I am a rat, you waste your time coming here, to my home, you fuckin’ bastard!’ But even after two doses of the agent that had entirely closed one of his eyes, Yonah Abergil’s spirits hadn’t dimmed entirely. This was no sex offender who’d be shaken apart merely by the shadow of a vigilante.

  The father let the man’s wet, swollen head fall back to the floor, where he messily ejected mucus from his nose and emptied his mouth of toxic saliva blended with blood. ‘This isn’t what you think. I don’t want to know about your money, your business. Or whatever else you do so you can live like this, like a python king in its palace.’ The father waved the handgun at the room. ‘I want you to tell me about one job. One job only. A job when someone was taken. A child. A child stolen from her home, from her parents. A snatch that was performed on your watch. Your turf. You know about it. You would have signed off the work. My sources are very good. They ratted you out because you are reptile shit in human form. And thank God there can still be consequences for someone like you.

  ‘So, back to this little girl who I’m here for. Information about one little girl is what you will provide. I want to know where you and your organization sent her. And then everything can be as it was. You understand me, you fat fuck?’

  The one red eye that regarded the father struck him as satanic. He saw calculation within it, some mystification, complete contempt, outrage at the situation, and an innate hatred for all but its own. He wondered if the man saw the same thing in his eyes.

  Yonah Abergil spat again. ‘You come here . . . you end your life for one kid? You come into Yonah’s home, you tie up his woman and lock away his father, and you expect me to help you? You think I am afraid of death? I love death.’

  The father recalled the thing in the painting that hung above the fireplace in the games room, and its bones and rags seemed to dance and jerk through his mind now. ‘I can see that you do. And I can help you with that. And your father too. That old bastard has done his fair share, has he not? King Death? Big men. You think? No. I know what you are. Reptiles.’

  The whisky made the father’s head spin through fragments of an education long over, and practically meaningless. ‘Amniotes. Tetrapods. Cold blooded. Squamata, the worm lizards. You’ve been around for three hundred and fifty million years, you know that? You began as Protosauria, the first lizards. You grew and survived, and survive you will again. You swim backwards in time because you are Sauropsida, the true reptiles. You have Therapsida, the beast face. I can see it now. You are unredeemable. There is no rehabilitation. You are the face of our times. You flourish because you lay so many eggs. You are oviparous. That means you are an egg layer. We are now in the Mesozoic age all over again because of you and your kind. The great age of the reptile. You.’

  Yonah Abergil’s visible eye changed its expression. He looked at the father as Malcolm Andrews had; at that moment a realization dawned that here was a man unstitched at some fundamental level. Threats and negotiations would not be effective before such madness, such determination.

  The father showed the red devil eye on the floor the picture of his little girl. ‘Take a good look. She was this age when she was taken from the garden of her home in Shiphay, Torquay. A place she felt safe, where she lived with her mother and her father. You ruined more than one life that day.’ The father recited the address, the exact time, the date, the year.

  There was no remorse, no softening in the scarlet eye. ‘I know of this girl.’

  The father’s heart stuttered then resumed banging, but too heavily.

  ‘Oui. Oui. I remember. I remember,’ the man added almost fondly and smiled.

  The air of the room seemed to still, but cool with a special tension that paused time. In the distance, from the old man’s day room that could have housed thirty people in a municipal care home, gunfire exploded in the film.

  The father stayed quiet. He did not know what to say. Secretly, he had never expected to hear the right response. Some vestige of what might have been a redundant decency inside his heart was still reluctant to extract information in this way, because he did not want his behaviour rewarded. But it was the only way, and in time, he was sure, his methods would become standard. This was one of the conclusions he had drawn during so many hours staring at walls, floors and ceilings that needed painting.

  ‘I tell you of this time and you must kill me. Oui, oui. Because if I live, then I warn who paid me so well to find men to take her, yes? And then those who have her will soon know you are coming too. I live and I also have to do some bad things to your bitch wife. Your bitch daughter also. I am right, am I not? You must know of us, of how we work. And you are the father, yes? But in this house we are all fathers. Me too. Yes, you did not know that? We are all bad fathers here.’

  And as the father crouched, stunned before a glimpse of an inhumanity he thought himself immune to, he detected the tiniest squeak of rubber on marble at the end of his hearing, and he rolled sideways.

  The leather settee, a few feet behind him, was punctured and let out a wheeze of air at the same time he heard a handgun bark.

  Glass smashed, wood splintered, plaster puffed.

  The father saw the white bulk of the nurse, her hand flashing as she fired again, again and again to tear up the room around him.

  Yonah Abergil rolled back and forth on the floor, crimson-faced, bellowing orders. ‘Kill him! Kill him! You bitch, kill him!’

  The father expected to be shot, but the woman continued to fire too wide, too low, or too high. Her bloodless face jumped with shock, her head twitched. She was an amateur, like him, miscast and thrust into the warping, slowing seconds of a murder scene.

  The father rolled, then scampered behind the sofa. Noticed two incoming shots had passed through the settee to impact hardwood cabinets set against the wall. That had been the sound of splintering he’d heard. But he was behind no real cover, and fearing the woman’s sudden composure and a truer aim, the father came up onto his knees and rested his wrists upon the back of the suite. And fired.

  A bleached tunic blossomed red. Became Rorschach-patterned as he hit her twice more. She lost her balance after the first bullet found its mark, teetering backwards on her plump heels, mouth open in horror at the idea of being shot. The father guessed she died sometime while sliding down the wall to thump the floor. Her head remained still, positioned on one shoulder, eyes wide with surprise.

  Dead. He’d killed a woman, a woman.

  He tried to figure out how she had got herself free. She still wore the apron cord, so she must have silently pulled the metal pole from the floor, or from out of the breakfast bar? Worked it loose, slipped her hands under . . . How did he not hear?

  The voice of Yonah Abergil, the
voice of rage, brought him out of his shock. ‘Stupid bitch! You stupid bitch!’ he screamed at the reddening lump at rest against the wall of his expansive living room.

  From the old man’s adjoining room the sound of gunfire continued and prolonged the atmosphere of carnage with firearms, the darkness flashing like a dance floor. The old man asked twice for someone called ‘Marie’, then fell silent.

  The father came out from behind the settee and checked in the adjacent master bedroom. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ The girlfriend was sitting up now, and had shuffled to a drawer that she was trying to open with her bound mouth.

  The father went to her, seized her slippery ankles and dragged her across the room and through to the living room so he could watch her. The woman’s dress wrinkled further up and over her buttocks to reveal all of her to the waist, like a torture porn film with an arty aesthetic. He had initially separated everyone in the house because whoever heard the interrogation would have to die, and he’d contracted inside, like an anemone on a rock, at the thought of executing the mistress and the nurse. Maybe if they hadn’t heard the interrogation they could have been spared? But now?

  ‘Turn your face away,’ he said to the woman.

  She didn’t seem to understand. The father rolled her over with his booted foot.

  ‘Bastard!’ Yonah Abergil cried out.

  The father swallowed the caustic reflux in his throat. Stood astride Yonah. Aimed the handgun at the back of one knee and fired.

  The man’s screams expanded and echoed throughout the entire house.

  The father dragged the woman back to the bedroom. The noise erupting from Yonah was further confirmation that he would not be able to shoot this woman.

  Back inside the master bedroom, he knelt beside her. Her fragrance and her fear swamped his face. ‘I have to hurt him. We both know it. He’s a devil and you sleep with a devil that buys you baubles. He thinks he has inherited the world through slavery . . . and murder . . . corruption. Kidnap. He allowed people to take a child. You all climb into the lifeboats before the children. You are an intimate affiliate of the reptiles. You present yourself to the best of your ability and then willingly writhe in their discarded scales. But I will not hurt you if you stay here and remain quiet. If you try and escape, or hear what he says to me, I will have to kill you. I am closing this door, but I may come back, into this room, at any time. If you have moved, I will start shooting without delay. I promise you that.’

  The father retrieved another handful of silk ties from the wardrobe. Strapped her glossy thighs together. Bound another tie behind her hot knees.

  He retreated to the games room and uncapped another bottle of good whisky on the bar. Through the door arch, he watched the figure on the living-room floor as he drank. Yonah Abergil squirmed in his own blood, lit up by the beautiful lights.

  A phone began to chirp in the distance. The father checked his watch. He’d been at the house for twenty minutes. He returned to the living room, squatted. Through the wall the father could hear the girlfriend sobbing through the wet sock in her pretty mouth. He again held the picture of his daughter before Yonah’s face.

  ‘Bitch!’ The man spat on the picture without hesitation.

  The father carefully wiped the bloodied saliva off the plastic covering, using Yonah’s shirt. ‘I don’t want this to continue. I’m feeling sick. I never feel entirely comfortable . . . But it takes you over, doesn’t it, when you get going? And why do you all make it so easy for me? But I’m genuinely thinking that I should end this soon. I’ll shoot every fucking one of you to death unless you tell me who took her.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘You want to walk with a limp? Or do you want to sit beside your dad in a wheelchair?’

  ‘You fuck yourself!’

  The father stood astride Yonah Abergil and shot through the back of his second knee.

  After a tense moment of complete silence, the man withered. His mouth fell open, his one unclosed brown eye bulged, his breathing stuttered and he started coughing. The pain must have been an agony beyond space and time. This was war, the father thought. I am in war. I am at war.

  A strange peace settled over him as he sat on the sofa. The big nurse had managed to hit the seat three times. The stuffing was smouldering. He could see smoke drifting from one bullet hole. His inappropriate sense of calm was twinned with an anaesthetizing exhaustion, and he wondered if he were now finally comfortable with brutality, or if his mind was shutting down and sliding into a protective shock.

  ‘So this is your last chance, Yonah,’ he said tiredly, ‘before I really ruin the film your father is watching. I swear to you now, he will not live to see the end credits. The girl. The little girl that was taken—’

  Yonah rolled onto his back, gasped, then started to pant, his face white as if all the blood in his body was leaking from his knees.

  The father took his eyes away from the legs; he found the immobility of the man’s lower portion an unbearable sight. And he suffered more than a begrudging admiration for this man’s refusal to talk. What kind of code would prevent a confession at such a time? The father recalled the thing in the painting, the loping thing in rags. What are you to them?

  Yonah started talking in French, then Spanish, Russian, then what sounded like Hebrew, before his voice disintegrated into the tight gasps of the agonized.

  The father stood up and walked to the open door of the old man’s day room. The old man turned his head and smiled at the father. The father raised the pistol, half-heartedly, knowing he could not kill the old man he now aimed at.

  ‘Non. No. Not Papa!’ Yonah screamed from the floor. ‘I tell you. You fucking prick!’

  The father turned his head in the doorway but did not lower his arm. Yonah Abergil moved his head so he could stare at the father with that one red eye. ‘They are dead. Those who take the girl. Semyon Sabinovic is dead. He is the one that took your girl. He was a smack head. Oleg Chorny was the driver. Georgian witch fucks. Semyon started to shoot himself up too high with smack, yeah? Got sloppy. So we arranged to kill him after the job. But his faggot toy, Oleg Chorny, he lived for a while. Another junkie. He goes into hiding but there he also died. Drugs. Another junkie fuck.’

  The father frowned inside his mask. He didn’t understand.

  Yonah spat his mouth clear. ‘Oleg and Semyon took her. Drove her . . .’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the man that pay for the snatch.’

  ‘What man? Give me his name.’

  ‘We only speak with some fucking lawyer. He paid us two hundred grand to take the girl. This lawyer we done work for before. We don’t know who paid him to set up the job. Just the representative we see, the lawyer. But Semyon and Oleg follow this lawyer’s car, from the swap. They track the girl’s clothes, yeah . . . with a tiny bug, so Semyon will know . . . who he do this snatch for. I know they do it, Georgian faggot pricks. They wanted to see who buys the kid. Semyon’s thinking of blackmail, maybe, later. Maybe this is a rich pervert they can shake down. Who knows? But they go and they see who buy the girl.’

  The father leaned against the door so he could stay on his feet. Alive? She could be alive. Alive. Alive. Alive.

  Pervert.

  Maybe not.

  ‘My girl,’ the father whispered. ‘Who . . . who did they take her to?’ He stood over Yonah, pointed the muzzle at the side of his head. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘That’s it, you fuck. All I know. The man who buy her was cautious, maybe he suspected the car would be followed, so he already paid me to kill Oleg and Semyon, but all through this lawyer. So I already done your work. Semyon got clipped, but Oleg killed himself with drugs when his faggot lover was wiped. They were lovers, queers. The name of who paid for this little girl died with them, the junkie fucks. They tell no one. They only worked with each other, no one else. Maybe if they had shared more, I didn’t have to ice them. Now get me a doctor. I’m fucking dying.’ Yonah gasped for breath, though whether this was exasp
eration on account of ratting, or the pain, the father did not know.

  The girlfriend whimpered from beyond the bedroom door.

  The father shook himself back into an awareness of the room, the carnage, the massacre. He fought through his memory as if it was full of jungle vines to find the name. ‘This lawyer, this go-between, what was his name?’

  ‘Oscar. Oscar Hollow. I have the number. In my study. We go there. Call him.’

  But he would still have to look for the abductors, in case Yonah was lying. For the abductors now to be dead was too easy. ‘These men that took her. Where did they live? Where!’

  ‘They lived in . . . above Brixham. Somewhere by the camps. Devon. But they are dead, I tell you . . .’

  ‘Who else knows they did this job?’

  ‘Only me.’

  ‘Convenient, and the kidnappers are dead?’ Even Rory Forester knew something. ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘OK, maybe a few associates know it was Oleg and Semyon who took that girl. I trust them so I tell them. But I swear that Oleg and Semyon are dead. Only they and the lawyer knew who paid for the girl and where she goes.’

  ‘Tell me more and you can have your doctor. Tell me more about them. Tell me about these pigs that stole a child for money.’

  The red eye regarded him, wanting to believe the assurance. ‘Oleg was enlumineur. He do the tattoos, yes? He was our best. Oleg’s tattoos were beautiful.’ The man spat his mouth clear. ‘Witches. They were . . . you know . . . He and Semyon, they go too far with the old ways from the old countries. Semyon think he know things. Thinks he is special. Some kinda priest. Shaman. Yeah? Invincible? Too many people listen to him, yeah, like Oleg did. They have too much influence. So they are given this job because they are the best at snatches. But this is to be their final job . . . I make sure of that, but we only get one, Semyon, in Totnes, where he had a place. On my father’s life, this is the truth.