by Nevill, Adam
He thought the painting medieval and European, yet primitively striking, while the shrine suggested the avant-garde with suggestions of the Americas. Another collision of decimating and colluding cultures, old and new, indigenous and foreign, densely coded and alien to his eyes. Ignorance, superstition and distant eras of darkness, seeping back as the seas rose and forests cindered. Of most concern was the incongruity of something so ugly, so malevolent, so brazenly despicable and yet perversely sophisticated, in a luxury villa occupied by a foreign criminal; a place from which he may have been followed. But by what?
He’d experienced a sense of an unaccountable awe too, after he’d knelt and executed the unconscious figure of Yonah Abergil; had even imagined himself making an offering, a sacrifice, to initiate his participation in an arena he could barely guess at. Strangely euphoric, after the savagery he’d indulged in, he’d been enveloped in a curious atmosphere and was momentarily reminded of the cathedral in Canterbury. He’d once attended a service there, to represent his company, around the time food aid stopped, when the great vaulted building had filled with people to beg God to intercede in the lives of further millions threatened through starvation. The study in Yonah Abergil’s house had seemed to fill with the same hushed and fearful respect that accompanied a silent candlelit procession he’d watched in London years before too; one that had stretched for miles in support of Bangladesh, each flame representing the thousands of faces that had disappeared beneath the violent brown waters. The atmosphere distilled all that was inspired by the iconic picture of the two blonde orphans, the twins, shivering amidst the wreckage of their home in Florida, benumbed but painfully innocent, their dead mother in the foreground, whom they had covered with a duvet as if she were only asleep, following a hurricane in 2027.
Inside that room, he had fallen into a mute and stunned reverence that had seemed to elevate into a sudden, unbearable comprehension of something else, vast and ineffable, that had reached away beyond his mind and its vague notions of time and space. That was how it had seemed. A gripping fatalism for his species had finally chilled and clutched the room, then popped, as if a door had opened to release a mounting pressure, moments after he had squeezed the trigger. The epiphany couldn’t have lasted for more than a few seconds.
He’d been left shaking, and wondering if the rumours about what these Kings of ruin believed had some merit.
Inside his dingy room at the guest house, the father slumped upon the bed and gulped at a bottle of rum. All about him were faded pink walls, orange curtains, china oddments rimmed with black dust that still managed to hang from the dross-furred wall brackets; an antique ghost-installation of bank holiday weekends for poor couples in decades long gone. And he tried to process the montage of bullet wounds, the faces inside Abergil’s house, the faces of the shrine, the sound of a presence shadowing his rout through the wet, black trees that played on repeat behind his closed eyelids.
He drank more of the rum, and resumed his pacing of the dismal room as the storm slapped the side of the guest house. He knew . . . he knew now. If Yonah Abergil was to be believed, then two years ago, for two hundred thousand pounds, paid by an affluent individual who must have been intensely aware of the father and his family, his daughter had been stolen to order by two members of an organized multinational criminal gang: Oleg Chorny and Semyon Sabinovic. Those were the men who had driven the black car away from his home, up the street, to turn at the summit of the road, and to take her away.
Oleg Chorny. Semyon Sabinovic. Oscar Hollow.
He focused on the names. Scrabbled for his equipment. Activated the screen and inputted the details he’d tortured from Yonah Abergil’s corpulent mouth.
My God, he’d executed a gang lieutenant in his own home. The enormity of the act, an assassination no less, suddenly became too large for his thoughts and he feared he’d begun to hyperventilate.
But he found nothing, not a trace of any of the three names he had been given. There was no listing for any lawyer in the British Isles called Oscar Hollow. He clawed at his hair and began to scream, wanted to go for a gun, but to do what? Then he stopped. Gene Hackman would know if they were on file, if they’d used an alias. All was not lost; Gene would know. The father had to find out, or he’d just murdered another two people for nothing.
Yonah hadn’t been lying; the father trusted his instincts; they hadn’t let him down so far. In fact, they’d led him this far . . . and no further?
What else had Yonah told him? The two kidnappers had addictions, were witches, shamans? Seers who had looked for, and seen, something unnatural. Men who were seekers. Seekers, but of what? That’s what Yonah had communicated while in tremendous pain, fearing for his father’s life, and using broken English on the blood-smeared floor of his villa. Yonah had confirmed that his daughter’s abduction had been no opportunist snatch and grab of a passing sex offender. It truly had been a professional job.
But for who? Why would anyone go to such lengths, and use such diabolical personnel, to steal his four-year-old girl?
‘Oh God . . .’ The father cramped and curled into himself upon the bed, while his entire consciousness seemed to slip, or collapse, through a sluice, at the arrival of the most unwelcome, but the most convincing, answer. Because such a price was paid only for a little girl that had looked a certain way and been a certain age. She was selected to satisfy the sadistic tastes of a deranged and pathological individual, who had probably amassed his wealth by utilizing those very same traits.
At the end, was there a terror so great that your heart burst? Were there agonies inside your small and perfect body that I have clutched to my own chest, so many times, to calm your distress? Did you encounter what no child ever should?
The father fell to his knees and scrabbled across the floor to his rucksack. He took out the four handguns, then stood up, gripping two of them, half-drunk and deranged; a witless, naked scarecrow in a speckled mirror who wanted to run outside, back through the storm to the house of Yonah, where he could shoot dead anyone he found, by simple association with Abergil, and of what his brokerage must have ultimately inflicted upon his daughter.
My love, my world.
Maybe he should dedicate his last few days alive to executing, without warning, any man that bore any connection to King Death, any affiliate, associate, prospect, or sympathizer. Perhaps a great levelling through bloodshed was needed to lance the corruption in the flesh of this beleaguered era.
And I could do it. Because if they hurt you, I could kill forever, and never feel a twitch of remorse.
And beloved is the virus that will streak so hot and shivering through their numbers. Precious is the tumult of water and debris that sweeps them away and holds their rat faces beneath the sewage and mud-thick swill. Sacred is the sun’s fire that chars them back to carbon.
I will decimate them.
If you no longer exist, then they will no longer exist.
The father laid down his weapons and crawled to his bed, where he buried his face in the covers, and all but buried his daughter in an unknown grave, cold these two terrible years gone.
NINETEEN
What had followed him home from the murder scene billowed wide and black through his sleep.
He came awake from a dream in which he’d opened the door of a cupboard inside some grey place, only to find a collection of weathered bones amidst soiled clothes. Children’s clothes buried within an earthen cavity, dug through the floor. We can show you what we found. His mother-in-law had said this. But when he’d turned, weightless with shock, he’d seen the body of Yonah’s girlfriend, stood tall in her black lingerie and high heels as she packed handguns and his daughter’s toys inside a leather suitcase. Her head was veiled, but he sensed that another woman’s face smiled behind the black chiffon. The face of a woman he knew well when it pressed against the gauze. He’d shouted, God, no! But twisted within sleep, and quickly passed through other strange, at times seemingly familiar, scenarios. He found himse
lf in a room, a black place with horrors painted upon the walls. A painted corpse twisted and danced in a distant corner, all the time grinning with satisfaction. The father then climbed and took his place within a shrine inside the room, amber-lit by candles in a cold darkness. Stepping over bodies turned to wood and paper and barely held together by their disintegrating clothes, Yonah Abergil said, And you, and you now, directing his path at gunpoint, up through the famine’s dead. Only for him to emerge in a concrete room, greened in the corners, with a cement floor stained dark and thickly. In there, he knelt beside his wife, the detective, and a woman hooded inside a sack.
You did this. You! Scarlett Johansson said through the bag over her face.
You did, Gene Hackman agreed, quietly, nodding.
His wife spoke while crying. The moment you meddled with that bitch, you did this to us all.
Out of a dark doorway behind them came a figure carrying a machete.
No matter how much he thrashed, shouted and struck his face within sleep, he’d not been able to break from the disorderly bed he found himself in next, in a badly decorated room. An object like a yacht’s mainsail smoked and yet cracked like wet cloth, where a ceiling should have been, over his naked body. The thing glistened at its heart, and from its internal oiliness the vapours became as black and fine-haired as those of an insect under magnification.
Sleep’s insistent torments would not release him. He next dreamed of himself and his wife standing in water, thigh-deep, black and cold. They held their daughter’s little wrists as she sank into the void. Something was entwined around her legs and waist that they could not see. Only her head and arms broke through the surface. They had the feeble strength he so often encountered in persecution dreams; their arms were numb, near-lifeless, perhaps able to cling for a while, but not to raise a weight. In a voice of enforced calm, his wife had said, ‘We need to say goodbye to her now.’ The idea caused the father the pain of being impaled upon an icicle. He looked down and into the small and frightened face and knew he would never let her go: instead, he would go down to where she went, deep into the black.
At six he fell awake, fatigued and harrowed by the night’s carousal. Dropped from the bed to go and douse his punished body in shallow, tepid bath water, meagrely drawn from what sputtered out of ancient pipes that made the floor of the communal bathroom shudder. Once his metered ration had dripped to an end, he dried his body and forced himself to swallow a dry bread roll and a cup of black coffee. He dressed in clean clothes that felt like a holy blessing around his punished skin, and packed away his belongings. He needed to move far away from where he had been an agent of murder.
The night’s visions had left his nerves jangling, his thoughts at the edge of panic; it took hours before he felt better. He’d never been religious, and soon after his daughter’s disappearance he’d lost all faith in the instinctive vestige of belief that there must be more than this world. He had no faith in justice or fairness, or any of the old values of the old world, but he didn’t know what he believed in after the previous evening at Yonah Abergil’s. King Death’s notions of an inevitable and engulfing chaos, encroaching upon everything about him, even impressed him as the most realistic current option, informed by his experience. He truly felt as if he’d been touched by . . . he did not know what.
In a wind-maddened dawn, he drove through a sopping world to the place Yonah said the kidnappers had kept a lair, an old church in Brixham; a place only a few miles away from where his daughter was taken.
While he waited for Gene Hackman to call and take his report, he planned to make certain that both kidnappers were dead. And the father understood that his motive for such an early start was mostly driven by the knowledge that he had finally brought himself to the attention of people who would not rest until his actions were avenged sevenfold.
TWENTY
‘Where are you now?’ Gene Hackman’s call broke the father from a doze he’d been unaware of entering, and returned him to the noise of rain pelting the car. He’d parked on the outskirts of Brixham and the windscreen blurred the sea grey and spray-hazy. The police officer was using a new ident and no visual.
The father coughed sleep from his voice. ‘Brixham. For good reason.’
‘You alone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Distance from Somerset is no bad thing.’ The man’s voice had changed from the last time they had spoken, and verged on breathless. ‘There’s a shitstorm brewing. I wonder . . . if you should go to ground, for a while.’ The father sensed the detective’s serious misgivings over their association.
‘Not possible. The men who took my daughter were down here. It was a local job.’
There was a loaded silence; the father prompted the detective. ‘Gene, you sound different. Can you talk?’
‘For a while. I’ve some bad news. Because of last night, your activities are already queue-jumping the murder squad’s busy agenda. Rina Agnelli, Yonah Abergil’s missus, has described your visit in great detail. And some clever prick over here has identified similarities in the recent slayings of at least two Kings, Rory and Yonah. There’s a pretty good description of you from The Commodore, and Bowles’s neighbour looked right at you too. Those two eye-witness accounts have been matched, and now linked to Abergil. Further forensic investigative measures are going to be pursued across all of the crime scenes. If that happens, we’ll soon have your DNA because you puked in Bowles’s house and dripped blood all over Rory’s floor. Your records are in the national database. So it will just be a matter of time, my friend.
‘Ballistics are also checking the slugs you left in Rory, and these will tie you to Murray Bowles and Nige Bannerman, but not Yonah. There’s already some talk of how you chose your targets, and why. Some people are nervous. Like me.’
The father closed his eyes. ‘The weather will hamper things.’
Gene disregarded his last comment as if it were wishful thinking that didn’t warrant serious consideration. It was all the father had had to hold on to: the idea that everything else was far worse than what he was doing, and that what he had done didn’t really matter. He’d also stopped believing this sometime during the previous night.
‘Yonah Abergil has friends on the job. I knew that. I told you. Council too. So once you are in their frame, Yonah’s little helpers on the force will track your movements, your vehicle by satellite, your financial transactions. Your car’s legit, so back-dated movements and expenditure will give them the caseload. All of it puts you on the spot for all the shootings. Open and shut case. Because of your car, your whereabouts will be ascertained in no time. If you’re lucky, it’ll be us that come for you. If someone here makes a call and tells them where you are, the Kings will get there first. Count on it. It happens. So ditch that motor and fast.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You will. Your motor has to go. It is your only chance to run for a bit longer. Your family hatchback needs to be driven a very long distance from where you are sitting, or you will not have the time to finish this. Leave it where I can find it. Message me the location at this ident. And I will scrap it. Don’t buy anything unless it’s with cash.’
The father swallowed. A cloud of unpleasant gas erupted from the floor of his stomach. He thought he was going to be sick into the footwell. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You didn’t finish up. I couldn’t have made it any clearer about what was at stake if you went up against one of them.’
‘I couldn’t . . . her, the girl. She was, I don’t know . . . just there, a girlfriend. She couldn’t have heard anything.’
The officer’s voice hardened. ‘I gave you a new shooter. I told you. No witnesses.’
‘She wasn’t supposed to be there, or the fucking nurse!’
There was a long pause, both men breathing heavily as they bit back on trading the accusations they needed to let fly. The officer changed his tack. ‘OK. OK. This shit always gets complicated. Let’s cool our heels. Think.’
; ‘I . . . I won’t be apprehended. I can’t be. I know that. Because of what would happen to me. But they’ll never know about you. I promise.’
‘You think?’ The officer laughed unpleasantly. ‘Upstairs is suspicious about the getaway in Torre, and there are some very good descriptions from Rory’s little mates, who are all pointing the finger at a plain-clothes cop and vigilante collaboration.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s a shit sandwich that we’re spread on, any way you look at it.’
‘The information you gave me, it was good. Abergil gave up the men who took my daughter. I know now. I know who they are, or were. And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t lying. If you hadn’t helped me, I wouldn’t have this. It matters. What you did matters.’
‘That’s something. I’m pleased for you. I am, I mean it.’ His voice trailed off and he sighed. ‘You really worked him for it. Christ alive. You shot out his fucking knees. Blinded him in one eye. He’d never have got that eye back. Detached retina from blunt trauma. You royally messed him up.’
The father couldn’t speak. The strength leaked from his body at this recital of his savagery.
The officer laughed. ‘And he deserved everything he got. His end was the cause for some celebration, shall we say, for some on our side, and let’s leave it there. I have no problem with what you did. But the girl, Rina, his missus, you’d have more time on your clock if she wasn’t in the picture, shooting her mouth off like a tragedy queen in a three-grand dress, all because that sack of shit she was screwing got whacked.’
‘She came home with him in the car.’
‘It happens. At least for some. She’s a bit of all right.’
‘I separated them. Secured them. The nurse got free. She went for a gun. Jesus Christ, they had them stashed all over. The other woman, Rina, I restrained her. Twice. I watched her. I questioned Abergil in another room so she wouldn’t hear. I don’t think . . . I don’t know . . . I couldn’t do it. Not her. I tried to think of a reason. A way to—’
