by Nevill, Adam
They sat with that thought between them, like an uninvited stranger at the table, and they watched the fire onscreen as the rain belted the windows close to their faces. Where can we go? the father wondered. We are alone in space. There is nowhere to go. The quick, cold realization never failed to produce an icy tension, the size of a snooker ball, behind his sternum. The very earth was getting smaller. To migrate north as a species and to go higher and higher as the heat rose, and to compete for fewer and fewer resources . . . The closing of borders. The end of food exports. The ever-emerging hostilities to seize fresh water and arable land . . . All of these things were part of the penultimate stage of mass collapse; the idea could still take his breath away.
One of the screens switched to an artillery barrage in Kashmir. The landlord pushed the volume up. A few more tousled heads in the bar turned to the news. The father couldn’t hear clearly from where he sat.
Subtitles indicated that Pakistan was now demanding half of the water in the Sutlej, Ravi and Beas rivers, and for India to completely desist using water from the upper parts of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers . . . During the last twelve hours, the British and United States governments had urged all their citizens to leave both countries. Diplomatic staff were in the process of being evacuated.
The vagrant had finished his drink and was licking the tangled beard around his mouth. The father checked on the barman: he was watching the latest from India intently with two customers. Carefully, the father moved his second glass of beer towards the old man. Slid away the empty glass and hid it under the window counter. ‘You’re local?’
‘Lived here for sixty years. I—’
The father cut him off. ‘I’m looking for someone from near here. An addict.’
‘You’ll find plenty of those.’
‘I don’t want plenty, I only want one. From the east. Russian. Georgian. He had a lot of gang tattoos and lived in an old church around here somewhere.’
‘Church? They’re everywhere now. And if you’re looking for a free feed I recommend the Temple of the Last Days. They do a good soup, with a—’
‘Where do the addicts collect, do you know?’
The old man gave him the names of three missions and the dispensary. ‘Not my poison, I’m afraid. I don’t even touch hard liquor. So I don’t mix in those circles.’ He said this with such sincerity the father wanted to roar with laughter. There was hierarchy everywhere.
‘This man had connections. Organized crime. I don’t think he’ll be under the pier.’
The old man stroked his beard, sipped the drink, watched him in a curious role reversal, as if it was the father who might be unstable, or dangerous. ‘Gangs with tattoos, I know who you mean. But I don’t get involved. I steer clear, my friend. And around here, the organization you are probably referring to took all the big houses up in Dartmouth,’ the old man said. ‘They tend to operate out of there. I don’t go over there any more. Can’t say as I’ve heard much about them from out Brixham way, other than the usual.’
‘Which is?’
‘They’re in everything. Came down with the trafficking and to get a stake in the camp constructions. Took over the drug crops on Dartmoor. Years ago.’ The man rolled his yellowy eyes upwards. ‘Even this place, or so they say. Girls upstairs. Or there used to be.’
The father nodded his thanks. ‘Enjoy the drink.’ He went to find somewhere still open that sold food.
TWENTY-TWO
Early in the morning, two days after the shooting of Yonah Abergil, Gene Hackman called. The father had moved to a room in a guest house, one mile east of Brixham; he wouldn’t leave the area, but would move each day until he could leave for good.
Delivered in a voice thinned and tightened by nerves, the information came fast. ‘Forensics went through Abergil’s mansion on all fours. A very fast response to the death of a dirtbag. But as I said, his demise has jumped a big queue. And samples have now been harvested from the evidence that’s not next to useless at two further sites yesterday, Bowles’s house and The Commodore. Word came down the food chain requesting that forensics take another look at these illustrious residences. So you’re as good as nailed for those two. Your DNA will have been pulled off the national. The fact that the investigation is being partly suppressed in-house makes me fear this has already been outsourced to Abergil’s mates in the local Kings. It’s probably their gig now, housekeeping.’
The father closed his eyes. ‘What else?’
‘When his body was found two years back, shot through the head with his hands and feet bound, it was news to us that Semyon Sabinovic was even in the country. A hit from the Moroccans, the file says, and revenge upon them was swift. That might have been Abergil’s cover story to take out one of his own? But how about this: Sabinovic was taken out one week after your girl vanished.’
Gene Hackman then confirmed that Sabinovic was Georgian, deported from three European countries for people trafficking, all charges occurring around the midthirties when the cross-border activity became hopeless to monitor. Oleg Chorny was Georgian too, but had operated under different aliases and with many passports, doing hard time in Belgium and Germany in the early thirties for trafficking, and his part in four sexual slavery rings. Chorny’s original outfit had probably been recruited, or amalgamated, into the burgeoning Kings organization while he served time in Hamburg.
Gene also told him that both men had form farming female teens into prostitution on the continent. And that detail fell upon the father’s heart like a steel axe with a frozen blade.
In addition, Oleg Chorny had been caught on surveillance cameras in Bristol, around the time of the Chantilly Road massacre and of numerous gangland hits in South Wales attributed to the Kings. That was the only reason why Gene had found an out-of-date dossier on him. Then the man had dropped out of the picture for three years, only to reappear in Torbay on the outer limits of Yonah Abergil’s outfit in the late forties when the vast refugee camps were being extended at bewildering speeds across Devon.
But Gene Hackman could glean no further news of Chorny’s whereabouts, or activities, after the spring of 2050. The father’s daughter had vanished in the summer of 2051, a year later. But the information, more or less, tied in with what Abergil had said, and it put Oleg Chorny in South Devon.
‘It fits. They both fit.’
‘Hundreds of them will do. But at least Yonah gave them up while you kneecapped him and put a gun to his dad’s head. As motivation goes, you gave him a huge incentive to squeal. It’s also all we have to go on, so, for your sake, I hope there is something solid in this.’
‘You didn’t say that Oleg Chorny was dead.’
‘No, but that’s not the same as saying he’s alive either. People vanish without a trace all over.’
‘But if he was alive, how would I find him down here, this Chorny prick? Is there someone I could speak to who knew him, who would confirm his death?’
‘Hang on. I’m not done, and this is where it all gets intriguing. I’ve no pictures, no notes, no records of his last alias, but a colleague with his ear to the ground on the drugs that way, and what is moving in and out of Brixham, has told me something interesting, and this information was further embellished by a contact in a sheltered housing project for addicts across the Bays. There’s every nationality shooting up or smoking along the sea front from Plymouth to Exmouth, but in amongst all of the colour in Brixham was an individual of eastern European extraction whose appearance once really stood out. We know the Kings entourage like a bit of ink, but this chap had his head done, meticulously illustrated with a King Death figure. It’s no prison tattoo. Too recent, too vivid. Apparently it was quite eye-catching. He was what they call an enlumineur. You said Yonah Abergil fingered this Oleg Chorny for the same trade?’
‘Yes. Do you have a name?’
‘No, but this guy was something of a guru years back, and considered a prophet amongst smack heads. A nutter with a bit of apocalypse fever like the evangelist
s. Was very generous when helping others open their doors of perception, by all accounts. It was generally presumed that he’d died a while back. But my contact is sure that this individual has been seen this year, during the summer. Never been picked up or even questioned, but my source is sure he was seen around. Popped up, apparently, to score, and appeared to be at death’s door. My contact only remembers this incident because his other clients had no idea how this illustrated guy was even still alive. This guy looked like a walking corpse, inked black and gold all over. The crowd my source had been treating for addiction were pretty freaked out, convinced that the dead had risen as predicted, et cetera. But I’m guessing that if this character is still around, and even if he is not Chorny, then he would have known of Chorny. Same profile: gangster with religion, an enlumineur, and once devoted to King Death, a junkie, and in the area.
‘There’s an old church, a Baptist pre-fab, used by the end-times Africans in the camps. Originally, it was a slaughter-house, an abattoir, before the camps were built. It’s no more than some kind of old shed, at the edge of the oldest quarter of the camps, and that’s where this guy was once known to reside. I’ll send the location in a message from this ident. Didn’t Abergil also say that Sabinovic and Chorny owned a church, somewhere near Brixham?’
‘Yes. He said Chorny lived in an old church, and Chorny was found dead inside it. Or under it after an overdose because Semyon Sabinovic was killed. But maybe there was no overdose.’
‘Then this guy is worth looking at, but I don’t know how it can be him, if Yonah sent that pair on a suicide mission to seal the leaks about the snatch. But this is all I’ve got.’
‘Thank you.’
‘There’s a caveat. Including the camps, you have a population close to two point four million on that stretch of coast, that we know of. It is a haystack and this tattooed guy is a needle. I’ve stuck my neck out and pushed my beak into two places, on your behalf, where it has no official business. If something very public happens to an illustrated man who looks like a corpse, it’ll be a bit coincidental. You follow? Very costly for me if this guy has some King credentials. So your usual impromptu firework display is off the table.’
The father exhaled. ‘So what do you recommend? Can you come down?’
‘And supervise you? No chance. But this will be no snuff movie. No blood bath. I don’t want to hear of some joker in a mask going on a binge with nerve gas and a shooter in a camp. It will pull even more of the world down upon your shoulders. And mine. You are already inside the machine. I’m getting the impression from early speculation that you’re considered a vigilante by our side. One of many paedo-killers. More savage than usual, but without the religion or politics. But what is still hard to reconcile about all of this is why your girl would be snatched through pros, as you had no cash-rich enemies. So we can only assume that the snatch was ordered by a wealthy stranger, as yet unknown, for a high price, but extortion was never the aim. I’m guessing here.’
‘I’ll find out why. But I can’t torment myself any more about his motives.’
‘OK. Now, all eyes are on the weather and the new bug for a bit. Which, I might add, is looking to be something far worse than anyone expected. The Department of Disease Control is in a right lather. It’s in the Midlands and south-east now. First point of infection they actually think was a Hong Kong Chinese tycoon, flown in to see the best immunologist in Oxford. He brought something very nasty along on a spot of health tourism. There’ll be a right ruckus if that news travels, as we’ve one hundred thousand dead pensioners from the summer who’ll still be going on the bonfire till Merry fucking Christmas, and this guy was fast-tracked to the best private care available. Happens all the time.
‘But in the calm after the storm, the eyes of the law, and those above the law, will return to Abergil, that stalwart of the community and local economy, and the man in the mask who’s been clipping kiddie fiddlers. So you need to start thinking of an exit strategy if . . . well, you know what I mean. If by some miracle Oleg Chorny is still alive, and he leads you to some pretty terrible news, to a resolution, then what are you going to do? I’d like some idea as I am balls-deep here.’
The father slumped into his seat. He would not lie. ‘If my girl is not . . . then all the men involved who are still alive are going to die by my hand. Chorny, who drove her away, the man who bought her, and the man who brokered the deal, this lawyer. And anyone else I find out was involved. They’ll all go. You know this. After I’m finished with them, I don’t really care what happens to me. But if I was apprehended . . .’ if I lose my nerve when all is done and decided ‘. . . I won’t ever give you up. I promise you.’
The father swallowed the lump in his throat. He’d long been grief incarnate, vengeance and desolation made flesh. And he was acknowledging the thing, the eventuality, the end that he had considered for himself in his wildest, most rage-charred moments. When he had stood naked in the dismal rooms of barely functioning bed and breakfasts and clawed his hair out after drinking a bottle of cheap spirits; when he’d punched pillows and old mattresses until he collapsed sobbing and sweat-foamed; when he’d ground his teeth into tiny hard white shards that had felt too big beneath his tongue; when he’d shot Bowles like an animal run to ground, and executed Rory and Yonah Abergil in their homes, and tortured old men in their living-room chairs . . . He had known that all the vengeful fire of hell now burned too fiercely inside of him to ever be extinguished, and that he must accept a violent and bloody end for himself, an eventual dousing of the maelstrom. Because if there was to be a continuance in this life only without his little girl, then he would choose oblivion. He was still breathing, but he had never survived her loss.
‘What if she is alive?’
The father took a moment to control his hope. ‘If I ever bore witness to a miracle and my girl was alive, if she was recovered, then what could I do? I could write a statement omitting any details of Scarlet Johansson, and you too. I could think of something to explain how I found her, and why I have done what I have done to extract information. But I doubt any authority would believe that I acted alone. They will know I had help. And I would be sent down, then put down by the affiliates of King Death.’ The father took a deep breath. ‘I would lose her again. So if I find myself in a preposterous situation and discover that she is alive, then I would vanish . . . with her.’
The police officer sounded tired, perhaps relieved, but also saddened. ‘Agreed. If there is a god, then you’ll both have to disappear. You and your girl, and her mother, and for good.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Oleg Chorny. If he is alive and you find him, what is your plan? Maybe I should rephrase that, do you even have one?’
‘If Chorny is alive, then he will either lead me to her . . . wherever she was taken . . . or he will live for as long as it takes him to tell me where he took her. Then he will disappear. The man who bought her will be next. The lawyer I will have to deal with later, when I have a name that I can trace. But I will do everything in my power to prevent anyone from finding them. Any of them. I will reduce them to ash.’ The last sentence seemed to emerge from a recently discovered pit inside himself, and it was as if his conscious mind could not catch such utterances from this pit before they left his mouth.
Both men remained silent as if to digest the enormity of such events, of such practical barbarism.
The father steadied himself because he’d started to shake. ‘This is what you would do if you were in my position. It’s why you saved me in Torquay. It’s why you are helping me now. What else can I do? You’d be mistaken in thinking I have a taste for this. Your own loss has been terrible and your grief will never end. I know this, and if my own heart wasn’t so broken, then it would break for you and your boy’s mother. But if there is even a slim chance that I could bring my daughter back from the dead, then I will do anything. We know this, you and I. This story will not change. No one even thinks of her now but her family. And the angels who
have helped me.’
After a period of intense silence, the officer spoke. ‘Easy with the angel shit. But if Chorny is in that chapel, and if he can take you to the next level, then he needs to be breathing to do it. You’ll have to extract the truth from whatever planet he lives on now, because if this illustrated junkie is our man, then he doesn’t appear to be on this one any more. Once his usefulness is exhausted, I agree, he will have to go. For both our sakes. The ways and means of his disappearance will need to be thought through. Very carefully. He cannot be found. But where will you go after?’
‘I’ll face that later. What about a car?’
‘Let me see about replacement wheels. I’ll send you the location of a pickup near Brixham. It’ll be there later this afternoon. Best I can do, so don’t go in before it’s dark, because you may need to haul this guy’s arse out of the area and for that you will need wheels. Oh, and use one of the new shooters and find a new mask, unless you want a big finish. Plenty will oblige on that score.’
TWENTY-THREE
Through the rain’s drenching violence, a dark shape snapped out its length. Curled back upon itself, then unrolled wetly to smack hard, like a leather strap, upon the water-glazed bricks of a wall. The father flinched to a crouch, disbelief matching his fear at the sudden billowing, the raggedy slapping above his head, momentarily settling to a lapping upon a garden wall, like a thin, predatory tongue.
At the very moment he turned a street corner to climb the last rise to the church, from within a walled garden this form had lashed out, or even appeared to reach for him. Had there been an arm stretching from its wet folds, concealed in the rain-blurred dusk? A lowered head, a face? The possibility of such a presence within the air had immediately returned his thoughts to the woods and his flight from Yonah Abergil’s villa, and to a fragment of a dream in which he lay helpless beneath a great black presence in motion. His most volatile instincts warned again of a pursuit from a thing unnatural.
