Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  He’d brought the drug stash from the chapel too, along with an army holdall he’d found beneath loose floor-boards. A sudden withdrawal from the concoctions the addict mainlined could be catastrophic, he knew that much; he would have to give him something to keep him alive, for a while. The creature’s chronic addiction might even be useful during the interrogation; he might awake eager for a fix. Most strains of recreational drugs were powerful enough to prevent any possibility of getting clean.

  The father mulled over his options to force a confession. But how long would this creature linger under the duress he knew himself capable of inflicting? If his rage erupted he could not trust himself.

  Chorny’s canvas bag contained guns and enough ready cash to keep the father going until the following summer, if he lived that long. How had it not been stolen? Though the idea that the thieves in the camps were averse to entering the chapel was not implausible. There were more drugs in the bag too, some tools and emergency rations: clear preparations for a getaway, and maybe one that had been anticipated, if the father’s image upon the walls was an indication of what the man knew was coming for him.

  There were more pressing matters to attend to now that it was light, like checking in with his wife again and driving as far from South Devon as he could manage in the stolen vehicle during the storm. He’d hoped that he would have known, by now, where to drive to: the very place his daughter had been taken two years before. But that information remained inside a comatose mind.

  A call came in.

  Standing in the rain, shivering inside his poncho, he scrabbled through his pockets. As he fished out his screen, a pair of unnaturally bright eyes opened on the dirty floor of the vehicle, and began to explore the interior. The father stepped away from the glass, as if suddenly shy before an introduction to who was probably his daughter’s kidnapper.

  An unrecognized number. It had to be the police detective, Gene Hackman.

  He’d driven the new vehicle a short distance from where the detective had left it, and parked at the foot of a small valley, as anywhere more exposed was still being hit by horizontal rain and winds strong enough to knock a child over. The depression in the earth was one of the few places that attracted only agricultural traffic, and he doubted that would make an appearance today.

  The father accessed the voice-only call. ‘Hello?’

  ‘What have you done? What the fuck have you done?’ The reception was terrible, but the speaker was immediately recognizable as Scarlett Johansson.

  ‘Scarlett?’

  ‘They know about you. I’m being followed. I was interviewed yesterday by my line commander. An inspector! Here!’

  ‘I don’t understand. How would they—’

  ‘A man was killed in Somerset. Yonah Abergil. You hear me? Ring any bells? A trafficker with links to lowlife in Torbay and Rory Forrester, who’s now been linked to Murray Bowles and Nigel Bannerman. They’re trying to tie this on me.’ She paused to get her breath. ‘Where are you now?’

  The father swallowed, and scratched through his thoughts. ‘They mentioned me? What did they—’

  ‘Of course they bloody mentioned you. That’s why I am calling you! If you’d stood down, it wouldn’t have bloody mattered. Those sites weren’t going to be investigated by forensics. Not for dead sex offenders. I told you! But you went for a King, a bloody King! You were told to stay away . . . They’re bringing more people in now. I saw them as I left the station. People on our side, friends. We’re all being questioned. Someone has given us up. All of us here.’ The woman was becoming shrill. ‘Where are you?’

  He had to swallow to ease the constriction in his throat. ‘Devon.’

  ‘I told you to stay away. Where are you in Devon?’

  The father wanted to tell her but held back. He looked at the sky as an instinctive suspicion made him tense. He had a new handler now, Gene, and the idea of his old car being tracked had been terrifying. Inner circles and need-to-know arrangements in Scarlett’s enigmatic world must have recently been ransacked like burgled rooms, and he was weak with fear all over again, but perturbed at how a link between him and Scarlett could have been made. Only her partners involved in the same illegal trafficking of information to vigilantes would have known she was handling him. His thoughts leapt into thin air, into vast open white spaces devoid of answers. He wanted to kill the connection. ‘I can’t. Not safe.’

  ‘Safe? We’re way past safe. You’ve put us all in danger. Jeopardized everything!’

  ‘I . . . I couldn’t stop. I was close.’

  ‘I could be killed.’ She said this quietly and without emotion as if she were talking to herself. ‘You know that? For helping you? Because of what you have done. The inspector was scared. More than me. Do you know what they do to people, even the police?’

  ‘But how have we been connected? How does anyone know we ever spoke? This set is unregistered. I change them all the time. The accounts are all unregistered. You gave them to me. You said they would never be traced. They were completely secure.’

  ‘They’ve put me in the middle of this because they now have all of the accounts that I have been using for you. Every bloody one of them.’ Her voice was shaken to the point of breaking. ‘Calls, times, places, they’ve traced the activity of all the identities attached to the accounts.’

  ‘Identities? These identities . . .’

  ‘All deceased. I’ve been using the accounts of the deceased. It’s what we use, their identities. They were the only connections between me and you, the dead. The accounts you used were traced to my idents and to wherever you were when I called you. And that’s even more evidence to link us to every hit. Christ, it doesn’t even matter about the accounts, they have your DNA at two sites, and they have eye witnesses.’

  The father knelt down in the wet grass and gripped his skull. ‘Someone on your side gave you up because I killed a King? Someone in your circle? Once they had you, they checked all your comms? But how . . .’

  Scarlett sniffed, her voice quivering. ‘They’ve tracked your car, the vehicle registered to you.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘It gets worse.’ Scarlett took a deep breath. The father heard her swallow. ‘The man you know, who took you on, the police detective. He’s dead.’ Scarlett Johansson broke down. ‘His head . . .’

  Unguided by the vague, useless thoughts that follow shock, his voice came out as a whisper. ‘Dead?’

  ‘They wanted you. And he . . . they caught up with him, and killed him. They put him . . . his head, inside the car. A message for you.’

  ‘God, God, no.’

  ‘The investigation is pinning this on him. On me, and him, and you: a vigilante and police conspiracy to murder. You have torn years and years of planning to pieces.’ He heard her swallow again to regain control of her voice. ‘He swapped vehicles for you?’

  ‘This account that I am using is one of his. He gave it to me. If you have it . . . You shouldn’t have called!’

  ‘Fuck you! This isn’t only about you and your fucking daughter . . .’ The woman stopped and sniffed. After a pause she said, ‘It’s over.’

  A terrible shadow fell across the father’s thoughts. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus. I know . . . I know how they got you. He gave you up. He knew you. He knew me. Gene . . . The detective. He was the only link between us. He knew my idents . . . Because he had no choice. They made him tell who’d handled me before, which comms she used. He knew about your idents?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When they caught him, before they killed him, they must have . . . They must have threatened his wife . . . or something. Torture . . . and he gave you all up . . .’ The cold air and wet soil sank through to the father’s marrow.

  ‘Leave. Run. Wherever you are now, go. Get out, move. Christ.’

  The father’s dirty fingers were in his wet hair, tugging. ‘Jesus Christ, I’ve got to call my wife. I’ve got to go. We both have to move. This call, if it’s being traced, will put me
here. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . . Would they know about the car I have now? Would he have told them?’

  Scarlett’s voice changed, became urgent, but frail, as if she were about to start crying again. ‘I could come to you. It’ll be safer. Better if there are two of us. Tell me where here is.’

  The father looked at the screen, then at the figure inside the car that had propped itself upright to study its metal bonds. ‘I’m sorry. They might be listening.’

  Her tone suddenly changed, became frantic again, but the fear was gone. ‘Tell me you’re close to her now.’

  And the father felt sick, wondering if someone was listening. ‘Closer than I have ever been.’

  ‘God bless yo—’ The call was abruptly cancelled from her end.

  The father threw away the device, as far from himself as he could, and ran back to the car. Ignoring his captive’s unblinking eyes, he tried to contact his wife’s new ident from the service inside the car. He couldn’t get through.

  TWENTY-SIX

  As the father began the drive to Birmingham, the wind was so strong the vehicle locked itself to thirty miles an hour on the motorway. He parked not far past the exit for Taunton and made three more attempts to contact his wife from a public comms post, taking the total to a dozen calls since he’d crawled away from Brixham. After the final unsuccessful effort he was close to tears.

  When he returned to the car, the prone figure on the back seat sat up so quickly the father gasped. He swivelled around in the front seat and the two men stared at each other, one grinning, the other tense and already fingering the handgun clamped between his thighs.

  When the father’s shock ebbed, the bony head instilled nothing inside him but odium, and desperate hope. A gangly wreck, clothed by a blanket and coloured ink, with eyes more serpent than human, too large for the face and yellowy with inner toxins from sustained substance abuse, smiled at him, as if pleased to make his acquaintance. Men like this had so recently murdered a police officer, his friend and his guardian angel. Revulsion alone granted him a reprieve from his terrors for Miranda, and for Scarlett’s impending fate.

  But he still had a problem believing that his daughter’s abductor sat within the vehicle. The move had been too easy, fraught with a psychic worrying, but bloodless. It seemed preposterous, after all this time and after all that he had done to get here, that the kidnapper would have just been there, and now here in a car with him.

  And the location of the snatch, the chapel; festooned with the most worrying resonances of what he had either failed to process, or refused to engage with since he’d seen the graffiti in Paignton, escalated his fear of being engulfed by something, perhaps predestined, that was far greater than himself. Bewilderment and fear ran his parliament today.

  ‘You knew I was coming,’ the father said.

  The figure’s smile broadened. More of the grey stubs were exposed in purpling gums that shone with too much saliva. When it came, the voice was more a rasp than actual words. ‘You have water?’

  He’d given the man nothing all day; his prisoner must have leaked a litre of sweat. Uncannily, the criminal’s eyes near-twinkled, were too bright and alert for someone who’d seemed to be coughing out his last breath through the hours until dawn, and then most of the morning too, asleep or semi-conscious. But somehow this creature was still alive and exhibiting no sign of fear at its captivity. Not a trace of anxiety was evident. The man was confident, even complacent, in his new circumstances. The attitude was as alarming as it was disarming.

  The father would need a smog respirator to muzzle the criminal. He’d always queued for his jabs, but the new TB strains could be resistant to drugs and he was run down, weakened, susceptible. He also wondered if the man had concealed drugs and administered a tonic to himself. With bound hands and ankles, the father couldn’t see how, and he’d searched the man’s body at the chapel as soon as his limbs were secure. The sticklike form had been all bone and parchment between the father’s rubber-gloved fingers. Searching him had been akin to sorting through the disinterred contents of an old grave.

  The father handed a bottle of water to the man, and watched the long neck quivering as it gulped the bottle empty. ‘And now,’ he said, smiling broadly after a gasp of satisfaction. ‘I need to take a shit. You have clean underwear for me?’

  The father climbed out and opened the rear door, watching the man’s large hands carefully. Oleg’s dirty fingers were entwined as if in prayer. ‘It might be your last shit, so make the most of it. And make it quick.’ He removed Oleg from the car and laid him on the grass verge at the side of the rain-raked road, then pushed him down and into the sopping drainage ditch, using one foot. The figure slid into the watery trench, then studied its new surroundings with a modicum of pleasure. Smarting eyes, unused to light, blinked at the grey sky.

  The father glanced back at the village they were near. Rain and wind had been keeping people indoors and off the roads, but there was no guarantee that would continue. It had gone noon and the storm was moving further north.

  The father pointed the gun at Oleg’s face as if he were about to execute him at the roadside, surrounded by drought-resistant soya plants that bustled like a vast green crowd. Oleg merely smiled. ‘Today, I knew a grim face would look upon me. L’Homme devant la mort. Is this the hour of my death? This I do not know.’

  ‘That depends on you. You don’t seem too concerned. You doubt me?’

  ‘To come so far just to see me? No, I don’t doubt you. I am pleased it will be you. But this is also a pity that we close a door so soon, one that has opened for each of us.’

  ‘Your name is Oleg Chorny.’

  The figure in the ditch grinned. ‘One of many, but still my favourite.’

  ‘That was me on that wall, back there in the church. Who told you I was coming?’

  Oleg laughed as if a child had asked him a silly but sincere question. ‘Signs are my guides. There is meaning in the void, in the deeps, but not in words.’

  ‘What the fuck does that mean? I’m not one of your junkie disciples. How did you know I was coming?’

  Oleg’s grin broadened. ‘Because of the confinement between the signs. For me and for you. You should have some vision now. But please, if you are not going to finish our meeting prematurely, may I?’ He pointed at his lap.

  The father stepped away, so that he could only see the man from the shoulders upwards, keeping the gun trained on the thin head.

  ‘You have towel, paper? Underwear?’

  He would have to provide a pair of his own, and toilet paper. The act of kindness made his guts writhe. And the man was trying to confuse him with psychobabble, with bullshit. He’d need to rein it in by setting a swift and brutal example, and one that wouldn’t be forgotten. Yet as Oleg squatted the father was again reminded that the man might be too fragile for violence. But the father would risk the evil shit. That got results. From there, he would move on to the man’s limbs and joints, later, and somewhere remote, once he’d contacted his wife. The encroaching notion of what he might find in Birmingham made him feel faint and desperate to lie down.

  There was no time for delay. Not now. People were looking for him, in earnest and by the most uncompromising means. They might know of this car. If Gene Hackman had given up Scarlett, her colleagues, the idents, then what else had he told his executioners? Under duress. They might be closing on him right now. A last stand might be hours away, or less. The idea of being killed beside a stolen vehicle, as Chorny looked on, grinning with his grey stubs, was too much to tolerate.

  The father’s heart beat sickeningly. He became short of breath and found it difficult to think clearly, to know what to do. But he did know that he wanted to get to work on the painted devil, to finally know what had been done to his daughter. After all that had happened, after coming so far, that must come first.

  Oleg spat. Stood up and gathered the towel, underwear and paper that the father had placed at the rim of the ditch. He cleaned himself by pas
sing his hands between his thighs, tottering for balance in cuffed ankles, then inspected the underwear with disappointment. Like most of the father’s clothes, the pants were faded from repeated washing in hotel sinks, sagging and near threadbare at the seat.

  From the pocket of his jacket, the father fished out the photograph he had taken from Oleg’s shrine. Presented it to the skull-face that blinked in the rain. ‘Tell me where she is.’

  Oleg looked at it for a few seconds, intensely, and finally nodded. ‘That one.’ He nodded some more, appearing wistful, as if acknowledging a long-held but unconfirmed suspicion. ‘There were so many in those days. But I can see now that it was her that brought you to me. The father. A Red Father, yes. That would explain the rage, the grief, and the guilt.’ He looked away, his face a committed grimace. ‘The death wish of mankind is the strangest urge, but the strongest, just as death is greater than life and love. It is a path you and I have both followed, and so we are together now. But we have some way still to go, Red Father, to finish this.’

  ‘What did you call me?’

  Towelling the rain from his scrawny torso, Oleg didn’t answer but said, ‘It is raining. Soon I will be wet again. Please.’ He pointed at his ankles then held up the underwear.

  ‘You can die in the rain with a bare arse. You can lie in your own shit for all I care.’

  Oleg looked at the gun pointed at his face. Jagged contours and thin skin refashioned themselves into a wistful sadness. ‘Before we begin, you must understand something: we are nihil. You and I. We are nemo.’

  The father thought of the painting on the wall of a dead ogre’s cavern. ‘What?’

  ‘We are nothing. We are nobody. Only in death do we transcend. And it is better to know where it is that we will go. To the terrible passage. I have known this for a very long time. And I am ready. ’Tis a good time for me. I am in contact with a patron, over there. But you? I don’t think so. You kill me and you are closer than you have ever been to the hour of your death too. Without me, I think the part that you have played will end for you unsatisfactorily. Alas, and you are so close.’