Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  On the back seat, the thin head studied him in the dim light. The big eyes were hooded but still shining. ‘How did you find me, mmm?’

  ‘I’m asking the questions.’

  ‘And I have given you the answer. That fat rat fuck, Yonah, gave you me and Simmy. But who gave you Yonah the pig?’

  The detective, but only after a tipoff from Rory that King Death were involved. Rory. From a conversation in a pub, Rory knew it was the Kings. If that degenerate knew his organization had carried out the snatch then others in his world knew even more. ‘Your old friends, the Kings, would have asked the lawyer where my daughter was taken. This go-between. This Oscar Hollow. The Kings, they will be here?’

  ‘I would think so. Soon, they may even do our work with the bitch for us. They are thorough when they cover their tracks. Kings are always in the service of death. But that would not be so good for what I have in mind.’ Oleg smiled pleasantly when he noted the father’s renewed attention, and his growing dependence upon him as a source of information, even guidance.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the father asked.

  ‘This woman. You have to ask yourself, is it more trouble to make her and what she covets disappear? Or is it easier to kill you?’

  ‘I’m the path of least resistance.’

  ‘Mmm, I would think so. But she will have to pay two prices then, maybe three.’

  ‘Prices? What prices?’

  ‘You. Your wife. The two pigs. All will carry a price as Kings do the bitch a big favour by removing problems and erasing history. After sales. We always made big money this way. And what has been uncovered can just as quickly be buried. You see? But no one will look for you when you are gone.’

  The father ground his teeth until his jaw lit up with pain. ‘Pigs? Don’t you call them that! And don’t ever mention my wife again, or I will shoot you dead where you sit!’

  The man fell silent, but still grinned.

  The father’s thoughts returned to the film of Scarlet Johansson, her face, the terror in the eyes. A recording of his wife was surely waiting for him too. The father sank his face into his hands. There was no question of him travelling back to the Midlands. He’d made his decision.

  Gradually, his thoughts returned to the twelve-foot fences, the razor wire, the lights and cameras, the probability of private security with exceptional military expertise, and the comrades of the addict who had stolen his little girl two years before, all biding their time within the cedar-panelled walls of a fortress. All of these things he would have to confront in a few hours.

  To be so close, and yet . . .

  The impossibility of the venture impaled him. He was a chunk of lava that had cooled to a small, black, porous rock. Discarded, burned to carbon by the cruelty and tragedy of having been given this life. And even that was a life much better than most would ever know.

  He thought of the little girl running through the house in the forest, this palace of the undeserving, the malicious and cruel, protected by an electrified stockade. Had there been a hint of a smile in the girl’s eye? When he thought of her mother again, the father cried. And he could not stop. The noises he made were the deep cries of an animal reaching the last of itself.

  He’d never been religious but the father prayed for this to end, and perhaps he now spoke only to a memory of warmth and light that had managed to remain inside his degraded heart.

  Night pinched out the last of dusk.

  In the mornings, when you were a baby, we would go downstairs together while your mother got ready for the day that she would spend with you. The morning was our time together before I went to work. You used to lie on me and hold my finger. Sometimes I can still feel your weight and your softness. I can smell your hair . . . You would wrap your hand around my finger. You always held what made you feel safe . . . Your father’s finger. And I am your father.

  The father finished recording his story on the car’s media, and set the recording to play live on the website devoted to information regarding his daughter’s disappearance: who had taken her, for whom, each name, a timeline, every shred of information he’d gathered in his time as the Red Father. He set the timer for his recording to go live in two days; by then he would have her or he would be dead.

  He made other preparations for the recording to be sent to the police liaison officer, whom his wife still dealt with, the two sympathetic journalists who had periodically tried to revive interest in the case, and his family’s legal representative.

  If he died in the morning, then at least his story would be with those able to investigate Karen Perucchi. The public would know that he was a killer too, but he didn’t care about that.

  THIRTY-TWO

  At four thirty in the morning, the father roused himself from a brief sleep, joints cracking, the painful stiffness slowly passing from his neck and joints.

  Chewing on an energy bar without any pleasure, he checked his existing tools again. On the passenger seat beside him, his equipment was laid out: four handguns, the nerve agent, binoculars, mask, water, torch, gloves, the metal cuffs he had taken from Oleg’s limbs and replaced with wire ties. The sight of the steel upon the cloth gave him a brief leap of confidence. But the bag of tricks that had enabled him to invade other homes, and to destroy criminals, soon appeared insubstantial and primitive. A drive to Southampton was unavoidable, to better equip. He’d need an open store that sold wire or bolt cutters.

  In the rear-view mirror his eyes were grim, the surrounding flesh unnaturally pale and wrinkled like wet cotton. Dreams had left him shaken. Omens, portents, the gibberish of a shattered mind; he didn’t know. But above all, for the first time since he began the search, he’d awoken afraid that he was a man too ruined to ever be a father again.

  Oleg must have stayed awake, and probably since the father had taken him outside at one in the morning to empty his bowels in the undergrowth, then given him the sugary drink he had asked for.

  ‘How will you do this?’ The voice that rose from the darkness of the rear seat was clear of sleep, but tight, near sibilant. The eyes were large discs, too bright, too still. The father could only hope the man would die from withdrawal to save him another execution. He ignored Oleg.

  ‘I can help.’

  The father packed a pair of small rucksacks. He chose his original handgun, for familiarity’s sake, and the one he had taken from a bedside cabinet in Abergil’s house. When he returned to the car the previous evening, he’d made himself familiar with that weapon, by firing it into a fallen tree trunk in the forest. The handgun had barely kicked or made a sound, but had broken apart the dead wood. The gun must have contained high-impact ammunition that would shatter bones around the entry wound. Whoever was inside the house might have them too. The idea seemed to drain his dim resource of strength through his feet.

  Oleg’s bag had also contained a small automatic rifle. The father wasn’t sure how to fit the magazine or unlock the trigger mechanism. He couldn’t face asking Oleg for assistance, so would leave that behind. He could only risk using a weapon at close range, aimed at a clearly identifiable target. There could be no stray shots if his daughter was inside the building.

  ‘How you get in, mmm?’ The questions continued from the back of the car, as if talking was easing the acute symptoms of the man’s abstinence. Oleg had folded in on himself as stomach cramps overwhelmed his frail, shivering body.

  ‘You going to kill me before you go, mmm? Though maybe the overdose you are considering is best. I will even tell you how to do it. But you kill me and we are both leaving this life today. And maybe today your daughter asks this Karen a question, this bitch who she thinks is her mummy. The little girl will ask who the man is, the one caught on the fence. She will never know that it was her own father that was shot on the wire. And at that moment, Karen will know that she has won. All her tracks are covered and the girl is hers forever.’

  The man was trying to manipulate him in return for a fix. ‘Shut up.’

 
‘Is this the plan for today, mmm?’

  ‘I’ll shoot you before I go in. For the last two years, I have wanted to make you suffer slowly. Make you feel something, know something . . . experience something that now you can only imagine. Make you feel what you inflicted upon us, me and my family. But I don’t have time. I will drag you into the undergrowth out there. I know the spot. I marked it out yesterday. And I am going to shoot you in the face while you look at the father of the girl that you stole.’

  Oleg grinned. ‘Good. ’Tis good. You solve a problem. Two problems. Mine cus I feel bad now.’ The figure was near-rearing off the seat in his discomfort, straining bony ankles and wrists against its ties with such vigour the car began to shake, the prelude to a seizure. ‘And before noon you die too. The storm will take away your screams. They will bury you in the trees, close to what you came here for. Your daughter will never know her own father again. She will never know that he is buried close to her. In time she even forget what she—’

  The father turned in his seat and punched the barrel of his Beretta against Oleg’s wet forehead. The man winced from the sudden shock of the blow, then slowly returned his skull to the end of the barrel. ‘Please. Yes? We do this now. It doesn’t matter. You, me, our thoughts, are nothing. Our lives are nothing. Nothing matters any more. Best to have no thoughts, no memories of this place. And no one dies easy of this pestilence.’ Oleg nodded at the silent, flashing media screen that had reported mostly the spread of the Asian virus since they’d arrived in the New Forest, occasionally interspersed with the great battle lines drawn up in Kashmir.

  ‘Usque ad mortem. Soon so many will be sick unto death . . .’

  ‘Go to hell.’

  ‘I just thought you wanted to save your daughter, mmm? I am going nowhere, and you need help, so why can’t we help each other? That is all I am suggesting.’

  ‘Shut it!’ The father nearly squeezed the trigger.

  Oleg opened his near-lipless mouth and took the barrel inside. He tried to say please, but with a gun inside his mouth it sounded like ‘Pliss.’

  The father climbed out of the car and made his way to the boot. He hadn’t expended any time at all thinking of how he would dispose of Oleg, but the sooner the better. He considered it strange, but ever since he had taken the man captive, his intense loathing and hatred for the figure had not so much subsided, as been replaced by new involvements, possibilities, second guesses, and terrors. And all set to the soundtrack of the man’s esoteric and mystical nonsense.

  Instead of taking revenge against Oleg, he was now being made to think of who had been killed because of him, of who he had killed, and who he would have to kill next. His daughter being alive had changed everything, swiftly introducing so many new considerations, memories, regrets, doubts and emotions into the existing maelstrom that was wearing him to sand. The father could not contain all of this. There was no part of him left over to consider the fall of man, and this world, that had accelerated around him across the last few years. He wondered why men were so poorly built to withstand suffering when its possibility had always been so assured.

  His mind was moving too fast. He needed to find some space to think through his move. He would have to silence Oleg first. An overdose, as the man suggested, was low key. The father climbed inside the car, the bag of drugs gripped in one hand. Oleg shivered with delight at the sight of the nylon sack.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘May I?’ The figure’s entire body shook, but his hands remained still enough to take the applicator. ‘You have to find the vein for me. And then you must decide if we part company now, or later.’

  ‘Where do you take it?’

  ‘Foot. Left foot.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Between the toes. Give me all of it if you want me to go now. Or only give me half. But if I don’t wake up . . . that would be bad for you.’

  The father pulled the applicator out of Oleg’s fingers. ‘Bad for me? How can you help me? Why would I trust you?’

  The man swallowed and widened his feral eyes. ‘There is still a fence at this house, mmm?’

  He had the father’s attention.

  ‘Maybe you hate me a little less while I help you with this, or you will have no chance. Your anger, it—’

  ‘Why? Why would I trust you?’

  ‘You think I have grown a soul?’ He laughed. ‘At last I see the error of my ways and I am a better man now, mmm? No, I don’t believe in atonement, but like I said, I want the bitch. We have history and she is the beacon I want to light up, in another place.’ He nodded at the drugs stash. ‘And for this I do anything too. My will is not my own. I am a vessel.’ He grinned his grey-toothed, slippery grin. The man then rolled onto his side and spat into the footwell. ‘These fences . . . You can’t dig under and can’t climb. They’ll see you on camera. Your weight will set off the alarms. Was that how you planned to get inside, to climb?’

  ‘Cut my way through.’

  ‘I see. So you think you can cut through this fence, then move to the house, then break in? This is your plan. But the steel will be too strong for the cutters you can buy. Maybe even the army bolt cutters will struggle. But if not, it will take too long. A good torch might do it, eventually, but they would see the flame from the house. You have no torch either. You can get one, but that means delays and my old friends can smell you here. So maybe you could cut down a tree. A big one. Let it fall on the fence. But where will you get this saw? And they will hear it anyway from the house. You have no plan.’

  ‘Piss off.’

  Oleg held up one long dirty finger. ‘They will hear the alarms when you are on the grass. Motion cameras will set them off. I remember there will be lots of grass for you to run across too. The bitch has a nice place, mmm? The doors and windows will lock when the alarm trips. And there is no way through that glass anyway. I know this. I have some experience. Their houses are fortresses.’

  One by one, the man carefully outlined every fault in the strategies the father had tried to make convincing during the night.

  ‘How? How do people like you do this?’

  ‘We wait. Watch. You snatch when people are moving, like in a car, or in the street.’

  Their eyes met. Oleg stopped smirking.

  ‘How long did you watch my house?’

  ‘How will this help you?’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘Not long,’ he said quietly.

  A silence thickened the stale air of the car. The father could not think straight on account of a compressed but expanding rage, could not speak. He did nothing but tense and tremble.

  ‘The devil has your girl and she wants to keep her. But thinking of what was done back then will not help you with what must be done now. Another way is you take this bitch hostage, and when she takes you home—’

  ‘No! I don’t have the time. They won’t leave that place until the storm is over. That could take days. Your shithead friends will get here, if they aren’t already.’

  ‘True. I know this. But I am not finished.’

  ‘Get the fuck on with it!’

  ‘Listen, you think of all ways in and how they don’t work, until you find the way that might work. So, if you will allow me to finish.’

  The father gritted his teeth.

  ‘Now, I would like half of what you have in that applicator. When I have it in me . . .’ The man paused to shudder as if with the expectation of ecstasy. ‘Then I will tell you how you get inside this house.’

  The father spat, but handed the applicator to Oleg, who immediately became busy with his left foot. With some reluctance, the father helped him locate a usable vein.

  When Oleg’s head flopped back, his trembling subsided, and the brittle, sticklike form seemed to melt into the seat. ‘Thank you.’ The man’s speech slurred as the narcotic tried to take him away.

  ‘How do I get in?’

  Oleg smiled. ‘Best way through such a fence is explosives. You blow in the fence. The alarms
go off for sure. The house will lock down too. Everyone is awake inside and panics. They go for weapons, make calls. All that bullshit. No problem. You just get to a door, a big window, whatever. You put another explosive on the glass. And that house will open in three seconds.’

  The father swallowed. ‘Explosives! Where do I get bloody explosives, you stupid junkie fuck? I suppose you’ll take me to some of your mates, who’ll kit me out? Is that it?’

  Oleg watched the father, his face near-expressionless. But the eyes narrowed and gleamed with a profound cold and the father knew he was looking into a mind that had long dispensed with anything approximating mercy or sympathy; here was nothing but a vital, calculating self-interest. But he’d let the man into his circle, and now sat in the rain discussing the emancipation of his daughter with the same chronic addict and murderous criminal that had taken her from him and his wife. Not for the first time in his recent life was he stunned by a situation he could barely fathom.

  ‘You kill like us. You have learned that much. But you don’t think like us. You could be a rich man already, and maybe have your daughter too, today. But your anger will kill you this morning.’ Oleg moved his head towards the nearest window. ‘If you let it. You need to clear your mind. And listen. You have to listen. To me.’ The man’s voice dropped to a softer tone, was hushed like a whisper, and slithered its terrible range inside the father’s mind. ‘Now, when you take me, mmm, from my place, you brought my shit along too, with the drugs, yes? Inside my army bag there are guns?’

  The father nodded.

  ‘Good. Very soon men without guns will have no chance here, or anywhere. Now you have plenty. Inside this bag, there are also six blocks of protein. In with my tools, you see the survival food, yes?’

  The father had seen the military cartons, amongst the weapons and spare clips of ammunition, a field medic’s kit and the binoculars he had taken. ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is not food. This is gel explosives.’ The man’s thin face split into a huge grin. ‘With these you will get inside.’