Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  The father got out of the car and moved again to the rear of the vehicle, collected Oleg’s tools from the boot, brought them inside. The thin head on the snaky neck watched him through the glass the entire time. Oleg even chuckled as the father opened the bag and gently took out one of the soya protein packets.

  ‘The soldiers that get inside buildings by going through walls to kill the terrorists, this is what they use. Very effective too. We get ours from the same supplier. And this will get you inside, through the fence and then into the house. Let me know when you want me to teach you . . .’ The man shrugged, smiled, and lay down on the seat, closing his eyes.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Face pressed into the leaf mulch, fingers in his ears, he heard the charge detonate. Powerful reverberations thumped beneath his prostrate body. A great length of fence shuddered between the concrete posts on each side of the blast. A hail of metal zipped away, the shards like the bullets of Torbay that had chased him from The Commodore and into the hills. And he was up.

  The father’s feet slid on the wet ground. Unsteady legs made him list. A sudden riot of nerves and adrenaline flooded his skin. He seemed to be looking down on himself, his mind strangely detached, but he ran.

  As Oleg predicted, the wire mesh had ripped vertically around a rent. The edges of the hole were blackened and smoked in the grey light. Batting the swinging sheet of steaming wire away from his face with his gloved hands, the father stepped through the aperture.

  At the same time his front foot touched the lawn, the floodlights brought premature daylight to the grounds, casting an elongated shadow of his tatty shape.

  Knees knocking together, his heartbeat in his throat, he skittered across the grass on feet he still couldn’t fully feel. After ten yards, he righted his lurch and rediscovered a proper command of his legs, breaking into a run towards the wall of glass in the centre of the great curved building, which grew vaster during his frantic approach.

  Lights glowed in the left wing. For the first time he saw the full great curving length of the pavilion and the sheer size of the swimming pool.

  An outbuilding clad in the same cedar panelling stood at ninety degrees to the main house. A long red gravel drive disappeared behind him. There was a double garage with three vehicles parked outside the red doors. So many?

  The glass wall in the centre of the house flickered bluish from within.

  Blood thumped and rushed behind his eyes, interfering with his vision. His feet soon left grass and slapped the white paving slabs of the pool area, his breath a wind about his masked face. Running the last few feet to the windows, he caught sight of his own reflection running towards him upon the face of the floor-to-ceiling glass panels. His face was a Halloween pattern of white cloth and smears of soil.

  From out of the mess of the shadowy confusion, screened upon the patio doors, came another movement from inside the flickering interior. A swift motion that slowed and padded up to the glass he stood inches away from. And despite his chest-heaves and noisy exhalations, his sight settled upon the face of a little girl, standing behind the glass.

  Somewhere in the distant reaches of the large room, beyond the glass and the white leather sofas, a jumble of holographic images from a cartoon capered. They threw a blue-white glow into the remainder of the room. When the perimeter lights exploded upon the patio, she must have been drawn to the glass doors.

  The girl wore pink patterned pyjamas. Her mussed hair was still tied in black bunches, sagging at the back of her head. And in the precious few seconds before she screamed and ran, the father looked into startled, wide blue eyes that were unmistakably his. Behind the shocked features of the girl’s face, behind the ghost of his wife’s freckles and snub nose, an approximation of his own bone structure had already formed, spliced with his wife’s narrow forehead. It was a recognition so powerful, the father believed his heart stopped beating. It was her. Her. Her.

  She’s alive.

  Penny.

  The girl fled, bunches swinging behind her, small white feet speeding across the tiled floor, away and past the flash of the hologram, until the small pink shape vanished through the wide aperture at the side of the room.

  ‘No! It’s all right!’ he shouted, but the glass was thickly glazed, no doubt soundproof. ‘Wait! Peeps, wait! Penny!’

  Inside his cloth mask, clinging about a face dampened by the wet world and the sweat of his terror, his voice became confined, trapped and hopeless. He banged both hands against the glass. She had not even seen his face because it was concealed by the horrid, dirt-smeared, nightmare mask. It was the closest he had been to the girl that half of his heart had sworn was dead for two years, and yet he had only succeeded in terrifying her.

  He tugged the mask from his face, banged the glass again. Then moved the second charge towards the window, only to pause, stricken by the idea of blowing out the glass with a child – his child – somewhere on the other side; a child transfixed by the monster on the patio. What to do? His pause became hesitation. He panted, he wheezed, he did nothing.

  Distracted by the scuff of a shoe’s sole behind him, he straightened and began to turn. Then heard more footsteps skimming the wet grass behind his head, and in the reflective glass surface of the patio doors, he saw a masked figure, wearing a black leather jacket, walking towards him. The father came about, clawing at the pocket that bulged heavily with the weight of the handgun he had taken from Yonah. The very moment he spotted the second man, standing by the edge of the pool, he saw a darting flash.

  The father’s vision exploded white.

  His feet rose up behind him and whipped over his head. Muscles bulged and split along his bones. His joints separated. Before his thoughts disintegrated, a pain so vast made him certain that his entire body had come apart, and had smashed into the glass wall between him and his daughter.

  After the black, he looked at the world sideways from hard, white stone, but didn’t know who or where he was. When the world stopped slanting and flickering and settled grey and wet and cold upon his mind, his body parts winched themselves back, on painful metal cables, into his traumatized trunk.

  He was too winded to move, even when the booted feet stood before his face. Disembodied hands moved his agonized, still-crackling meat about the paving slabs. Tugged and emptied his clothing. A black sack was yanked over his head.

  Coherent thoughts slotted together post-trauma, but the world and a dying sense of some distant hope went out with the light.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Stiffening the cloth over his face were stains made by the desperate, the inside of the hood long-soured with traces of its previous occupants. Outside the hood, pulled so tight about his throat with a drawstring, no one spoke.

  On the paving slabs he had been sure he was dying. It now seemed death would have been a mercy. Around the time feeling began seeping once more into his limbs, a man with hands as rough as untreated wood was painfully securing his wrists behind his back with a plastic tie. The father’s ankles had already been secured to the legs of a chair, after his feet had been kicked into position on what sounded like cement.

  Shivers goosed his flesh because he was naked save his underwear. They had pulled his clothes off his limbs and torso and then quickly slashed the fabric from his body with what he presumed were knives. The entire process was swift and casually effortless, because they had done this before with their cruel fingers, gripping men like fish hoisted upon cold slabs.

  The shock of the powerful electrical charge had gradually subsided as they carried him from the patio. But everything from his buttocks to his shoulders seemed bruised. His body would have ached terribly in the coming days that he would never see.

  Once he was secured, footsteps retreated. A door closed.

  Trying to move his hands and feet caused him pain. The sensation in one foot was dying, so tight was the binding.

  This wasn’t the work of private security. They had him, the Kings. The black hood and his stripped body
were the giveaways. Some of the parked cars he’d glimpsed must belong to them. They must have been waiting for his amateurish attempts at entry. He knew what came next and he thought of Gene with what little of his wits he still possessed, and the father saw again the bloodied shoulders, the familiar face toppling, falling away. ‘Oh, dear God,’ he whispered to himself and to the empty, cold space he sensed outside of his stinking blindness.

  From one black into another. That’s all. That’s all it will be now. There is no afterdeath.

  Then he thought of Penny and the father cried from sheer frustration. Tried to choke out despair both cold and relentless, which weighed down his heart as if it was filled with wet sand. She was alive and still living with her captor and he had failed to rescue her; had failed to take back his own flesh and blood.

  To increase his torment, he recalled Oleg’s mocking words as the wretch clamoured for his fix. He’d said something about her never knowing her own father, and had talked about him dying on the wire. But he had made it through the wire and up to the door, only that was his lot and his allotted time in her presence: dirty, monstrous and masked for a moment, and now they had won.

  To have been so close to her. A thin pane of glass had been the only thing between them, a barrier cruelly transparent. He saw her little shocked face again. And in his memory he watched her scurry away, a thin figure in pink, with messy hair, fleeing her own father, who had walked through a hell vile and absolute for two years that had felt like a century to save her. That had been the last time she would see her father. He wanted to die before having to endure the realization for much longer.

  It may have been a groan or even a baying that rumbled from the pit of his bowels and scorched his throat. It could have been the lowing of a beast before its end in an abattoir. But within the sound, which surprised his own ears, was a noise from the deepest fathom of desolation; one that required no words to communicate its message. Now that all had been decided, that’s all man was, all he amounted to: a beast, weakened by terror and awaiting extinction, while enduring the horror of this very recognition. Billions had already acknowledged this. Billions more would too. These were his thoughts.

  There were no reckonings for evil. There was no justice for the wronged. But there was meaning. Oleg was incorrect because life, increasingly, was the triumphant preserve of the unscrupulous, the selfish, the criminally rapacious, and the murderous. They had already laid claim to what was worth having in his world, and in the world. Their will had become the only meaning.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  After he’d lost the sensation of one entire foot below the ring of pain on his lower leg, a door handle turned. Beyond the hot darkness of the hood he heard a pair of feet slowly and cautiously enter the room. The single set of steps calmly approached his position.

  The father flinched as the feet paused before his chair. He clenched his jaw in anticipation of a blow, but the hood was loosened. A scent of rubber invaded the fetid cloth about his face. The stinking rag was removed and the father blinked in the bright yellow electric light of a garage. The dry white hands that appeared before his face stank of antibacterial rubber, and quickly fitted a surgical face mask over his mouth and nose.

  The father peered up at the head of a small man whose face was also covered to the eyes by a mask, and further encased by glasses to protect his tear ducts. Around these barriers on the stranger’s head, he detected short, dark hair and brown eyes, with a suggestion of plump, chummy features distending the mask. And those were the sort of eyes that appeared permanently set in an expression of detached amusement, as if restraining mirth at whatever pitched up before them. There were still enough clues to suggest that the figure’s normal state was one of careful grooming and a neat presentation. Despite the dressing gown, pyjamas and uncombed hair, the night clothes were expensive, the ends of the tousled hair perfectly cut. Inside the transparent gloves the nails on the pale hand that had softly but contemptuously raised his chin were manicured.

  ‘Incredible,’ the man finally said.

  The presumptuous fingers left the father’s chin. The stranger stepped away from the chair and withdrew some distance. He produced a vial of antiseptic from a deep, lined pocket and sprayed the already gloved hands with an aerosol. The expression in the eyes of the small man altered and became wary and calculating, with a slight stiffening of distaste too, as if the father exhibited the signs of some contagion.

  The father said, ‘My daughter . . .’ He had nothing else to contribute.

  The man raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t come in here to get involved in complicated discussions about ownership. She came here before my time, but rest assured, the girl you knew as Penny is well loved, by both of us. Very happy and in the best of health. She’s a lucky girl. Though what is ironic is that her true origins have only recently been revealed to me. In fact, I’ve only known for a matter of days. I’ve always known her as Yasmin, and Yasmin she will remain.’

  The father suspected that the masked man was smiling.

  ‘Quite a lot to take in. You and I have that in common. That is assuming you have only recently discovered where she was, and that she was even alive. Though I doubt you wasted much time getting here once you knew.’

  The man drew a garden chair out from the side of the garage and made himself comfortable. ‘Although I haven’t had much time to let it all sink in myself, what Karen actually did two years ago, and who you actually are, hasn’t changed my feelings towards my fiancée or my adopted daughter. Not at all. I’m encouraged by that.’ The man smiled again, pleased with himself, pleased with his advantage, pleased that it wasn’t him bound to an antique wrought-iron garden chair, with one foot either purple or completely white; the father was too scared to look down that far.

  Engulfed by his desperate frustration, when so near his goal, the glowing coals within his belly seemed to flare, and he thrust against his bonds, only to suck in his breath and become still again. His eyes streamed with tears at the renewed pain circling both ankles.

  ‘There is a vague resemblance too,’ the man in the mask said. ‘But my incredulity has been monopolized by you being here. Here! That is truly incredible. Last night, I heard a precis of how you managed to arrive at our little home. You see, our other guests arrived ahead of you and briefed us. And I must say I admire your grit. The sheer determination. Jesus, I mean, you were never a killer before, were you?’

  The father stayed quiet.

  ‘They said that you took out a lieutenant.’ The man grinned. ‘Some sex offenders too, which we are not, incidentally, so let’s get that out the way first. I’d imagine that assurance, at the very least, would be some comfort to you. Though Penny-stroke-Yasmin even being alive would trump that.’

  The man stood and began to walk around the father. ‘I’m told that you even went into one of their strongholds, some fetid hive down the coast, and blasted your way out.’ He came back into sight, grinning anew, and maintained his jovial, gently mocking tone. This man was amused, but the father was too tired and uncomfortable to waste his time guessing why, and his captor was no King either. He’d said he was Karen Perucchi’s fiancé.

  ‘But I think you’ll agree that the clean-up they have performed in your wake has been extensive. Though the washing of their spears has had some unfortunate . . .’ The man’s face changed. ‘You won’t believe me, but for what it is worth, I am deeply sorry about your wife. We played no part in that.’

  The father swallowed. A sob burst from him. He clenched his entire body to prevent the scalding grief he would never be able to stopper once it broke his insides apart. He had refused to check messages or watch any more films, but here was confirmation of what he would have found had he done so.

  The man’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘I think my fiancée more than sated herself two years ago on that account, exacting her retribution. So your wife’s blood will not be on our hands. But they have her here.’

  The father stiffen
ed upon his chair. ‘Miranda is alive?’

  ‘Yes. They brought her with them, last night, either asleep or drugged. She still hasn’t roused, but she is alive. And I have made a request that they let you see her when she finally comes around. It’s the least they can do, considering the circumstances.’ He chuckled. ‘For the sake of your daughter, you’ll be pleased and relieved to know that Karen is a very different person these days too. I certainly am. Your daughter changed her. Both of us, to be honest. I believe that child changed everything here when she came to live with Karen. She’s a very special girl.’

  The father’s temporary relief that his wife was still alive was tempered by the inevitability of her not being so for much longer, and he was dumbfounded again by this man’s avuncular tone, as if he were discussing some distant sporting event seen from the stands.

  The man placed one rubbery finger next to his lips and frowned. ‘Karen was sure that no one would ever connect her to the abduction. She paid handsomely to make certain there would be no loose ends. But here you are, so there is a missing link. And I’m really curious. Karen has assumed that this Yonah Abergil, whom we were told about last night, and whom she never met, by the way, gave us up. Or maybe his old father did when you paid them a visit? I’m told they shared everything but hated each other. Strange people, eh? We know the kidnappers bugged your daughter’s clothes and followed the car containing your daughter here. So we must assume that they told this Abergil chap about Karen?

  ‘Or, was it someone else who let it slip? Someone we don’t know about, yet? The problem with criminals of all stripes is that they like to brag, and Karen was never quite sure how discreet the firm she hired through a go-between would be. It’s what you get when you go off-piste, I suppose. Double-dealing, betrayal. So is that how you found out about Karen, from Abergil? And if so, did he get the information from the two men who carried out the grim work of kidnap, before he had them retired? These are my concerns.’