Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  You lived with your mummy and daddy in another house, a long time ago, by the sea. There was a garden. A big garden . . . There was Nan and Poppo. Cloth Cat . . . Cloth Cat . . . Oh God, Cloth Cat. Your name is Penny. Not Yasmin. Your name is Penny.

  When the girl saw the car, she had tried to sit down on the lawn. As her whole body convulsed with misery and fear she had looked back at the house. Her father had dropped to his knees beside her. Released one of the bags of money, a lifetime’s riches that would remain on the grass. He could not carry both bags one step further, and knew he would need to carry the girl and the other bag of money the entire distance to where Penny’s real mother lay unconscious inside a car. When he thought he heard what might have been a copter in the distance, he surged up and onto his feet and swung the girl into the air, holding her under the arms. It was the first time he had embraced her for two years, this clutch, this clasping to his chest that was, that day, crisscrossed with the straps attached to a bag full of guns and explosives.

  And he’d run to the black car, ungainly, his sweat-lathered face whipping from side to side, his eyes not seeming to register anything, a crying child slung over his shoulder.

  And into the place where fugitives have always sought refuge they vanished, driving deep into the trees: a man, an unconscious woman, and a frightened child.

  FORTY-ONE

  As he drove, and as his leaden, bruised body began to warm inside the car, the father asked Penny repeatedly about what she remembered, asked her about the first thing she could remember, and he told her over and over again that she was taken from him and her real mother. He told her that her real mother was asleep and lying on the seat next to her. But Penny didn’t understand, or was too frightened to even acknowledge his questions.

  He’d abandoned the car he’d driven out of the grounds, and carried Penny and Miranda to the stolen vehicle that Gene Hackman had procured for him in Devon. There was enough of a charge in the vehicle to get them to Wales, and he knew it must surely be safe from the scrutiny of King Death.

  Miranda began to rouse near Salisbury, her jaw slack; her eyelids remained heavy and what could be seen of her eyes was red. She didn’t know where she was for several seconds and panicked. When she sat up, she began to be sick, so the father pulled over and helped her out of the car, and into a cold wind with spiny teeth that carried a light, fast-moving rain.

  The sky was a flat, cloudless grey, like a low ceiling that had trapped a violent and relentless maelstrom of air between the ground and the heavens. At the side of the road, the pines lurched and screamed, funnelling the tail of the storm down and across the tarmac. Through the noise, he tried to speak but the wind chill made him stutter. He had to hold Miranda upright while she was ill. There was no way of knowing what they had given her, in order to transport her from one place to another, but the powerful tranquillizer had not worn its way out of her legs. Once she knew who he was, she said in a thirst-croaked voice that she couldn’t feel her feet, or her hands. Disoriented, confused, her judgement so impaired, she twice asked him, ‘Where’s Mummy?’

  Eventually the father managed to make his wife look at him, and to stop talking. He gave her water, and she drained an entire bottle in one draught. Then he made her swallow most of an energy drink. Beside the car, leaning against him in the layby, Miranda began to shake violently with the cold and he realized just how thin her clothes were, and how inactive she had been, and probably for more than twelve hours.

  As she revived, she began to remember the details of her abduction and clawed at him. The father held her tightly and told her repeatedly, ‘They are gone. The men are gone. They’re not here. You’re safe. Safe now.’ He kept saying this, though didn’t believe it. He feared the arrival of the police, or far worse that may also be nearby, at any time. Vehicles passed, but the drivers merely glanced at them and continued. The drivers seemed especially committed; he suspected they knew things that he did not.

  ‘I’m so cold,’ Miranda said, and pushed towards the car. He still hadn’t told her about Penny. The situation was becoming absurd.

  ‘She’s here . . . here. I found her. I have her. That’s why they took you, because I was so close to her. I have Penny.’

  ‘Who?’ his wife asked, and blinked and pulled at her face with numb fingers as if to revive the muscles around her jaw.

  ‘Penny. I found her. She’s in the car.’

  His wife squinted at him, confused; he could see bewilderment filling her murky eyes. Then she must have imagined that she was dreaming, or that he was mad, because she said, ‘No. Stop now.’ And as he strained to hold her long body upright, she looked past him and must have seen the small figure on the rear seat of the car.

  Miranda tried to scream, but the noise was so weak and frail that it sounded like the wail of a woman who had just lost her only child, rather than one who had just seen her own child, and one given up for dead, for two years. There must, the father thought, be an equivalency to those kinds of shock.

  ‘Miranda! Listen, Miranda! Miranda . . . It is her. Penny! She’s alive. She’s well. But we can’t stand here any longer. You’re frozen. And I need you to come back to me, to . . . to be with her, while I get us away from here. It’s not safe. We’re too close to the place I took her from. Do you understand? We have to move now.’

  ‘Penny?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, but she doesn’t know me. Nor will she recognize you. It’s going to take time.’

  ‘Where? Can’t be . . . It’s not true. Where was she?’

  ‘Later. There isn’t time now. We have to move, and I need you to be with her. Please. Be her mother again. Please.’

  And then Miranda was crying and so was the father.

  Just past Salisbury, Penny became hysterical. The father pulled over again and had to restrain her flailing arms. But the girl didn’t strike out for long, and went limp moments after he embraced her. Miranda had been talking to Penny in a voice so low and quiet that he couldn’t pick up what she was saying. In between moments of shock that made her weep, Miranda had done her best to revive herself, though her hands were still leaden and unresponsive, and her speech was slow and slurred.

  Intermittently, Penny cried softly, until they reached Bath, where she had finally allowed Miranda to, at least, hold her. Not until they were skirting Bristol did she speak and only then to ask for ‘Mummy’ and ‘Richard’ through her tears.

  Who? Miranda mouthed at him as he leaned over to the back seat, but the father shook his head to deflect the inquiry, saying nothing more than, ‘The people who had her.’

  Miranda gave Penny drinks and two of the energy bars she found in the father’s rucksack, sucking in her breath when she saw the handguns, and the money in the bag that he had taken from Oleg’s vestry and Richard’s safe.

  ‘I’ll tell you later. Now is not the time.’

  Penny always said, ‘Thank you,’ when she was given things, and her instinctive good manners, twinned with the depth of her fear and shock at being in the car with two unfamiliar adults, left the father’s eyes moist for hours. Her innocence, compared to what he had done that very morning, made him feel desolate.

  The wet, grey stirrings of the crops and copses and hedgerows flashed past the car, mile after mile. Occasionally and fleetingly, so as not to be distracted from his traumatized daughter, he scanned a few channels for weather and traffic reports and learned the hurricane had mostly passed. There was flooding behind him, and across the north-east, but little along his prospective route into North Wales. But information about nearly everything else was scant because of the escalation around Kashmir.

  The father kept the service mute, but just from the visuals and subtitles he could see the evidence of mass strikes from the air, reaching beyond Kashmir, far inside both India and Pakistan.

  The Punjab was on fire and the two countries were deep into drone war. They’d smashed as many of the other’s satellites out of orbit as they could manage. Walls of long-ran
ge artillery produced monumental cement and dust clouds in all of the major cities close to the borders. Events seemed to have escalated during the early hours of that morning as the father had fought his own desperate battle. India was continuing to exercise the long-threatened Water Option policy, and had increased the diversion of the head waters of the rivers the two countries shared.

  Almost as a footnote, there was an increase in the amount of information about virus outbreaks in British hospitals. Hundreds more staff and patients were being reported dead in several parts of the country. CDC precautions were now being announced publically and regularly in the affected areas. People in several counties were being asked, amongst other things, to isolate those they suspected of infection. Outbreaks seemed far worse in Central Europe and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The ministry for health in the United Kingdom believed the virus was being passed by touch, sneeze, and coughs. The father believed he knew better. As soon as they arrived at their destination, he would need to inoculate Miranda.

  Abandoning the news, he found children’s channels and left one on for hours on all of the vehicle’s screens. His daughter stared at the shows as if the screens were blank. When they reached Gloucester she started to shake.

  Approaching Worcester, the roads became clearer, even unnaturally so. The rain remained incessant.

  The roadside services in Shropshire, where he’d stopped to use the toilet, and hoped to buy supplies from, were closed though it wasn’t yet five p.m. A twenty-four-hour service was advertised from the motorway. Few cars were parked at the facility. Most of the freight was immobile, lights off. The motorway had been near-deserted for the previous forty miles too. What traffic he had seen was mostly emergency vehicles. Private cars had been travelling far too fast in the wet conditions, their automatic functions overridden by manual operation to achieve greater, unsafe speeds in terrible driving conditions. For his family’s own safety, the father had kept the vehicle locked into automatic and let the computer transport them, albeit far more slowly than he would have liked.

  Food he bought from a vending machine he left with his wife on the rear seats. His daughter had fallen into an exhausted sleep by then, her nose and eyes red from crying, her head at rest upon Miranda’s lap. Even that small contact and suggestion of trust and familiarity filled him with a hope that made him dizzy. And watching her sleep engulfed him with memories of doing so when she was a baby.

  Before the final leg of the journey, he leaned his weight against the car. He gripped his scalp as if to contain the riot of his memories, and to calm his shock over the girl who was his again, at least in body, as was her mother, the real one. Attempting to process all he had done within the past few days, and all he had seen and experienced, was futile.

  He climbed back inside the vehicle and they set off again.

  As they drove, he began to tell Miranda in hurried whispers about how he had found Penny. She never interrupted, but stared at him in horror.

  At dusk, he suspected night was falling earlier and faster than usual. He left two new messages for the owners of a cottage in Snowdonia for which they were headed, giving them his expected time of arrival. Promising to pay in cash, he had booked the place in the car that morning, just after they had cleared the trees of the New Forest. Four cottages were still rented out in an old slate quarry as holiday lets. Two were available. As a family they had once stayed there when Penny was eighteen months old. It had been their last family holiday, and was the remotest location the father knew of that he knew how to get to. Besides three new nuclear power facilities and some chemical plants, the mountainous region had not become overcrowded, nor entirely divided by gated communities, though there were more of those now than ever before.

  He cancelled the transmission of the message that he had made in the car before his assault on Karen Perucchi’s compound, and also checked the news regularly in the front screen so no one in the rear could see it, still fearing reports of a home invasion with multiple casualties in the New Forest, and the sight of his face on national news services. He kept the sound on mute and read the subtitles. If he was apprehended, and that was a very real possibility that he refused to imagine in detail, suppressing the idea with a struggle, he would need time to form a cogent explanation, and to think of a way of ensuring his safety in custody. But instead of news of a national manhunt for him, he instead saw and read that there had been a massive exchange of nuclear weapons on the Indian sub-continent, within the last three hours, as children’s cartoons had flashed and jumped inside their car.

  They arrived at the old slate works’ cottages in Graig Wen after nine. Mighty Cadair Idris and the surrounding mountains had been swallowed by low cloud and nightfall. Few lights shone in the valleys. Paranoia that the region had suffered a power failure had chased his thoughts right through Wales. He feared that the madness and destruction in Asia had already reached here too, and thrown the mountains and sea into a blight of darkness and silence.

  As soon as he alighted from the car, the sharp, thin, cold air, the starless sky, seemed to get inside his mind and his chest, like an absence of gravity that briefly suggested again that he could be swept from his feet to plummet upwards. Here, they were three grains of sand lost in a lake of ink.

  He had to carry his daughter out of the car and up to the door of the cottage he had secured for one month, while his wife hobbled behind him, the numbness of her feet and hands persisting, but at least fading. The key to the cottage was in the place the brief, terse message from the owners had notified him of. Perhaps they thought it inappropriate for someone to go on holiday the same day in which tens of millions must have been burned alive on another part of the planet.

  Inside, the father had hurriedly closed all of the blinds and then returned to the car to collect what little luggage they had, the money and his weapons. Miranda settled Penny on the sofa, and wrapped her in three blankets she ferreted out of the airing cupboard. The father double-locked the doors.

  As he returned from checking the rooms upstairs, his daughter had woken up, and began to meekly unwrap and nibble at the food he had left on the coffee table. Miranda couldn’t get the packets open, but hunger had driven Penny to take what had been offered. She soon lay down again, under the blankets, and Miranda tucked them beneath her thin body.

  In all the time he had been searching for her, he had never once looked into how to tend a traumatized child, and knew nothing about when or how details and information from a stolen past should be introduced to a young mind. Had he ever truly believed that he would find her alive?

  He placed a screen on the small table before the sofa. Without speaking, Miranda accessed the files and played a collection of family pictures on rotation. Pictures of Penny as a baby, a toddler, of them together as a family and at the very same cottage they were slumped inside now. He inserted three of his favourite home movies into the montage, including the last film recorded in Berry Pomeroy Castle, five days before she was abducted. Lying absolutely still, Penny watched the flickering screen with an expressionless face. Miranda whispered a narration to accompany the pictures, while stroking her daughter’s hair. Before the father withdrew from the room, he placed Cloth Cat beside the screen.

  The father went into the kitchen area. Opened a bottle of rum and supped from the neck. Resting his back against a wall, he thought his muscles could have been dishcloths wrung out around his bones. One hand and his shoulder throbbed with aches. About his ankles, the broken skin silently screamed beneath circles of dried blood.

  You are here, with her.

  For how long?

  He checked the news broadcasts with the sound muted. It was all India and Pakistan.

  ‘Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ,’ he said to himself, as he looked at the earliest pictures of the devastation. He was thankful that his family was in the other room.

  FORTY-TWO

  He lay on the bed beside his wife, but on top of the bedclothes, with their daughter between
them. The lights in the room were switched off, but he’d left the hall one on and the bedroom door open as he and Miranda had always done when Penny was small. Downstairs, their daughter had eventually fallen into a deep and silent sleep on the sofa, but still hadn’t said much. He and Miranda had carried her upstairs to the largest room.

  Inside the little bag that Penny had carried from the house on her back, there were only two changes of clothes. The only toys were the few items he had brought down from his last trip to Birmingham, and she’d not seen those since she was four.

  The past for all of them was severed, at least physically. He doubted they could ever go back to Birmingham, or even the south-west. Like for the rest of the planet, the north now called even more loudly. His wife’s parents had driven to Scotland an hour before Miranda was abducted; she had told him in the car. They would break the news to them about Penny the following morning. But such things, like their next move, where they could go, who they could tell about Penny, and when, he would have to think about at another time, on another day. For now, they just had to exist together, in the same space, and the girl had to know them again. Until that happened, they weren’t moving from the cottage. King Death’s most loyal supporters would not know where they were.

  In the half-dark, the father stared at the side of Penny’s head for hours. Most of her face was concealed by her raven hair. He listened to her sleep. Not long after she fell asleep, Miranda had drifted away too, squashed, as if for dear life, against her recovered daughter.

  The night before I lost you, I did what I always did, I stood outside the door of your little room and I listened to you sleeping. Peering into darkness, I would hear you turn under your bedclothes, I would hear the odd puff of air, silence, a sigh, a word, and then the deep, steady breaths. From the day you came into my world, I did this every night I was home. I never wanted to miss a day of you.