Lost Girl

by Nevill, Adam

  Bowles’s neighbour, a father too, who had dared to brave all odds by bringing children into an old world down on its knees in the heat, and adrift upon its back in the floods, had quickly retreated through the back door of his home, struck dumb with fear and disgust at what he’d seen over the garden fence: the bush-hatted puker, the stumble-wreck killer, tripping his way to bustle through the fence’s rotted planks like an animal affrighted in a pen.

  To have made another father even more afraid of what lapped at the shores of every home in treacherous nocturnal tides now smote the father’s heart as he lay alone in his hotel room. At this he felt a terrible shame creep through him, more than at the red deeds he’d performed in that dim nest of molesters that were never to be undone. For his own sake, the father had already assumed that the darkness of the ogre’s grim halls would eventually settle into a persistent though manageable trauma, but that the family next door would have to linger in perpetual anticipation of another killer’s arrival in the night.

  Hours passed and the heat in the room broiled the father out of brief sleeps, basting him in an animal lard of remorse and misery, outlining his scarecrow bones with sweat, as a corpse leaves tracings in a winding sheet. He periodically gulped warm water from a plastic bottle, wincing. Even swallowing hurt his shoulder. Had he not been so lean, muscle meats and fats would have borne the impact of the ogre’s club. As things were, the snooker cue had ricocheted off actual bone. Left him splintered and tattered: a messenger of judgement and death, but one ungraceful and ramshackle in the grim businesses he now conducted at the houses of men who ended childhoods.

  He watched the foul flower of the shoulder bruise open in the noon light that spiked silvery-yellow through the solitary window. An indigo stamen grew upon his back: seeded, black-and-green-veined like a new tattoo, Japanese vivid. A pistil and petals, scarlet as roses, bloomed over his collar bone. The arm below was near-unusable, the skin curiously nerveless from the elbow to fingertips. A deeper magma of molten pain glowed from the wrist bones to his neck and threatened to erupt if he moved. The father imagined the X-ray that he could not risk having taken of the ghost bone in its darkness: a split humerus, the acromion reduced to debris, a skin-balloon of hot water fattened with pink jellies. But at least it was the left arm.

  Accident and Emergency was a white glaring precinct inside his imagination, filled with husks, barely fluttering human moths on drips seeking hydration. He’d seen the footage. Even if he were seen by a nurse, amongst the kidney failures and bodies floppy with heatstroke, months of rehabilitation without the possibility of physiotherapy might yet be required for his shoulder.

  He imagined his remaining funds squandered on private physicians, or the endless waiting at healthcare centres run by the NGOs. He suffered a clear premonition of indifferent medical professionals, the nurses, orderlies, porters, all twitching on amphetamines to stay awake, and beyond insensitivity to the death and misery the heat had wrought on a people already disrupted by riots, assorted head-smashings, clannish murders, poverty, shortages, rage, humiliation and mistrust: a maelstrom that had gathered momentum with every storm that lashed across the sea to Great Britain. There was no medical option, not for his work. If he fell in this business he stayed down.

  The father swallowed two of the last eight painkillers: strong for headaches, irrelevant in the matter of smashed bones. He rinsed them down with the half-pint bottle of rum. Returned the bottle to the bedside cabinet, found his phone and called the last number Scarlett Johansson had used, and waited. And waited some more.

  ‘What happened?’ When her voice appeared in his ear it was so clear he would not have been surprised if she had been standing beside his bed.

  The sound of the only voice in which he’d recognized understanding, sympathy and cooperation aboard his solitary voyage, made the breath catch in his throat. A woman who sent him to torture sex offenders was his only companion now; a person who pitched her words like a businesswoman with no patience for small talk. The closeness of her brought a great sob, like a gassy bubble, up through his chest.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  The father burned with shame at the sound of the grief that had bassooned from him. He swallowed hard to still the tremors of his vocal chords. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Back at the room.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘My shoulder.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It went wrong. Things . . .’ He blew air out, tried to empty himself of emotions so pickled and sour and yet still racing. ‘The police will be looking for me.’

  She did not speak for a while. In the pristine air of the connection he listened to the silence of her thinking. Finally, she ventured, ‘Do you need a doctor?’

  ‘Not sure. A broken bone, maybe. My shoulder. I’ll wait till tonight, see if I can move my arm again.’

  ‘Lot of nerves in the shoulder. One of the worst places to get hurt. Let’s start from the beginning.’

  He did and was forced to remember and recount what he had discovered in the attic: two unwashed faces above thin bodies, huddled beneath limp coverings, their tousled hair silhouetted by the torch and then lit up. Suspicious eyes had blinked, wide and smarting in electric light, in those young faces long-banished beneath that roof. Boys, who had been locked away in a space reeking of perpetual damp and subjected to monumental solar heat. The attic had been a triangular roofed cage, stunk out with sour flesh, piss in pots, kidney and ammonia, pungent underarms, assorted trash fumes beneath hot bin lids.

  ‘It’s OK now,’ the father had said to the boys.

  The small faces had merely watched him in an uncomprehending suspense. Neither looked English with their black eyes and sallow skin. They never moved, but Bowles did. Half-blind, and still cuffed, the ogre had risen from its bathroom refuge and hurtled its bulk down the first-floor passage.

  Anyway, they like it here.

  The father’s horror became a billowing of hot blood within his skull. When the heat dispersed, it left him white and cold and jangly. But on newly swift legs, he’d run down the ogre.

  He’d fished out the gun from his pocket, still eschewing the less lethal immobilizer option, and fired from the top of the steps as the moving bulk below turned the bottom corner of the stairwell, Bowles’s big hand bringing a sound of splintering wood from the newel post. Halfway down part of a wall erupted like wet chalk.

  The father bounded down the stairs, three at a time, the torch handle between his teeth, his eyes not moving from the white disc of light that guided his booted feet.

  He caught Bowles in the back with the next shot as the big man bustled through the kitchen. Bowles flinched but barely slowed. The father didn’t think the handgun was up to such a task, and re-aimed for the black streak ahead of him, moist and sticking to the shirt, taut across the broad back, and he pulled the trigger twice more.

  The ogre at the far end of the kitchen lost his air after those two shots, as if winded by a blow to the gut, and grunted liquescent, before stumbling against the refrigerator. But Bowles’s big legs were not to be stopped and they kept on going, though with less decisive steps upon the patio, where he needed to rediscover his centre of gravity as if he’d just risen on old feet from a chair.

  Despite merely walking through the hall and kitchen, the father found himself gaining on his quarry. His gun slapped again, a crack echoing against mould-speckled walls, the tinny sink and laminate-cupboard hollows, and a fresh small hole punched itself into the beast’s flanks. Slap of a rivet. That bullet really punctured the leviathan, kidney or liver shot through that bled black and fast. The ogre had tried to move his bound, pudgy, tentative hands behind his body as if to touch the newest wound.

  The father fired again and caught the side of the man’s neck. A smoking hole dimpled the fatty ham, wet-slapping like a hand against a bug inserting a tube to drink. Bowles finally lost his balance and fell heavily, without a word, sidewa
ys into something metallic that clanged and scraped across the patio.

  When the father came out of the back door, Bowles was already on one knee and about to push upwards like a weightlifter tugging a load onto his shoulders. The father aimed for the base of the big head, fired twice, maybe three times, he couldn’t remember. But there were visible holes, big grunts, and Bowles lurched to hit the fence. His fists punched a plank out. Beneath his chest the cement pooled dark-oily. He made no further attempts to rise and only shivered in the warm morning air, while his cheeks and lips moved as if he was talking in his sleep.

  The father returned to the kitchen so he would not have to look at what he had done outside. That morning was the first time in his life that he had fired a handgun: a device that no citizen should even hold, but that was something he realized too cruelly in retrospect. He had not been able to stop once he’d started; that was how it had felt, like he was an excitable baboon amusing itself with a deadly advantage happened across in a hunter’s tent.

  In trauma, his mind had become a red-black carousel, emitting rusty iron music, played backwards. The father had pulled up his mask. Nape and scalp pinpricking icy, his stomach had splashed all of its matter onto the lino. Bowlegged with nausea and punch-drunk from shock, he’d then gone outside and swayed about the filthy yard, aiming his body for the rear fence. Surprised by the neighbour when only halfway there, the father had tried to turn away when he realized his mask was gone, but had lost his balance and fallen.

  The father had risen from his stinging knees and moved more quickly, to force himself through the split fence panels. By then his breath was a wind all around his head, and his eyes were flitting to the sky, the houses, the trees, the tarmac, his spattered boots, and would not be still. All of his clothes were wet through with sweat.

  He still had the gun in his hand when he reached the car. The hand loosely cradling the torch swung limp under the planet of pain that bumped the side of his neck.

  He hit at least two cars on the way back. Didn’t have the wherewithal to activate the navigation and tried to drive manually, having to steer with one hand while going too fast, and crashed his way out of Upton, the car reduced to a tin can filled with mania.

  The father swallowed. ‘He saw me,’ he said to Scarlett. ‘The neighbour. There’s sick in the kitchen.’

  ‘You have a firearm. You never told me. Why? You have the evil shit, the immobilizer. What were you bloody thinking?’

  ‘I got scared after Andrews.’ On his first move, Malcolm Andrews had beaten him badly before he could get the spray into play. Afterwards, he’d wanted to command a greater range and more decisiveness, just in case. The immobilizer was an antique and only had one charge, was too all or nothing. Both items he’d been supplied with forced him to get close to his targets. Too close. He hadn’t liked extracting the dart from Robert East’s convulsing body either.

  When he bought the handgun from a black marketer’s armoury, stored in a mobile home in Stourbridge, he’d shuddered with genuine terror, but also shivered with a schoolboy’s glee. From the point of sale, he’d suspected that, one day, the gun would go off in public. Guns really shouldn’t exist, he now thought, hopelessly. But they were so plentiful; it was far easier to buy a gun than a pound of meat.

  ‘Two? You shot two of them? Christ alive!’ A momentary loss of nerve from Scarlett fanned the father’s panic.

  What had he been thinking? He’d been injured in a darkness only lit up by blooms of agony and panic, those curious undersea creatures of the head, greenish arachnids with tracery legs, flashing and vanishing. He’d been bushwhacked by the ogre. Another ghoul had then opened a door and asked for progress on his battering. Small footsteps had creaked in an attic. How did he explain the nightmare of the lair to his handler, all of those movements in the darkness? Because that was what it had been: a cavern, unlit and stinky, with caged victims who’d faced terrible futures inside a black humidity, and rubbings of unclean flesh that could arrive at any time out of a hot, eternal night.

  ‘There were two of them. Bowles was waiting for me. He must have heard me get in. When the other one came at me . . .’ He thought himself a boy, split from a cat brawl on a playground, buoyant and near-dreamy with adrenaline, trying to allocate blame for the presence of blood under a nose.

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘Bowles called him Nigel.’

  ‘I’ll check the name. And the boys, where are they now?’

  The father swallowed. He tried again to remember what happened before he shot Bowles, to find a sequence amidst the abattoir jumble in his head. ‘I found them, and . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Then I chased Bowles. He ran. I shot him. I had to clear out. The neighbour saw me. The boys were still upstairs.’

  ‘What about your mask? Tell me you wore the mask?’

  ‘I took it off to be sick.’ The father’s voice lost its strength. He felt himself regressing as he sifted through the wreckage of the move, this burden of disaster he now shared with a friend who had given him a chance to find his little girl.

  ‘Did he see you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were they dead? Can you be sure?’

  Dead. The word’s weight had curiously evaded his full comprehension. Shock and revulsion had left little room for a consideration of the real consequences of squeezing a trigger. But the word fell through him like a crash of a great cymbal now. Reverberations harrowed his teeth and his very hair became erect with static, lifting upon a cold scalp at the presence of that word in his ear. Dead.

  He’d put out two lives. Those little lights were doused prematurely the world over, every day, and in their tens of millions for some years. But he’d never expected to contribute to the great blackout, even in such dirty water as he forded now. Seeing the world, feeling its temperatures upon the skin, dreaming, thinking, all of that was now gone from two men. Even if they had chosen to revel in things that would sicken any decent heart, they would no longer breathe again.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Pretty sure. I hit . . . the first one in the face. Bowles a few times.’ At close range. And it had been a determined and intimate execution with a pistol, as if he were some half-uniformed rebel in Central Africa, a place that surpassed even biblical depictions of hell. His gorge rose again as he thought of the blood from Bowles’s pallid neck running dark on the greening patio. ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘I’ll second that. But the first thing we do is stay calm. Stay put. Don’t go out for a while. Or at all, unless your shoulder is broken. If they have food and water downstairs, then buy that. I’ll reach out and see what is being done. We can’t even assume that the neighbour called the police, and someone needs to recover those children.’

  He heard the descending note of disappointment in her voice. He’d said enough to ruin anyone’s day, but still not enough. Out with it all. ‘And . . . cars. I hit cars on my way out.’

  Scarlett Johansson didn’t say anything, but her silence was worse than any words. He could almost hear the ropes he dangled from being severed. She’d not work with him now, not again, and he didn’t want to be himself any more. ‘There’s something else.’

  A sigh. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Bowles. I questioned him, before . . . and he said a man called Rory, who lived at The Commodore, near the front, knew something. Rory Forrester.’

  ‘Good work.’

  He wanted to weep from the shred of quiet approval. ‘The man, this Rory, he’s mobbed up. With a gang, Kings. That’s what Bowles said.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ She said this under her breath, which made it worse. ‘Them . . . OK. I’ll look into it. You get any hardware?’

  ‘No. I was in and out in . . . minutes, I think. It seemed much longer, but they attacked as soon as I moved upstairs. There wasn’t time for anything but a few questions. I sprayed Bowles. But if he hadn’t run, if there had been no . . . no one in the attic, it wouldn’t
have happened. Any of it.’

  ‘We didn’t know he had company, but suspected he was active again. He must have been forming a new group. How is your head?’

  ‘Head?’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I don’t know. What you’d expect, I think.’

  ‘You think you can manage to lie low?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll call you when I know more about the situation.’

  ‘This Rory, I need to move on him—’

  ‘God, no. Don’t even think about it. Bowles was a liar. A sadistic predator and a liar. It could be misinformation. I’ll need to check this thoroughly before we do anything. And if this Rory is down at the front, it’ll be problematic. Not even the local force will go down there any more, unless it’s really serious. You’re not an army and you are upset, you are hurt. You have to stay where you are.’

  ‘I’m concerned about the time. We’ve never had a lead. And we have a name.’

  ‘She’s been gone two years. A few days or weeks will make no difference. Not now. I’m sorry.’

  TEN

  For six days he stayed in his room. Night and day he cradled his shoulder, and sometimes he wept; the joint and corresponding arm became a sick child, pale and huddled close to the parent’s warmth and heartbeat. Tepid showers were the only highlights of each day, taken for one minute of bliss. But in the close heat of the room the sweat would immediately gather anew in his runnels, cracks, valleys and pits.

  Most of the water apportioned to his room he drank from the bathroom tap. Each afternoon, he allowed himself one sink full of cold water so he could push his face to the bottom of the porcelain basin, with the wrist of his right hand held under the running tap to cool the molten blood that pumped close to the skin.