Lost Girl (10 page)

‘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.’

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.

He shuffled between his room and the vending machine in the unmanned reception two floors down when he needed to eat. Every step made him gasp. The cartons of food were manufactured by his last
employer, cultured micro-proteins he’d helped distribute years before, with a sense of urgency as world food prices rose and exports thinned. The dinners were flavoured and shaped to resemble
foods once eaten in better days. Few improvements had been made to the product since he stopped working in logistics, a time he barely thought about now.

When his company began distributing the product fifteen years before, the father had wondered if, one day, he’d find himself eating the food originally intended for the starving: a heavily
processed nutritional substance designed to supplement overseas food aid when the grain reserves dropped, then all but vanished. Producing bulk over variety had quickly become essential. But every
synthetic foodstuff, produced by the country’s untiring chemical plants, was now eaten domestically to replace meat and dairy products. Nothing reached the listless brown skulls of Africa, or
the terrible encampments erected in southern Europe.

The meals in the machine were three times more expensive than those sold in shops, but he bought them and ritually heated his dinners in one of two microwave ovens in the kitchen area, then made
a careful return to his room. By the time he sat at the little table, the food was cool enough to eat with a plastic spoon, though even the bovine movements of his jaw sent little shudders of pain
into his shoulder. Shifting to sit or lie sideways, and constantly rearranging the spare pillow upon the bed that his body dampened, he made attempts to ease the relentless aches. Movement in the
fingers of his left hand was the only good sign, and on the strength of that weak fist alone, he delayed any attempt to reach the hospital in Shiphay. The hospital was close to where he and his
family had once lived, and he could not bear to look upon that hill again, or to see the silhouettes of the old houses march back into his memory.

When he managed to sleep, it was at odd times: noon, from six in the morning until nine in the morning, for half-hour stretches during boiling afternoons to awake sweat-drenched. Or he took naps
during humid evenings in which his own animal smell polluted the small room. On the third night he fell away into a void so deep, he awoke in the middle of the following day as the sun pushed its
fiery red surface against the side of the building. Only to fall asleep again, or maybe he just fainted, to wake after midnight.

Whether patchy and broken, or long and seemingly comatose, his sleep came alive with things he feared were signs of a brain broken like crockery on a hard floor, then put back together in new
sequences that barely resembled the original.

Awake, he filled the hours by watching nothing but news on the stations the room’s media service offered. Old films and dramas, documentaries and comedies were available, spread across too
many other channels as always, but for the last two years he’d allowed himself no entertainment, long ago deciding that he’d lost the right to leisure or pleasure. Anything composed of
levity or trivia would somehow unbearably remind him of times he’d permanently lost.

Day and night, coated in sweat and periodically groaning at the metronomic pulse of pain in his shoulder, the father simply lay as still as he could manage and watched the stricken world.

Broadcasts told him that close to half a million people were thought to have now expired in the heat from the Mediterranean to northern Germany. The great fires had ebbed, then started again,
then ebbed. The heat on the ground had made them impossible to fight from anywhere but the air, so they had continued to burn for a long time.

Broadcasts told him that the Egyptians had bombarded the Ethiopians again, and that the Ethiopians had shelled the Egyptians. The vast foreign farms in Sudan, Mozambique, Ethiopia, the Congos
and Algeria had been ransacked again by the starving and the Islamic militia groups. Saudi Arabian grain convoys leaving Sudan had been attacked and looted. Mercenaries had responded. In the
broadcasts a lot of dead people were lying in the various reddish soils of the African continent. A loose and volatile confederacy of rebel leaders had accused South Africa of hoarding food.

But what worried the father more than anything, what actually made him close his eyes, was the news that the sixty million hectares of arable land leased to foreign powers in Africa were now
producing crop yields of grain that were down by sixty per cent.

The number made the father feel sick. Even the abandonment of most foreign-owned livestock and biofuel farming interests, two decades before, in order to grow drought-resistant grains, had come
too late for Africa. The quick and irreversible slide into starvation, collapse and evacuation, across the entire continent and beyond, seemed as contagious as the two new pandemics.

A strain of SARS coronavirus was thriving in teeming Asia. They were calling the new bug SARS CoV11. Broadcasts switched between this and the Gabon River Fever in West, North and Central Africa,
where cameras peeked through the side of shanty houses and viewed what looked like colourful sleeping bundles at rest on the earth. Towns of driftwood and corrugated iron were eerily still. Clumps
of thin people lay against each other at the side of unsurfaced roads, unmoving. Men holding guns had rags tied around their noses and mouths. A child lay still against the depleted breasts of its
mother. Bulldozers made great rents in red soil. Bodies inside plastic sacks were rolled into the pits. Black smoke fumed from pyres that men tended with long sticks like shepherds of old. An
airport in yellow smog in Korea. Armed police and men in white suits gathered around grounded planes. Technicians squeezed liquid into trays from pipettes. Freight trucks idled at roadblocks. More
face masks. China, the Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, Bangladesh, the east of India: they were all coming down hard and fast with the bug.

In other news, Russia and China expelled more of each other’s diplomats and imposed new sanctions upon one another over Siberia. Not too far away, there had been another coup in Pakistan,
on account of the long-term fresh-water crisis, where men continued to stamp on Indian flags with sandalled feet, strike their heads with their own hands, and kick up the white dust from the ground
of their arid country, while a large group of Indian generals crowded behind a podium to face the press.

Eventually, by the fourth day of his confinement, the father preferred to sit in silence with the media switched off.

Scarlett Johansson called the father at seven p.m. on the sixth day.

Naked, he was standing at the foot of the bed and slowly raising his left arm away from his body, sideways first, then to the front, as if he was performing some slow semaphore for landing
aircraft. From what he could gather from the myriad online sites that he’d visited, his shoulder was probably not broken but deeply bruised; at worst the bone was chipped. If there was no
fracture his left arm would still need to rediscover mobility before it seized. Around his arm and back, the red and black flower was turning green and yellow. Progress.

‘The man you shot was called Nigel Bannerman. He and Bowles were tight in prison . . .’ Scarlett listed the man’s crimes and the father closed his eyes as they were recited.
‘We reached out to sympathetic individuals in your area to check on developments. There is some good news: the case will remain open, but it will be absorbed into a variety of unsolved
murders going cold.’

‘Thank God.’

‘You better had. The murder squad’s caseload down there is unmanageable, so this will not be a priority. Possible causes of the double murder are currently revolving around
politically motivated vigilante activity. Big nationalist support in the area. Organized crime hasn’t been ruled out either, but no one fancies a loner for this, and no one on the job is
demanding your immediate capture for clipping Bannerman and Bowles. They’ve known for a long time that sex offenders and paedophiles began clustering around the refugee situation, so my gut
tells me the police won’t be gnashing their teeth over a slight reduction in those numbers. Though I don’t think killing is something you will ever be comfortable with. This cannot
happen again. You do understand that?’

‘It was never something I intended to do. What about Robert East?’

‘He never reported your intrusion so we needn’t fear a connection there. As for the others, Tony Crab now has dementia and no one is connecting this to Malcolm Andrews or Bindy
Burridge, who still haven’t reported you. Above-national-average rates of the usual are massively in your favour here, public disorder, domestic violence, rape, alcohol-related violence, gang
violence, drug running, you name it, so the local force has more than enough to keep itself occupied right now.’

The father swallowed. ‘The two boys in the attic?’

‘Greek. No record of them entering the UK. Social services are going through the records of Greek nationals with refugee status, to see if they can trace any relatives. They may have been
trafficked.’ Scarlett Johansson didn’t say any more. If his daughter had been trafficked abroad by a paedophile ring, his search was futile.

Millions had been displaced from southern Europe alone, augmented by further scores of millions from the Middle East and Africa, and all pushing north into Europe. It had changed the continent.
Every man, woman and child south of France was steadily fleeing drought, heat, starvation, the wars and innumerable diseases that accompanied each dilemma. The biggest migration of a single species
ever known on the planet was underway, and it had never been easier for someone to go missing. One third of all the refugees were children.

The father knew how criminal gangs had found people willing to do anything to escape their own countries, and then escape the refugee settlements they found themselves herded inside. Gangs had
found an infinite supply of defenceless, weakened, frightened and confused people upon whom they could force their will. He also knew from his own exhaustive research that the UN and
Interpol’s estimate of children being used in prostitution, in Europe, at the time his daughter was taken, was close to one million. It was anyone’s guess how many more children had
since become subjected to sexual slavery.

The father wiped the sweat off his face with a forearm. ‘This Rory Forrester, what do you have?’

‘He’d done hard time for rape and indecent assault as a youth. Got in with a gang in the south-east. And his last known occupation was trafficking. He was arrested and imprisoned for
running Asian girls in London. Came out and drifted to Portsmouth according to his parole records. He’s been off radar for two years. The local force had no idea he was even in the
area.’

‘But they’ll go and pick him up?’

‘Not likely if he’s with the King Death gang. As I said, the police have a full plate with this lot already. The county is crawling with King Death gang activity. Illegal tobacco and
drug farms on Dartmoor. Illegal pork and poultry operations. Bootleg cider outfits and people trafficking because of the camps, which are the most sought-after refugee destinations in Europe. The
Kings are into everything now, everywhere, and taking it all over. Construction of the camps, land sharking to take over property for redevelopment, false IDs, any kind of contraband, gun running
to the jihadists and the nationalists, car theft on a massive scale, black-market meat. It just goes on and on and on. Some in government think the problems they’re causing should be a
greater priority than the climate. And after the riots, the police and army abandoned the snatch policy in Torquay.’

‘So he just gets to carry on? Like they all do. No one goes looking for them. The precedents have already been set. Jesus.’