Lost Girl (15 page)

After the father stumbled out from behind the wall and fell into the rear of the car, it had sped away with the door still open and one of his feet hanging in thin air. As if stone chippings
from the road had been flung up, three dinks sounded from the rear of vehicle in quick succession. Only when the car slowed to turn at the summit of the hill had the father been able to slam the
rear door shut. More shots had been fired up the road from the junction without finding their mark. Someone had recovered the shotgun too. That went off in a dim, ineffective boom, but the weapon
did not fulfil its potential that day.

No one followed them. No helicopters arrived to buzz overhead.

The father had collapsed across the rear seats and remained still and silent, mostly staring at the beige ceiling of the car, occasionally using his uninjured hand to wipe the sheets of sweat
from his face. He drank a pint of water in one draught but could not look at the wound in his hand for long.

‘Your handler, the woman you call Scarlett Johansson, reached out. She said you were about to fuck everything up, for everyone, at The Commodore.’ It was all the driver had said by
way of greeting once the father was inside the vehicle. The man said nothing more until they were free of the old housing stock on the fringes of town, and beyond the temporary settlements that
formed a corral reaching off to Exeter.

When the police officer stopped the car, he said a lot more. ‘I’d be a liar if I said there was no silent rejoicing amongst our lot when the likes of Murray Bowles,
Nigel Bannerman and Rory Forrester get moved on, but there are too many of them for you to get through. I can’t let you run round the county executing the shite. You can’t play this
kind of lottery for much longer before you buy it. By all accounts that’s nearly happened twice.

‘We’ve close to twelve hundred sex offenders we know of in the county. We’ve more people traffickers down here than doctors. We’re rife with indentured slavery.
We’re the major producers of domestic heroin now. We’ve gun runners, amphetamine labs, meat smugglers, war criminals from Africa and the Middle East keeping their heads down in old
holiday chalets right up to Ilfracombe. The nationalists have made us their home from home. We’ve forcible evictions by mobs, property scams and land grabs, and more unsolved murders than
we’ve got men on the ground. We’ve over twenty homicides per officer. And you’ve just given us another handful.’

The driver paused and swore under his breath, wiped the wet sheen off his face. ‘They’ve smashed the cameras out all over the town. You ask any of them kids back there to reel off
the ever-changing plates of our unmarked cars and they’ll do it. We had the Royal Marines on the streets all last summer for the riots. Things have been very cagey since. And here’s you
walking into the bloody Commodore, wearing a sun hat, and going mad with a shooter in some King Death clubhouse. You thought all this heat would keep our hands full and hide one man on a mission,
eh?’

‘I’m sorry. It was never meant to happen.’

‘Heard that before.’

The police officer was breathing rapidly, coming down from his own near-death experience and talking quickly. The father suspected he took crystal. ‘We can only hope that disorder, mayhem
and chaos do you a large favour. There are more than enough home-grown head-bangers to keep us occupied. But with all the new arrivals, it’s bedlam. And we don’t anticipate it getting
any better. Criminals like it here. We’ve the navy chasing their boats all through the channel and into the Atlantic off Cornwall. They’re having to commandeer anything with an outboard
on it. The navy get called away to another hot spot and it’s a free-for-all down here. The shitheads know it. Think of it. Think of the numbers coming in and running through here now. What
can you do? What can we do? The Dutch are running into Belgium, France and Norway with the sea lapping at their heels. The French don’t want any more Africans, so where do they go? Two
guesses. The rest of the Greeks and Spanish got to go somewhere now too. They ever have elections here and I don’t need to tell you who will get in. The whole world is moving north, mate. The
rules are changing and the tone is changing. Every country for itself. What comes next? Every man for himself? You think I jest? You’ve seen the news.

‘We’ve had to make a truce with half the gangs round here, but it’s not really us you need to hide from. Not after this morning’s high jinks. We ain’t really got
time for you, mate. Others have a longer reach though, and more eyes and ears than we can dream of. So, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but this is no way to look for your kid down here.
Things are too complicated. You can’t come back here. Not now. Not after this morning. Not for a long time. You know that? You gotta stop.’

The father had let the police officer sound off. Like him, he could tell the speed of his blood was gradually slowing too. Their urgent, spiky thoughts were wilting inside the hard shell of the
boiling car. Judgement was returning from exile, disbelief raising its head. They were sodden, haggard from adrenaline, from fight and flight, fight and flight again, until it was the same leaden
sensation. They’d soon grown sluggish in the heat as if tired and sleepy after a large meal with wine.

After he’d finished speaking the detective fell quiet for a long time and stared through the windshield. When he next spoke, he said, ‘I could use a drink,’ and removed a metal
flask from the glove compartment. ‘Fuck, it’s hot. Forty-fucking-five. You haven’t got much to say for yourself either, eh?’

The father knew all about the futility the man had spoken of. He knew all about odds too, and statistics, and remote chances, because 2051 had been a good year to steal a child. Back then, the
father had learned to resent all that was going wrong in the world for his own reasons. He’d only possessed the capacity to go mad from the loss of his child. He’d no time for
Bangladesh, even when eighty per cent of it was underwater. Greece, Spain and their fires, same thing. Africa, yet another bad year. China and its droughts, he had no head space left for imagining
the numbers forced to migrate. Australia on fire, again. The Central Americans who died against the fence in the United States after the Mormons came into office. None of it had mattered to him but
as a cruel diversion that took people’s minds away from one missing four-year-old girl in Devon. His solipsism had been planetary in size. He’d defy any mother or father of a small
child to think differently.

The father finally gave his response. ‘In 2051 there were three hundred and eighty thousand cases of missing children recorded in this country.’

The officer turned his head to the side and looked over his shoulder, his expression unreadable, save for a default wariness blended with irritability.

‘Seven out of ten came home in twenty-four hours. Lot of kids without parents in the camps were hard to keep track of, but most came home. Of those still missing, five thousand of the
children were abducted. Half of these were also recovered in seventy-two hours. They were mostly taken by family members. Lot of pissed-off divorced fathers and mothers out there. My little girl
didn’t come home. Many of the others who were abducted were found later, alive and well with extended family, relatives. My girl wasn’t found.

‘But one in ten of the five thousand abducted children were taken by strangers. Five hundred children in one year. Mostly snatched from the care homes and refugee camps. Three in ten were
killed, and they were murdered within hours of their abductions. The rest were taken and kept alive for other reasons. There were three hundred and fifty children in this category, taken by
strangers. Nearly half were eventually found alive, but in places they should never have been. And they had endured things that no child should have to even imagine.

‘I can only go on probability, and the probability that the majority of the outstanding one hundred and sixty-two missing children still being alive is good. Statistically, sex offenders
would have killed forty-nine of them and hidden their remains. That leaves one hundred and thirteen children abducted, still missing, but maybe still living as captives. One hundred and thirteen
children. My only hope is that she is one of them. It’s not much of a hope, is it? But it’s why I do this.’

Once, in the early hours of another terrible morning when a special kind of clarity engulfed the father and his fidgeting and muttering ceased, he had sat up in his disorderly bedclothes and
written a letter to his little girl as she smiled at him from a photograph at his bedside. To this day, he kept the letter in his wallet. He knew it by heart.

Even though you were stolen from me and your mother, and even though our hearts are broken and we love you more than ourselves, you are not a priority to the authorities. The people who go
missing, the people who are robbed, and even many of the ordinary people just like us who are murdered, are not priorities. Not now. Not any more
.

You will always be my priority
.

You will never be forgotten and I will never stop looking for you
.

I promise
.

The father cleared his throat. ‘We thought there would be reconstructions. A media campaign. Wealthy benefactors. Nationwide DNA screening. Exhaustive interviews with sex offenders to
shake free a lead. These had been our hopes that year.

‘Don’t misunderstand me, a child stolen from the garden where she was playing still mattered to people. Maybe even to most people. For a while. It mattered to some for even longer.
But for most, such a thing never mattered for long. These things don’t. They can’t. Not any more. Who has the thoughts . . . the space in their heart for a missing child in these
times?’ The father closed his eyes, swallowed and composed himself. ‘Thank you . . . for helping me. But if you wanted me to stop, then you should have let them kill me, because the
only thing that will stop me is my own death. I’ve come too far now. I’ve gone too far. And she’s still too far away from me.’

The detective looked at his lap as if considering the use of his handgun, pulling the trigger out here amongst the silent fields as the father knelt like a penitent in the wheat.

The father rose from the seat and opened the rear door, watched by the officer’s hard eyes in the rear-view mirror. Cradling his punctured hand beneath an armpit black with sweat, the
father unlatched a gate and entered the wheat field. He knelt down at the edge of the crop and sobbed. He wept with pity at his broken body, the pulse and sting of his hand, the ache in every bone
inside that arm, the dead weight of his depleted legs. He wept for himself because he had killed a teenager. Shot and killed someone not much older than a boy without being able to identify a shred
of remorse inside himself. He felt even less for the others he’d left for dead: three men, he thought, but what had happened was too vivid, perhaps too vivid to be trusted, but then soon
unclear too. Besides Rory, did any of them speak to him before he shot them? He couldn’t remember their last words, and had little sense of them but for quick flashes of their faces, their
animate eyes. He wasn’t alarmed by his callousness, or maybe he was in shock. He hoped he was because he hated himself for the recognition of a trait that explained why so few cared about his
daughter.
This is how we are now
. This is what the world was trying to tell him. The great dieback from drought, famine and disease was making inroads into the herd; the other animals were
running wild-eyed with foam-lathered flesh. Their teeth were showing inside red mouths that cried out uselessly. There was panic. Clubs and rocks were being seized and hoisted aloft to defend what
little was left, fences were being erected. Grieving mammals were thinning to extinction; their little ones went first. And it wouldn’t stop.

The sun burned his neck red and made his thoughts swim. The magnitude of the loss all around him was sickening. He’d sooner take death than a permanent realization of how things were.

The police officer touched his shoulder. Passed down the silver flask. The father nodded his head, took the flask and let the rum burn his throat. The officer knelt beside the father as if they
were pious men and about to praise some capricious goddess of the fields for the bounty provided. ‘Bloody long wait ahead of you in A&E for your hand, but I’ll take you somewhere to
get it looked at.’

‘Why?’

The officer’s eyes became distant and he turned his head to partially conceal his face. ‘Cus I know what it’s like.’ He took something from his pocket. Held the screen
out to the father, who looked down at an image of a laughing boy, no older than two, wearing blue pyjamas and surrounded by toys on a carpeted floor.

‘Yours?’

The detective nodded, face stricken, his mouth hopelessly trying to smile as if at some fond but spoiling memory.

‘Taken?’ the father asked.

‘Flu.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The officer slipped the device back inside his jacket. ‘Your wife know about this?’

The father shook his head. ‘She isn’t doing so well. Not since we lost the little one.’

The officer looked away and nodded as if this was what he had expected to hear. ‘Money?’

‘Not much left.’ The father sighed. ‘We sold the house. Spent the savings we put aside for our daughter’s future. My wife’s parents helped a bit too, as much as
they could. There was a small fund once, some donations. That’s gone now. I haven’t worked in two years.’ He’d often wondered if he would find work again. There was no more
money coming in. Welfare would amount to a miserable, static existence somewhere near his wife and her parents. If he made it back into logistics, and the work involved food provision and
distribution, he would be classed as a key worker. The emergency coalition government only had to class something as
key
and a worker wasn’t left with much of a home life.

He feared his time on the road and inside the houses of strangers was coming to an end. The idea of stopping should have brought guilty relief, but he could not identify a shred of it. To stop
when he finally had a lead was an unbearable prospect. To have come so far and altered himself into . . . he didn’t really know beyond still being
her
father, but he’d lost
sight of land in most other respects. He was committed. And he knew now that he would die as simply that,
her
father.