Lost Girl (2 page)

The father had run down the path, leapt down the steps to the bottom level and had seen the gate ajar. All of the air inside his chest had seemed to cling to the top of his lungs. Somehow,
within less than a second, his mind had replayed every single bright yellow road safety poster he had ever seen in his life. But he’d heard no traffic, so if his daughter was in the road
there was no danger from approaching cars.

He’d thought of his daughter’s last words:
What’s that?

And that was the first moment he had suspected that she might have been taken by a stranger. When the idea entered his thoughts, his mind had reeled horribly, as if he’d just climbed off
one of the small roundabouts in the local play area. He had lost his balance and gripped the gate with all the strength of a dead man’s hand.

Holding his breath the father had stepped into the road. His legs were quivering and he’d felt concussed. The street had suddenly seemed brighter, but the air was cooler than it had been
as he raced through the garden.

His wife had called his name from the trees. Her voice on the verge of tears, she’d added three words: ‘She’s not here.’

At the top of the road, a long one that ran from the hospital to the main road that he used to get to the motorway for work, he could see three vehicles, about three hundred feet distant: a
white car turning into their road at the top, a red car waiting at the stop line to turn left, which it did as soon as he looked up the street; and behind the red car was a black one, a full
electric SUV model. Brake lights on the rear of the black vehicle had glinted, two cherries in the sunlight.

The top of the road had shimmered dusty. There were no pedestrians.

The father had begun walking towards the end of the road. He hadn’t run, because part of him was desperately trying to refute the notion that she had been taken from their garden.
He’d suffered a constant morbid anxiety about her safety since her birth, but what he felt right then amplified the instinctive dread to such a level that his ears had popped, and the
stiffening of his gut had stifled his breath.

‘She’s not in the garden.’ His wife had come down the steps and into the street. He hadn’t been aware of her descent. Still unbelieving, the father had glanced at the
neighbouring properties, across the road and behind him, trying to make his daughter reappear with the power of his mind alone.

At the T-junction the black car was still waiting for its turn to enter the traffic. The father had found his voice and called out his daughter’s name.

Behind him, above him, he had heard his wife again. She had returned to the garden. Her voice grew shriller as she’d called their daughter’s name into the still, humid air.

The black car at the end of the road had not appeared to be in any hurry. From a distance of two hundred feet, the father couldn’t read the number plate. His legs had felt old and
insufficient, but his jog had soon become a sprint and he’d begun crying with a similar intensity to the way the child he’d just lost cried when she was frightened.

The black car had turned left, onto the main road, and had vanished from sight.

Pink slippers no longer than his index finger, the uppers designed into mouse faces; she’d pulled out the whiskers a long time ago.

The father wiped the sweat from his hands on the bed sheet and placed the slippers on the mattress. Removed another item from the pink rucksack: a shirt so tiny that the dimensions, more than
the memory of
her
wearing it, momentarily seized the workings of his heart. Sometimes, he would take out the shirt, hold it to his face and believe he could still catch a trace of the
fragrance unique to his child – malt mixed with soap.

The shirt was yellow and the bear printed on the front held an ice cream. His daughter was wearing it in his favourite photograph that always rested upon the bedside tables in the series of
small rooms he rented, like this one.

Preserved in that image at three years old, she was standing in their garden, amidst umbrellas of pumpkin leaves that hid her legs in a vegetable plot so bright the print appeared blanched.
Smiling, she revealed small, square teeth, as the sunlight caught her raven hair, creating a sheen on the crown of her head. Shielded from the glare, the dark gemstones of her lowered blue eyes
glittered with joy.

Cloth Cat came out of the pink rucksack next. The soft toy was a present from the father’s brother, who lived in New Zealand. If Cloth Cat ever strayed far from their daughter’s
hand, the father and his wife had panicked. He’d once climbed over a fence at night to search a park for Cloth Cat, convinced that his little girl had dropped the toy over the side of the
pushchair without him noticing, earlier in the day. Retracing the afternoon’s walk, he’d moved between rows of millet covering two square miles of a former West Midlands green space,
the crop arranged like phalanxes of a great army of old, every soldier carrying a spear. Torch in hand, the father had searched a mile of ground for the toy cat, along each of the sun-baked tarmac
paths, his eyes so alert they’d ached. The toy was irreplaceable; his wife had already looked through the online trading sites to discover that numerous kinds of cats had been available, but
no Cloth Cats. His daughter would never have been fooled by a usurper.

The father did not find Cloth Cat because the soft toy was still in the place his daughter had forgotten she’d ‘posted’ it. While her father had searched through the darkness
of a blackout, Cloth Cat was safe inside a kitchen cupboard at home, and had been the whole time the little girl had cried for the toy’s loss.

Some time later, the girl stopped reaching for Cloth Cat. A giraffe and a frog with long legs became new and constant companions. Yet when the father believed it safe to store Cloth Cat in the
garage, the toy returned to the girl’s favour and became the centre of her court all over again. The father often tried to imagine his daughter’s face if she and Cloth Cat were ever
reunited.

He cared more for his memory of her than he cared for himself, and he kept her things safe and close so that no more of her would go. But when his mind turned to the numbers of people who were
now crammed into this island, he could understand why his family had never been a priority to the police. When he considered the refugees, the millions, with more and more coming in every day in
great noisy leviathans of motion and colour and tired faces, he realized the authorities had never had the time to look for one four-year-old girl. And whenever he watched the news, he understood
why so few of the missing were ever found – because very few were even looking for them.

The emergency government claimed the population still stood at ninety million. Others claimed the population of the British Isles was now closer to one hundred and twenty million. Either way, he
and his wife were simply lost amongst the millions. When he’d accepted this after the first year of his daughter’s abduction, he had simply sat down in silence. His wife had lain down
and never really risen again.

In the first year, he and his wife had made hundreds of phone calls together, and sent thousands of emails to all kinds of individuals and departments. Sometimes they met harried people who
listened to them for a while. Pictures of the girl were shown on television and appeared on websites too. This continued for days on television and months online. And the father had also walked and
walked for the best part of that first year and shown her photograph to as many of the millions as he could reach, which wasn’t many. And while he implored the troubled faces to understand,
he came across many other people showing photographs amongst the crowds, along the streets, in the towns and villages, and as he walked he knew that he had truly gone mad from the loss of his
little girl.

He would never be able to adequately describe to anyone how stricken he’d been nor express the tormenting repetition of his thoughts. No combination of words would ever suffice. And he
came to believe that when minds were forced to function in such a way, they simply broke.

For two years their lives had been solely concerned with grief. Not only had their child gone, their capacity for happiness was taken with her. Maybe this was something the abductors never
considered: the insidious consequences of their actions, the deadening longevity of effect. Or perhaps they were euphorically aware of this, and the far-reaching ripples empowered them through the
curious mental alchemy of the narcissist. If this was so, then he had the right to destroy them.

The father rose from his knees and lay on the bed, curled himself around the slippers, Cloth Cat and the shirt. And only then did he begin to shake.

Four hours later, the call he’d been waiting for arrived, so the father wiped his face with a towel and cleared his throat of the clot his grief had laid there.

The communication was voice only, without visuals. As if he had willed her to call, it was Scarlett Johansson, and she gave him the details of the next man he was to visit. The sex
offender’s name was Robert East.

Robert East’s bungalow stood at the far end of the close, behind a low front wall of Cotswold stone. Before the pink stucco house front and the white stone drive, a neat
brown lawn had died between opposing rows of ornamental shrubs. Wooden blinds blacked out the sun in every window. There was no gate. Nice when times were better, better than most now they were not
so good.

During reconnaissance, straight after Scarlett’s call, the father had peeked at Robert East’s bungalow for the first time. Nothing had changed in the street in the three subsequent
days when he’d driven past, or watched from a distance. All of the same cars were in the same places. And again, in the dry foliage of the front gardens, not a single twig or leaf stirred as
if the heat had preserved the place as an arid still-life.

There were only six properties in the cul-de-sac, owned by people keeping their heads down in the best bit of Cockington. Three bungalows in good shape on the right-hand side, every curtain shut
and all the blinds down. Out front: two Mercedes, one Jaguar. The discreet glassy bubble of a small spherical camera lens could be seen on the front of two of those places, watching the cars and
front windows.

Two concrete town houses reared on the left-hand side of the street, clutched by the brittle arms of overhanging skeletal trees. Two storeys with lots of glass faced the sea, cut into the side
of the hill seventy years gone. Balconies were empty and windows were closed, but someone was still up early to watch the sun rise in the building neighbouring his target, because the living-room
blinds were open on the first floor. The glass was black and reflected the wide dome of sea in the bay.

Two street lamps had cameras. He would also be seen by the cameras on the properties as he walked the length of the short road. Not reason enough to abandon ship. The father didn’t want to
waste any more time because time changed the memories of people he needed to speak with. Time moved faster now, and the lives it drove forward were ever filling with gathered debris of the mind and
senses. Too much catastrophe in the world needed to be comprehended, with more and more happening all the time. It was the age of incident. Merely at a local level in Devon, there was the hot
terror of summer, the fear of another flood-routing winter, cliff erosion, soil erosion, soil degradation, blackouts, and the seemingly endless influxes of refugees.

Up above, the sky began to bleach white-blue from blue-black. When it became silver-blue with sharp light in an hour, the heat would boil brains. It was already twenty degrees when he parked one
street down and covered the car’s plates, before moving on foot through the trees opposite Victory Close. Nerves as much as exertion made him sweat harder.

It was a quarter past five and after driving up the hill to get here, the father hadn’t seen a single moving vehicle. Not much work in the town now and never much work traffic in this part
of the town anyway. These were the homes of the over-sixties who didn’t need to slave until they dropped cold in a warehouse aisle or a field. Senior management, retired executives and some
gang lieutenants up here, but no real high rollers. These residents had never made the top two per cent, though they’d tried, and had mostly checked out of the labour market to slide through
the grim and steady collapse in as much comfort as they could hope for. They endured power cuts and a diet of synthetic meat with seasonal vegetables, but still enjoyed lifestyles far beyond the
reach of most. They’d done all right. Even then, spot-check security patrols would be all that most budgets covered here. Maybe one would roll through every hour; that was all the local
Torbay groups offered. But in the heat?
All services are experiencing difficulties . .
.

The near-impossibility of a citizen enlisting help in a crisis was also in his favour. Community spirit was thin on the ground, even in the better parts of town. People heard shots popping and
they locked down, grateful it wasn’t their turn. In many parts of the country, who even knew who lived next door? The national characteristic was mistrust.

That summer, the elderly poor had lain dead in their beds from heatstroke all over this town, often discovered by smell alone. The acknowledgement made the father uncomfortable, but the way of
things had a big upside on a ‘move’. This hour of the day was also the low tide of crime. Hard cases were up all night and slept late. Not the father. He was no pro but he was getting
better at this.

The father checked his kit: rucksack on his chest, immobilizer, mask and stun spray in the front pockets of his shorts: easy access left and right. He hoped to be in and out by six. He checked
his watch. Sipped tap water from the bottle he kept in a rear pocket of his combat shorts. Pulled the bush hat low and slipped on sunglasses to make a visor across the top of his face; indoors he
would mask up in cool cotton.

But, for a while, he couldn’t move his feet towards the bungalow, and pissed against a tree instead. His guts slopped and reared and his underwear clung wet with sweat around the waistband
and between his buttocks. His breath was loud around his head as if a man with asthma was standing at his shoulder.