Lost Girl (20 page)

A metal pole supporting a breakfast bar now stood between the nurse’s secured arms. It had looked sturdy when he tied her wrists. She’d thought the father was going to kill her. They
all did. They all expected to be killed; clearly a rule in the world they inhabited, one that swarmed with the vengeful. A world they had refashioned to suit themselves. A world they never expected
to turn against them. But they must have entertained doubts that their lives could just go on and on and on like this, while so many suffered . . . with ninety million people out there, fidgeting
and restless with chronic stress about blackouts, food, flood water and the terrible sun.

‘Away from there!’ he bellowed at the girlfriend in the master bedroom. She stopped moving and started swallowing whatever was clogging her throat. ‘Forget the fucking
bed!’ Anger was good. He needed more anger, but not too much until they were all secure. ‘Just kneel on the floor, now!’

Kneeling suggested execution in their world; he read this in her eyes. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I am here for information only. From your . . . your boyfriend, or whatever the
fuck he is. Yes?’

The woman teetered a few feet away from the bedside cabinets, clearly uncertain whether she believed him. Reaching one hand down to the bed she eased herself to her knees.

‘Away from the bed. Here, on the rug. Move!’

She did so, on her hands and knees, and crawled towards him in a way he thought accidentally obscene. ‘Stop. There. Put your hands out.’

The father unthreaded the cord that was looped around a dressing gown hanging on the door, and bound her wrists, then strapped and tied her arms against her body with a leather belt. Her
fingernails were immaculately painted red, something you rarely saw any more. One of her fingers glittered with diamonds, her wrists rattled with gold.

‘Good. Good,’ he whispered to her in encouragement. ‘This won’t take long. You won’t be hurt. I promise. Now stretch your legs out.’

‘No. Please, God.’

‘Just so I can tie them. I will not harm a hair on your head . . . if you do what I say.’ The ease with which the words were beginning to come to him made the father feel a
combination of relief and disgust.

The woman stretched her long legs out and the father moved to her ankles. Looked about the room, frantic to find another bond with which to tie her legs as both sets of cuffs were already in use
on Yonah Abergil. He didn’t want her moving to a concealed weapon, a phone, a button.
Maybe one has already been pressed
.

The father ran to the walk-in wardrobe, tore open the doors and chose one of at least a hundred handmade ties. He returned to the woman and knelt by her ankles, removed her shoes. The heels were
long, patent black daggers. They brought to his mind quick, hot thoughts of other floors upon which other pairs of high-heeled shoes had once been discarded; memories from deep within his days in
the logistics hierarchy when the ambitious looking to move upwards would use any tactic for elevation. Ambition he had taken advantage of, taken his share of. They had been irresistible to him,
those girls in tailored suits and silky blouses, whose softness whispered beneath their clothes, whose perfume had intoxicated him as much as the alcohol he’d poured down his neck as he
courted them at conventions, at functions, and in the offices where so many games were still played, as the climate raged and the world disintegrated.

He caught again a stronger, sudden sense of himself in the past, a near-forgotten man now. Was consumed by a sense of the tingling, tantalizing, heady excitement that came with a new face, pair
of legs, uncovered breasts, a strange voice saying his name, encouraging him, flirting with him, a refreshingly alien mouth on his lips in some half-lit room, far away from home.

He’d often wondered if the state of emergency had added fuel to human desire. People said so. The opportunities for intense reminders of what it was to experience pleasure, to lose
one’s mind in another’s body, were precious. The sense that the chances for such activities, like everything else, were falling into short supply for all but a very few people, may have
been one of his motivations and his excuses in hindsight.

The legs of the girl on the floor shimmered under the spotlights in the ceiling. Her legs were coated in a fine second skin of sheer nylon. Stockings. Black to match her transparent panties.
He’d seen nothing like it in years. He could see how her underwear clung to her pale buttocks like a dark smoke because her dress was hiked up. There had been so many times when he had not
resisted his urges, and when he’d made promises and assurances to ransack the bodies of desirable women. He had been despicable. But this girl had dressed to please that
thing
out
there – that people trafficker face down in the living room. With her beautiful legs she rewarded the sexual slavery that he engineered.

The father’s arousal was a neglected, confused beast, which tried to awaken its old heat and become an unruly engorgement. And yet he waved a loaded handgun through the exclusive air of
the stranger’s house, with his face masked. People about him slobbered from the effects of a nerve agent.

Monstrous
.

He shut his heat off. The sense that the top of his skull was lifting, his spirits rising, he closed, sickened at himself for feeling desire at a time like this, when he had frightened a woman
half to death in her own home.

Lust had always distracted him. Two years ago, he had been asked to watch over his little girl and he had written a flirtatious mail to a woman instead while a stranger had lifted his
daughter’s small feet from the soil of their garden, and taken her away. He’d once believed losing his little girl was a natural consequence of his behaviour, even a punishment. But
there was no reckoning, there were no judgements other than the ones that were made by men like the one he was about to execute. On this, the theology of King Death was right.

He stood up. Collected a pair of clean socks from a drawer, pulled one taut, slipped it between the woman’s glossy lips, and knotted it behind her head.

She closed her eyes and wept.

With the woman’s lover he could not be so tolerant. The man was cuffed at wrist and ankle with penitentiary steel, and positioned in the middle of the vast living room,
his knees strapped together with his own leather belt, his head engulfed by a pillow case, like a ready-made crime scene photograph.

As the father trotted down the three marble stairs and entered the vast lounge area, he tried to disassociate the figure from the evening’s inevitable conclusion. But when he stood beside
the body on the floor, unbagged its head and removed the gag, the gravity of the impending execution became disorienting again.

‘You know you die for this,’ the man said quickly. ‘Your family, your friends. Children. All of them. They die. Bastard. You are bastard.’

‘But not before you, unless you use that swine mouth for something other than making threats.’ The father kicked the man’s shoulder hard.

The blow only succeeded in making Yonah Abergil angrier. ‘Bastard! Everyone you know, they cease to exist. In one week, they all in hell. I assure—’

The father’s second kick met the man’s red face.

While Yonah blinked and coughed in shock and a momentary senselessness, the father regagged him and sprayed the nerve agent over the man’s entire head.

The father left the lounge and entered a large adjoining room with a full-size snooker table, a bar, walls covered in original paintings, and a sunken floor leading to what looked like a cinema.
Beyond the large glass patio doors, the black surface of a swimming pool was riddled with rainfall.

All this from slavery and murder
.

The father uncapped a bottle of whisky from behind the bar and began to gulp. He was wet through but burning alive. His legs were numb. He wiped tears from his eyes and noticed the painting
above a fireplace that a fully grown man could walk inside.

The father checked on the old man again. He was still smiling at the large images that flickered around his chair. It was a holographic film, a Chinese action thriller about
evil American imperialists with a plan to control the world’s fresh water. It had once been very popular. Perhaps the still-functioning fragments of the old gangster’s brain liked to be
reminded of former glories, schemes in collaboration with corrupt authorities, gunfire, body counts, piles of cash, girls and rare wines on tap.

The dresser was full of blister packs and pharmaceutical boxes. No shortages here, but did the old man need medication now?
The nurse . .
.

Whisky bottle in one hand, gun in the other, the father walked across the house of plenty to where he had secured the nurse in the kitchen. The tea towel stuffed inside her mouth muffled her
shrieks at the sight of him. The father held up his hands, palms outwards, to show he meant no harm. Then filled a jug with cold water at the sink. Returned to the lounge and doused the head of
Yonah Abergil, who eagerly raised his swollen face into the stream and moved his head from side to side to direct the liquid onto his burning eyes.

The father placed the whisky bottle on the coffee table, sat down, cross-legged, before the blinking, sputtering upturned face and removed the gag. ‘This can all stop. Very soon. Your dad
gets his medicine, your girlfriend gets untied. Everything goes back to how it was, if you help me. I am going to ask you some questions.’

‘Nothing!’ The man raised his head and spat onto the father’s legs.

The father stood up calmly, collected the whisky bottle from the coffee table, positioned himself behind Yonah and smashed it across the back of his head, making sure the heavier base did not
connect with his skull. Yonah’s hair was threaded wet and red.

‘Or we go on like this. We go on and on and on, all night.’ The father reintroduced the nerve agent to his hand and prepared to use it.

Yonah grimaced and rolled away, his neck rearing like a serpent, his head twisting away from another incineration of his eyes and sinuses.

The father followed him and rolled him back to the middle of the floor. Yonah was a big man, carrying at least thirty extra kilos in such lean times, and his gut hadn’t been built by
cultured micro-proteins. The man’s breathing was now under severe strain too, twines were snapping from his cables; the bullock was sagging, poisoned and leashed.

‘You think I am a rat, you waste your time coming here, to my home, you fuckin’ bastard!’ But even after two doses of the agent that had entirely closed one of his eyes, Yonah
Abergil’s spirits hadn’t dimmed entirely. This was no sex offender who’d be shaken apart merely by the shadow of a vigilante.

The father let the man’s wet, swollen head fall back to the floor, where he messily ejected mucus from his nose and emptied his mouth of toxic saliva blended with blood. ‘This
isn’t what you think. I don’t want to know about your money, your business. Or whatever else you do so you can live like this, like a python king in its palace.’ The father waved
the handgun at the room. ‘I want you to tell me about one job. One job only. A job when someone was taken. A child. A child stolen from her home, from her parents. A snatch that was performed
on your watch. Your turf. You know about it. You would have signed off
the work
. My sources are very good. They ratted you out because you are reptile shit in human form. And thank God
there can still be consequences for someone like you.

‘So, back to this little girl who I’m here for. Information about one little girl is what you will provide. I want to know where you and your organization sent her. And then
everything can be as it was. You understand me, you fat fuck?’

The one red eye that regarded the father struck him as satanic. He saw calculation within it, some mystification, complete contempt, outrage at the situation, and an innate hatred for all but
its own. He wondered if the man saw the same thing in his eyes.

Yonah Abergil spat again. ‘You come here . . . you end your life for one kid? You come into Yonah’s home, you tie up his woman and lock away his father, and you expect me to help
you? You think I am afraid of death? I love death.’

The father recalled the thing in the painting that hung above the fireplace in the games room, and its bones and rags seemed to dance and jerk through his mind now. ‘I can see that you do.
And I can help you with that. And your father too. That old bastard has done his fair share, has he not? King Death? Big men. You think? No. I know what you are. Reptiles.’

The whisky made the father’s head spin through fragments of an education long over, and practically meaningless. ‘Amniotes. Tetrapods. Cold blooded. Squamata, the worm lizards.
You’ve been around for three hundred and fifty million years, you know that? You began as Protosauria, the first lizards. You grew and survived, and survive you will again. You swim backwards
in time because you are Sauropsida, the true reptiles. You have Therapsida, the beast face. I can see it now. You are unredeemable. There is no rehabilitation. You are the face of our times. You
flourish because you lay so many eggs. You are oviparous. That means you are an egg layer. We are now in the Mesozoic age all over again because of you and your kind. The great age of the reptile.
You
.’

Yonah Abergil’s visible eye changed its expression. He looked at the father as Malcolm Andrews had; at that moment a realization dawned that here was a man unstitched at some fundamental
level. Threats and negotiations would not be effective before such madness, such determination.

The father showed the red devil eye on the floor the picture of his little girl. ‘Take a good look. She was this age when she was taken from the garden of her home in Shiphay, Torquay. A
place she felt safe, where she lived with her mother and her father. You ruined more than one life that day.’ The father recited the address, the exact time, the date, the year.

There was no remorse, no softening in the scarlet eye. ‘I know of this girl.’

The father’s heart stuttered then resumed banging, but too heavily.