Lost Girl (22 page)

The father thought of the painting in the other room, the picture on Bowles’s wall, the stretched arms of bone outside Rory’s hovel. The connections were unsettling. ‘What did
they see? What is this fucking face?’

Yonah’s open eye settled on the father, and widened. ‘Maybe you see this too . . . you would be like them. Maybe you are already . . .’

The father wondered what he should do. He worried he might lose his voice before he could ask more questions. But what questions? And Yonah was delirious with pain and no longer making much
sense. The father’s mind was becoming a blank, wiped clean from shooting a man in both knees, and from killing a woman. But he believed some of what Yonah had said, just like he’d
believed Murray Bowles and Rory Forrester. He got results in the same way these men had, because he’d used a language they understood. This made him feel absurdly better about the nurse and
all of the blood swiping, smearing and staining the floor and rug of the living room.

He thought of the girlfriend with the sock tied tight inside her painted mouth. He needed to check on her.
Now!
But could not move his feet. If she had heard the names her lover had
just confided to him . . . If she had, she would tell others, associates, or the police, whoever arrived here first, and it would be known why he had made a move tonight, and who he was prepared to
become a bestial killer for:
a child
. Had she overheard the names, Oleg Chorny, Semyon Sabinovic? If she’d heard of the connection to this lawyer, this go-between, Oscar Hollow, then
the other
man
who had paid for his daughter would also be warned. They would all know that the father was coming.

She was taken for so much money.
Why?

The father clutched his cotton-skinned head to try and still the small explosions inside his skull. His mind offered problems aplenty but no solutions other than . . . what he couldn’t
face now. They all had to go.
Another woman. As well as Yonah
. Two more murders on top of the nurse. Another spree. The police would surely intervene. Both sides of the law would want rid
of him.

You go in and you gotta be the only one who comes out alive
. But he had not been told about the girlfriend, and the nurse shouldn’t have been on duty. ‘Oh Jesus Christ
Almighty.’

The father moved around the room looking for weapons and cameras. The handgun he had removed from Yonah’s jacket in the garage was already inside his rucksack. He had found a third handgun
in the master bedroom in a bedside drawer and slipped it inside his bag. He was playing for time, delaying the inevitable.

Back inside the master bedroom he closed the door. The girlfriend had not moved. Her no longer so lovely eyes watched him. He put his fingers to her lips, listened hard. Through the closed door
he could hear Yonah moaning, sometimes shouting. But his voice was muffled through the door. The father struggled to recall how loud their voices had been during the exchange about who had taken
his daughter.

And, my God, he knew now.
He knew
. He had the names of the two men who took his daughter. Men apparently deceased. Men paid to snatch his daughter, but then murdered by their own boss.
And the lawyer who brokered the deal, he had that name too. He had never been so close. No one had been so close. A loose word from Bowles, then Rory’s sand-blasted face confessing at
gunpoint, and now this fat criminal bound on the floor of a mansion. ‘I am justified. I am justified,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Did you hear what was said?’ he asked the
girlfriend.

She didn’t understand. He repeated the question twice, then embellished it with, ‘What we discussed? Did you hear the names? You know of these people that were mentioned by your
pig?’

She frowned, shook her head vigorously.

The lawyer. He had the lawyer’s name: Oscar Hollow. Yonah had his details, idents, an address: the next move. The father rose from his knees, went back into the living room and removed the
gun from the nurse’s hand. She had small hands, silly hands, dead hands.

Yonah sat up and stared at the wet ruin that was the front of his trousers around the knees, the silk now sopping black. The father wiped his forearm across the man’s wet eyes, but the
second one was still closed, the first as red as fresh blood. ‘You come here for your daughter, yes. I respect that. You are a man who has been wronged.
Oui, oui
. You will do
anything for your family. It is all we really have, family. Am I not right? My father . . . Are you a man of honour? A man of your word? Your daughter, if she is . . . I can get her back. I make
the call. I can do it now. Call the lawyer. He is your only hope. He knows where she was taken. We go straight through him and to the fuck who give us money to take a child. Had I known she was the
child of such a man, I would not have let them take her. I have little to do with this snatch. I am just taking the money for the Georgian faggots. You think I can make these things happen? Just me
here? I hear things. Know people. Nothing else.’

The father realized the bedroom door was open. He’d left it that way, was slipping now, couldn’t coordinate so much inside his head. ‘Shit.’ If she hadn’t heard
Yonah before, then what had she just heard? Though Yonah had only just mentioned Oleg and a lawyer, he thought, but couldn’t fully remember.

The father went and closed the door of the master bedroom without going back inside. Yonah’s voice followed him. ‘The lawyer. We call him now, yes? Yes. Come. We tell him the deal is
off. I buy her back tonight. If she is alive, you will have your daughter in one day. What you say?’

‘The number. The address.’

‘I do it for you . . . In my office.’ Yonah paused in his frantic monologue to wince and shudder white from the fresh onset of agony inside his devastated legs. ‘My office . .
.’ The sweat-covered head nodded at the hallway before the front door. ‘There is a safe.’

A ringtone trilled again from somewhere inside the house.

‘Marie! Marie!’ the old man called from his room.

Yonah’s face screwed up. He wiped again at the cold sweat that pulsed from under his hair. ‘No! I cannot move. My legs. Don’t touch me. Please.’

Hands under the man’s sopping armpits, the father dragged him quickly across the floor, out of the living room, and across the hall. ‘Which room?’

Yonah was breathing heavily, his good eye had shut again. Drool had made an appearance at the sides of his mouth. The man was in hell. His legs had left draglines right through the house.
‘This door,’ he whispered.

‘This one? This one!’

‘
Non
. This . . .’

By the time the father backed him into the office Yonah had passed out. He knelt beside the man and slapped his cheeks. Pulled out a bottle of water that bumped against the weight of so many
handguns inside the rucksack, and doused the man’s head and face in water. Slapped him again. Yonah did not respond with anything but the vague movement of his bottom lip.

‘Christ.’ The father laid him on the ground. The lawyer, the lawyer’s name was Oscar Hollow. It might be enough. His eyes flitted about the room looking for a safe, and saw the
shrine. Squinting, he moved closer. Took it all in, then looked away.

On the wall of the office the screen pinged with an incoming call. Deeper inside the house another screen trilled. A third beeped from inside the kitchen. The house was being besieged by
requests for contact, for signs of life, and at such an early hour of the morning. The sounds grew and swelled in urgency. The chirrups and bells pinpricked the father’s sparking nerves. He
needed to leave and fast. A two-mile walk to the car through the rain-doused darkness awaited.

From the distance the elderly man called for Marie again. In his mind the father saw the heavy-set nurse running sideways through the lounge, near-gibbering with fear, firing a gun wildly into
the walls of the devil’s palace. He imagined men rushing through the night too, coming to the house, holding black guns inside the unlit interiors of fast, expensive cars; all of them ready
and able to smash vertebrae with hammers and electrocute testicles until they’d been cindered to olive pips, but only as a prelude to lopping through a neck with an oily machete.

The father stepped away from the unconscious figure on the floor. Withdrew his handgun from the side pocket of his trousers.

The closed eyelids made Yonah Abergil look dopey. Thick lips and a double chin gave him the appearance of being harmless and too ordinary for depravity.

He has to go
.

The father squatted three feet clear and aimed the pistol at the man’s faintly pulsing temple. Closed his eyes and squeezed the trigger.

Back inside his shabby room at the guest house, the father stood upright and naked, his wet and soiled clothes strewn about his feet. In the age-speckled glass of the dresser
mirror, he looked like a half-starved torture victim, superimposed onto an old page of history. But as he assessed the damage sustained in his retreat from Abergil’s villa, he made sure not
to look at his own face, the face of a killer that had its daughter’s eyes.

After he’d dropped from the main gate of Yonah’s villa, he’d seen distant white headlights shining across the black fields, no more than a mile away. If those had been
reinforcements, he’d escaped with minutes to spare.

Nor would he ever learn how assistance had been summoned to Yonah’s house: a panic button depressed by the nurse before he shot her, the failure to raise an answer from the incoming calls,
an offsite detection through hidden cameras on the property? And as he staggered from the property the father had wondered whether those rushing into the breach after midnight were private security
personnel or Kings. Home owners were permitted to use deadly force against intruders; it was close to the most popular policy introduced by the first emergency government, eight years earlier. A
fear of which he’d carried on every move, churning like an unstable gas inside his shivery bowels.

Fleeing back to his car he’d been forced to go off-road, knocking and scraping his legs against tree branches, fences, fallen logs, and the bristling brackens engulfing the woods. Livid
weals and scratches now flecked the angry bruises the length of his legs. A hot and insistent ache around a deep crack in his shoulder suggested the scaffolding of repaired tissue and sinew had
come undone; the long pink knife wound in his hand transmitted the muscle-deep sensation of a fresh hole, as if Rory’s blade had bloodlessly passed through his body that very evening. His
lungs were peeled meat, depleted black wings cupping a near-expended heart. How many times could he go through this?

It had taken him two hours to find the car. The terrain on his retreat had been near-impenetrable, his feet hidden in darkness as he kept to narrow bands of woodland protecting crops from the
road. Energy shortages forbade street lighting at night, but there had been few settlements or houses near Abergil’s property. Dense, sopping clouds had covered the meagre iridescence of the
heavens. Twice he’d stumbled in the wrong direction and crouched to catch his breath and re-orientate his retreat. But despite the discomfort of his wounds, and the fresh horror of killing
two people, it was the lingering sense of being followed through the dark that now gave his hands a slight palsy.

Bedraggled and bleeding, rent and grazed, he had eventually returned to his lodgings. The grey-toothed and mute landlady had still been awake. Appearing crushed beneath some permanent weight of
personal misery, which dimmed her eyes to a watery blue and sank the flesh at the sides of her mouth, she’d not said a word to him and only watched him stumble up the stairs to the room
he’d now need to evacuate by morning. But all he’d mind for was the
thing
in the trees.

Deciding against his torch, which would have been seen for miles, unless absolutely necessary when he was caught on a spiny branch, or after he’d stumbled into a dead end, he’d
hauled himself through the undergrowth at the side of the crop fields, and splashed through ditches already knee-deep with rain water, at the side of the roads that took him away from the
criminal’s home. And he’d become certain he’d been tracked all the way back to the car he’d parked earlier, tight to the hedgerow of a strawberry field. Only then did he
stop casting fearful looks backwards, prepared to shoot whatever it was that seemed to be skittering through his disorderly wake.

Once the possibility of a pursuer had infiltrated his thoughts, he’d never stopped sensing it nearby. Every ten steps, he’d paused to peer about in a din of rainfall and heart thuds,
ready to shoot at the closest crackle, snap, or the most immediate flurry of wet motion. But he’d seen nothing save the jagged outlines of black tree branches, the sway of leaf clusters
buffeted by the wind, or the smudge of the stone walls bordering the road.

Onwards he’d pushed, more quickly each time, only slowing again when catching anew the rapid rushings of a thing scraped by twigs and flapped by wet leaves close behind him, or to one
side. Twice he’d hissed a challenge and been answered only by heavy splashes of water funnelling above his head. But whatever was disturbing the branches and verdure behind him had
consistently failed to reveal itself, as if
it
were invisible.

Over the last half-mile he’d blindly run into trees, scratched and speared himself, had his face repeatedly branch-whipped, his knuckles tugged at by brambles. He’d then continued
with his face upturned, trying to catch a better sight of the suggestion of thin limbs that began launching from a tree branch to disappear into another silhouetted clump of cover; nearly seen
swoops and winged flashes, beneath a black sky, or sudden bustles amidst the ocean sounds of the wind, shrieking through the tallest oaks and mountain ash, as if something large had periodically
thrashed about, and directly above his head. Falling several times, and twisting onto his back, his gun hand wavering in the wet, inky atmosphere, he’d been convinced he’d become the
quarry of something of the air.