Lost Girl (3 page)

Shivering with nerves, he forced himself to visualize his approach: brisk and confident on a straight line down the left side of the close, face lowered. And then he was off, almost before
he’d made the decision to move, going through the trees, onto the road.

Buildings and trees jumped in his vision, and his legs didn’t feel too good over the first ten feet of tarmac. All he wanted was to sink to his knees.

He cleared his mind of everything but the hardwood door at the end of the street. Number 3: unlucky for some.

As the father moved through the refrigerated gloom of Robert East’s bungalow, the newsreader’s solemn voice seemed to boom in each empty room like the intonation of
a curse.

Following Spain, Italy, Turkey, the Benelux and Central European countries’ decision last month to reclose their borders, the newly formed French government is now considering the
reclosure of its own borders, claiming its territory has again been ‘overrun by refugees’. President Lemaire has declared the current situation an ‘uncontainable and unsustainable
humanitarian crisis’. The move has drawn fierce criticism from the Scandinavian bloc and Great Britain, the latter describing the policy as ‘destined to cause an incalculable loss of
life amongst the most vulnerable people on the planet’. The British nationalist leader, Benny Prince, applauded the news and urged the British emergency government to follow the French
example
.

The airwaves had long surrendered themselves to a relentless round-the-clock litany, sound bites from the biblical stories of a species’ epochal demise. Many people thought it was best to
not know, to take one day at a time. He’d never been like that. For the father the news was gripping, then monotonous, and finally meaningless. He took long breaks from the media but then its
catalogue of despair became compulsive again. Reset, start over.

This was the end of the international summary, less pressing stuff that most could cope with thinking about. The alarm of the forest fires in Europe had obscured Britain’s thoughts in
black smoke for an entire summer. At least the volume of the broadcast must have smothered the crack of glass and the bang of his knees on a wooden surface in the utility room, when the father had
upset a tub of clothes pegs and sent three plastic bottles of detergent bouncing across the lino. No intruder alarm had been set either, which meant he would be able to work onsite this morning. A
confident man lived here.

The father masked and gloved up in the kitchen: a horror-show face of white cotton complemented by rubbery octopus hands.

He noted the single plate and coffee mug in the draining rack, then entered the hall on swift feet, and paused, listening for signs of movement beneath the broadcast.

Nothing.

He entered a dining room, his torch beam scouting the walls, and saw immediately that it had been a long time since a meal was eaten there. Everything was filmed in dust. The Easts had once kept
dogs too: two spaniels. Photographs of the dogs covered the wall dominating a long-disused dining table with leather chairs for six diners. And when
she
had been around, Robert
East’s wife, Dorothy, had been fond of glazed ceramic figurines: little girls with lanterns and puppy dogs, small boys with shepherd crooks, ballet dancers and saucer-eyed kittens. Their
shiny faces had an innocence and frivolity unsuited both to the times and the sole remaining resident’s history.

Dorothy had been gone six years. Her cancer had been cured twice without much fuss, but flu had cut like a scythe through the over-sixties in 2047. But her little people, and their pets, still
crowded the shelves of a cabinet between the china plates and bric-a-brac in two corner display cabinets, either in homage to the woman, or because of the widower’s laziness. The little shiny
people all looked past the masked intruder in beatific wonderment. We all have our mementos, the father acknowledged, but how long should we keep them, when memory is just one more thing to break
us?

The father moved out of the room and further down the hallway, looking at the pictures on the walls: Robert and Dorothy sitting at the captain’s table on a cruise ship, tanned faces and
bottles of wine, real chicken.

No children in the marriage but Robert made up for that in other ways. A shame the dogs hadn’t been enough, or the father wouldn’t have been here at five thirty with a can of stun
gas in his hand.

Evidence of a solitary widower depressed the once-elegant living room too, all underwater shady now behind the closed blinds. A settee, unruffled by use, huddled next to an easy chair equipped
with a clip-on dinner tray. A white plastic trolley on wheels stood beside the chair with bottles and packets of medication, arranged around the TV control. Robert’s chair was close to the
big wall-mounted media service. A melancholy home for sure, but the guy had cruised into his seventh decade, even after what he’d done.

According to the father’s handler, Scarlett Johansson, Robert East was a man driven by his appetites, and the father thought it a rare mercy that most people did not share such hungers.
But Robert had invested a great deal of time and effort into satisfying his urges. When the police finally found time to investigate Mr East, they had learned of his expertise in lying and charming
and manipulating and tricking his way to children. Robert’s whereabouts were right too for
that day
.

Scarlett said Robert was never a suspect for his daughter’s abduction because there was no evidence against him, or anyone else for that matter, and because he’d had an alibi the man
had been ruled out during the brief investigation of 2051. Robert had always been good at alibis. But sometimes, his ambition had exceeded his ability to remain unnoticed.

Scarlett was unsatisfied with what had been done two years before: a solitary police interview with Robert East concerning his daughter’s abduction. Time, manpower and resources were in
short supply during the Torbay riots of ’51. Time, manpower and resources were in even shorter supply in 2053.
Critical
, the father had been told, and so many times. The situation
was always
critical
. But nothing was more critical to him than his little girl, and all the father had to do this morning was make certain that Robert East was not
the one
, by any
means necessary.

Inside the hall the father paused again and listened hard.

In other news, tensions have increased between Beijing and Moscow on the Sino-Russian border as the Chinese refugee crisis intensifies, extending into the fifteenth consecutive
year
.

Time to engage. The father moved along the passage to the three bedrooms. Two closed doors, the third ajar: the master bedroom.

Successive droughts in the ‘north Chinese plains’ have devastated agriculture for two decades. The recent wheat harvest in the north plains was a near-total failure, following
the third monsoon failure in five years, and in combination with the depletion of the Yellow River and the region’s deep aquifers; the fresh-water shortage was far more critical than was
estimated by the Chinese Government in 2047. The water shortage has been classed as irreversible by the UN
.

The father found Robert sitting up in bed, watching the news intently, taking bad tidings from near and far, and maybe wondering what it all meant for him.

. . .
a potential relocation of one hundred million Chinese citizens into Siberia, within two decades, will be, the minister quoted: ‘absolutely necessary’
.

The father reached into the bedroom, flicked the lights on, and stepped inside.

‘Who are you?’ Robert said, with too little surprise, as if uninvited masked visitors in his home, during the early morning, were not unusual. Maybe they weren’t. These were
strange times.

The Russian government has declared that all possible options will be considered to reverse the ‘increasing and unmanageable’ flow of migrants from the east
.

Anything could happen.

‘Don’t get up. Stay still.’

‘What do you want?’ Robert’s dentures were not in his mouth. His gummy voice was now girded with outrage at the intrusion, and sharp with contempt for the stranger at his
bedside. If the man had been frightened or infirm the father might have struggled with the morning’s work, because what he most feared in these situations was his own sympathy. Gnarly men and
obstinate men, who had wrought trauma on small children, helped him slip into the red room of the mind, and in such a hot place he was someone else, another man. He had been such a man, a man that
boiled, on his three previous moves.

The father swung the torch beam into Robert East’s face. ‘Information.’

‘Who are you?’ Robert rose up from white bed sheets: a scrawny upper body in the bundling of pyjamas, the turkey neck thrusting, salt-whiskered chin jutting, his eyes slit mean. Long
fingers immediately spidered about the bedside table, clawing for the phone, maybe a panic button.

The father looked absurd too, and a fright, in the face-clinging Balaclava and bush hat, but he didn’t read fear in Robert. This man was an old friend of confrontation, crossed boundaries,
invaded privacy, awkward conversations. And regardless of whether Mr East knew anything about his daughter, he hadn’t paid any kind of price for what he’d done to other children.
He’d remained cosy up on this hill, nested in reasonable air-conditioned comfort with no winter flood risk. The father clenched his fist around the stun spray, took a step forward and punched
down hard, knocking the man’s head into the wall.

Spit leapt silvery from Robert’s lipless mouth. The hair at the side of his head swayed like a bleached sea anemone, waving its fronds in shock. His mouth formed an ‘O’ and his
eyes widened, before
he
– before the fiend that Robert East really was – returned into the small black eyes like a devil’s spirit repossessing what it had been jolted
from. All white and wattled with rage, Robert turned his face to the father and roared like an old silverback gorilla slapped by a chimp.

The father hesitated, stunned, cement-footed by this dragon belch from a frail, birdy ribcage, horned with cadaverous collar bones. He hadn’t expected Robert to have such leathery bellows.
A pterodactyl, he thought unkindly, erupting from its cotton nest. And soon, Robert was all veined pate, fringed with wisps, big bony hands clenching, and clawed feet kicking at the sheets in his
petulant haste to get up, get out, and to get at the trespasser.

This how you kept your pervy peers in line, Robert?

The father wished he’d hit the man harder. Half measures and indecision would sink him, so he readied the stun spray canister, no bigger than a lipstick, and puffed the aerosol over the
man’s skull. With his own face turned to the side, his hand shielding blowback, he made sure to vapour Robert thoroughly.

Scarlett had once called the gas ‘evil shit’. Not long after they’d become acquainted, she’d supplied the father with a pick-up location, where he’d found the
police-issue nerve agent, amongst other equipment, zipped inside an old vinyl school bag. She’d once said that a face full of the gas was like a combination of inhaling black pepper and
dipping your head into lightless arctic waters, forty below. Eyes would feel wind-whipped sands and weep sulphuric tears as the frontal lobes crackled to ice. Evil shit indeed.

The ‘final shit’, the handgun, the father had procured for himself.

Robert steam-whistled and clutched his face. His torso toppled, skull-thumping the carpet between the father’s ankles. By the waistband, the father hauled the rest of Robert out of bed and
set him down, face first in his tears. On the ground, Robert started to shiver inside his pyjamas and vest like a scared child. For a few minutes he’d be insensible, incapable, with all of
his inner alarms screaming about the pepper and the ice, the pain and the lightning storm that his thoughts now staggered through.

The father put away the evil shit and unzipped the rucksack strung round his front. Dipped his chin inside, with the small torch clamped between his teeth, and took out the ‘kinky
shit’: a rubber ball on a leather strap.

Pulling Robert’s head up by the straggly white trim on the eggshell skull, the father cupped the gasping mouth with his rubbery hand, the ball gag sitting in his palm. Without the
impediment of dentures, the gag went into Robert’s maw like an unripe plum. The father then buckled the ball gag tight at the back of the old man’s head, strapping the tanned furrows of
skin good and tight. He finished by cuffing the man’s wrists, and that was easy as the hands were clamped over a pair of streaming eyes. He was getting better at this.

Rolling Robert onto his back with his foot, the father surveyed the long fellow more closely. Rangy shanks and old bones. He hadn’t bathed in a while either and smelled of sour cream and
vinegar.

The father unholstered his bottle of chemically treated saline from his rucksack and doused Robert’s face, shaking the container empty. Robert moved his hands to let the tepid liquid
relief swill and rinse out his eye sockets. He spluttered, coughed like a bull, then fell to groaning and clawing at the kinky shit between his gums, now stuffing up his head with old Wellington
boot fumes.

‘Nasty, evil shit. Can’s full too. And I’m not shy with it, Robert. I’ll discharge it all day in this room until it rattles dry. I’ve seen eyes bulge like beef
tomatoes after two doses.’ The father tapped Robert’s hip with the toe of his hiking boot. ‘On your feet, or your knees if you can’t see shit. And take me to your
stash.’

Sat in the recliner, Robert was scared, chilli-eyed, shuddery, and locked in by a dinner tray like a baby in a high chair. Cuffed hands lay limp in his lap. His media devices
were lined up, side by side, on the coffee table. ‘That’s all in the past. I’ve never reoffended.’ And that was all Robert seemed inclined to say.

‘When you were barred from the care homes, how did you get your fix? Who was in your last crew? Names, Robert. Names and addresses.’