Lost Girl (8 page)

Towards the top of the bag, his fingers located the cold metal of the handgun, and spidered over the shape to find the handle, trigger guard, safety catch. Then he backed himself up the wall,
dipping his face to shake it free of the tickling lines of sweat that slathered his cold, ashen cheeks inside his Balaclava.

Bowles stopped his rampage, bent double on the landing, and the father could see him clutching his wet face, as if the man were attempting to peel away the incendiary vines that smouldered so
deep. The ogre spat, gargled and swore. Above these sounds of distress, the father listened for any signs that the neighbours had been roused by the breaking glass, the bullock bellows and wall
thumps.

At the top of the stairs, the father found a light switch and clicked it down. Only one bulb had been smashed, but no light came from the second fitting. The power must have been cut, which
explained the ogre’s practised shuntings through the dark. ‘I’ve a gun,’ he called out. ‘I’ll shoot you through the mouth if you don’t shut it.’ The
father’s voice was weak and trembled from the pain in his shoulder. He pictured his torso was now rent asunder, with a scapula smashed like pottery, a collar bone leaking marrow.

‘I ain’t got nuffing,’ the ogre cried out, before it took to dry heaving.

Another voice rose from beyond a closed door. ‘Bowwy? Bowwy? You get him?’

There was another man inside the house, but the father did not know how this could be; he’d seen no one but Bowles enter or leave the building for days. He didn’t know if he should
bolt from the house or go for the torch.

The ogre ignored the other man and continued to cuss at its flooding eyes.

‘Bowwy, Bowwy.’ Again the voice, muffled in one of the first-floor rooms. ‘I’m coming out. You get the bastard? Who was it? That junkie cunt?’

Slapping one hand against the walls and doors, the ogre slobbered and thumped away. Spitting, it finally fell at the bathroom sink and clawed the taps.

The father moved across the landing, shaking at the agony that was his shoulder, until he reached the torch. Some feeling was seeping back inside the dead arm. He pocketed the handgun and picked
up the torch.

A second door in the passage clicked open. The father turned and shone the torchlight into a pale face that instantly recoiled like a sea creature, back into its stale darkness. The door
closed.

Standing outside the room, he heard a scattering of objects beyond the door and guessed that the second man was going for a weapon. He glanced at the ogre on its knees in the bathroom, dousing
its face and grunting. If these two men chased him, there would be noise and shouting outside.

‘You want it? Eh? You fucking want it?’ the second man cried out from inside the room.

The father slipped the torch under the armpit of his injured shoulder, whimpering at the merest movement of that joint, drew his gun and booted open the door. The torch shone through, but too
low. He leaned his weight backwards, onto his burning heels, to raise the beam. Torchlight whipped across disordered blankets about a camp bed, a floor strewn with clothes, empty bottles, a screen
on a table, an old wardrobe, and finally onto a bony face belonging to a small man with thinning grey hair, who wore a t-shirt with a stretched neck and underpants that sagged off his waist. The
man held a glass bottle. ‘Weren’t me,’ he said. ‘Ain’t got fuck all to do with me. Bowles brought them here.’ The man then frowned, stupefied, as he took in more
of the father’s bush hat and Balaclava. Bending even further backwards, the father raised the torch into the man’s eyes.

‘You ain’t the filth,’ the man said, almost joyously, as if he’d bested the father at some ruse, before raising his arm to hurl the bottle. Without a thought the father
shot through the torch’s yellow glare.

The snarling face jerked. There was a brief hint of a small black hole, punched above an eye, before the back of the grey head scattered wetly across the messy room, like a handful of pebbles
flung hard through a leafy bush.

The father lowered the gun and moved away.

Bowles now sat with his back to the toilet, a dirty towel pressed into his face.

Dear God
. He’d just murdered a man while swept along in a rush of anger, adrenaline, joyous endorphins bathing his shoulder from the inside, and a reckless desire to destroy
anyone who opposed his presence. The car was a long and terrible run away. Shots fired would sometimes bring a patrol car. The address wasn’t in the town centre, where violence was habitual,
but would righteous neighbours, sharing these hideous walls, know the sound of a handgun? He wondered all of this while aware of the wasted seconds. The weapon had made a short, dull, slapping
sound and was hardly fearsome on the ear.

The father looked to the next set of stairs, which led to the loft conversion. A closed white door was visible. Feet retreated from behind it and lowered voices rumbled. But whoever was there
soon fell quiet as if they knew he was listening to them. The father recalled a loft conversion seen from outside. ‘Who is that?’ he said to Bowles. ‘Up there?’

Bowles stayed quiet.

Beside his foot, the father saw what he had been struck with: the polished handle of a snooker cue, unscrewed for demolishings in confined spaces.

Bowles peered at the father around the side of the towel, with one sphincter eye. ‘What you want?’

The father had to swallow to speak. Still so deeply puzzled by his actions, he also needed to force himself to remember why he had come to this place where he had become so unwound, so quickly.
‘Information.’ His good hand opened the rucksack. Two of his shaky fingers found the photograph of his daughter. He went and placed it on the bathroom floor, stepped back, then
retrained the handgun on the big man.

The father glanced again, over his shoulder, at the loft door when a bed strained its springs as someone above climbed onto a mattress. Curious, the father moved the torch onto the door and saw
the padlock, then returned his sweat-stinging eyes to the figure on the bathroom floor. ‘What am I going to find up there?’

‘Nuffing.’

‘That so?’ The father wanted to fire the gun again before the police arrived, so that Bowles would never get away with what he had done in this house and in other places. ‘The
picture. Look at it.’ The father shone the torch on the photograph. ‘Lean forward and take a look.’

Bowles obeyed, then leaned back. ‘I didn’t take her.’

‘Who did?’

He shook his head.

‘Give me a clue or this might go off again.’ The father shook the gun in the air.

‘I tell you anyfing, youse will kill me.’

‘Your friend’s dead. I don’t want to kill again, but I will. The photo.’

Bowles shifted about where he sat. ‘You have to ask Rory about her.’

‘Who’s Rory?’

‘He lives down the front. Says to me, he knew who done that one.’

Bowles’s one available eye closed, issued fresh tears. The father scrutinized the man’s face. ‘Second name? Address?’

‘Forrester. Lives in one of them old hotels. The Commodore. You won’t get near him though, cus he’s mobbed up wiv the Kings.’ Bowles smirked as if proud of even a minor
association with this group:
Kings
. He was referring to an organized criminal gang, who would be running something in and out of the area: drugs, wealthy refugees, prostitutes, meat,
medicine, like all of the other gangs; mostly stuff that was no longer manufactured in the country any more, or exported from others, which was nearly anything people wanted badly. Kings: they
sounded familiar. Yes, they’d murdered a lot of people in Bristol.

‘The Kings? More stupid pricks? How many stupid pricks live in this town? If I had known there were this many stupid pricks here, I would never have come in the first place.’

‘You don’t wanna know.’ The figure’s anal eye moved to the painting on the wall. Something approximating pride appeared in his plump face.

The father took out a pair of cuffs. ‘Put these on. You can take me to Rory now.’

‘No chance.’

‘Better there than here.’

Upstairs someone had started to move again. Bowles glanced up, unable to conceal his concern. He then peered at the father and opened his mouth as if to explain something. The father shook his
head. ‘Cuffs.’

Obediently, Bowles cuffed his own hands, though as loosely as he could manage on his doughy wrists.

‘Tighter.’

The father listened to the clicks as Bowles ratcheted the metal tighter. When the steel indented the man’s flesh, the father lowered the gun. ‘That door to the loft, where are the
keys to the padlock?’

Bowles’s swallow was audible. ‘It was Nige who brought them . . . Anyways they like it here. Council says we gotta take in refugees, if we’s got spare rooms, like.’ The
man’s voice was almost a whisper by the time he completed the final sentence. Whatever he’d told himself about why he kept the attic door padlocked was losing veracity and validity the
more he saw of the father’s eyes within the Balaclava.

The father listened for sirens. Heard none. ‘Keys.’

On the verge of tears, Bowles said, ‘Please don’t, mister.’

I am an imposter. A tired, so tired, father. An idiot with a spray can and a gun. A fool in a land of monsters, who took up arms and became a clown
.

Lying on the bed, the spent muscles in the father’s legs thumped with aftershocks. Furnace heat swelled from the baked and dusty ground outside the hotel and beat against its steel, glass
and oven bricks.

The gun rested on the bed beside his knee, taunting him with estimations of his future: the years that must now be spent in a stifling prison. Unable to stand the sight of it, he used what
little of his strength remained to zip the handgun inside the rucksack. Using a foot, he pushed the bag to the bottom of the mattress.

As soon as he’d returned to his room, he’d surrendered to his body’s desire for stillness and for fuller assessments of damage sustained. Morning’s searing light had
already revealed torn trousers and bloodied knees, collected in the rout, and his forearms were blotted by cuts and striped with scratches. The pain in his shoulder continued to pulse through his
left arm and across his back.

At least this strange passivity supplanted the riot of thoughts that had driven him through the early hours. Partial recollections of those intense, furious seconds in the darkness had lessened,
then dispersed like a tired but once frantic crowd, to leave a curious calm about the wreckage in his memory. His body was loose-limbed but heavy now, flat, exhausted, and he was no longer the man
who had done
that
. Whatever electricity had crackled along his nerves and roared through his blood had earthed itself. The hate-filled ape inside him had slipped away, in shame or
astonishment, and gone back to the dark to leave a frail, shaken soul in its place. How many times would that creature have to come out shrieking before it cindered him, or refused to leave?

Pulling hard on the neck of a bottle of Welsh rum, he closed his eyes and prayed for this all to end, and for him to find, or bid farewell, to his daughter. Her picture lay on the pillow beside
his head. Her father, he knew, had gone too far.

The father had now waited a long time for the throwing wide of the door. Even though he had shot and killed two men that morning, the police had not come for him. He’d expected their swift
arrival, preceded by distant but encroaching sirens: the ancient song that trilled the blood’s memory and alarmed ne’er-do-wells into fights and flights. But who knew what would even be
investigated any more? And in the slow, hot hours behind drawn curtains, the father discovered ample time to consider his retreat.

After the killing was done, a man in the house neighbouring Bowles’s unlit hive had come out of his back door, naked save for a pair of jeans. He’d turned his torch on the father: a
bush-hatted felon in a scrapyard. The neighbour had confronted the father’s wet, white face, and illumined a man aghast at his sudden commitment to terrible, irreversible actions. Right after
he’d shot Bowles, the father had yanked off his Balaclava and been sick in the kitchen. A reluctant executioner with no stomach for what the world asked of him, he’d then dripped
half-digested tofu Bolognese and DNA all through the crime scene. It had been the second killing that had rendered him witless and harrowed him ashen in a stranger’s yard. He had been reborn
a man permanently removed from the safe ground of a decency that he’d always taken for granted.

Just after the neighbour appeared, the father had launched himself at the rear fence, and careered over the crooked paving slabs on rickety, half-numb legs, his knees reduced to creaking hinges,
his mind jumping with subliminal flashes: blooded flesh, white faces, loud voices, gun shots.

Bowles’s neighbour, a father too, who had dared to brave all odds by bringing children into an old world down on its knees in the heat, and adrift upon its back in the floods, had quickly
retreated through the back door of his home, struck dumb with fear and disgust at what he’d seen over the garden fence: the bush-hatted puker, the stumble-wreck killer, tripping his way to
bustle through the fence’s rotted planks like an animal affrighted in a pen.

To have made another father even more afraid of what lapped at the shores of every home in treacherous nocturnal tides now smote the father’s heart as he lay alone in his hotel room. At
this he felt a terrible shame creep through him, more than at the red deeds he’d performed in that dim nest of molesters that were never to be undone. For his own sake, the father had already
assumed that the darkness of the ogre’s grim halls would eventually settle into a persistent though manageable trauma, but that the family next door would have to linger in perpetual
anticipation of another killer’s arrival in the night.

Hours passed and the heat in the room broiled the father out of brief sleeps, basting him in an animal lard of remorse and misery, outlining his scarecrow bones with sweat, as a corpse leaves
tracings in a winding sheet. He periodically gulped warm water from a plastic bottle, wincing. Even swallowing hurt his shoulder. Had he not been so lean, muscle meats and fats would have borne the
impact of the ogre’s club. As things were, the snooker cue had ricocheted off actual bone. Left him splintered and tattered: a messenger of judgement and death, but one ungraceful and
ramshackle in the grim businesses he now conducted at the houses of men who ended childhoods.