Lost Girl Read online

  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.

  THREE

  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.

  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.

  FOUR

  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. Thes
e 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.