Lost Girl Read online

  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.’

  ‘I told you, I never reoffended. My wife . . .’ He swallowed. ‘My wife was seriously ill, and I—’

  ‘You ever really cared about her, you wouldn’t have put her through seven kinds of hell.’

  The father felt his advantage slipping away. A recurring problem with the spray was the escalation of fear in the victim of a second dose, or something else just as bad. The discomfort of the gas was intolerable, and the afflicted even began to believe they’d done nothing wrong, that they’d hung up their boots and never been near a single mother with a drug addiction again. That was no good, and nor was a false confession to stop the agony: a timeless problem with torture.

  The father put the can on the coffee table so that Robert could see the little yellow pillar from hell, filled with compressed fire and brain-freezing skull-fuckery. ‘Robert, we both know your predilection is something you’ll never recover from, and it’s not something you will ever resist when it calls. You may not even be in control of your legs when you see a set of swings and a seesaw. Until your sex drive starts to resemble the dead lawn out back, it’s a white-knuckle ride. I’ve done my homework and I understand, so denial is just no good to me.’ The father checked his watch. ‘I’m on a clock.’

  ‘Someone is coming . . . friends, they—’

  ‘Sure, sure they are. And you’ll have plenty of time to freshen up once we’re done.’

  Something that might have been hope flickered across Robert’s face, before the emotion’s strength failed and could not pick up the miserable, suspicious, downcast mouth that would be set in stone long after the father left the premises. And now the two of them were in the living room and the tussle was behind them, the father was beginning to self-hate. A distant version of himself wanted to beg forgiveness for what he had just done to an old man in his bedroom. But the father wheeled that self away and shut it inside a back room of his head, and then he swallowed the key.

  He went rummaging in the rucksack again, fetched out the photograph in the plastic bag, moved closer to the easy chair. Robert’s eyes followed him, wary, but no longer beseeching because the contempt was seeping back. In what little of the father’s face that he could see, the eyes and nothing more, Robert had just glimpsed a trait that he believed he could work on: a weakness. The father had seen this near-hidden but eager expression in men like Robert before; they wanted a lowering eyelid, a flicker, a dilation, something like that, something near-imperceptible. Robert wanted to know what people cared about, as if the information was a toehold on a sheer rock face to work on, widen, expand into a handhold, then a ledge, eventually a cave they could settle down inside to begin whispering. Get a trickle of sand moving, some loose ground. Keep it up until there was a rockslide of trust and familiarity. Then he was holding the rope and someone else was dangling at the end of it. The father had used blunt instruments on Robert, but suspected the man had finer tools to work with on him. If you let him. But this wasn’t a game of chess, not any kind of negotiation either, because such things had done the world no good; there was never agreement when it was required, there was nothing left but self-interest and the necessary force to achieve it.

  The father skipped to closing statements and sentencing. He hardened his tone, but kept his voice low. ‘There will be no explanations, no excuses. No chatter. The jury on you came in a long time ago. We’ll never bond, Robert. If you say one more word that I feel is moving us away from the very specific information I came here to gather, then I will spray you like a greenfly and put the rubber ball back inside your mouth. At your age, two, maybe three doses will give you a cardiac arrest. So, how about no more doses and you just find it in yourself t
o tell the truth. Now, this is what I know. You were the owner of an agency that supplied staff to care homes for children. You supplied three homes with carers. But you also employed your mates, with whom you shared similar interests.’

  ‘Ancient history,’ Robert said, in an aristocratic drawl. His face had faded grey, and gone all pinched around the mouth. Welling eyes were lidded and even looking down a long nose at the father, who was out of his seat like a jack-in-the box to swipe up the spray can.

  Robert flinched. ‘Sorry,’ he barely said.

  The father slowly returned to his seat and settled himself. ‘You were always the ringleader. You oversaw everything. Anything your group did, you knew about. Two of your associates vanished into Thailand a few years before 2051, a year that is very pertinent to today’s meeting. The third, Billy Furrow, was killed in prison in 2050. So none of your inner circle was available to me, and could not have been involved in the abduction that I’m here to investigate. But you may have had associates in the area who knew something about this snatch in ’51. I don’t entirely fancy you for the crime, Robert, but you are just the sort of bird that would flock with those that did take . . .’ The father cleared his throat.

  ‘Social workers blew the whistle on you in 2046. Under Section 47 of the Children Act 1989, the local authority had a duty to investigate any child in danger, or suffering abuse. A social worker in Plymouth demanded an investigation into all three care homes that you were intimately familiar with. In fact, one social worker believed you, in effect, ran these homes with your mates.

  ‘You pleaded not guilty to seventy-two counts of taking indecent photographs of children between the ages of three and six. Seventeen counts of indecency with a child were also added to the charges. So you might understand why your protestations about your sick wife and never reoffending hold no water. You were sentenced to seven years in prison. The sentence was reduced to two years due to chronic overcrowding after the Bristol riots and you were freed the following year. You came home and I can only assume that it was business as usual.

  ‘Most of your known victims were children in care, but you were a regular stroller around whatever seaside attractions were still operational, as was revealed by your photographic archive. You were getting on, but you were probably still active at the time of any abductions in 2051. Statistics suggest that you would still be, at the very least, in the loop.

  ‘After 2048, the police lost sight of you. This means they were no longer looking at you, Robert, in 2051. A few years had drifted by since you went down, and things changed here, didn’t they? The Greeks, the Spanish, and many more of the Africans who’d made it as far as Europe, all hit the beaches and stormed the ports and tunnels. Three million people were directed into the south-west, because it was still the least populated part of England. So by 2051, no one had the time to look for one little girl any more. And you must have been rubbing your fucking hands, Robert.

  ‘But in 2051, a year that I will never forget, the local police’s Child Protection Team consisted of two people. One of them killed himself last year. Depression suicide. The other one doesn’t work any more. They did what they could, but working knowledge of the case, and of the many sex offenders in this county, is now thin on the ground. The team only has one full-time member of staff now. Did you know that? And the social workers are drowning in a tide of sick, malnourished and traumatized children, in temporary accommodation and refugee settlements, down the coast. I bet you can see where this is leading and you are beginning to understand why I am here. There are other ways to look for missing children, Robert, and I am one of them.’

  Robert’s nostrils flared, either from suppressed rage or humiliation. ‘Home Guard, eh?’

  ‘Now, not only do you have a classic profile for a repeat sex offender, but your preferred victim’s gender is female. Your preferred age range is three to six years old, and that’s another reason why I am here today. There is no wiggle room. So I want you to take a good, long look at this picture and then I want you to help me with my inquiries. OK?’

  ‘Vigilante. Thought they’d cleared you out.’

  ‘Clear your mind, Robert. Concentrate.’ And then the father turned the picture around and held it a few inches from Robert’s face.

  In anti-climactic fashion Robert asked for his reading glasses and the father was uncomfortably reminded of an expert preparing to inspect a sample within his field of expertise.

  The father trussed Robert’s ankles with the second set of cuffs, scanned the area around his chair, placed the stun spray back in the rucksack, then went and collected the glasses from a table in the master bedroom. He was not convinced Robert needed the spectacles; when he returned to the living room, the man was eyeballing the picture on the coffee table, and wasn’t squinting. Even after all they’d been through, he still took the father for a prick.

  ‘I recognize her,’ Robert said, looking up directly into the eyes of the father, who adjusted his own feet to remain steady. His blood had bloomed after shock, hope, terror and euphoria had left him dizzy and erased all the colour from the room. But Robert waited and was in no hurry to blurt. He let the tantalizing detail hang, and the father no longer wanted to hit Robert; he wanted to beg and plead with him for another sentence, a name, a date, or place. And Robert knew this. ‘I remember the news story. Was she taken from a garden?’

  The father only nodded because he didn’t know what to say. This was a clever move. Robert was already creating distance by suggesting, quite convincingly, that he couldn’t remember the details of the abduction. But an abduction of a child in Robert’s town was the kind of thing the man would remember with exacting clarity.

  Or was Robert telling the damned truth? The father never knew, not really. Neither did psychiatrists, or police detectives, parole boards, or any explorers of the mind. He’d long come to believe that all actions were symptoms of selves that came and went like smoke rings, in and out of scarlet doorways, thickening then dispersing. The autocrat in the deep was never glimpsed. He lay in the primordial black and fired signals from unreachable fathoms. No one saw his face. The ruler of us was unique and ineffable.

  Sullen and flattened by the realization that there would probably be no great revelation that morning, the father regrouped his wits by an act of will. ‘I’m on the brink of crop-dusting your bloody chair, Robert. You gotta do better than this.’

  Robert swallowed. ‘There was talk . . .’

  The father leaned into him, his vision flickering around the edges. ‘Where? Online?’

  Robert nodded. ‘Around that time. And I don’t know anything else about it, I really don’t—’

  ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘There was talk about it, about who could’ – Robert paused to choose his words carefully – ‘have involved themselves. No one local was the consensus. Or, at least, no one ever mentioned anything that convinced me.’

  ‘But some of them claimed to know something?’

  ‘No more than jests and things like that. About, you know, what might . . . People pretended they knew.’ Robert swallowed.

  At the mention of ‘jests’, Robert must have seen the blood bulge the very skin of the father’s eyeballs. Robert may also have seen a screaming mouth in each of the pupils facing him, while the father sensed the house rise a few inches and then drop without rattling a single porcelain knick-knack on the mantel. His anger was white-hot coals followed by the cold of deep space. One of his hands fidgeted at something else he kept inside the rucksack: the final shit.

  ‘Perhaps it was someone you knew.’ Robert offered this in a conciliatory tone of voice, as if he were talking to a dangerous simpleton.

  ‘I don’t know anyone that awful.’

  ‘Addicts, they’ll take anything to sell.’

  ‘Enough of these straws your claws are clutching at. Let us return to the jests, Robert. What precisely did you and your peers find so funny about this abduction?’

  ‘Not me. Never. I was
just saying that some pretended, the more garrulous elements, that they knew . . . where she was, who she was with . . . That sort of thing.’ He cleared his throat. ‘But I think the prevailing opinion was that a visitor to the area, an opportunist, may have been responsible.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Moved her elsewhere. Abroad. Possibly. Or . . . did something unspeakable and then covered their tracks.’

  Unspeakable. The terrible three hours after a child’s abduction when the abominable, the unthinkable, could occur, but was something to laugh about online for Robert and his mates. Shaky as a scarecrow released from its pole, the father moved his feet.

  Robert’s turmeric-puffy eyes pleaded with him; even in a burning squint they could read the change in the intruder. ‘I’m afraid I cannot help you. If I knew anything I would hardly keep it to myself. Abduction was never . . . I’d never taken anyone’s . . . I would never . . . What are you doing?’ Robert turned his head this way and that way to see why the father had gone behind the easy chair. He even attempted to rise.

  The father said, ‘Sit,’ in a voice belonging to some other man.

  Robert stayed seated. ‘Nothing, there is nothing more I can tell you. Names. I have names of others who may be able to assist you. Who were around at the time. Who were intrigued by . . .’

  The father came round from behind the easy chair and leaned over the coffee table. He took Robert’s equipment from the table top and placed everything on the TV dinner tray. Stuck memory pins into the back of anything with a memory. ‘All of them. Every one of them,’ he said. ‘Numbers and email addresses. Your passwords, user names, the sites, encryptions, links, the places. Download them from everywhere you store your filth. If the names don’t check out, then God help you, Robert.’

  Robert started typing with cuffed wrists, his hands moving like featherless ghost birds, bony herons descending and alighting from the screen. Occasionally he glanced nervously at where the father stood, just behind his right ear, watching his progress and making sure that he didn’t send a message. Sweat rolled from the tip of Robert’s nose.