Lost Girl (11 page)

‘Not quite. He’ll be investigated for sure. Eventually. When the resources and timings are right, they’ll look for him. But you don’t set the pace here. And neither do
I.’

‘But how long? When will this Rory be investigated? Are we talking weeks, months . . . or longer?’

‘I don’t know. King Death is a very nasty organization. Probably the worst gang now, in most parts of the country. They go back decades, as long ago as the fall of communism in
Russia. Trans-national crooks to start with, smuggling imports with high rates of tax. They evolved into kidnap and ransom specialists years ago. You might even remember the kidnapped children of
the solar field industry executives in 2036. That was them. There’s rumours of dozens of other high-profile targets kept out of the news, who paid significant ransoms to get their executives
back, and their executives’ children back. That’s how they made their biggest paydays until drugs, arms, food and medicine expanded the franchise. But trafficking has been the most
lucrative business for them yet, in combo with where it bleeds into the sex trade.

‘They’ve forged links with all the local elements that came in with the refugees, the Kurds, Serbs, North Africans. You name it. There is no single ethnic bias any more. When
cross-border intelligence folded, it’s anyone’s guess how many of the hard core came here from eastern Europe. But Interpol believe they’ve upwards of eighty thousand foot
soldiers in the UK alone now. These outfits are one of the few success stories from the last twenty years.’

The father, like everyone else, had seen gang members around the coastal places where he’d drifted, and watched them strutting about the better harbours, often outside the large homes he
had driven past, beyond the towns; buildings they took possession of with huge sums of cash combined with intimidation. Lots of fat men, foreign and home-grown, taking ownership of the lifeboat
island of Europe, shouting communications at screens, or admiring their own clothes and cars. Standing on long driveways, opening and shutting boots, or playing with dogs, seemingly laconic men,
lazy in expensive clothes, drinking wine in the better hotels sealed behind high fences, their feet spread too far apart in arrogant contentment; men on loungers beside swimming pools. Swine
dressed in whatever the French and Italian mills could still produce and sell at grotesque prices. The wealthiest and most important were never even seen; they had private grounds, penthouses,
subterranean mansions and compounds with walls the father would never scale.

‘I don’t get it. Why would they kidnap my girl? We didn’t have any money. Not real money. We didn’t count. I was a regional manager. This doesn’t make sense. For
them to target us, we’d have to have something they wanted.’

‘You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. And your guess is as good as mine. But look, let’s not get carried away with hearsay from Murray Bowles. He probably only told you
so he could intimidate you with his affiliations. If she was taken by a gang then she was taken for . . .’

‘What?’

‘Something we probably don’t want to talk about. But that seems unlikely. It would be near-unprecedented for a gang to snatch a middle-class child from a middle-class area, with no
prospect of a significant ransom. Your family does not fit the profile to lose a child to sex traffickers. It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely with far easier catches in the refugee and
substance-addicted populations around the fronts.’

Trafficked
. She’d mentioned sex traffickers again. The father felt his soul slump to its knees at the merest suggestion of an international connection, of an impossible widening
of the geographical area beyond that which he could hope to search.

‘It’s difficult to believe,’ Scarlett added, ‘but the police have almost no intelligence coming from inside the King Death organization, and they can’t verify what
testimony they do get either. But if there’s a King connection, reprisals for snitching are very harsh. I want you to go and refresh your memory on the Bristol drug wars in 2047, so you can
see what we’d be up against.’

The father clenched his one good hand into a fist. ‘There are methods that are sometimes used to extract information. I have read about this. I know it happens.’

‘Torture? Sure. For suspects of political killings, high-profile assassinations, terrorist links. But nothing will be pulled out of the bottom drawer on a rumour about a sex trafficker and
one missing child. Yours is a very old case now.’

The father momentarily forgot the pain in his shoulder and ground his teeth. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘You won’t. You’ve done enough. This mess is containable, but anything else could see you caught, or worse. You cannot risk putting yourself anywhere near this group, because
what happens then? You’d be risking everything, yourself, me, our work, and our assistance for others in your situation. This has gone far enough. I’m sorry.’

‘We’re close.’

‘No, we are not. We have nothing concrete.’

‘Bowles wasn’t lying. I know it. I know he wasn’t . . . He had this picture. It was horrible, strange. Not something a man like that would . . . I don’t know . . . have
in his house. A picture of death, I think. But it seemed to suggest something else, a connection. To King Death? Maybe. And this Rory Forrester is in with them. There must be something in what
Bowles said.’

‘How do you know? From pictures and some lowlife bragging about his mob affiliations? We’ll need a lot more than that.’

I don’t agree
.

For the following three days, the father stared at a screen in his little room, searching, filtering, speed-reading, occasionally pausing to sit back, light-headed and nauseous
from both the heat and the impact of the pictures and films he’d found. It had not taken him long to realize that if there was a King Death connection to his daughter’s abduction, the
odds had changed and the dangers had increased incalculably, perhaps enough to make him want to never leave the room again.

Distant incidents in Bristol, London, Glasgow, Cardiff, Leeds and Plymouth were refreshed in his memory: lists of casualties, and passport photographs of scarred, tattooed and emotionless faces
of men who had done things to people that would not have been out of place in medieval battles. Deeds gradually accepted by the public with a numb resignation. Another unanticipated consequence of
economic inequality, the refugee crisis, the repeated disruption from heatwaves, storms and floods; all opportunities for the gangs to fast-track their interests through extortion, bribery, kidnap,
blackmail, intimidation and violence.

A relentless spate of face-saving revenge killings and turf wars had raged during the forties: throttlings, burnings, head shots, and beheadings. Each method of murder becoming a gang signature
in a grim competition to heap even greater horrors onto a world already weeping with horror. But above all others, the Kings truly were the reigning monarchs of ruin, vice, corruption and
murder.

He’d turned his face away from the screen at the sight of what they’d done in Bristol in ’47. Members of the public had found the bodies before the police, then taken pictures
and posted them: images of eighteen headless shapes with their hands tied, photographed on the carpeted floor of a terraced house. The victims had been people traffickers reluctant to submit
themselves to a more ruthless tribe that favoured decapitation to make its mark in a terrible decade: a never-ending carousel of flame, black smoke, glass-strewn streets, bodies under tarpaulins,
riot shields glittering in sunlight, placards, aerial footage of felled buildings in other countries, churning brown water moving too fast through places where people had once lived, trees bent in
half, tents and tents and tents stretching into forever . . . And King Death flourishing in chaos.

A grinning bone figure fluttering in rags was a more aesthetic trapping the group boasted. And so insolent was their self-assurance, the foot soldiers even tattooed the figure upon their
throats, or covered their entire backs with it, entwined with mortuary rolls, with deeds they’d performed cryptically scripted in Latin. On the street, or in prison, the ink was a better form
of protection than body armour.

Independent journalists had long claimed that the group had never been properly investigated. If they murdered their own and members of rival factions, but not the general public, the neutral
but overwhelmed police had apparently maintained a policy of ‘containment and observation’.

The climate, civil unrest and terrorism were being cited by the Home Office as the priorities of the times; every other year there were evacuations of civilian populations from parts of the
country newly, or more severely, ravaged by the weather. The standing army had guard duties and relentless patrols around power stations, crops, solar farms, factories of the synthetic food
industry, and the gated communities, whose own private security operations constantly lured police officers and soldiers away for more lucrative work. There was the processing and management of the
vast influx of refugees to be taken into account, the roads to be kept clear during evacuations from flooded areas. All of these things preoccupied the protectors of law, order and security. A
person only had to watch the news for ten minutes to be convinced by the official explanations for why the country had been engulfed by crime, both opportunist and organized. Not even the wealthy
were immune.

There was no escaping
them
now.
They
had been accepted, normalized, like too many other terrible things. And they were into
everything
, that’s what Scarlett had
said, particularly private industry and politics.

Always a folly, as well the father knew, to presume that people would forget the old world and make do with its salvageable, serviceable relics. Gangs supplied when others could not, or they
hoarded the assets for themselves. To believe that ordinary people would go without meat and embrace grains and synthetics was a mistake; they’d known that in food logistics twenty years ago.
Black markets were inevitable. People knew that what they wanted was available somewhere. People knew where they would rather be. People would pay anything for medicine if they had a sick
child.

After the father had returned his daughter’s things to the rucksack and the rucksack to the wardrobe, his hands were shaking. Closing his eyes and staring at a single
point in the distance, he’d tried to wipe his mind clear of the images he had absorbed of King Death’s victims, and of his own: the two were uncomfortably similar, like symbols on
converging routes of a critical path funnelling towards a distant rendezvous.

When he felt better able to face an inspection of his equipment, he laid all of it out on the bed and reloaded the handgun. Then sorted out his last set of fresh underwear. After he’d
dressed, he looked online at the satellite pictures of The Commodore, and the home of Rory Forrester, an affiliate of King Death.

Before he left his room, he left a voice message for Scarlett Johansson. ‘I’m sorry . . . I am going . . . I need to speak to Rory Forrester, today. Whatever happens, no one will
ever know that you helped me. I swear to you.’

As he walked to The Commodore, the father recalled the distant sight of the town and harbour, many years before, when he and his wife had first viewed Torbay from the sea while
holidaying. They had boarded a ferry from Torquay to Brixham, and from the deck they had watched a vista of white buildings cover the cliffs and hills like a child’s blocks: an imagined city,
startling in the glare, masquerading as an El Dorado, a Tangier, or Pegeia, the moored pleasure boats and yachts heraldic, their masts the lances of knights assembled in the bay.

Distant crowds about the harbour might even now startle awake dim memories of old Cannes and Saint-Tropez, at least in those who once knew such things, from when this place had called itself a
Riviera and had promised cold drinks to sip on shaded patios, bristling seafood platters, and the wearing of cool summer cottons upon salt-bleached decks. Even now, the many pillars of the former
retirement and holiday apartments, all given over to the exodus from the flooded low-lying coasts, the swamped cities, and the first and most fortunate refugees, might still look grand from a
distance, though from nowhere other than the air, or from far out upon the sparkling sea.

With every footstep through the outskirts of what remained of Livermead’s little peninsula, nearly all washed away now to the kerb of the road from Preston, the father clung to the shadow
behind the vast seawall and moved east.

People milled and turned away, nudged the father, their faces challenging or unaware, constantly changing. One side of the long road, leading to the harbour, was black with shadow, and within
such precious shade many figures huddled. They were mostly foreign and unwilling to spend more time than was necessary inside the camps, the crowded chalets further east, or in their noisy housing
blocks inside the town. Old wheezy buses, and a few cars, passed slowly on the single carriageway.

The crowds
. Whenever he encountered them, the crowds added a sense of futility to his quest that was near-unbearable, and he would swallow his despair like a lonely seabird with trash
in its gullet. Because no scene remained static, none was ever replicated in any exactitude. Streets and roads, towns, villages, cities, were endlessly repopulated, with more and more faces filling
smaller spaces all of the time. People learned to look above so many heads, and inside themselves, to escape the burden of such numbers, this cognitive tonnage of multitudes. So where, inside such
numbers, was one little girl with startled blue eyes, jet-black hair that she’d inherited from her mother, a skipping walk, and who was always so quick to cry when frightened?
She was
only four and so small when her feet left the soil of her home
.

How would one tiny face be remembered now? Hundreds of thousands wandered these paths every day, came and went, vanished. A mind could not store so many faces in an incalculable array of
moments, left behind within so many days, weeks, months, and years.