Lost Girl (12 page)

Two years
.

There had been no eye witnesses the afternoon she was abducted. Not one.

No one else is looking for you now. Only Daddy
.

Someone had to speak up, either someone who had been present and helped sweep the small figure aloft, or someone with secret information. They needed to whisper soon, or spit the story from a
reddish, tooth-splintered mouth, to lead him nearer to
the one
.

Did you cover her little mouth, or drug her? Did her eyes ever open again? Did they open and see a monster? Did a heart no bigger than an egg break open, as the gulf widened between that
garden gate and her dark eyes?

For every tear she shed, I will pluck my retribution from your living flesh. Her terror and her anguish will be
yours.

The father walked deeper into the harbour and forced himself to put away those thoughts that still came most days, and which turned his head bloodless and wooden, like a carving that grimaced
through the pain of old regrets. Everlasting was the agony of such remembrance.

No coastal paradise here either now. The father might have become a wanderer in ancient times, put ashore in a sweltering hive of pirates, slaves, cut-throats, urchins and pickpockets, the dusty
and desperate, wide-eyed beseechers and apostles of mutating faiths, increasingly confirmed by the signs of the end of times; all driven here from places baked to clay and burned to dust, arriving
at a town besieged and battered by a remorseless yet increasingly lifeless sea.

Few but the young offered smiles to each other around the high-walled harbour, as they slipped and side-wound about the thoroughfare, beneath sun-desiccated buildings that the Victorians had
erected and never envisaged so begrimed and peeling as they were now, two centuries after the coal furnaces and fires of the Industrial Revolution belched.

Above the harbour he saw the long wounds of cliff erosion, interspersed with the white rubble of the tower blocks that came down years before, when the rains moved the topsoil in red gouts and
gushes of clay rushing to the sea. Abandoned clifftop buildings, standing like potential suicides with toes aligned at the edge, gaped eyeless at the treacherous bay that had thrashed them with
storm winds and tidal surges, so many times over so many years. The town had not been abandoned, not yet. Scarred and fragmenting, it still teemed, because there were fewer and fewer other places
left to go. But when would all of this be finally washed away, he wondered, and its foundations bleached like beak-broken shells?

Men watched the father from where they leaned against walls and beside doorways about the marina, surly sentries beneath holed signage that once offered discos, swimming pools, fish and chips.
Above the signs reared the relics of neo-classical arches, cupolas, grimacing stone balconies and other bourgeois pretensions. When he met the eyes of the men, they turned their heads but left the
father with the impression that they were not uninterested in his presence.

Smells of fried soya, oil, home-grown sugars, beery carpets sun-warmed and aromatic, and sounds of vintage electronic music drifted about the crowds, the stifling air additionally thickened by
sweat, sea salt, and sewage. Great gulls with horrid beaks and expressions reduced to simple, functional cruelties, seemed keen for those below to stumble and fall. Their guano created a messy
stucco down the drainpipes and pebbledash.

All around the inner harbour, and the vast concrete seawall that blotted out the murderous horizon of water, the father sidled and ducked through the drug sellers, the palms of his hands raised
like closing doors. Offers of cocaine, amphetamines, ecstasy, heroin, mostly homegrown and cooked now, were whispered like forbidden, mystical words from a motley of teeth-flashing diviners and
soothsayers: Arabs, Africans, Greeks, Spaniards, Turks, Algerians, Egyptians, the red-faced, heat-blasted English, all muscling and sweating about the sea front, before the pubs and ice-cream
concessions, the cannabis cafes, and those restaurants still open and selling imitation meat and fish concoctions.

Everyone was a farmer now. How much you could grow and how large the marrows, fruits and root crops were the new obsessions, and the new competitions now that designer baubles and flashy
interiors were not an option for any but the
two per cent
. About the fringes of the legitimate market – offering fruit and vegetables, grown on front lawns, roofs and excavated
patios, all local produce the wooden boards claimed, and a surplus from the country’s new breadbasket as the east coast slowly sank beneath the waves – bootleg booze, exotic prostitutes
and drugs waited inside yet darker rooms.

Clothes were recycled and sold here too. Remade, homemade, washed and heaped upon trestle tables, as were stolen and bartered electrical goods, and the agricultural tools made in the new
industries of the Midlands. Stores had been commandeered, or leased through favourable terms by the belligerent, militant councillors, and now sold and resold the junk-shop fare of things no longer
produced or imported. He’d seen the same in Totnes, Plymouth, Exeter, Brixham, Bristol and Bath: open-air markets encroached upon and infiltrated by black markets. Farm workers, itinerants,
the resettled, foreign and domestic refugees, drug addicts, more alcoholics than he believed possible in any single place, had all now gathered where holidaymakers and retirees once flocked.

The father wasn’t hungry but bought a sandwich, the filling burning with local mustard, and a bottle of orange juice squeezed fresh by Portuguese refugees in a distant grove on Welsh land
where sheep had once grazed. And then he moved up the road into grimy Torre to find The Commodore.

He’d tried to visit the place two nights before, but the streets were too busy with unpleasant antics. Earlier that morning, he’d driven through quickly too, as the sun’s fire
licked the horizon, and he’d glimpsed the closed doors to the old hotel as he passed by, while trying not to look at the building. Up here, there was nowhere safe to leave the car, so
he’d attempt an infiltration on foot, and he’d be unmasked until he was inside.

In two hours the heat would make this climb up through the town near-impossible for all but the fittest, and would drive the irritable hustling crowds of the town and harbour back indoors, like
wasps into the holes of a brick wall.

When he arrived at the warm buffets of lingering waste, one mile above the town and sea front, someone with TB coughed as if in warning like the bell above the door of a shop. The sound gruffed
from the innards of a boarded-up building with no front door, which had once sold gifts to families on holiday. Damage from the winter riots had not been repaired this deep into the town, or even
been cordoned off. Charred bones of timbers protruded through the red-brick musculature of once-white hotels and local businesses. The sickly, chemical taint of an old blaze hung over the
sun-dappled ruins. By the day’s relentless light, the father could see how the anger of the displaced and jobless, this purposeless mass, had punched itself drunk against the masonry and
timber that tried to corral it here, before pissing up the ruins.

From shadow to shadow, with his chin dipped, the father sluggishly nudged himself upwards, engulfed by fresher and fouler exhalations from the very buildings, alleyways and cramped pavements: a
dying town’s breath that he could taste, emitted with an air of bitterness that could only become hate, sublimation, or the shame of a poverty that grew to madness. Under a peculiar gravity
the father’s spine succumbed to a curve, as if in holy reverence of the wretchedness heaped about him. How could spirits ever raise themselves here? They all clung to life but gave it little
value.

The colony of addicts founded in Hele had long ago reached this far south and then swelled into every available room and beneath any vestige of shelter. To think he had crept down to the coast
too, with a wife and baby, to start again, and to flee the human ruins deposited and multiplying in the cities as the economy collapsed. But the incapable, unemployable, transient, feral,
vulnerable and hapless, the dispossessed and broken, the abandoned, had been barely contained by other regional authorities and they had already been taking up residence in much of South Devon
before he arrived.
They
waited on the other side of every town now, just over the hill. They were everywhere, the wretched, and their numbers would only grow. And yet here he was, a tired
man of no funded or legitimate occupation, sifting through human and structural debris, looking for a stolen child. He wanted to laugh loudly and freely and madly like the ragged pockets of
intoxicated sots about him, who even now, in such appalling heat, burned themselves towards a new day’s sprawling confrontations.

About the former hotels, restaurants and luxury apartments, all transformed into a grubby sprawl of hostels, the eyes that regarded the father seemed bereft of anything but cunning or
resentment. Distinctions between men and women were not always clear. Faces had been carbuncled into unique formations of bone and scar tissue from falls, sun-blistering and fights. Baseball caps
trammelled down unwashed hair above the rusticated, sunken faces of the drink-embalmed and weather-mummified, who were yet still living. Soiled clothes in the wrong sizes, caped by old jackets
given out by the Red Cross, formed the uniform. A species successfully crossing with the rodent; perhaps a farsighted evolutionary leap towards becoming envoys for the future, when the
planet’s aridity seeped further north.

From either side of a front path leading to a former bed and breakfast, two desperate prostitutes who no longer made much effort offered pained smiles made grotesque by missing teeth. But the
father made sure not to meet any of the eyes that peered at him. Any twist of distaste around his mouth could ignite a rampage of dirty shoes, scuffling into the curious dances of mayhem. But nor
could he appear intimidated. Indifference and preoccupation with other matters were the arts and wiles the less desperate had learned in order to avoid interaction in places such as this.

As he neared a crossroads, a termite hill of cheap concrete high rises reared on his right: the Beach Haven Estate, thrown up ten years ago for London’s East Enders and the impoverished
Spanish, but just as quickly maligned into one of the ten worst places to live in the country. The flats were his landmark and one he’d noted as an approach to The Commodore, now partially
concealed upon a hill on his left side, amidst other former hotels, and the dusty, motionless palms.

At the back of what had once been a Chinese restaurant, now trying its hand as a surgery run by a charity, he showed a collection of dirty children a carton of chocolate, while not at all
insensitive to the irony of his tactic. If Bowles’s testimony had been correct, the local young may well be familiar with Forrester as a dispenser of praise and favours. And as the children
brushed against the father’s pockets and his rucksack, offering cheek and challenges and lots of spit to plop near his shoes, he wondered out loud about his old mate, Rory, at The Commodore.
Was he on the second floor or the third?

‘He’s first floor,’ one of them said, unthinking, as the father peered at The Commodore, a 1930s town house converted into a hotel, and in turn into a flophouse for parolees,
then refugees, and finally used for new purposes the council and police had lost track of. And there it was again, upon a wall: King Death, rising in black rags, grinning, spray-can-etched between
two ground-floor windows. Its long arms were flung wide, daring the foolhardy to come closer.

The eyes of the other children now moved subtly to watch the two teenagers on vintage bicycles who had appeared and were circling the small gathering, their two-wheeled mounts artfully remade by
oily-fingered tinkerings with scrap. The faces of the teenagers were near-permanent sneers, browned rictuses beneath the peaks of baseball caps: a default setting. The bicycles creaked closer in
tighter circles but never stopped, and the riders never addressed him. The father moved away from the crowd, but it followed him.

He kept his hands deep inside his pockets, wrapped around the nerve gas and the stun gun, ignoring the first tugs on his shorts and rucksack, before he shrugged off another set of more insistent
fingers that flicked the end of his watch strap in an exploratory fashion. He increased his stride away from the medical centre and climbed concrete stairs to a car park filled with rubbish that
curled around two sides of The Commodore.

The children waited in the car park, amused at his entrance into the warm darkness of the building, as if he were an imbecile about to attempt some feat that had already defeated a multitude.
There were no cameras here and the father wondered if he could risk showing his face to the kind of men who would never report him to the police.

And around they went, stamping their feet like a pair of heat-enraged apes. Palms slid over slick flesh, clothing was gripped and yanked uselessly in a dance of two drunkards,
prison lovers enraptured. The father was the younger and fitter of the pair; Rory’s senses were dulled by the alcohol he reeked of. But neither was a natural street fighter. There was little
evidence of coordination or balance, scant progress made in the scratching, or from the dull thumps of fists pulled free and swung, or much control amidst the cussings and grunts of these
rough-trading beasts.

In the melee, Rory’s teeth had twice closed on the father’s face and he knew the man was straining for his nose, or a lip, with those Neolithic teeth, browned at the root and
yellowed like corn at the tip, as if from chewing an Iron Age diet of nettles and seeds. Rory’s head itself seemed newly resurrected from the dawn of human settlements in the area, a crude
skull found in a clay pit amidst shards of broken pottery, but now tight with ruddy, sun-spotted skin, suggesting a new regression – from ape to reptile.

Together, they eventually fell towards the bed as Rory turned within the father’s arms and slid to his knees as if to cover his head, before curling into a ball.