Lost Girl (19 page)

‘There will be cameras onsite at Yonah’s place, so wear your Halloween outfit, but not that bloody bush hat. And shave your hair and your pubes off. Don’t leave a trace. Glove
up, do the works. The shooter will be new, and you will be the only thing that walks out of his villa alive, with one exception. He looks after his dad, who’s nine parts gone with dementia,
so in the unlikely event that he remembers anything, it won’t be taken seriously. And go in at night when the nurse ain’t there. You do understand what I am saying? I cannot add any
more emphasis to that most essential component of the biggest move of your career. But if anyone is in that villa, with the exception of the old boy, you have to clip them. If you’re fingered
for this, you’re done, and so is your wife.’

The father could barely breathe, let alone speak.

‘Can’t hear you?’

He coughed. ‘I understand.’

‘I suggest you turn your conscience off, because you will be dealing with a man who put his own in the bin decades ago. Think of your girl and do what you need to, yeah? That guy with the
crazy big stones who strolled into The Commodore,
that guy
, he’s the one you need to be. Then get the fuck out and lock yourself away until I can assess the fallout, as well as any
intel you pick up on the job.’

‘OK.’

‘Oh, and before I go, I have one more request.’

‘Go on.’

‘As we are now working together, I’m going to need a name. And as you’re a fan of the movies, I always liked that guy Gene Hackman, you know, in the old flicks.’

His wife was awake when the father returned to the bedroom. By the way she looked at him, he knew she’d been awake when the call came in. Her expression was a mixture of
fear and desperate hope.

‘I have to go back.’ The father began emptying the chest of drawers and dropping the clothes, which his wife had just washed, onto the bed.

Miranda reached out and held his wrist. He sat down and pulled her to his chest, whispered in her ear. ‘I can’t say much.’ He swallowed at the grim sensation of leaving his
wife’s warmth again. ‘But it’s the best lead I’ve ever had.’ Miranda’s body tensed within his arms. ‘Only, there’s . . .’ His voice failed him.
‘There’s risk. So . . .’

She pulled back from his embrace and stared at him in a way that made him recoil. ‘I can’t lose you too,’ she said quickly.

He tried to smile, but felt his face stiffen, his mouth ache. ‘I’ll be careful. But I have to do this. I am going to do this.’

‘Are you saying goodbye?’

‘No.’ He spoke before his anxiety gave him pause to think. ‘But, in what I am doing, there will always be a risk.’

His wife put her face in her hands. He reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘It’s going to be fine. But you, and your parents, you will have to go somewhere else.’

She looked at him, her eyes red. ‘Go? Where? Where can we go?’

‘Some place safer.’

‘This place is entirely safe.’

‘A place where no one knows you’re married to me.’

‘My God.’

‘Like that place where we took
her
for her first holiday. That place in Wales. When she was eighteen months old. And of all things, that place is still open. They still have the
four cottages they rent out.’

‘Stop. We can’t just leave.’

‘You can, and you have to. I checked on the cottages a while back, in case I ever had to, you know, go somewhere for a while.’

His wife looked at his scarred hand. ‘After you’d done something terrible.’

The father nodded. ‘And you can’t tell anyone, anyone at all where you are going. No one.’

‘Do you think that I could even bear to see that place again, where we were, with her?’

‘Then choose somewhere else. But wherever you go, tell no one.’

‘My parents won’t leave here.’

‘Please.’

‘You’d put us all in so much danger? I’m not sure I even know who you are.’

The father felt himself shrivel, inside and outside. His skin cooled, prickled, and a little tremor made him shake. ‘I want to be who I used to be. Without her, I never will be.’

‘It’s too much. This, what you ask, is too much . . . for us, here, in this life. You’ve gone too far.’

‘Then think of this: there is no vaccine for that bug. Look at the hospitals. It’ll be the elderly who’ll be going out like—’

‘Stop!’

‘Do it for that reason. Leave here and go to a better place, with your mum and dad.’

‘There’s always a bug. This one will be like the others. They come, they go—’

‘Not this one. I’ve heard things. Been told things. We can’t assume it’s like the others. Please leave. No later than tomorrow. You have to tell me that you will
go.’

‘I can’t. How can I tell you something like that?’

The father closed his eyes. ‘If I could . . . If there was a strong chance that I could find out what happened, or even find her, would you go then? Just for a while, until I called
you?’

His wife stayed quiet for a while, then sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘I would go to hell and back just to know.’

He held her hand tight. ‘And I get that. But I’ll go to hell for both of us. For all of us. For even the slightest chance of knowing, I will go anywhere. Places that you cannot
imagine that I will never let you see. Because she is worth it. Because we are worth it, our family.’ He stood up and continued with his packing.

‘Can you at least tell me where you are going?’

‘Somerset.’

‘Somerset!’

‘There is someone I need to speak to down there, who might know something. I can’t say any more. Get new idents, all of you, and let me have yours before I leave. And I will be in
touch when it’s safe for you to come back here.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘If your parents won’t leave, then you have to go alone. I mean it.’ The father buckled his rucksack closed and walked to the door. ‘Gotta go now.’

Miranda climbed out of the bed and followed him to the door. When she touched his hand he turned and held her tightly. ‘Go,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll deal with my parents.
What about your brother?’

‘I’m counting on George being safer in New Zealand.’

‘On the bed.’ The father pointed the handgun at the biggest bed he had seen in his life. From the mirror that formed the entire rear wall of the master bedroom,
back at him leapt his reflection: a caped horror show, his face defining itself pinkly through the sodden mask. Black with rain, the new hat drooped around his ears. About his bones, the army
surplus poncho was seaweed-slick.

I am nothing but a thing soaked to its skin, in clothes two years ragged, holding a gun. I am shorn, bespattered, psychopathic, bestially liberated. And I am here for you
.

Fear in the beautiful green eyes of the woman who should not have been here, transformed into something else that promised hysteria. Panic jittered along her arms like St Vitus’s Dance and
made her hands flutter before she clutched them to her cheeks.

Minutes before, as the couple alighted from the Ferrari, the father’s dripping presence had appeared in the garage. The moment the soles of Yonah Abergil’s hand-stitched loafers
found the cement floor, an aerosol of the evil shit had pattered over his jowly head. So noxious were the chemicals in the enclosed space, they had all barked like dogs to clear their airways.

Inside the expansive hall, where the father had first ushered them, the girlfriend’s confusion had turned to anger. ‘Do you know who we are? Do you fucking know who we are?’
she had screamed at the man she had found waiting at Yonah’s lavish home, wet to his underwear and socks and shivering with more than cold, but pointing a handgun at her face.

‘I know what you are,’ the father had said to the woman, as the gold and white opulence of the house seemed to vault like a Catholic shrine about them. And her threats helped him
overcome the horror of seeing her alight from the car, and not long before he had realized there was a nurse on the premises too. He had not expected to find two women here. There
should
not
have been two women here. There should not have been
any
women here.

If anyone is in that villa, with the exception of the old boy, you have to clip them . . . Think of your girl and do what you need to, yeah?

The couple had not seen him emerge from the ornamental trees growing inside the garden wall, or run so quickly across the rain-thrashed drive after the security gates opened. Nor had they seen
him duck into the garage behind the slowing vehicle, where he had then hidden, crouching, behind their car; a creature from murky waters, its pincers gloved in surgical rubber and ready to bite.
They had not seen him on account of the dark, or the rain that flogged the house; they had not even seen him when the security lights exploded yellow across the front of the property, because they
were drunk. Through the wet gusts that gambolled and flapped in from the estuary, growing in power by the hour, Yonah Abergil had driven his rare and expensive car home intoxicated. Why so
reckless, the father had wondered, when you have so much?

As the couple had swayed and wobbled out of the blood-red vehicle with flushed faces, their imported clothes had issued aromas from the best things remaining in this life. They had seemed to be
of the past, abruptly alien to the father’s current existence and how it had been partitioned amongst bedsits, anodyne hotel rooms, and an old family car’s hot interior.

In all the hours of waiting, of being dissolved from the inside by the acids of anxiety and the agony of recollection which had filled the last two years of his life, where were these people?
They had evaded all that. Fortunes stowed and unshared, they lived deep inside glittering palaces, glass and steel monoliths, or were caged within humming perimeters of electrified fence. And
inside that swept garage and living room befitting a tyrant, the father found nothing but resentment inside his deeps. Evidence of a lifestyle he could only imagine had made his lava boil, gut low.
All of this for stealing children
. . . for putting women to work in brothels, the dispossessed into labour gangs. Legitimized barons and sanctioned exploiters, that’s what they
were. They were the tax-loopholed, dirty-cash-laundered elite, replete and meateater-sheened. They made it too easy for him to think of them with such simplicity. And it was vital that he did hate
them, or how else would he kill them all this night?

He ran back over the current situation:
crying woman, man choking on the living-room floor, old man watching his screen, his nurse shackled in the kitchen . . . phones, panic buttons,
cameras . . . what to do?
Then forced his mind to return to this bedchamber fit for a spider king, where he had pushed the woman ahead of him.

Once the advantage of surprise was taken, then whatever followed was dependent upon his decisiveness. He was on his own, and more so than ever before. And now they were all inside and individual
roles were being established by swift, brutal methods, and as every second ticked by, he was starting to hate himself. He loathed female grief because of how low it made him feel. Next to the woes
of young children, he found the distress of women the hardest to endure, and as a man accustomed to disappointing women, familiarity was no defence before their tears. ‘No. I didn’t
mean
that
,’ the father said, when he perceived that the woman thought she was going to be raped. ‘Get on the bed. I need to tie you . . . I need to restrain you . . . I mean .
. .’ He was only making it worse. She began to shudder.

‘I’m not going to hurt you. Please.’ This assurance in his trembling voice didn’t do any good. She’d already stumbled backwards, away from him, in her high-heeled
shoes, towards the wall beside the vast bed. And there might be a weapon in the cabinet drawers. This woman had already told him about the existence of two handguns in the kitchen. There would be
others, concealed, ready to blaze away at trespassers and thieves come to partake of what had already been stolen from others, or purchased with blood money. But how could a woman so beautiful, who
looked so frightened, be one of
them
?

Yonah Abergil was lying on the floor of the living room, blowing his nose tanks out and down a suit that seemed to have been tailored with magic. His fat hands and skinny ankles were bound with
the steel cuffs, his greasy mouth was hampered by the kinky shit, his face swollen and wet with tears.

Abergil senior was inside a day room that resembled a North African warlord’s rumpus room; he was untethered but wheelchair-bound. The father knew that the elderly man had dementia but
didn’t rule out his attracting attention in some other way. A hidden phone, something like that. Panic button.
You were going to check for them
. The father’s chest tightened as
the situation began to unravel. Who would come here? More of them, the Kings, or a private security patrol with shoot-to-kill permits, or maybe their friends in the police?

One thing at a time.
Be systematic
.

He would have to check on the old man again once this woman, the mistress, was secure. In the palatial distance, the nurse was still sobbing, her face reddened from the nerve agent he had
sprayed her with after he’d stumble-marched Yonah Abergil and his woman into the house from the garage.

The nurse had already run for a phone, or she had been trying to reach one of the guns in the kitchen: the father didn’t know because the nurse didn’t speak English. She had been
hard to communicate with, though his handgun had proven more effective than any muffled verbal efforts, grunted through the cotton clinging to his wet face. But there were too many people, too many
rooms, too many phones, too many guns.

Cameras?

The nurse was secured with the cord from an apron in the type of kitchen the father would have expected to find in a restaurant frequented by the super-rich. The stainless steel, coppers, glass
and dark flagstones had unsettled him with diffidence. And then the room’s opulence had made him angrier.
This is what they have for being how they are
.