Lost Girl (27 page)

Both men remained silent as if to digest the enormity of such events, of such practical barbarism.

The father steadied himself because he’d started to shake. ‘This is what you would do if you were in my position. It’s why you saved me in Torquay. It’s why you are
helping me now. What else can I do? You’d be mistaken in thinking I have a taste for this. Your own loss has been terrible and your grief will never end. I know this, and if my own heart
wasn’t so broken, then it would break for you and your boy’s mother. But if there is even a slim chance that I could bring my daughter back from the dead, then I will do anything. We
know this, you and I. This story will not change. No one even thinks of her now but her family. And the angels who have helped me.’

After a period of intense silence, the officer spoke. ‘Easy with the angel shit. But if Chorny is in that chapel, and if he can take you to the next level, then he needs to be breathing to
do it. You’ll have to extract the truth from whatever planet he lives on now, because if this illustrated junkie is our man, then he doesn’t appear to be on this one any more. Once his
usefulness is exhausted, I agree, he will have
to go
. For both our sakes. The ways and means of his disappearance will need to be thought through. Very carefully. He cannot be found. But
where will you go after?’

‘I’ll face that later. What about a car?’

‘Let me see about replacement wheels. I’ll send you the location of a pickup near Brixham. It’ll be there later this afternoon. Best I can do, so don’t go in before
it’s dark, because you may need to haul this guy’s arse out of the area and for that you will need wheels. Oh, and use one of the new shooters and find a new mask, unless you want a big
finish. Plenty will oblige on that score.’

Through the rain’s drenching violence, a dark shape snapped out its length. Curled back upon itself, then unrolled wetly to smack hard, like a leather strap, upon the
water-glazed bricks of a wall. The father flinched to a crouch, disbelief matching his fear at the sudden billowing, the raggedy slapping above his head, momentarily settling to a lapping upon a
garden wall, like a thin, predatory tongue.

At the very moment he turned a street corner to climb the last rise to the church, from within a walled garden this
form
had lashed out, or even appeared to reach for him. Had there
been an arm stretching from its wet folds, concealed in the rain-blurred dusk? A lowered head, a face? The possibility of such a presence within the air had immediately returned his thoughts to the
woods and his flight from Yonah Abergil’s villa, and to a fragment of a dream in which he lay helpless beneath a great black presence in motion. His most volatile instincts warned again of a
pursuit from a thing unnatural.

But bent low to the wet paving, his sight found nothing more than an old sheet, blown from a washing line and caught upon a spiked fence; fabric seemingly invested with life in the turbulence.
Begrimed by traffic and dust, but now restored to suppleness by a month’s rain in twenty-four hours, the linen had recreated itself in his mind as a flapping shroud, released from disinterred
remains.

The tension leaked from the father’s muscles and left his limbs jittery.
There is nothing else
, only this wounded earth and us upon it.

Refuse swirled. Rain flooded over every doorstep, kerb and car tyre. Water sheeted down the hill, overran his boots, plumed clear from drain grates. Narrow lanes of terraced houses, their paint
faded, their rendering pocked and worn, created channels for the black waters to hurtle down to the thrashing waves of the harbour.

Between the terraces he could walk in a straight line, but in this weather, no one else risked the streets. At intersections and on the wider streets, he’d stagger, head down, the wind
trying to lift and roll him at the same time, as he watched for detached guttering and sheet iron blown loose. He’d heard the clangs and groans in the places beneath roofs where materials had
broken free, and he had seen roof tiles skitter like giant woodlice across the road he’d come in through.

Dim candlelight chinked through curtains and around the storm shutters of the houses. The street lights were out; the power had been down since the previous night, another incentive to leave his
room on the outskirts and to enter the roaring tumult of the dark. But towards the end of his journey, up through the harbour town, such was the force of the wind that the father was forced to pull
himself from lamppost to doorway, storm porch to front garden wall, car by car. He’d struggled up through the streets from the harbour in similar fashion, his slicker shiny as eel skin, his
front-strung rucksack a tatty water bladder blackened by rain. But on the higher ground, the weather now seemed cursedly worse and portent-heavy.

Near the summit of the hill he reared into the stone front of a small house, its sooty cement cold through his poncho, transmitting a chill into his bones. He peered up at a new form that
flicked out between two chimneys, a ribbon or shred as long as a serpent, thin, darting to strike, black as jet.

But only a flag, its pole shuddering in the wind. This night, he knew his mind was going to be his greatest enemy.

Earlier that evening, the detective had sent him a message and the details of where he could find his getaway.
Good luck. I’ll be in touch tomorrow
. The replacement vehicle waited
one mile north of Brixham.

For a mile on foot, from Churston Ferres to Brixham, he’d been battered and blown sideways across the fields of crops he’d crossed, taking cover behind stone walls and earth works,
where they existed, to avoid the thrashing trees and fall of branches in the woods set back from the coastal path. Then he’d advanced up and through the wind-flayed town from near the
harbour. As he moved through the evening, lower sea-level sections of the headland and the harbour wall had entirely vanished, every few seconds, beneath the enraged surf.

From the end of Churston Ferrers and the town limits of Brixham, the great Moor Edge refugee camp now continued to the banks of Long Wood on the River Dart, engulfing Kingswear. Oleg
Chorny’s last known address, the chapel, was close to Raddicombe Wood, set back from the Kingswear Road. The father had another half a mile to walk, through the fringes of the vast temporary
encampment, now larger than many British cities. Three miles wide and five miles from tip to tip, but still growing northwards to join the Riviera camp behind Paignton and Preston. And from that
point unto North Devon, the largest drought-resistant grain-producing area in Britain – over two hundred square miles of wheat, soya, maize, millet fields, five nuclear power stations and the
three new reactor sites that were hastily under construction.

Through the dusk and rainfall, pressed into the saturated earth beneath the coal-black sky, the father could see the silhouettes of the first great blocks of white prefabricated neighbourhoods
that comprised the vast refugee settlement, the entire grid divided by wide lanes to prevent fires jumping. The pale, unchanging, cuboid mass of housing was silent, but tens of thousands of candle
flames pinpricked the wet vista upon the hills.

Hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and Greeks lived alongside the southern Italians, the Portuguese, Bangladeshis, and half a million North, East and West Africans, in two-room buildings. Three-
and four-storey apartment blocks, each living space as long as a chalet, had begun to supersede the bungalows on the eastern side of the camp.

Like watch towers about old Roman forts, the newer apartment blocks faced an older, alien world, from which the buildings’ inhabitants had streamed, aboard anything that would get them
across the Channel and sea.

The father eventually found the old Baptist chapel, trembling in the wind, fifty feet behind a shuttered healthcare centre and a large primary school for refugee children. He moved carefully,
now close enough to the residential areas to be within reach of the security patrols, recruited from within the camps to deter smuggling, thieves and the direct-action nationalists that hounded the
settlement.

Not good weather tonight for any nocturnal activity outdoors. The entire area appeared to have locked down as the storm swept across the south-west. If the winds broke eighty miles an hour, a
great many of the prefabricated dwellings here would be uprooted and destroyed. If the hurricane season returned as it had done for the past six years, the cabins would soon have to be replaced by
the sturdier towers.

At the edge of the chapel’s front lawn, and a long untended pumpkin patch, a faded wooden sign had been bent and shaken by the wind and now lay flat upon the earth. GLORY TO GOD AND HOPE
TO THE WORLD had been stencilled above a hand-drawn picture of an open bible. Like an old wound, a metal crucifix ran to rust down the painted cement blocks on the building’s front. It was an
agricultural building, from another time, with a galvanized roof, but converted from slaughtering livestock, or poultry, to human use or habitation. The doors to the old church were locked, the
windows shuttered.

The father assumed the abattoir had been engulfed by the refugee settlement when the land was reclaimed by the emergency government, and later procured on the black market by Oleg Chorny and his
lover. The National Land Registry still listed it as a private building, the purpose religious. Whatever new use the place had been put to, someone with money had once chosen to live amongst the
dispossessed, on the edge of a vast camp, a new city with a population created solely from the stateless, the homeless. Perhaps a good place for a serpent to hide and to operate if he was part of
the many organized criminal enterprises that now controlled most of the camps, in the same way they controlled the city ghettoes and prisons, and had allegedly captured half of the world’s
money within half a century.

The father flashed his torch around the perimeter. No alarms. No cameras. Weather-worn signage filled a frame beside the front entrance:
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but
against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (Ephesians 6:12.)

The father turned about in the darkness and flashed his torch across the ground and the neighbouring buildings, and over wet cement, silvery cascades of rain, white roofs, wires shaking like
skipping ropes, treetops panicking, grass and flower beds blown flat. In the distance another of the many greenhouses imploded from the pressure of the fast wind. They’d been going off like
light bulbs since he’d left Brixham.

The father circled the building. Three entrances. Double metal doors at the front. Two old wooden fire exits: one at the rear, the other at the side. No light shone within. It looked deserted.
The father wiped his bare face. From out of the rucksack, he withdrew a handgun that he’d boosted from Yonah Abergil’s house. He holstered the weapon in the front pocket of his trousers
and slipped the nerve gas into the other trouser pocket at the front. Once inside, the handgun would be only a back-up for the stun charge and gas; he dared not hold the handgun in his business
hand. The torch occupied his free hand.

He chose the emergency exit at the side. If this tattooed man was here, the father knew he would have to reach the target quickly before he could arm himself. And then he needed to immobilize
him with the stun charge or spray, cuff and gag him, before extracting him through the storm to where the new vehicle was parked, less than a mile away. They would have to wait out the night inside
the car, and that is where the interrogation would take place.

The father briefly steadied himself against the cinder-block wall. Closed his eyes and thought of his daughter’s small face.

Tucking the handle of the torch under his arm, he brought out the small crowbar from his rucksack to lever open the door. The father forced the wedge between the handle and tin frame, and pulled
on it, using his body’s weight like an oarsman fighting the surf. The door snapped open, and the father stepped from night into something altogether darker.

The building did not feel abandoned. By men, perhaps, though not by the presence suggested by the appalling things daubed upon a wall that his thin torchlight found a few
seconds post-entry. And within the void, the beam of white struck a sickly yellow face first, its eyes red and vacuous, the mouth open. The face grew in the disc of illumination until the father
realized it was attached to a hairless head, crudely crowned, but barely supported by a thin body, bound more than robed in red. The figure occupied a rust-coloured throne.

The corpse king’s feet were fleshless and he sat beside a queen lacking in all of the grace, elegance and nobility expected to accompany a royal title. Her face was a bloodless oval, her
head covered with grubby linen bindings. Small pink eyes peered with an imbecilic intensity into the black air about the regal seat. The female figure’s raiment was plain, whitish, and
resembled a nun’s habit.

The couple stared blankly at what stood before their thrones: another emaciated human emblem of bone, naked save for a loin cloth, the parchment flesh lacerated from the sharp heels to the
hairless scalp and weeping black tears. Before its stitched-up eyelids, it carried a box filled with small brown skulls, a gift to the abominable royalty that sat so straight-backed and listless
before the messenger.

The father had shut out the roar of the storm by pulling the door shut behind his swift entrance into the building. But the dimming of the volume seemed to make the pictures even worse than they
were, as if a reverential hush had descended about him in the rank darkness.

Unlit, the building would have been unnavigable without a torch because he could see that the windows and rendered walls had been covered in thick layers of black emulsion, before being further
vandalized by the lurid paintings. Extending from the throne-room scene, the father’s torch revealed that the same artist had covered all four walls with his ghastly mural.