Lost Girl (32 page)

The Kings would now know where he had activated the message, but they could not have known that he would come to Portsmouth before the communication was opened. Even so, he could not stay here
for long or the monstrousness that decapitated a serving detective would be upon him, and that would be him upon his knees, waiting for the steel to scythe down, from behind, from beyond his blind,
panting anticipation and terror.

He needed to get out of here. There was no one to help any more, no more sympathy or assistance to call upon from allies. Friends and guardians had been sacrificed for him. For his cause, they
had been abducted and killed. The idea was too great for his mind to withstand. He wanted to get back to the car.

Miranda
.

‘God, please . . .’ Thoughts of his wife intermingled with images of the detective’s gored shoulders. The father retched again onto the pavement.

Second message
. There was a second message. This one had also been sent from the police officer’s account. One hour after the first film was posted; so both would have been sent
from
those
who were now hunting him. Perhaps the second message was a further taunt, or more to horrify, sicken and weaken him with terror. He briefly imagined watching a desecration of
the policeman’s remains as he stood speechless in the wet street. His whole body tensed as if a scream was close to emerging from his throat; he wanted to fold in on himself and close
down.

Find a place to end this, to end all of this
.

At the comms post, he opened the second message. Decided to look at it quickly, and then run.
Run where?
Until Chorny gave him somewhere specific to go, a location, a name, he had no
destination to pursue. That information would have to be extracted from the man, and fast, as soon as he returned to the car. No more clues or riddles. Chorny spoke or he died within the hour.

A road appeared onscreen, lit dim amber at night, flanked by brick apartment buildings. The father didn’t recognize it. The scene had been filmed from street level, from inside a car. Two
men came out of one of the buildings and approached the car. They wore black Balaclavas, like guerrillas, with a suggestion of lighter colours about their eyes. As he studied the men, more figures
left an entrance to the apartment building in the background. Three other people had emerged. Their arms were linked, until they began walking in single file. The gait of the figure in the middle
was distinctly feminine, her coat long, her face lowered. But it was not his wife because this woman wasn’t tall enough.

The scene jumped and here was another plain room: cement walls, narrow, low-ceilinged, white. A new scene in the same room was dropped into the montage. This act featured a cast of one: a thin,
naked woman, narrow-faced, her breasts small and covered by her arms, her hair tied back; someone he had never seen before. Make-up ran down her cheeks from wet eyes. Her mouth opened. ‘Every
door is closing.’

She lowered her gaze and looked at something to the left of the camera, at whoever was sat there. The woman swallowed. ‘You knew me as Scarlett. My real name is Amy. I also have a child. I
am a mother and I love my son very much. My son and I are in danger because of what you and I have done.’

‘No. No.’ The father spoke to no one but himself in the windblown street. He slapped the side of his head as if to knock these images out before they settled. So they already had
Scarlett when she called him that morning? They were listening then, and had made her call him to get a fix on his location. What choice did she have? She was a mother.

‘All of this must stop, now. My son and I will be reunited. We will be safe.’ She tried to smile, but her face dropped before she finished the sentence she clearly did not believe a
word of. ‘Use this account to arrange a meeting. It’s very important that you make contact. This is about your daughter and your wife. Information you need is waiting for
you.’

The father wanted to terminate the message, but knew he was now incapable of doing that because his little girl and his wife had been mentioned.
They
knew he would listen, and while he
did so his skin shrank at the idea that a vehicle was on its way right now, to finish this carnage he had brought into so many lives. The longer the messages lasted, the more time the Kings would
have to reach him. His legs started to twitch, as did his hands, his face, his thoughts.

They’re coming
.

Scarlett spoke again. ‘Your daughter is alive. She is a happy and healthy girl. She is six years old. There have been reasons why she could not be with you and your wife. Your wife
understands now. Everything has been explained to her. She will be in touch with you too. Soon.’

‘God. God.’ The father spoke to the rain and wet cement, to the rattling of a security shutter. An alarm screamed in the distance. Only seagulls answered it with sounds that seemed
to swallow the father’s mind.

‘There is no way you will find your little girl. There never was. But she can be brought to you, both your daughter and your wife, if you cooperate. You don’t have a choice because
this matter is closing. The man they wanted was the police detective. Not me, not you, not your wife. Not my son. We played no part in the murder of Yonah Abergil. Please let us know where you are.
Where we can all meet, safely, in public. No one will be harmed. This can all end soon, and we can all be reunited with those we love.
Please
.’

The woman swallowed and her eyes welled up. She struggled to compose herself, to straighten her face. ‘They understand you. Understand what you have done out of desperation, out of a
desire to see your daughter. And you will see her . . . soon. But you must . . . you must get in touch from this account, or this will not end and the consequences of your actions will be addressed
in full. For all of us, please. Please . . .’

The screen jumped and the message restarted.

For all of us, please. Please . .
.

The father killed the connection and staggered away from the post.

The vehicle’s navigation found another car park two miles away. On arrival, he couldn’t recall the journey, either through the streets or up inside the concrete
levels to the sixth storey. Too many thoughts were clambering into his head and getting stuck in a limited space. Images from the communications appeared red and vivid in nauseating bursts;
fragments he would recall for as long as he lived.

He near-fell from the car and pressed his face into the cold metal of the roof.

His wife had been mentioned. The Kings had his wife? It was why Miranda wasn’t answering. She was unavailable.
And will be forever now. They
had moved so swiftly, so decisively,
once his identity had been established.
They
had killed a police officer. Surely another one by now, the woman he knew as Scarlett. Maybe her son too.
God, no. Please God, no
.
They would kill his wife. A cull: this was their message. If he opened another mail at the account Scarlett had given him, he might see his wife on her bare knees and he would hear her pleading . .
. ‘Oh Jesus Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.’ He buried his face in his hands and groaned. He sounded monstrous, bovine.

They
said his daughter was alive. The enormity and impact of that thought was too sudden for him to process. Instead, he went limp to the soles of his feet. If they weren’t lying
and they knew where she was, where she had been taken two years ago, they could also go and collect her. They could . . . The beheading: their signature. ‘Bastards!’ He struck the roof
of the car. ‘Bastards!’

Inside the boot, Oleg Chorny coughed and made the noise of a dog. The skeletal figure began to bump about.

Did they even have his wife?
A ruse. Maybe
. They could be lying about everything. There had been no film of his wife. But why didn’t she answer his calls?

Everyone you know, they cease to exist. In one week they all in hell
.

Root and branch
.

No more sleep, no more resting for the scarecrow. No more disinformation from an addled consciousness. Chorny confessed now or he died. The father yanked open the boot. Seized Chorny by his
ankles and hauled his legs out of the car. Grabbed his shoulders and positioned him on the cement. The figure was dazed and the light smarted against those big yellowy eyes. He covered his
skull-face with his long, bloodless, crab-leg fingers.

The father carried him like a roll of carpet to the side of the car park and to the waist-high wall. Understanding the intention, Chorny pushed back, weakly, into the father’s side.

‘Time . . . You’re going over. You’re done. You shite. This ends!’

Oleg’s face mooned with terror. ‘No! Your daughter, think. Think. I am helping you. Together we do this. We get her back.’

‘Liar. You’re all liars.’ The father pressed his face into the veiny skull as he held the man’s hollow cage of a torso, gritted his teeth and whispered. ‘I’ve
just heard from your old friends. They removed the head of someone who helped me. They filmed it and showed me. They’re onto me and they are coming. No more delays. You love death. You all
love death.’
But maybe not this one
. ‘This is the hour of your death. I’ll see you on the other side. And I will come for you there too.’

‘You don’t listen. Please . . . this, no.’

The father manoeuvred the man to the cement wall and pushed his head over and into the rain-specked air beyond. ‘Down there. You’ll break apart on the street . . . I’m done.
I’m done with you all!’ The father gripped Oleg’s body in a bear hug around the top of his thighs, and raised him up as if to bundle him over.

Oleg attempted to fold himself in half, his pale face discovering a new shade beyond white, his spindly arms grasping for the wall. Spittle flecked his mouth, his nostrils flared horribly. And
as his bony head hung in empty space his eyes became even vaster, expanding as he looked at the sky. He then glanced over his shoulder at the immensity of air below that a man could plummet through
like a brick.

‘Time to go to your afterdeath.’ As if placing a sacrifice onto a plinth to await a god, the father rested Oleg’s pointy hips upon the ledge. Witless before the drop, the
man’s mouth fell open, but he appeared too frightened to speak. Two-thirds of his near-fleshless bones were draped over the ledge, the sky above, death below. The father didn’t like
heights either, but had never before seen fear so vividly erase everything but itself upon a human face. Today, they were all traders in fear. Merchants who negotiated inside the deepest aquifers
of each other’s nightmares: a stolen child, the prospect of a beheaded spouse, the terrible thinness of the air and the cool breeze preceding a fall to one’s death on concrete. The
father had drilled deep into the only thing that mattered to all of them who bargained in such places as this: life and death, how you and those you loved died. There was nothing else, not really,
not any more. Every man, woman and child would know this too, in time. Destiny. Maybe this afterdeath was nothing more than acceptance.

The father pushed the jabbering skull another inch into the void, then turned it over so the big-eyed face could fully see the smashing floor below.
Whoosh, scream, cement
. He wanted to
let the figure go and knew he could do it. If Oleg did not speak now and reveal where his daughter had been taken, the father would let the body drop.

The figure found its last breath, its final cry, and . . . began to laugh, and the mad laughter ascended the scale into something raucous, queenish. His entire body shook with mirth as if
another drug-deprived seizure was imminent. ‘Death is larger than life!’ He reached his bound arms into the air as if preparing for a high dive. ‘Always it has been this way. So
let me return to the terrible passage, Red Father. You disappoint me, but at least the fire of your rage will give me a fitting re-entry.’

A gun pointed into his face, the withdrawal of narcotics: nothing had made Chorny do anything but act out, lie, resist. Here was more evidence. This man was truly unafraid of death. His
recalcitrance and doublespeak had merely prolonged his time. This lover of death had played him. It was as if he was privy to greater opportunities that not even death could spoil.

The father felt his body heave towards a sob of frustration at the utter futility of the tasks he had been set. Despair soon encased him like lead. His wife, Scarlett, Gene, had died for nothing
and he was just wasting time in a public car park with a junkie. ‘You have no idea! No idea . . . what you did to us!’ The father screamed to rouse himself from torpor, from shock, from
the dread that this man would never tell him what he wanted, what he needed. ‘She was everything! She was ours. We loved her. You have no idea what you did . . . to me . . . to her mother . .
. You don’t know . . . You don’t know what you did . . . What you all do . . .’ He sobbed and let the man’s thighs loosen under his arm. He clenched his jaw, swallowed.
‘I wished . . . I wished I’d had the chance to kill your lover too. You bitch! But I’ll finish what that fat prick Yonah started. He got to your lover first, but I’ll finish
all of you who touched her, who paid for her—’

Oleg turned his head to fix his serpent eyes upon the father. His legs tensed and he hooked his calves behind the father’s waist. The mad eyes narrowed, confused but searching at this
mention of his old boss. ‘Yonah? Yonah Abergil?’ The man paled again, but from not from a threat of death this time. The features withered under a sudden and terrible comprehension. The
mad intensity in his eyes went out. ‘Simmy. He . . . Abergil had him killed?’ The man’s shock was not fake, but then the father had been certain that his terror was no act either.
‘Tell me!’ Oleg shrieked so loudly that the father nearly let go of the bundle of cuffed bones. He finally had the man’s full attention; had accidentally learned how to hurt him,
and deeply.

The father spat and began to laugh. ‘You didn’t know! Your messages from the other side didn’t tell you? Yes, Yonah murdered your lover. He had him killed. Your own boss had
your lover killed, you skinny fuck. My daughter was his last job. And you didn’t know. The devil that paid for her paid for your deaths. It was part of the contract. You can’t even
trust each other. There are no words. No words for people like you. There is no death to fit your crimes.’