Lost Girl (34 page)

‘Shut up!’ The man was an illusionist who’d somehow faked his own death. Faith healers, prophets, evangelists, the world was strewn with tricksters, now that hope was dying.
‘Your junkie disciples put you underneath that place, and you played dead.’

‘The office of the dead. I asked to be laid down, for sure, facing east, beneath the altar. I told those who were around me that I wanted no lamentation. If I sank away, I would lie upon
the ground like a beast, like a pauper. I was untouchable, as it should be. At the end we are all the same, we are
nihil
, we are
nemo
. I asked those who followed me for one last
act of devotion, that they wrap me in a shroud and leave me in the crypt. These preparations always achieved results. Is the grave not closer to hell? And under that place I have journeyed far to
find Simmy, that is all.’ Oleg paused to wince. ‘I saw things you cannot imagine. But what little I could remember when I returned, I painted . . . including the patron, our guide, who
has followed the trail of our signs. My signs and Simmy’s, and yours too, Red Father. Your offerings were delicious to it, and you have become its servant also, blind though you are. And so,
here we are.’

‘You’re full of shit.’

Oleg humoured him with a smile. ‘You too, I think? Mmm, you’ve seen the things that wait for us, what we stirred up. Maybe you have glimpsed
it
too. Bad dreams, Red Father?
It clings because you have been noticed, through me. Our journeys are visible in another place. Do not fool yourself about this a moment longer, Red Father. And your daughter’s sign burned so
brightly. Simmy knew the energy around her would be strong if we took her. It dragged you in, and you are so close to her now.’

The father was on his feet. Yonah Abergil’s handgun was in his fist. The sights wavered over the skull before him.

‘I am very sorry to get you mixed up in this, Red Father, but at least you can get your daughter back, for a while, I think, if it means so much to you . . . but only if you don’t
squeeze the trigger.’

The father thought he said ‘What?’ but wasn’t sure he had even spoken.

‘You want to know who has your daughter? I will tell you. A woman has her. A woman paid Yonah to take her. And Yonah paid Simmy to make the snatch. Simmy asked me to drive. We did
everything together.’

For a few seconds the father did not understand what the man had just said, could not interpret it, but then the final part echoed between his ears. He comprehended that there had been the
words:
A woman has her
. ‘Who?’ He had to swallow to repeat the question. ‘Who is she?’

‘Through the fat larva that was Abergil, it seems the same bitch who has your girl had my Simmy killed too. This is of great concern to me.’

The father became frantic. ‘What woman?’ He moved towards Oleg.

‘She had no children. And she wanted yours. She wanted a child, but she wanted to make you suffer too. You and your wife. Oh, she was bitter. In this work there was revenge, and madness. I
think maybe that also made the ritual so much more than we could control.’ Again, the nonchalant shrug. ‘I will tell you her name, and then you will give me my drugs. I am not feeling
well. To go between
there
and here so much, it takes a toll. And the boot? There will be no more of that.’

‘Tell me.’ The father could barely speak. ‘You know where she was taken. Tell me where she was taken.’

Oleg nodded, and smiled wistfully as if recalling good times.

‘Tell me!’

Oleg raised his claws and spread his talons to appeal for calm. ‘In a place by Swindon, there was a car waiting for us and our little
passenger
. We tagged her clothes.’

‘The girl, she was put in a second car?’

The skull nodded, its lungs rasped. The father turned away to escape the spray teeming with bacteria that erupted from the grey-stubbed mouth.

‘The second car. Where did it go?’

Oleg recovered. ‘We use our navigation and we followed the next car until it stopped for a security check in . . . some place . . . in, in Wroughton, yes, Wroughton. By the forest, the New
Forest. The car was not searched. The security waved it through. So we knew this car belonged to
someone
. Someone important.’

The figure swallowed, wheezed and took in more air. He spat blood onto the cement. ‘This car finally stops and we have the location, so we went in on foot, through all of the lovely trees.
And we found a most magnificent house, big. Then we found out who lived there. This was a woman’s house. A very rich woman, so Simmy thought we might visit her again one day.’

It made sense, horrible sense, like everything else these dreadful creatures did. They would steal a child to order, but they would want to know where the captive was taken; they would want to
know everything about a person with whom they did their foul business, like a woman who had enough money to pay for the abduction of a child; the child of a nobody. Because such a paymaster could
also pay them more at a later date, or she could be beheaded and shuffled deep beneath the cold earth.

The father barely heard himself speak above the pressure pulsing between his ears, behind his eyes, and bass-thumping his chest. The anticipation of the final details was near-erotic. ‘Her
name. Who? Who is she? What is her name?’

‘My drugs first.’ Oleg snapped two long fingers in the air. ‘I want them now.’

The father moved, but felt as if he was wading through water to retrieve the man’s stash.

‘And the bitch you seek belongs to me. I will kill this woman. Those are my terms.’ The bony wreckage spoke matter-of-factly, smiling all the while, as if the grief he had
experienced on learning of his lover’s betrayers had vanished.

The father stuffed the bag of paraphernalia into Oleg’s clawing fingers. ‘Her name? The name!’

‘You give me your word first that I can kill the bitch who paid for Simmy to die?’

‘I give you my word.’ For this last piece of information, he knew he would do whatever was necessary, to anyone, anywhere. He’d make a pact with any devil. And according to
this criminal, his daughter was alive. If a woman had paid for his daughter, then his daughter may not have been taken for human horrors from which there could be no recovery. His little girl may
not have been abducted for the worst act a human being could commit: the rape and murder of a child. A concept forbidden from the father’s thoughts, which appeared only in the nightmares that
had always made him want to die.

If Oleg Chorny was telling the truth, then she might well have been stolen from her parents to live another life. He and his wife had once prayed together that this was so. For many months after
his daughter had been taken, he would imagine this very scenario so that he could fall asleep with tears of joy in his eyes. To know that she was alive somewhere, and not hurt, had been the
greatest mercy imaginable for the last two years.

Oleg closed his eyes. ‘The woman’s name is Karen Perucchi.’

Disbelief was followed by sickening jolts of acceptance, and the father sagged to his knees.

Oleg slumped upon the back seat, his head back and eyelids trembling, mouth agape and his ridged throat exposed. The father stared through the windscreen, without seeing much.
Just as preoccupied as the intoxicated figure in the rear, he swept his memory backwards, and into a minor episode of his past; a regrettable experience that had suddenly, and traumatically,
devoured the present.

When the father first met Karen Perucchi, a few years after the final collapse of global food exports, she had been the CEO of the Open Arms charity. And long before then, there were
water-cooler rumours about her organization.

They discovered each other at a conference held during a lengthy period of looping discussions about agricultural capacity in the United Kingdom. Talks in which it was impossible to discuss the
matter of food self-sufficiency without finally acknowledging the end of food aid to Africa, Asia and the Middle East; a common dilemma in a Europe swelling with refugees.

Word on the logistics vine implicated Open Arms in embezzling billions of euros in food aid. As the prices in international food markets last-gasped at stratospheric highs, Perucchi’s Open
Arms was one of many organizations suspected of an enterprising repackaging and selling of foodstuffs, and medicines, at inflated prices, to countries fatally stricken by drought and famine.

Even on a transparent legal basis, no more than a fraction of her organization’s revenue had ever reached the starving. Plenty of NGOs and charities were caught with their snouts in a
diminishing trough, as public sympathy peaked during successive Chinese, African and Central American famines. But what little had been reaching the needy had clearly been too much for Perucchi and
her corporate peers. As had been the case with many of the crisis enterprises, as soon as large sums of money became involved in addressing the catastrophic effects of runaway climate change
twinned with overpopulation that had followed centuries of environmental vandalism, the unscrupulous in the higher latitudes initiated one last freeboot, before the world they knew vanished
forever.

As shortages became critical in territories stricken by drought, and governments collapsed, black markets empowered organized criminal franchises, armed militias, and even legitimate armed
forces, who took control of all aid and relief operations, from warehousing to distribution. Eventually, as most financial donations and every case of food aid were seized by criminals or political
rebels, first-world contributions to the beleaguered masses carpeting the planet were consigned to the past. A dismal end to global interaction.

During their affair, he’d learned that she’d also siphoned off a cut of her organization’s considerable funds into an eye-watering salary for Open Arms’s senior
executives. And had done so for years. So high had she soared into the troposphere of the highest earners across successive years that she had, in effect, become untouchable in the eyes of the law.
In his lifetime, the father had never met anyone else as privately wealthy as Karen Perucchi.

Even though his association with her was relatively brief, he’d quickly identified an equivalence in the fear and sycophancy that she inspired in those around her; the two key human
responses that orbit affluence. After five months of inconsistent and difficult relations, he’d wanted Karen to leave him alone forever, going to great lengths to extract any trace of himself
from her determined radar.

But despite repressing Karen Perucchi in his memory, he now had to accept the incredible: this former lover had subsequently ruined the lives of his family.

Way back then, his abstinence, self-control and caution had always been compromised when he was on the road, and when he first caught Karen’s lacquered eye at the conference, he’d
held her fixed, unsmiling stare, and transmitted that near-imperceptible flicker of desire back to her, then looked away. And that was
the
moment, the very first moment that had delivered
him here: a ruined man, a killer, sat in a stolen car with a rucksack full of guns, while a drug addict and kidnapper shot up in the rear seats.

An old girlfriend.
Her
. Impossibly, it was
her
.

In the conference hall, his eyes had returned to Karen’s face a few seconds later and she had noticed him too. The
come hither
exchange in the auditorium had not been planned.
When her attention fell upon the third row of the conference hall, in which he sat, all of his instincts had screamed for him to lower his face. But unsuitability charged with danger had often made
women attractive to him, until he met his wife. He’d eventually figured out that a reciprocation of risky sensual possibilities was a kind of mirror that served to confirm his own
desirability to women. It had not taken a therapist to make him acknowledge this. An insatiate narcissism had trapped him as an adolescent gazer into reflections, following him out of youth, and
had demanded that he test himself with a giantess of the business world that day; a woman elevated by an intimidating reputation far beyond his own rung of the career ladder.

At the time he was a single and recklessly promiscuous man; in one of his phases, usually followed by a retreat into monogamy. But during his predatory periods, his desire to seduce, to
encounter novelty, to perpetually rediscover anticipation and satisfaction, would consume him after a few drinks. The same compulsion had driven him through his twenties. Back then, he’d been
popular, but commitment cautious; a bad bet, but illogically irresistible to some women, and often the naive or damaged. He’d been frightened by the need of several women to possess him
entirely, but unable to change his habits. When half cut, he hummed with an erotic electricity before he was fully aware of what he was doing.

Through the long working hours and the miles travelled, he’d even seduced colleagues, at least five, including an ill-advised digression with his last boss, Diane Brown. An entanglement
that Diane had possessed the sense to kill quickly. Sleeping with her a few times, whilst knowing that passion might flare between them in the future, had been sufficient. Ideal, in fact. That was
how he’d rolled.

He had met his wife just over a year after Karen: ending an anxious time that seemed to cure him of his incautious fixations. Coming together and then settling down with Miranda had been
motivated, in part, by the shock of Ms Perucchi. He’d never denied it, and he had subsequently buried the memory of Karen.

Back at the conference, he’d spoken well in his keynote speech and Karen’s attentions had grown by the second day. She appeared to circle him, incrementally drawing nearer, and
he’d toyed with what he assumed was her yearning for flattery. On the final day of the conference, he arranged to be near where she would be talking to the Swiss trade consulate. Nothing more
had been required of him: exchanged glances and a physical placement beside her. She’d taken it from there.