Lost Girl (45 page)

He left the living area and walked down a corridor, half-lit by natural light and the dim glow of the blue panels beside the doors. Three-quarters of the way down, he came across a door covered
in stickers. A sign in the middle of the wood, at a child’s eye level, indicated ‘Yasmin’s Room!’

Removing his mask, he crouched as the strength deserted his legs. Covered his face with his hands and thought all the way back to their grief and shock that first afternoon when Penny was taken.
He filled his mouth with the Balaclava’s salty fabric to stifle a sob and screwed his eyes shut. The revelation came harder and colder: they had both nearly died mere feet away from their
daughter, and it seemed they had just evaded the cruellest of all the injustices. If he let out a cry, others would follow. He could not even begin to grieve for Scarlett and Gene, his guardian
angels. This wretched life moved too quickly and forbade it.

Attempting to gather his wits, and readying himself to look upon his daughter’s face, he realized he had never truly believed that he would stand outside any door with his daughter on the
other side, save one inside a police station or a hospital morgue. But slowly, his sense of being bludgeoned by futility began to ease. The pressure weighing upon his heart, a pig-iron cage fitted
too tightly, loosened. Hopelessness and loathing were slipping away. He wasn’t sure whether it was elation, shock, or even terror that inhabited the new space.

Glancing down the corridor, he also considered what he and his daughter’s kidnapper had just done. So what would he tell his daughter about
those people
? How did he stop being the
Red Father and become again the father she had once loved? ‘Oh Jesus, oh Jesus.’ The father’s hands trembled upon the wood.

Beyond the closed door, small feet bumped rapidly towards where he knelt. ‘Who’s there? Richard?’ the little girl called out with delight. And before he had time to stand, the
bedroom door was pulled open.

He retained his retreat from the house only in fragments, punch-drunken memories. Later on, these moments appeared too vividly, yet out of sequence, pulling him back to another
time and place: back to the terrible sweat that coated his entire body beneath someone else’s clothes, his heavy legs heaving through air thick and slowing, the wet sandbags of his lungs, the
eternity of mowed lawn he laboured across to the car, pulling a child behind him, holding leather cases of money in the other hand.

She didn’t remember him. His appearance had changed a great deal, and she had just turned four when she last saw him. Two years had been a third of her life, her permanent memory only
beginning some time just before she was lost. Karen would have done everything possible to make her forget what she knew of her parents, and her other life.

Other details from his escape from the house in the New Forest could appear at any time too, and often words he had thought forgotten.

Where’s Mummy?

We need to go now, quickly
.

Where’s Mummy?
The voice warbling with impending tears.

Penny’s smooth face had whited in panic, crumpled. She had started crying when he pulled her from the house, and the pieces of his long-broken heart had split further apart. He’d
realized he was abducting his own child from what she knew as home, two years after she had been taken from him. He suspected that her old terrors from an afternoon on a distant front lawn in
Torquay may have awoken right then.

We have to leave for a while. It’s not safe for us to be here. Can you carry this bag? We have to go to the car
.

As they had turned, ungainly, him panting and her whimpering, into the living area, he remembered trying to block her view of the room with his body. She had looked down and seen sheets there
and the girl had clearly but wordlessly wondered why so much bed linen was spread and crumpled over the floor of the place where she had played, so safe and warm, for two years. And then the father
had seen Oleg.

Before he had left the room to find his daughter, Oleg had been walking backwards, slowly, talking to himself, or at the sky, while dragging a body by its feet into the rear grounds. When the
father returned with Penny, and tried to pass through the expansive white crescent of the living area, to reach the glass doors – by then clutching more than holding the girl’s hand and
shepherding her before him, this small stranger who held the little bag into which they had shoved a few articles of clothing – Oleg was sitting down.

Upright, his eyes wide and bright, he had selected one of the large white chairs beside the media centre. The man had been grinning, though it had taken the father a while to realize that Oleg
could not see them. An exhausted applicator had lain unclutched in one upturned claw.

The father had found the long silhouette of the man’s thin shape especially unappealing as it sat propped up like a cadaver unearthed in a tomb. But once he’d understood what
unnerved him about that actual corner of the room, he’d stopped looking at it and begged the frightened girl to go outside with haste.

Don’t look back. This way. This way. To the car
.

At any time later that night, and for many nights afterwards, yet more could feature upon the screens of his mind at any time, including those memories he could not trust.

Cloud cover had only allowed sparse light into the open-plan centre of the building, so the cause of the motion around Oleg’s death seat could have been nothing more than the reflected
arrangements of rain-black clouds in the sky outside. But beyond the lounge windows, as they staggered onto the patio circling the covered pool, the father suspected that day had already
surrendered and that night had fallen. That was not possible as it was still not even noon.

Another backward glance into the darkening room revealed in the far corner, upon one wall, a seemingly impossible unfurling of lightlessness, momentarily convincing the father that shadows were
moving like water, except upwards from the floor, and perhaps surging too like a visible gas.

The dark flow
.

He’d told himself this effect was caused by the storm, because further up the white walls he could see the great shadows of the tree limbs from outside. It was unfortunate, because they
too appeared to his frenzied mind as long arms, or even wings. Wind that had been inaudible inside the house was now gusting through the trees along the fence, and the movement of their branches
was, of course, cast upon the walls behind Oleg’s chair. Shock and trauma were the only reasons the darkness had suggested facets of that loping king in rags, the one he had seen depicted in
other places. The maelstrom of emotion that interfered with his breathing, and his very heartbeat, was worsening the effects of the wind-stirred tree shadows, and it was nothing more than that, or
so he told himself for hours afterwards. But then the shadows and even the gloaming air had also seemed to expand on those interior walls and move not unlike a large octopus in inky water, before
the shape flitted as fast as a black spider, disturbed from behind wet wood in a garden; up and across the ceiling it seemed to go and then away.

To the car, the car, the car
.

The walls of the main building and garage became a cover he had then longed desperately for, as if he and the girl were small creatures, like mice, electric with panic, scampering beneath
something vast enough to alter the air pressure, the very density of the atmosphere. And as this sensation spread out above them, it also suggested that they were cast under a dreadful
scrutiny.

A swoop of vertigo had discouraged him from looking up. He’d been convinced they could fall upwards, together, into the black sky, and just keep on going, gathering speed, until they were
unable to breathe . . . until they came apart from each other and from themselves. He’d thought himself dreaming while awake.

Mummy. My mummy
.

I can’t tell you now . . . I’ll explain . . . do you remember your old house, before you were here? The house on the hill
.

Mummy
. Her crying, her crying and then him crying because she did not know him.

You lived with your mummy and daddy in another house, a long time ago, by the sea. There was a garden. A big garden . . . There was Nan and Poppo. Cloth Cat . . . Cloth Cat . . . Oh God,
Cloth Cat. Your name is Penny. Not Yasmin. Your name is Penny
.

When the girl saw the car, she had tried to sit down on the lawn. As her whole body convulsed with misery and fear she had looked back at the house. Her father had dropped to his knees beside
her. Released one of the bags of money, a lifetime’s riches that would remain on the grass. He could not carry both bags one step further, and knew he would need to carry the girl and the
other bag of money the entire distance to where Penny’s real mother lay unconscious inside a car. When he thought he heard what might have been a copter in the distance, he surged up and onto
his feet and swung the girl into the air, holding her under the arms. It was the first time he had embraced her for two years, this clutch, this clasping to his chest that was, that day,
crisscrossed with the straps attached to a bag full of guns and explosives.

And he’d run to the black car, ungainly, his sweat-lathered face whipping from side to side, his eyes not seeming to register anything, a crying child slung over his shoulder.

And into the place where fugitives have always sought refuge they vanished, driving deep into the trees: a man, an unconscious woman, and a frightened child.

As he drove, and as his leaden, bruised body began to warm inside the car, the father asked Penny repeatedly about what she remembered, asked her about the first thing she
could remember, and he told her over and over again that she was taken from him and her real mother. He told her that her real mother was asleep and lying on the seat next to her. But Penny
didn’t understand, or was too frightened to even acknowledge his questions.

He’d abandoned the car he’d driven out of the grounds, and carried Penny and Miranda to the stolen vehicle that Gene Hackman had procured for him in Devon. There was enough of a
charge in the vehicle to get them to Wales, and he knew it must surely be safe from the scrutiny of King Death.

Miranda began to rouse near Salisbury, her jaw slack; her eyelids remained heavy and what could be seen of her eyes was red. She didn’t know where she was for several seconds and panicked.
When she sat up, she began to be sick, so the father pulled over and helped her out of the car, and into a cold wind with spiny teeth that carried a light, fast-moving rain.

The sky was a flat, cloudless grey, like a low ceiling that had trapped a violent and relentless maelstrom of air between the ground and the heavens. At the side of the road, the pines lurched
and screamed, funnelling the tail of the storm down and across the tarmac. Through the noise, he tried to speak but the wind chill made him stutter. He had to hold Miranda upright while she was
ill. There was no way of knowing what they had given her, in order to transport her from one place to another, but the powerful tranquillizer had not worn its way out of her legs. Once she knew who
he was, she said in a thirst-croaked voice that she couldn’t feel her feet, or her hands. Disoriented, confused, her judgement so impaired, she twice asked him, ‘Where’s
Mummy?’

Eventually the father managed to make his wife look at him, and to stop talking. He gave her water, and she drained an entire bottle in one draught. Then he made her swallow most of an energy
drink. Beside the car, leaning against him in the layby, Miranda began to shake violently with the cold and he realized just how thin her clothes were, and how inactive she had been, and probably
for more than twelve hours.

As she revived, she began to remember the details of her abduction and clawed at him. The father held her tightly and told her repeatedly, ‘They are gone. The men are gone. They’re
not here. You’re safe. Safe now.’ He kept saying this, though didn’t believe it. He feared the arrival of the police, or far worse that may also be nearby, at any time. Vehicles
passed, but the drivers merely glanced at them and continued. The drivers seemed especially committed; he suspected they knew things that he did not.

‘I’m so cold,’ Miranda said, and pushed towards the car. He still hadn’t told her about Penny. The situation was becoming absurd.

‘She’s here . . . here. I found her. I have her. That’s why they took you, because I was so close to her. I have Penny.’

‘Who?’ his wife asked, and blinked and pulled at her face with numb fingers as if to revive the muscles around her jaw.

‘Penny. I found her. She’s in the car.’

His wife squinted at him, confused; he could see bewilderment filling her murky eyes. Then she must have imagined that she was dreaming, or that he was mad, because she said, ‘No. Stop
now.’ And as he strained to hold her long body upright, she looked past him and must have seen the small figure on the rear seat of the car.

Miranda tried to scream, but the noise was so weak and frail that it sounded like the wail of a woman who had just lost her only child, rather than one who had just seen her own child, and one
given up for dead, for two years. There must, the father thought, be an equivalency to those kinds of shock.

‘Miranda! Listen, Miranda! Miranda . . . It is her. Penny! She’s alive. She’s well. But we can’t stand here any longer. You’re frozen. And I need you to come back
to me, to . . . to be with her, while I get us away from here. It’s not safe. We’re too close to the place I took her from. Do you understand? We have to move now.’

‘Penny?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, but she doesn’t know me. Nor will she recognize you. It’s going to take time.’

‘Where? Can’t be . . . It’s not true. Where was she?’

‘Later. There isn’t time now. We have to move, and I need you to be with her. Please. Be her mother again. Please.’

And then Miranda was crying and so was the father.