Lost Girl (7 page)

It was easy to imagine the creature’s outer flesh as soft and slippery, but the father detected a tough core in a large body; the doughy shoulders and arms suggested an unappealing
strength. This was a man who might hold on tightly. A physical sense of the man grew the longer the father watched him, and as they inexorably drew closer to each other. Imagined textures, the
weight and density of the body, taunted the father until the man’s dimensions began to seem entirely unassailable, the damp fleshiness unmanageable.

Bowles would always close his front door without looking over his shoulder, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. Just in and out he went, short journeys, the small eyes shielded,
half-closed.

No lights had come on in the hallway during the evenings. The father had wanted lights. Perhaps it was the idea of being in a close, dark space with Bowles that appalled him more than the sight
of the burly figure. And the longer he had waited, the more his imagination effortlessly refashioned the big man into an opponent light on his feet with the eyesight of a rat, aware of the father
outside and simply waiting for him in a familiar darkness. Something about this move just did not
feel
right. A nervy suspicion endured, not helped when Scarlett gave the father notes and
warned him ‘not to underestimate the suspect’. When in role as a sadist, apparently Bowles was fond of blood and a veritable master of the universe.

Going in early Friday morning would have been ideal, but the father was still outside, watching, on Sunday morning. Plans had been made and remade. He had carried out more reconnaissance than
normal. Lengthy preparations hadn’t reaffirmed his purpose, but only made it vaguer. More than heat was holding him back here.

The sky faded to a treacherous Atlantic blue, with a promise of cool air that would never come. A dilution to a milky blue would follow, before a canopy of polished steel would burn unprotected
eyes. He could not be here in daylight. There was barely the best part of an hour of semi-darkness remaining. He wiped the sweat off his face with a forearm, started the car and drove to the place
where he’d decided to park in an adjoining street. He would enter through the rear garden.

Fir trees covered the rear of the property, but he would break cover the moment he pushed between two leaning fence panels, rotted away from a concrete post. There was nowhere
to hide in the garden. Even without ambient light, if anyone was to look from the rear windows at the back of the three terraced houses confronting him, they would see him.

He’d need to move slowly because the back yard was an obstacle course designed by those who cared nothing for a rear outlook. The smell of desiccated grass by the broken fence clouded his
thoughts and hampered a strategy that became even less clear in his mind, less convincing, until his plan entirely fell away. He was tired, had slept badly for months, was thinking too much but
resolving nothing. His head was not right for today’s work. But would it ever be right again?

Elderly private owners occupied the house on the right. Their garden featured an orderly array of crops around bleached stone paths. Two families shared the house on the left. He’d counted
five children earlier that week and wondered if the parents knew who was living next door. He thought of the children playing outside their neighbour’s shabby house, and the father shivered
with a sudden, mad desire to do the move fast, and at gunpoint, eschewing nerve gas or the police immobilizer.

According to Scarlett, Murray Bowles had already served a three-year sentence in the early forties for the physical and sexual abuse of children, before appearing in court in 2046 on twelve new
charges of indecent assault and the rape of minors. The latter abuse was sadistic in nature, though he served no more than three years. He was out in 2049 and housed at the seaside in Margate. In
2050 he moved west, to Torbay.

In the late thirties Murray Bowles was a suspected affiliate of Ken ‘Santa’ Barret, a reviled paedophile and one of the last child killers to get the nation bristling for the death
penalty, before such things were swept away by record rainfalls, European hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. In Nottingham ‘Santa’ Barret’s group had killed two brothers in
care during a sadomasochistic ritual. Rumours suggested more children had been killed by the ring. Five of the twenty boys and girls that Santa’s secretive group had abused were never
found.

‘Santa’ Barret was killed by other inmates in prison in 2043. Besides Murray Bowles, none of Barret’s associates had ever been traced, and Bowles’s connection to the
‘Santa’ murders never stuck due to lack of evidence.

The father knew why Scarlett Johansson had made Murray Bowles available to him: he’d mainly groomed from care homes in the East Midlands, like his master, and they’d often moved the
victims into rented flats. Two children were imprisoned for over a year, and Murray Bowles had arrived in Torquay the year before his daughter was taken.

Bowles couldn’t drive, but may have been part of a group. Parole officers had kept an eye on the man once a month for thirty minutes since his release from prison, but he hadn’t been
a suspect for anything since 2049. According to statistics and case histories, that didn’t mean much during the quiet periods of predators like Bowles, and all of the offenders were mostly
off radar now; there were far greater priorities to occupy the police and social services.

He should have been told about Bowles before. That bugged him. A notion that the four men he had made moves upon thus far had been mere practice, and that he had been surreptitiously tested and
trained in advance of this hot morning at another stranger’s house, nagged him. As his wife suspected, maybe tendrils of the Home Guard scandal, created by factions in authority and their
associations with paramilitaries, were now coiled about his neck. God knew he had reason to be here, but he didn’t want to be used for general organized harassment, or another paedophile
cull. He did not want to engage in anything not directly connected to finding
only
those who took his little girl.

On his way into the rear yard, the father passed a plastic water barrel, a bulging shed, soaked and dried out too many times. A trellis had sprung free from a painted cement wall. Weeds and tree
roots extending for water made the patio uneven like the deck of a ship coming apart on black rocks. He stepped over a sink, its pipes plumbed into nothingness, and skirted greening sacks of
sun-bleached refuse. At the kitchen door a taint of sewage wafted about his face. Only one first-storey window was uncovered.

The father found the right tool in his rucksack and began working at the door, in the gap between the frame and the lock. A secondary glazed door, but cheap, the glass all tapioca bubbles and
mist.

He entered the kitchen soon after, stun spray and torch in either hand, and stood in a room long and narrow like a galley on a canal boat. A scrap merchant’s mound of mismatching pots and
crockery and plastic formed a small mountain over the draining board, the sink and small kitchen table. Packets of soya meals for one were stacked in a precarious tower. The father could smell gas
mingling with damp-softened wood. A silent, lightless house lay beyond an open door at the far end.

What carpet there had once been in the hall was worn through to flattened threads, spider-webbing wooden floorboards. There were no decorations on the walls peppered with ancient Rawlplugs
protruding like grubs; the interior had not seen paint or new wallpaper for decades.

A front room was choked with boxes and cases and shadowy humpbacks of junk piled over dim furniture. A dining room facing the garden had mustard-coloured curtains, red lino peeling off the
floor, pale but dirty walls. Someone had broken the brick fireplace apart with a hammer but left the rubble on the floor, as if work had been abandoned as strength failed and futility numbed good
intentions.

Moving up the narrow staircase, he felt the newel post and bannisters moving under his hand, and a sebaceous odour clung to the dark and warm space of the stairwell. The first-floor landing was
the same, the smell even stronger, as if a hot animal had been driven indoors by the heat of the day and settled to its heavy respirations in the gloom.

Four doors on the first storey: all closed and painted a sickly vanilla colour. He thought they must open onto three bedrooms and a bathroom. Frosted-glass panes above each door suggested
distorted views upon horrors selected and refined by what sparked inside Murray Bowles’s vast and shaggy skull. The father imagined the ghosts of former tenants: an elderly working-class
couple, retired from council jobs in Walsall, now shivering and aghast at time’s remorseless disintegration, and its rehousing of villains inside their old home.

There was a solitary picture on the wall of the first floor, between two of the doors; a curious place to hang a frame, almost as if it was a warning of what inhabited the nearest rooms. He lit
it up.

And recoiled.

A flat black, but somehow receding, background pushed out a figure in the centre of the canvas: a painted corpse. Naked and grinning, its ribs were exposed through the sickly green wash of its
skin and the belly was hollowed out. It held up two thin arms and upon each hand was balanced what could have been a rose-coloured fruit.

The father squinted, moving closer. At the grey paps of the skeletal figure, lifeless babes swung, suckling. Three others seemed to squirm like larvae between the dead figure’s legs.
Ghastly cherubim, pallid and puffy, the infants looked up with tired white eyes. Below the babes were words within a small scroll:
Nihil. Nemo
. They meant nothing to him. Latin again, and
an uncomfortable reminder of the graffiti in Paignton; here was another emaciated figure suggesting decline, perhaps even death with a hint of depravity. In the darkness, the father found the
connection deeply disconcerting.

Sickened and disoriented, the father continued to frown at the picture with an appalled incomprehension, until a door was yanked open and banged against a wall beyond his torchlight.

He flinched.

Heavy feet bumped loose floorboards. Frantic breaths of animal excitement filled the unlit cave.

Behind you
.

The father’s torchlight raked the ceiling as he turned.

The blue lightning of smashed nerves erupted through one shoulder, and he fell forward, his arm dead. Pins and needles sparked in the pads of his fingers, at the end of his distant hand,
swinging below the agony of his shoulder. The torch dropped, bounced, rolled, and shone sideways across dirty canvas shoes and a grubby ankle bandage: Bowles. The encroaching scuffles of the big
feet filled his vision, until the father staggered away, across the dirty carpet.

Air whisked past his ear, ending in a plaster-gouging thud as a second blow narrowly missed his head. The air was then carved in two again, as a long weapon was pulled back high, eager to
achieve its pulverizing designs upon his skull. A light fitting exploded on the backswing. This and the entanglement of the weapon with a light cord bought the father time.

He could see little, but with what remained clear in a mind traumatized by pain, he interpreted the location of his opponent’s exertions and motions within the smelly passage, and shambled
towards the end of the corridor and to the window as if to pitch himself through.

Big feet thumped after him, carrying the phantom whose rage seemed fuelled by the laboured breaths of this wounded stranger on invaded terrain. Another swipe of air, accompanied by a grunt,
brought an object whisking close to the father’s spine. Whatever was swung clipped his buttock then smashed into the heel of his booted foot.

After dragging himself the last two steps to the window, crazy and sick from the fire inside his shoulder, and now his heel, the father fell against the curtains. And knew at once that he was
trapped. His skin iced all over at the idea of being smashed apart like kindling.

Foul fabrics issued a tomb’s trapped fragrance. Distant light from his discarded torch glimmered about a bulk silhouetted a few feet before him. The figure appeared gigantic, grazing the
ceiling and struggling to forge its vastness through the cramped passage. Again the ogre’s club fell.

The father dropped until his buttocks rested upon his ankles.

Out smashed and tinkled the glass of the window above his head, the violence swaddled to a muffle by the wretched drapes.

The father rose from the gritty floor as the club was yanked free of the dusty impediments, whooshing backwards to prepare for another blow. His useful hand stretched itself towards the great
shadow. And he sprayed, aiming for the boulder of a tatty head. A shoal of small droplets, an invisible rain, pattered over the colossus.

Down came the club as the ogre roared at the first sting of venom. The father launched his body under the falling club and struck a thick paunch with the shoulder not ablaze with pain. The ogre
clutched at him. Fingernails grazed the father’s nape like tines across pastry. And the two of them huddled, briefly, like worn-out wrestlers, held up on sweat-glossy shins, before the father
slipped away, under a wet armpit redolent with farmyard scents, and hurled himself back towards the staircase.

Behind his noisy rout, the nerve agent’s caustic sizzle found fine tissues in the giant’s yawning head. Puffy sinuses and fleshy tear ducts now blazed with chemical fire. There was a
scream, a chaos of a living intruder alarm.

Enfeebled by the gouging pain inside his shoulder, the father stumbled down the first few stairs, then fell down a few more. In the torch glow, and through the bannisters, he glimpsed the
bear-like shadow above, banging its great feet and swiping the air in rage, spitting out what burned its sinuses like inhaled cumin.

Inside the rucksack, the father’s weak hand pawed about, an injured crab inside a disrupted rock pool. Fingertips brushed steel cuffs, the ball gag, became tangled in a chain then freed
themselves. His eyes implored the stinking darkness for help, but the torch was kicked even further away by the ogre’s dance.