Lost Girl by Adam Nevill Page A

inside his imagination, filled with husks, barely fluttering human moths on drips seeking hydration. He’d seen the footage. Even if he
were seen by a nurse, amongst the kidney failures and bodies floppy with heatstroke, months of rehabilitation without the possibility of physiotherapy might yet be required for his shoulder.
    He imagined his remaining funds squandered on private physicians, or the endless waiting at healthcare centres run by the NGOs. He suffered a clear premonition of indifferent medical
professionals, the nurses, orderlies, porters, all twitching on amphetamines to stay awake, and beyond insensitivity to the death and misery the heat had wrought on a people already disrupted by
riots, assorted head-smashings, clannish murders, poverty, shortages, rage, humiliation and mistrust: a maelstrom that had gathered momentum with every storm that lashed across the sea to Great
Britain. There was no medical option, not for his work. If he fell in this business he stayed down.
    The father swallowed two of the last eight painkillers: strong for headaches, irrelevant in the matter of smashed bones. He rinsed them down with the half-pint bottle of rum. Returned the bottle
to the bedside cabinet, found his phone and called the last number Scarlett Johansson had used, and waited. And waited some more.
    ‘What happened?’ When her voice appeared in his ear it was so clear he would not have been surprised if she had been standing beside his bed.
    The sound of the only voice in which he’d recognized understanding, sympathy and cooperation aboard his solitary voyage, made the breath catch in his throat. A woman who sent him to
torture sex offenders was his only companion now; a person who pitched her words like a businesswoman with no patience for small talk. The closeness of her brought a great sob, like a gassy bubble,
up through his chest.
    ‘Are you all right?’
    The father burned with shame at the sound of the grief that had bassooned from him. He swallowed hard to still the tremors of his vocal chords. ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘Where are you?’
    ‘Back at the room.’
    ‘Are you hurt?’
    ‘My shoulder.’
    ‘What happened?’
    ‘It went wrong. Things . . .’ He blew air out, tried to empty himself of emotions so pickled and sour and yet still racing. ‘The police will be looking for me.’
    She did not speak for a while. In the pristine air of the connection he listened to the silence of her thinking. Finally, she ventured, ‘Do you need a doctor?’
    ‘Not sure. A broken bone, maybe. My shoulder. I’ll wait till tonight, see if I can move my arm again.’
    ‘Lot of nerves in the shoulder. One of the worst places to get hurt. Let’s start from the beginning.’
    He did and was forced to remember and recount what he had discovered in the attic: two unwashed faces above thin bodies, huddled beneath limp coverings, their tousled hair silhouetted by the
torch and then lit up. Suspicious eyes had blinked, wide and smarting in electric light, in those young faces long-banished beneath that roof. Boys, who had been locked away in a space reeking of
perpetual damp and subjected to monumental solar heat. The attic had been a triangular roofed cage, stunk out with sour flesh, piss in pots, kidney and ammonia, pungent underarms, assorted trash
fumes beneath hot bin lids.
    ‘It’s OK now,’ the father had said to the boys.
    The small faces had merely watched him in an uncomprehending suspense. Neither looked English with their black eyes and sallow skin. They never moved, but Bowles did. Half-blind, and still
cuffed, the ogre had risen from its bathroom refuge and hurtled its bulk down the first-floor passage.
    Anyway, they like it here
.
    The father’s horror became a billowing of hot blood within his skull. When the heat dispersed, it left him white and cold and jangly. But on newly swift legs, he’d run down the
ogre.
    He’d fished out the gun from his pocket, still eschewing the less lethal