Free Lost Girl by Adam Nevill Page B

people wanted badly. Kings: they
sounded familiar. Yes, they’d murdered a lot of people in Bristol.
    ‘The Kings? More stupid pricks? How many stupid pricks live in this town? If I had known there were this many stupid pricks here, I would never have come in the first place.’
    ‘You don’t wanna know.’ The figure’s anal eye moved to the painting on the wall. Something approximating pride appeared in his plump face.
    The father took out a pair of cuffs. ‘Put these on. You can take me to Rory now.’
    ‘No chance.’
    ‘Better there than here.’
    Upstairs someone had started to move again. Bowles glanced up, unable to conceal his concern. He then peered at the father and opened his mouth as if to explain something. The father shook his
head. ‘Cuffs.’
    Obediently, Bowles cuffed his own hands, though as loosely as he could manage on his doughy wrists.
    ‘Tighter.’
    The father listened to the clicks as Bowles ratcheted the metal tighter. When the steel indented the man’s flesh, the father lowered the gun. ‘That door to the loft, where are the
keys to the padlock?’
    Bowles’s swallow was audible. ‘It was Nige who brought them . . . Anyways they like it here. Council says we gotta take in refugees, if we’s got spare rooms, like.’ The
man’s voice was almost a whisper by the time he completed the final sentence. Whatever he’d told himself about why he kept the attic door padlocked was losing veracity and validity the
more he saw of the father’s eyes within the Balaclava.
    The father listened for sirens. Heard none. ‘Keys.’
    On the verge of tears, Bowles said, ‘Please don’t, mister.’

NINE
    I am an imposter. A tired, so tired, father. An idiot with a spray can and a gun. A fool in a land of monsters, who took up arms and became a clown
.
    Lying on the bed, the spent muscles in the father’s legs thumped with aftershocks. Furnace heat swelled from the baked and dusty ground outside the hotel and beat against its steel, glass
and oven bricks.
    The gun rested on the bed beside his knee, taunting him with estimations of his future: the years that must now be spent in a stifling prison. Unable to stand the sight of it, he used what
little of his strength remained to zip the handgun inside the rucksack. Using a foot, he pushed the bag to the bottom of the mattress.
    As soon as he’d returned to his room, he’d surrendered to his body’s desire for stillness and for fuller assessments of damage sustained. Morning’s searing light had
already revealed torn trousers and bloodied knees, collected in the rout, and his forearms were blotted by cuts and striped with scratches. The pain in his shoulder continued to pulse through his
left arm and across his back.
    At least this strange passivity supplanted the riot of thoughts that had driven him through the early hours. Partial recollections of those intense, furious seconds in the darkness had lessened,
then dispersed like a tired but once frantic crowd, to leave a curious calm about the wreckage in his memory. His body was loose-limbed but heavy now, flat, exhausted, and he was no longer the man
who had done
that
. Whatever electricity had crackled along his nerves and roared through his blood had earthed itself. The hate-filled ape inside him had slipped away, in shame or
astonishment, and gone back to the dark to leave a frail, shaken soul in its place. How many times would that creature have to come out shrieking before it cindered him, or refused to leave?
    Pulling hard on the neck of a bottle of Welsh rum, he closed his eyes and prayed for this all to end, and for him to find, or bid farewell, to his daughter. Her picture lay on the pillow beside
his head. Her father, he knew, had gone too far.
    The father had now waited a long time for the throwing wide of the door. Even though he had shot and killed two men that morning, the police had not come for him. He’d expected their swift
arrival, preceded by distant but