Lost Girl by Adam Nevill Read Free Book Online

Scarlett Johansson had handlers herself and had been chosen to contact some of the parents who had lost their little ones. Perhaps she had been told that he was the right kind of person
for collaboration because he’d once been arrested for assaulting a convicted sex offender, a man who’d shrugged off his approach and his request for information about his daughter. The
man had not even been in the right part of the country when his daughter was snatched. But the father had needed to do something and the man’s indifference had been inappropriate. It had
taken four men to pull him away and to hold him shaking against a wall until an auxiliary police officer arrived on a bicycle.
    Charges were pressed, but circumstances were taken into account and he’d been released with a caution. Scarlett Johansson had known about this incident and of the father’s need to
do
something. Somewhere, off the record, discussions must then have taken place about his suitability for making moves. If deliberations had happened between factions in authority, in
times of so little restraint, he had been told nothing of them, nor of any assessment passed through the secretive processes that involved Scarlett Johansson.
    Handlers were probably politically motivated and working in collusion with the nationalists, long the most popular political movement. His wife thought so, and Miranda believed he was being used
to harass criminal elements in certain areas of the country. She feared he would be asked to eradicate them too. Such clandestine strategies were not unknown. But it was also possible that these
officers of the law were good men and women, helping a father find a stolen daughter because
they
could not make things right any more. Maybe there were a great many Scarlett Johanssons
who offered parents a respite from the torments of waiting for news, the harrowing silence that inexorably moved parents further, and still further, and yet further away from the exact moment their
worlds were rent by events that had nothing to do with heatwaves or storms. The father hoped so, though he didn’t really care where the information came from. He didn’t know how it all
worked, he just wanted help.
    During one of those days deprived of his daughter, inside that sleepless blur of exhaustion and grief and terror, Scarlett Johansson had called him, and on the day his child had been missing for
twenty months, one week and two days.
    Scarlett Johansson had called him many times since. Even though she had a tendency to speak quickly, as if afraid of talking to him, the father would ask her to repeat herself. He made sure he
never made mistakes when he recorded information, because so much had already been overlooked or completely ignored. And he would record every fragment about these men who did not care about other
people, or could not care, not really. This awareness had made his four moves easier. And he was still not convinced by the apparent remorse he had witnessed amongst those he’d interviewed.
Nor did he believe that the people he hunted could change for the better. That assurance also made his dealings with them easier.

SIX
    One week after his visit to Robert East, his lip-licking desire for strong drink enticed the father out of the hotel room and he ventured into Paignton town centre to buy a
bottle of Welsh rum. He’d been locked away, living off bread, imitation cheese and real fruit, while waiting for Scarlett Johansson to call and give him an
all clear
.
    Even though the range of food dwindled, alcohol never failed to appear in stores and markets. No one in any kind of authority would dare take the alcohol away. Wine drinkers were sometimes
bereft, but their privations were the least of anyone’s worries.
    In the twenty-four-hour supermarket, the rum was pricey, and stacked on the higher shelves, protected by cages. His funds were not being replenished, and nor was this a special occasion, but he
needed to drink. And he