Michael Robotham - Lost

“Aleksei Kuznet visited me last night. I think I know why I was in the river. I was following a ransom.”

Joe doesn't bat an eyelid.

“He wouldn't tell me the details, but there must have been proof of life. I must have believed Mickey was still alive.”

“Or wished it.”

I know what he's saying. He doesn't think I'm being rational.

“OK, let's ask ourselves some questions,” he says. “If Mickey is alive, where has she been for the past three years?”

“I don't know.”

“And why would anyone wait three years to post a ransom demand?”

“Maybe they didn't kidnap her for ransom, not at first.”

“OK. If not for ransom, why?”

I'm struggling now. I don't know. “Maybe they wanted to punish Aleksei.”

It doesn't sound convincing.

“It sounds like a hoax to me. Someone close to the family or to the original investigation knew enough to convince desperate people that Mickey might still be alive.”

“And the shootings?”

“They had a falling out or someone got greedy.”

It sounds so much more rational than my theory.

Joe takes out his notebook and starts drawing lines on the page as if playing hangman.

“You grew up in Lancashire, didn't you?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“I'm just asking a question. Your stepfather was an RAF pilot in the war.”

“How do you know that?”

“I remember you telling me.”

“Bullshit!”

A ball of anger forms in my throat. “You're just itching to get inside my head, aren't you? The Human Condition—isn't that what you call it? You got to watch out for that bastard.”

“Why do you keep dreaming about missing children?”

“Fuck you!”

“Maybe you feel guilty.”

I don't answer.

“Maybe you blocked it out.”

“I don't block things out.”

“Did you ever meet your real father?”

“You're going to have trouble asking questions with your jaw wired shut.”

“A lot of people don't know their fathers. You must wonder what he's like; whether you look like him or sound like him.”

“You're wrong. I don't care.”

“If you don't care, why won't you talk about it? You were probably a war baby—born just afterward. A lot of fathers didn't come home. Others were stationed overseas. Children get lost . . .”

I hate that word “lost.” My father didn't go missing. He isn't lying in some small part of France that will forever be England. I don't even know his name.

Joe is still waiting. He's sitting there, twirling his pen, waiting for Godot. I don't want to be psychoanalyzed or have my past explored. I don't want to talk about my childhood.

I was fourteen years old the first time my mother sat down and told me about where I came from. She was drunk, of course, curled up on the end of my bed, wanting me to massage her feet. She told me the story of Germile Purrum, a Gypsy girl, with a “Z” tattooed on her left arm and a black triangle sewn into her rags.

“We looked like bowling balls with sticky-out ears and frightened eyes,” she said, nursing a drink between her breasts.

The prettiest and the strongest Gypsy girls were sent to the homes of the officers in the SS. The next group were used in camp brothels, gang-raped to break them in and often sterilized because the Roma were considered unclean.

My mother was fifteen when she arrived at Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women in the Reich. She was put to work in the camp brothel, working twelve hours a day.

She didn't go into details but I know she remembered every one of them.

“I think I'm pregnant,” she slurred.

“That's not possible, Daj.”

“I haven't had my monthly days.”

“Have you been to see the doctor?”

She looked at me crossly. “Esther tried to make me bleed.”

“Who is Esther?”

“A Jewish angel . . . but you clung to my insides. You didn't want to leave. You wanted so much to live.”

Daj was talking about me . I knew this part of the story.

She was three months pregnant when the war ended. She spent another two months looking for her family, but they were all gone—her twin brothers, her mother, her father, aunts, uncles, cousins . . .

At a displaced persons camp near Frankfurt, a young British immigration officer called Vincent Smith told her she should emigrate. The United States and England were taking refugees if they had identity papers and skills. Germile had neither.

Because nobody would take a Gypsy she lied on the application form and said she was Jewish. So many had perished it was easy to get identity papers in someone else's name. Germile Purrum became Sofia Eisner, aged nineteen instead of sixteen, a seamstress from Frankfurt—a new person for a new life.

I was born in a rain-swept English town in a county hospital that still had blackout curtains on the windows. She didn't let me die. She didn't say, “Who needs another white-haired German bastard with cold blue eyes?” And even when I rejected her milk, puking it down her open blouse (another sign, perhaps, that I was more of him than her), she forgave me.

I don't know what she saw when she looked in my eyes: the enemy, perhaps, or the soldiers who raped her. I looked as though I owned the world, she said. As though everything in creation would be recast or rearranged to suit me.

I don't know who I am now. I am either a miracle of survival or an abomination. I'm part German, part Gypsy, part English, one-third evil, one-third victim and the other third angry. My mother used to say I was a gentleman. No other language has such a word to describe a man. It's a paradox. You can't claim to be such a thing but you hope others see you that way.

I look up at Joe and blink away the past. I've been talking all this time.

His voice is softer than mine. “You're not responsible for your father's sins.”

Yeah, right! I'm angry now. Why did he start me out on this? I don't want any of his airy-fairy, touchy-feely, Pollyanna-pass-the-tissues psychological crap.

We sit in silence. I'm through with talking. My nightmares march in jackboots and are best left alone.

Joe stands suddenly and begins to pack his briefcase. I don't want him to go now.

“Aren't we going to talk about the ransom?”

“You're tired. I'll come and see you tomorrow.”

“But I remembered some of the details.”

“That's good.”

“Isn't there something you can tell me; something I should be doing?”

He looks at me quizzically. “You want some advice?”

“Yes.”

“Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.”

Then he's gone.

When Mickey disappeared I didn't sleep for the first forty-eight hours. If a missing child isn't found within the first two days the chances of her being found alive diminishes by forty percent. Within two weeks it is down to less than ten percent.

I hate statistics. I read somewhere that the average person uses 5.9 sheets of toilet tissue when they wipe their arse. It proves nothing and helps no one.

Here are some more figures. There were six hundred volunteers scouring the streets and eighty officers going door to door. The sense of urgency bordered on violence. I wanted to kick open doors, shake trees and chase every child from the parks and pavements.

We checked alibis, stopped motorists, interviewed tradesmen and tracked down visitors to Dolphin Mansions in the previous month. Every resident was interviewed. I knew which of them beat his spouse, slept with prostitutes, lied about sickies, owed money to bookies and cultivated marijuana in a box under her bed.

There had been sixty-five unconfirmed sightings of Mickey and four confessions (including someone claiming to have sacrificed her to the pagan god of the forest). We had also been offered the services of twelve psychics, two palm readers and a guy calling himself the Wizard of Little Milton.