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lowering eyelid, a flicker, a dilation, something like that, something
near-imperceptible. Robert wanted to know what people cared about, as if the information was a toehold on a sheer rock face to work on, widen, expand into a handhold, then a ledge, eventually a
cave they could settle down inside to begin whispering. Get a trickle of sand moving, some loose ground. Keep it up until there was a rockslide of trust and familiarity. Then he was holding the
rope and someone else was dangling at the end of it. The father had used blunt instruments on Robert, but suspected the man had finer tools to work with on him.
If you let him
. But this
wasn’t a game of chess, not any kind of negotiation either, because such things had done the world no good; there was never agreement when it was required, there was nothing left but
self-interest and the necessary force to achieve it.
    The father skipped to closing statements and sentencing. He hardened his tone, but kept his voice low. ‘There will be no explanations, no excuses. No chatter. The jury on you came in a
long time ago. We’ll never bond, Robert. If you say one more word that I feel is moving us away from the very specific information I came here to gather, then I will spray you like a greenfly
and put the rubber ball back inside your mouth. At your age, two, maybe three doses will give you a cardiac arrest. So, how about no more doses and you just find it in yourself to tell the truth.
Now, this is what I know. You were the owner of an agency that supplied staff to care homes for children. You supplied three homes with carers. But you also employed your mates, with whom you
shared similar interests.’
    ‘Ancient history,’ Robert said, in an aristocratic drawl. His face had faded grey, and gone all pinched around the mouth. Welling eyes were lidded and even looking down a long nose
at the father, who was out of his seat like a jack-in-the box to swipe up the spray can.
    Robert flinched. ‘Sorry,’ he barely said.
    The father slowly returned to his seat and settled himself. ‘You were always the ringleader. You oversaw everything. Anything your group did, you knew about. Two of your associates
vanished into Thailand a few years before 2051, a year that is very pertinent to today’s meeting. The third, Billy Furrow, was killed in prison in 2050. So none of your inner circle was
available to me, and could not have been involved in the abduction that I’m here to investigate. But you may have had associates in the area who knew something about this snatch in ’51.
I don’t entirely fancy you for the crime, Robert, but you are just the sort of bird that would flock with those that did take . . .’ The father cleared his throat.
    ‘Social workers blew the whistle on you in 2046. Under Section 47 of the Children Act 1989, the local authority had a duty to investigate any child in danger, or suffering abuse. A social
worker in Plymouth demanded an investigation into all three care homes that you were intimately familiar with. In fact, one social worker believed you, in effect, ran these homes with your
mates.
    ‘You pleaded not guilty to seventy-two counts of taking indecent photographs of children between the ages of three and six. Seventeen counts of indecency with a child were also added to
the charges. So you might understand why your protestations about your sick wife and never reoffending hold no water. You were sentenced to seven years in prison. The sentence was reduced to two
years due to chronic overcrowding after the Bristol riots and you were freed the following year. You came home and I can only assume that it was business as usual.
    ‘Most of your known victims were children in care, but you were a regular stroller around whatever seaside attractions were still operational, as was revealed by your photographic archive.
You were getting on, but you were probably still active at the time of any abductions in 2051. Statistics suggest that