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fired signals from unreachable fathoms. No one saw his face. The ruler of us was unique and ineffable.
    Sullen and flattened by the realization that there would probably be no great revelation that morning, the father regrouped his wits by an act of will. ‘I’m on the brink of
crop-dusting your bloody chair, Robert. You gotta do better than this.’
    Robert swallowed. ‘There was talk . . .’
    The father leaned into him, his vision flickering around the edges. ‘Where? Online?’
    Robert nodded. ‘Around that time. And I don’t know anything else about it, I really don’t—’
    ‘Get on with it.’
    ‘There was talk about it, about who could’ – Robert paused to choose his words carefully – ‘have involved themselves. No one local was the consensus. Or, at least,
no one ever mentioned anything that convinced me.’
    ‘But some of them claimed to know something?’
    ‘No more than jests and things like that. About, you know, what might . . . People pretended they knew.’ Robert swallowed.
    At the mention of ‘jests’, Robert must have seen the blood bulge the very skin of the father’s eyeballs. Robert may also have seen a screaming mouth in each of the pupils
facing him, while the father sensed the house rise a few inches and then drop without rattling a single porcelain knick-knack on the mantel. His anger was white-hot coals followed by the cold of
deep space. One of his hands fidgeted at something else he kept inside the rucksack: the final shit.
    ‘Perhaps it was someone you knew.’ Robert offered this in a conciliatory tone of voice, as if he were talking to a dangerous simpleton.
    ‘I don’t know anyone that awful.’
    ‘Addicts, they’ll take anything to sell.’
    ‘Enough of these straws your claws are clutching at. Let us return to the jests, Robert. What precisely did you and your peers find so funny about this abduction?’
    ‘Not
me
. Never. I was just saying that some pretended, the more garrulous elements, that they knew . . . where she was, who she was with . . . That sort of thing.’ He
cleared his throat. ‘But I think the prevailing opinion was that a visitor to the area, an opportunist, may have been responsible.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘Moved her elsewhere. Abroad. Possibly. Or . . . did something unspeakable and then covered their tracks.’
    Unspeakable
. The terrible three hours after a child’s abduction when the abominable, the unthinkable, could occur, but was something to laugh about online for Robert and his
mates
. Shaky as a scarecrow released from its pole, the father moved his feet.
    Robert’s turmeric-puffy eyes pleaded with him; even in a burning squint they could read the change in the intruder. ‘I’m afraid I cannot help you. If I knew anything I would
hardly keep it to myself. Abduction was never . . . I’d never taken anyone’s . . . I would never . . . What are you doing?’ Robert turned his head this way and that way to see why
the father had gone behind the easy chair. He even attempted to rise.
    The father said, ‘Sit,’ in a voice belonging to some other man.
    Robert stayed seated. ‘Nothing, there is nothing more I can tell you. Names. I have names of others who may be able to assist you. Who were around at the time. Who were intrigued by . .
.’
    The father came round from behind the easy chair and leaned over the coffee table. He took Robert’s equipment from the table top and placed everything on the TV dinner tray. Stuck memory
pins into the back of anything with a memory. ‘All of them. Every one of them,’ he said. ‘Numbers and email addresses. Your passwords, user names, the sites, encryptions, links,
the places. Download them from everywhere you store your filth. If the names don’t check out, then God help you, Robert.’
    Robert started typing with cuffed wrists, his hands moving like featherless ghost birds, bony herons descending and alighting from the screen. Occasionally he glanced nervously at where the
father