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stood, just behind his right ear, watching his progress and making sure that he didn’t send a message. Sweat rolled from the tip of Robert’s nose.
    But Robert did as he was bid, and his paprika-rimmed eyes, wetter than a beagle hound’s, peered at the glowing screens as if cross-referencing, annotating, listing, footnoting: a rat
scholar. He stopped typing after ten minutes. ‘That’s everything,’ he said, a show of contrived penitence deepening his tone.
    The father collected the items and removed the pins, slipped them all inside his rucksack. Robert would never give the father everything, not even on pain of death. He’d given him
something, probably details of those men incapable of reprisals. There would be some sites loaded with visuals too, which the father would never have the stomach to trawl through. Scarlett
Johansson would want it all. Her ‘associates’ would then sift through the materials on behalf of all of the other agents in the field.
    The father refilled his bottle of water in the kitchen and returned to the living room, sipping. It was really warming up inside, the heat now pushing its great bloat through the utility-room
window that he’d left open down the hall. He thought about his car and knew it was time to go.
    Robert now looked as miserable as the faces seen at the windows of municipal care homes. ‘She was your daughter,’ he said, with what sounded like deep resignation and genuine
woe.
    The father cleared his throat. ‘Your home is filled with memories, Robert. I can see that. But let me introduce one of mine. There was a little girl who was loved so hard . . .’ His
voice started to break.
    ‘Don’t, please,’ Robert said, as if the father was being rude.
    ‘She was taken. Two years ago. Her family want her back . . . so much.’ The father’s eyes smarted and his throat began to swell enough to prevent much more talk. He rummaged
inside the rucksack and moved further behind the easy chair, out of sight.
    Robert’s voice rose. ‘I can’t help you. You think I would keep information back from the authorities about this?’
    ‘I do, yes.’
    ‘I know what I have done was wrong. But it was in the past. Well before 2051.’
    The father bagged Robert’s head and pulled the drawstring tight.
    ‘Oh God, no,’ Robert said as if from down a well. He tried to get to his feet again.
    The father took a few steps back and killed the overhead lights. ‘Someone, somewhere, will be glad I’m doing this. Here’s one for the kids.’ The father shot the dart into
the man’s wrinkled neck.
    Robert’s ankles were tethered but the rest of him shot forward and snapped off the plastic dinner tray and landed on the coffee table, hard, his elbows barely breaking his fall. His entire
body convulsed.
    Eventually, after the first shocks abated, he turned his hooded head to reveal the outline of a nose and an open mouth, gasping. There was a muffled sob from inside the cloth bag.
    The father took out the final shit and pressed the handgun against the side of the man’s skull. And it seemed so simple, such a simple act to perform: just a short squeeze on the trigger
and every memory of those small, pale bodies, the frightened faces, reddened and stained with tears, or mute with shock and confusion, would be gone from this man’s head forever. One more
death, and the end of a man more deserving of death than most leaving the stage these days. This very man, with his head in a bag, could simply be shot dead one hot morning in his own home. The
father believed he could actually do it now. Not before, with the others; murder had seemed too much for him. But we change, he thought, we change as we are aged by the heartbreaker called
life.
    A murder, an execution, would bring scrutiny, eventually. And no, he would not kill Robert East, and he had to remind himself that he was a father with a broken heart and a broken head, but he
was no killer.
    Nor did the father believe that this