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RACHEL
I logged on to Furry Football countless times that night. I was hoping to encounter Ben again, of
course I was. You would have done the same thing.
But he wasn’t there. Not anywhere. I trawled the online game until I knew every inch of it, every
server, every area you could play in. Overnight, avatars with foreign-sounding names came and went,
and I could see the ebb and flow of the time zones as they logged on and off: hundreds, thousands,
tens of thousands of children online from all over the world. But not Ben. I never encountered him
again. Not once.
The hours searching didn’t breed any doubt in my mind, though, because my conviction that it had
been Ben just grew and grew, that feeling so powerfully strong it was as if he’d actually flitted past
me in his red anorak, met my eye for a second, and then gone again, just out of reach of my
outstretched hand.
I wanted to tell John, I thought he of all people would understand, would feel the enormity of this
fleeting contact with our child.
I called the hospital in the hope that he might have improved, that he might even be conscious. A
voice that was compassionate and tired-sounding told me that there was no change in his condition.
He was stable, that’s all she could confirm, she said.
I imagined him as I’d seen him the night before, the absence of him, his mind curled up tight
beneath the bleeding and the swelling and the trauma. Did a very small part of me, just for a moment,
envy him that oblivion? Maybe. Was it because I was finding it harder than ever to exist? Probably.
But two things kept my mind engaged that night, kept me alert, jittering. Two things nagged at me
with the persistence of a noose slowly tightening around your neck.
If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then why would Ben have disappeared so abruptly from Furry
Football? If Lucas Grantham had taken Ben, then who was looking after him while Lucas Grantham
was in custody?
I passed my phone from hand to hand, my fingerprints oily on its screen. Silent, it felt to me a
useless object, its very existence mocking both my reliance on it, and the isolation that bred that
reliance.
I wanted a phone call from the police to let me know that they were searching properties, that they
were knocking down doors and smashing windows as they looked for Ben.
I didn’t want process. I didn’t want twenty-four hours of questioning. Them and Lucas Grantham in
a room, with the tea, and the biscuits, and then after that no charges brought and all that time Ben
could be somewhere with nobody to care for him, nobody to bring him food, or water, or he could be
somewhere with somebody else, somebody who made him log off Furry Football late at night, in a
hurry.
But my phone remained mute.
Silently, in its depths, I knew that emails would be pinging in: media requests, contact from friends
and families we knew, those who were too scared to speak to me, people who were most content
monitoring me from afar.
But the phone itself didn’t ring. The police didn’t call me. Nobody did.
And in that silence those two thoughts went round, and round, and I didn’t know what to do with
them. I felt as if I was no longer the wild-eyed fighter, the scrapper, who stood up at the press
conference and dared Ben’s abductor, who looked down a lens and into every corner, trying to find an