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here.
And then I saw something else.
Scattered all over the bed, beneath a fresh scar on the wall where it looked as though it had made
impact, were the components of a smashed laptop: shards of plastic, electrical bits and keyboard
keys, all separated from one another by significant force.
Ben would have liked the laptop. He might have played on it.
But he might not have been allowed to go online, to play his favourite game. The laptop might have
been snatched from him, and hurled against a wall in anger.
And would that anger have then been directed towards him?
I fumbled for my phone. The reception was poor, but it was enough. I called 999.
And when I’d finished the call I stood in the middle of that space, with the painful wrongness of it
in every corner of my vision, and the shattered computer components a glowering hint of violence,
and I began to moan, and it was a dreadful, primitive sound, and the moans turned into a shout for
him, a final desperate plea, an ululation, like the one I’d made in the woods one week before.
And I fell to my knees, hope shattered.