Some of the photographs are innocuous enough: the usual failed blurry pictures of pavements and the inside of bags where the camera has been activated by mistake; extras of other saved photos; faces caught at an unflattering angle, eyes mid-blink, gawping mouths; Bridget herself; Toni; Rosie and Naomi, arms around each other. But others are not so innocent, and it is these that make her catch her breath. They spread before her on the screen of her laptop: hands, shoulders, ear lobes; thighs, breasts and buttocks. There is a toe, the nail painted red, a black-and-white photo of a belly button. With a sick feeling in her stomach, Bridget knows that what she is looking at is her beloved niece, her cheeky, funny, clever, nervous, shy, hilarious Rosie. Her naïve and stupid little fifteen-year-old flesh and blood. And that these pictures are the reason for that creepy nickname.

There are male body parts too. These pictures have messages beneath them. They look like the messages from Instagram – the format is the same. They must have accompanied the pictures. They must be screenshots, taken by Rosie.

A washboard stomach. She thinks she recognises it from a Facebook poolside picture of this Ollie boy. He must have cropped it and sent it, vain bastard.

Check this out, he has written. Thoughts?

Thoughts? My God, the narcissism of the young these days! No wonder they’re all so fucked up. She scrolls down to a male nipple, deep brown on a tanned chest. How does anyone go for this level of conceit?

Like what you see? Send me yours.

‘Jesus.’

There are eyes, an ear pierced with a diamond stud. There’s a tattoo of a dragon on a tanned shoulder, the arm toned not from hard work but from a gym; it has that inflated look about it. A male toe. The sight of it, the message underneath, almost make Bridget retch.

Show me yours?

A toe. His. It is the last of the images of body parts to load. The first, then, that he sent, or at least that Rosie captured. It is beyond weird. Is that where it all started? With this innocent picture that is anything but? Is that how this creep began his insidious, pervasive campaign? He must have known her by then, must have seen how very shy she was, how vulnerable, how ripe. How well does he know her? What was she thinking?

And the fact that these images are clearly from Instagram, their captions below them in the shots… Why? So she could read and reread these words, alone at night, in her room, thrilled probably beyond measure by her own illicit fantasy. But why not look at them online? Maybe it was about owning them for a moment, halfway between the cyber and the real worlds, a digital image, downloaded, to hold in her naïve little hands. Whatever, she then deleted them before Toni could check, deleted them even from the deleted album. She has been so careful.

She has been so very careless.

Bridget slouches against the chair back. ‘Oh, Rosie darling.’

It is a little under half an hour since Toni left. Bridget has no idea now where she is. She could be in the café, in the park, talking things through with Rosie; or, God forbid, driving frantically around the streets, searching for her daughter, the only person in the world deemed missing before they are due to return home.

Rosie’s phone has faded to black. Bridget picks it up and swipes it, looks again at the laptop screen in front of her.

Show me yours. A toe. Who would send an image of a toe? She glances at Ollie’s Facebook profile, flicks through his pictures. There’s no denying that the boy is a honey, a beauty, the stuff of Renaissance art. His hair is slicked here, falling over his eye there, his gaze is sure and his teeth are even and white. A toe, a shoulder, a belly button, descending, teasing, like a stripper in a club… When does persuasion become coercion? When does coercion become manipulation? The manipulation of an expert?

Sexy Lady.

She shivers, shakes her head against the chills on her skin. She calls Toni. Toni doesn’t reply. She must be out of the car by now – perhaps she’s left her phone behind as she often does. Will she bother going through the rigmarole of getting out of the car and going into the café, or will she just slow down and peer in through the window as she drives past, maybe park outside and wait for a confrontation? They will be back soon and the atmosphere in the flat will be appalling. It would be better to be out.

But Bridget doesn’t move. She can’t move. Something is keeping her in her chair, laptop in front of her on the table, Rosie’s phone in her hand.

It started with a toe. At his suggestion. And if he is a normal young guy, a teenager as innocently out for kicks as any teenager that has ever lived, then why, why does this feeling of unease fill her chest, make her hair follicles tingle?

She flips back to his Facebook profile. It is like trying to figure out a crossword clue, staring at the swirling letters of an anagram, hoping for enlightenment. She goes through his photos again: him on holiday, by the pool, showing off his physique like any cocksure lad his age; as a cute kid; in black and white, pouting, but again, there’s no law against that. A poseur, a narcissist, a chancer with a taste for redheads and the risqué. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of it, but something, something, something…

Think, Bridget. Why does your scalp itch? What is it that doesn’t fit, here in this profile of this beautiful boy, this Michelangelo’s David, this Adonis? She casts her mind back to the boys at school. Peter Fisher, he was a blond bombshell, and Nick Fitzgerald, Fitzy, yes, it was Fitzy who all the girls in her year went for. Fit Fitzy, the name scrawled on the cubicle walls, on the back of the prefabs at the far end of the schoolyard. Left Bridget cold, though at the time she didn’t dare to think about why, and why quite the opposite was true of Eleanor Green. Fitz, with his cold blue eyes and his fishtail parka, his button-collar shirts and his way of smoking Silk Cuts outside the chippy and later at the weekly disco in the grim community centre at the end of their road. The girls went to pieces around him, but he kept his smiles to himself like a miser keeps coppers, sparing one only occasionally, when there was something for him in exchange.

According to his profile, this Ollie Thomas is nineteen years old. A gorgeous-looking guy in the prime of his life, probably has girls fawning over him all day long, just as adults did when he was a little boy. That kind of beauty shapes a person. A person just like Fitz.

She holds the phone close to her face and scrutinises his brown eyes. You could drink those eyes like melted chocolate, spend years waiting for them to land on you, see you.

‘Why would someone like you,’ she whispers, there in the tense silence of the kitchen, ‘be pestering fifteen-year-old girls for pictures of their toes?’ Fourteen-year-olds. Rosie was fourteen when this started.

Something else about Fit Fitz – girls would do anything for him: smoke, steal, offer themselves. Nick Fitzgerald never had to ask. For anything.

So why, why would this boy offer his toe to a shy, nervous girl like Rosie and say, Show me yours, when surely there must be many girls willing to show him anything of theirs, in the flesh, for nothing more than a flash of those brown eyes, for the promise of a kiss from those plump lips, a smile from those even white teeth?

And in asking herself this final question, the niggling doubt, that troublesome piece of grit in the wound, rises to the surface, ready to be tweezed out.

If the question is: Why would he stoop to such a thing? the answer might well be: He would not.

And if He would not is the answer, then the new question is: Why did he do it?

And finding no reason, other questions form…

Who?

Who would cajole a child to show herself in this way, in secret?

Who, if not this boy?

Who is Ollie Thomas?

Bridget leans forward and opens another browser.

‘Let’s see who you are, mate,’ she whispers.

She types in: Google Reverse Image Search. In another tab, she brings up Facebook, finds Ollie Thomas and copies the clearest photo she can find into the browser: he is poolside, wearing pale blue shorts, bare chest. The search, she knows, will only find him if this exact image exists somewhere else online.

Searching…

Bridget pours her forgotten coffee, stirs in a spoon of sugar and takes a sip. It is tepid but sweet.

Searching…

Does this photo exist elsewhere?

It does. A match. She clicks and clicks, finds a Facebook page that looks terribly familiar, pictures she has only just seen: the childhood snaps, the party pictures with girls, cigarette dangling from his lips like James Dean. But this man’s name is Raoul Mendez: Spanish by birth, model, resident of Chelsea, actor.

Not Ollie Thomas.

Ollie Thomas, if that is even his name, has stolen this profile in its entirety and used it like cheese to trap a mouse. Or a maggot on a hook; yes, this is fishing, catfishing. She’s heard about it.

‘Jesus.’ She is reaching for her phone to try Toni again when Toni calls.

‘She’s not here, Bridge.’ Her sister’s voice breaks. ‘She’s not here.’

‘Tones,’ Bridget says, every cell of her being focused on keeping her voice steady. ‘You need to come home.’