‘Tones.’ Your auntie Bridge’s voice came down the line. ‘You need to come home.’

‘Come home?’ I said. ‘Why? What’s happened? Is she there?’

‘Nothing’s happened.’

But I could tell. I could tell something was wrong. ‘What, Bridge? Tell me.’

‘I’ve found some stuff, I’ve—’

‘What stuff?’ I was shouting down the phone. ‘She was here. She was here, Bridge. I asked the girl at the till, and she said she saw her. She did come here. She had a hot chocolate. It took me ages to find a parking space. I had to park four roads away – it took me ages, Bridge. I couldn’t get here any quicker and now she’s not here.’

I broke down, Rosie. Right there on the street. I couldn’t help it, didn’t care.

‘Tones.’ Your auntie was using her calm voice, the one she uses to talk me down from whichever ledge I happen to be on.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘There was a girl taken from a café in Putney. No one has seen her since. So don’t. Don’t handle me.’

‘I’m not.’ A sigh.

‘Look,’ I said. I was trying to get a hold of myself, trying to appear rational. ‘I’m getting in the car. I’m on Holly Road.’

‘Did the girl in the café see Rosie leave with anyone?’

‘No. She didn’t see her leave. Said she left her hot chocolate though. She didn’t drink it. Oh God. She’s been taken, Bridge. Someone’s taken her.’

‘Toni, try and stay calm for me, babe. Breathe. She left her hot chocolate last week too, remember? Maybe she doesn’t like hot chocolate.’

‘Stop it! Stop trying to calm me down! I can’t calm down! I can’t breathe. How can I breathe? She’s missing, Bridge. Someone’s taken her! I’m… I’m going to drive around, see if—’

‘No, Tones,’ Bridget insists. ‘You’ll be pissing in the wind. She could be anywhere. We’re better off working together here. Come home.’

‘I’m calling the police, Bridge.’

‘No! No police.’

I put my key in the ignition and closed my eyes, made myself breathe. Down the line, silence.

I could picture your auntie Bridge, there in the kitchen, her hand gripped tight around the phone. She had her eyes closed too – I could feel it. Tears came. I sniffed.

‘Listen to me,’ she said softly. ‘She’s a teenager and she’s not even late coming home yet. If you call the police now, they won’t take any notice. They’re fucking useless. You know that, I know that.’

A sob escaped me.

‘Tones? Toni? Come home, babe. We’ll find her. Together.’

‘They’ve probably gone for a walk, haven’t they?’ I said. ‘It’s a nice day. They’ve probably gone for a walk.’

‘They might have. But, Toni, listen to me. We need a proper plan. You need to drive calmly and carefully back home, yeah? Driving around hoping to spot her is no use at all. To anyone.’

‘OK.’ I started the car. ‘I’ll come home.’

I drove back to our flat as fast as I could, Rosie. I could barely see to drive I was crying so much. Everything I’d ever feared was coming to pass, and even though I’d lived with the conviction that one day something terrible would happen to you, I could not believe that it had. I felt and did not feel the gearstick in my hand; saw and did not see the blink of red to green at the lights; heard and did not hear the bleep bleep bleep of the crossing. I found myself parked behind the flat, clutching the leather sleeve of the steering wheel. I had no idea how I’d got there.

Bridget must have heard the car on the gravel because she ran out to meet me, her face grave. It was so horrible, Rosie, seeing her expression and just knowing that something bad lay behind it.

I threw open the car door. ‘Have you had news?’ I was grabbing my stuff from the passenger seat. Bridget didn’t say anything. She helped me organise myself out of the car – I was shaking from head to toe, Rosie. I couldn’t coordinate; my eyes crowded with blackening stars.

‘I’m nearly there,’ Bridget said.

‘What do you mean “there”?’ I looked up at her. ‘Where? Do you know something?’

‘Yes,’ Bridget said. ‘Let’s get inside.’ She tried to push me towards the house, but I stopped.

‘Don’t push me. Why can’t you talk to me as we go, for God’s sake?’ I said. ‘Don’t make me wait.’

And so she began to talk as we made our way together across the backyard.

‘This boyfriend of hers was fake, Tones,’ she said.

‘What? Fake? Oh my God.’ I began to cry. ‘For God’s sake, why didn’t you tell me on the phone?’

‘I didn’t want you to get pulled over for speeding or… worse,’ she said. ‘I had to get you here safely, and I couldn’t come for you. Come on, Tones. Calm down. Let’s work together, yeah?’

We went inside. Bridget walked over to the stove and stood with her back against it. She looked so serious, Rosie. Not a trace of her usual mischief. I barely recognised her. I slumped against the tabletop.

‘How can he be fake?’ I wailed.

Your auntie Bridge must have dashed towards me, because the next thing I knew she was holding me in her arms and I could feel her mouth pressed to the top of my head.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘It’s OK. We’ll find him.’

‘This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. It can’t. It can’t, it can’t. We need to call the police right now.’

‘No we don’t. I’m nearly there. I’ve nearly found the bastard.’

She sat down next to me, in front of her laptop. I pressed my cheek against her arm, peered while she showed me what she’d been doing, how she’d found out that this Ollie was not who he said he was.

‘I know his fake identity,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know who he actually is, not yet.’

‘So she met him on Facebook?’ My heart was pounding. I felt sick.

‘On Instagram, I think. It’s hard to tell. I’ve yet to check if they have mutual friends. It could be that he got to her by being friends with a girlfriend of hers. Some of these girls, and boys too, they have thousands and thousands of friends and followers. I remember Rosie saying – they don’t care who friends them, it’s a numbers game.’

‘So I must have seen him on her Facebook page? But I’ve checked through her friends so many times, and there was no one dodgy-looking, no one much older or anything. Oh my God.’

‘That’s who she thinks he is.’ Auntie Bridge handed me your phone. It was open at Oliver Thomas’s profile. I stared into it, scrolling through the pictures.

‘He’s beautiful,’ I said.

Oh, Rosie, you poor, poor girl. He was a honey, wasn’t he, this boy you thought you were meeting? How would you say it, a babe? I get it. I bet you’d never think I would, but I do, baby girl, I do. I can remember.

‘That’s what I thought,’ your auntie Bridge said. ‘It’s what made me wonder why he’d send a fourteen-year-old girl pictures of…’

The air filled with unspoken words.

‘Of what?’ I made myself say, my voice tentative as a hello called into a dark, empty house. ‘Of what, Bridge?’

She sighed. She looked like she was going to be sick. She couldn’t look at me, Rosie. She could not look at me.

‘Well, of his toe, actually, at first,’ she said.

‘His toe?’

‘Yes. And then… other parts.’

‘Oh God. Oh my God.’ I was pulling at my hair until it hurt. ‘And why did you say fourteen? Rosie is fifteen, Bridge, she’s fifteen.’

‘She was fourteen when he first made contact.’

‘Oh my God, what? I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him, Bridge.’

‘But it’s not him, Toni. This boy is not the man we’re looking for. These pictures don’t belong to that man – you see that, don’t you? The boy in that photo is called Raoul. He’s a Spanish model, from Toledo, living in Chelsea. You couldn’t get more exotic. He’s young, he’s rich and he’s a god. But someone stole his profile and used it to lure her. It’s called catfishing, Tones. I’m so sorry.’

My face was burning, my neck, my chest. I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came.

‘Oh my God, Bridge. My Rosie, my baby girl. We have to call the police. We have to.’

Your auntie Bridge reached for my hands and squeezed them.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘When have the police ever done anything for us? Never. When did they ever help Mum when Dad was knocking seven bells out of her? Never. When have our family ever relied on them? Eh? Never. And Eric? I sorted Eric out, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, but this is Rosie, Bridge. She’s my daughter.’

‘I know. I know that. But I sorted Eric and I’ll sort this bastard in a way the pigs never could. I’ll kill him. The police won’t do that, will they?’

‘No, Bridget! I have to call them. You don’t even know where he is.’

‘No, but I will. A few minutes and I’ll have him, trust me.’

I faltered. ‘Did she… did she send pictures, Bridge?’

‘That’s not important now. A lot of kids do this picture stuff. Rosie told me herself, but she said she’d never do it.’

‘Why you? Why did she tell you?’

‘I don’t know. It’s not important. The fact is, it’s happened, kids make stupid mistakes, and what we have to do now is find this bastard and find Rosie. But we can’t do that if we’re hysterical and worrying about what she has and hasn’t done, and if we call the police, they’ll slow us down. They’ll have to take a statement, there’ll be some idiot plod on the phones… The thing I need to figure out now is how to find the postal address of whoever is behind this profile from the metadata, and then we can go and kill the motherfucker.’

‘But how does she know him? Is he from drama? How old is he?’

Your auntie Bridge groaned. ‘She doesn’t know him, Tones! That’s the point. That’s all irrelevant now. You need to forget him. He doesn’t exist, not for us!’

I felt so stupid, Rosie. But I was scared. My mind was all over the place. I know we should have called the police there and then, but the thing is, our family never have, only once, when your auntie Bridge called them to try and save Mum, your granny Casement. She was only six, she didn’t know any better, and of course my dad answered the door and sent them on their way. Growing up, no one I knew ever called the police – the pigs, as we called them. They were the enemy. It’s hardwired into us; it’s part of our DNA. And then of course, there’s the pact.

Your auntie was already at the computer, mumbling to herself. I picked out swear words mostly.

‘So if we… gpsfortoday.com… hmm… fuck… but if I… ah.’

‘You’ve found him?’ I was at her side, heart still pounding, sweat trailing down my back.

‘No. Not yet. Just let me concentrate, OK? Let’s see… metadata… which social networks protect your EXIF…’

I was looking over her shoulder. She was skim-reading the screen, reading aloud for herself as much as for me – not that I could understand a word.

‘EXIF… GPS location data from other users… blah blah… how to check a photo for EXIF location information… Here we go, right… what’s this… blah blah… ah, Facebook, here we go… fuck.’ She threw herself back in her chair.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Facebook, in all cases, wipes all EXIF data from a photo.’

‘Is that good?’

‘No,’ your auntie Bridge replied. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Can you find him?’

‘I don’t know.’ Bridget stared at the screen. ‘I can’t get his location from where he uploaded his fake profile. Facebook wipes that info. Instagram will be the same, then, I imagine. I can try. But there must be a way to find out who this bastard is and where he lives. There must be.’ She studied the computer screen, eyes flicking over the documents. She picked up your phone and shouted into it: ‘Who are you? Where are you?’

‘This morning, when I brought the phone in, did we check if there were any straightforward texts?’

‘There was one came in from Emily, but no, we didn’t, I didn’t.’ Bridget flipped her thumb over the screen. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘OT. That’ll be him. It says, See you in a bit. And there’s a love-heart emoji. Sent at 10.55 a.m. He must have sent it after she left the house. That’s why she hasn’t deleted it.’

‘She was deleting things too?’

‘Yes, I told you. Focus, Tones.’

‘But… surely,’ I said, ‘if we have his mobile number, can’t we just trace his phone?’

Slowly, your auntie Bridget turned to face me, her eyes wide. She grabbed my face in both hands and kissed me on the nose.

‘You absolute beauty,’ she said. She leaned back, pushed her hand through her hair, making the spikes even spikier. ‘I’ve got all bogged down in the online stuff, and all the time, yes, yes, bloody obvious, all the time, if we know his number, which we do, we should be able to trace the bastard. I couldn’t see the bloody wood for the trees, Tones! I was thinking we could only trace Rosie’s phone through mine, but she’d left it here so I thought that was a non-starter… but she’s got the Find My Friends app, hasn’t she, so instead of finding her, I should be able to find him! In seconds!’

‘Really?’ I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe it was me – of all people – who had found the solution.

But your auntie Bridget’s eyes closed a little; lost their shine. Her shoulders sagged.

‘But there’s no way he’d disclose his own location, would he?’

‘What d’you mean?’ My chest tightened once again. Hope, so alive a moment ago, died.

‘I don’t have you on Find My Friends because you’re still chiselling epistles into a stone tablet, but I have Helen and Rosie so I can find them whenever. Or find their phones. But I can only do that because we all agree to it, unless…’ She tapped her fingernail against her teeth.

‘Unless what?’

‘Well, unless in the grooming process…’ She winced. ‘Sorry. Unless he gave his location as a way of persuading her to share hers, as a way of tracking her at all times. It’s all about trust, about getting them to think… If they get access to their location at all times, there’s nothing anyone can do. Stopping her going for a coffee or whatever wouldn’t work – you’d have to keep her prisoner, and even then you could never leave the house yourself. She would be a living target.’

Your auntie moved her thumb over your phone screen, her lips pressed tight together. ‘But then he would’ve had to leave his location on, and surely he would’ve switched it off once he had hers. Unless…’

Despair rose within me. I didn’t dare speak. I could only hope, focus on the fantasy of that hope and how, if it was strong enough, you would be delivered to me. And if you were safe, everything would change. I would be different. I would be better. Everything that was broken could be mended. We would never argue again.

It was a matter of seconds before Bridget jumped out of her chair, eyes glittering like a crazy person with a knife, and said, ‘I’ve got him!’