“Do you want me to list them?” Moustache Milligan said. “I'll list them for you. I tell you this, it won't make you feel better. There's what we call tiger kidnappings. It's usually a relative of a bank employee gets taken hostage while the manager opens up the vault and removes the cash. Then there are kidnappings for hostage swaps. There are kidnappings for specialist knowledge—doctors get lifted to patch up some hood who's been shot up in a gang fight. Then there's express kidnappings. They lift you and every day march you down to the cash-point to take out the daily limit until the account's empty. It's a flourishing business, son, kidnapping. And then there are the people who just disappear. Gone. Missing persons. It's mostly those, missing persons.” Moustache Milligan lifted his ballpoint and looked directly at Everett. “Now son, if you want to give me a statement, you and your mum can go home and let us find your dad.”

Everett leaned back his chair and breathed the paint fumes deep inside him.

“Okay, I came down into London after school to meet my dad…”

All the way up the A10, through Dalston and along Stoke Newington High Street, Laura didn't speak. Not a word. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel and mumbled mangled bits of lyrics from the smooth-listening MOR radio station until Everett wanted to punch his fist at the radio, punch any button, hit any station with a bit of noise and beat and life. Anything rather than listen to his mum getting the lines wrong.

See that girl, hear her scream, kicking the dancing queen. It's not that! Everett seethed inside. Clown Control to Mao Tse Tung…Major Tom! Everett wanted to shout. Major Tom Major Tom Major Tom. Get it right. The song was forty years old, but Everett knew it better than his mum. There was a word for misheard lyrics. Everett had come across it online: a mondegreen. He'd liked the word. He remembered it.

By the time they got to Evercreech Road to pick up Victory-Rose, Everett understood. This was anger, of a kind he had seen once—only once—before. He'd seen it the day he came back from football practice and found all the lights on in every room and every door open and the radio blaring through the entire house and his mum in the kitchen, mopping the floor, mopping and mopping and mopping. Something kind of ooh ooh, jumping up my tutu, she'd been singing along to Girls Aloud.

“Mum what are you doing?”

“This floor is disgusting. It smells. That's disgusting. Kitchen floors shouldn't smell. There's ground-in disgusting things between the tiles. And I'm not having those things over my nice clean floor.”

She had pointed at Everett's football boots. He slipped them off. Stocking feet on cold concrete step.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes I'm sure. Absolutely sure.”