‘Look what they did to my son,’ Whitestone said.

‘Online?’ I said. ‘How the hell can it be online?’

‘Because fifty people got out their phones and filmed him. They filmed him, Max. Nobody helped him. But they all filmed him.’

On the film, the white lights followed fifteen-year-old Justin Whitestone as he sank to his knees in the middle of the empty dance floor and screamed. A terrible sound, filled more with fear than pain, and the pain must have been unbearable. Somebody laughed. The film stopped.

‘Who have we arrested?’ Edie said.

‘Nobody,’ Whitestone said. ‘It happened in the toilets. Somebody put a bottle across his eyes in the toilets. The place was full of people but nobody saw a thing. My Just will need someone to take care of him for the rest of his life – and nobody saw a thing.’

‘There must be CCTV cameras,’ Edie said.

‘Not in toilets,’ Whitestone said. She was still staring at the frozen image on her computer screen. Her son on his knees, blood streaming from his torn eyes, the long-legged high-heeled girls and shirtless gym-fit boys standing behind him with their phones in their hands. ‘No CCTV cameras in toilets, Edie. Invasion of privacy.’

‘Pat?’

‘Yes, Max?’

She was hypnotised by the image on the screen and still would not look at me.

‘They must know who did it,’ I said.

‘Oh, they know all right. It’s a gang from one of the estates behind King’s Cross. The Dog Town Boys. Have you heard of them? I even know their names and where they live. But nobody saw anything, nobody is willing to come forward, and there are no cameras to prove a thing.’

I reached forward and hit the command and Q buttons on her keyboard. Quit. The image disappeared. She looked at me. But there was nothing I could tell her to stop the pain. And if it had been my child in the hospital, my Scout with her sight gone and her attackers still walking the streets, there would have been nothing that she could have done for me.

‘They’re getting away with it, Max,’ Whitestone told me. ‘But then they usually do.’

I was back at home before I managed to get anyone on the phone who had been involved in investigating the blinding of Justin Whitestone.

‘Terrible thing,’ said an old DI from New Scotland Yard. ‘Well-educated kid like that, never in any bother, and some little herbert takes his eyes out for looking at him the wrong way or spilling his drink or whatever it was. They don’t need an excuse, do they? Yeah, I remember the case.’

‘Back up a minute,’ I said. ‘This is not an ongoing investigation?’

The DI sighed down the line.

‘What can we do? Everyone’s scared of the Dog Town Boys – and when I say everyone, I mean everyone in about a square mile of the council estates behinds King’s Cross.’