He had always loved photography, the thrill of seeing an image caught forever, of capturing it and keeping it, of holding it in your hand or having it in your pocket so you could look at it whenever you felt like it. He’d once read about a primitive tribe in the Brazilian jungle who didn’t like having their picture taken because they believed it took a part of their soul away. Other people laughed at that kind of thinking, but Alistair didn’t. He understood. Because the tribespeople were right – having a picture of someone was like having a tiny piece of them. You weren’t allowed to have a lock of their hair or an item of clothing, but you could possess their image, in high resolution full colour, forever. And no one had to know.

It helped him, sometimes, when he had had a particularly troubling day at work, to look at the beautiful pictures he’d taken. As a counsellor and well-being therapist, there were good days and bad days. On the bad days, when it felt like a thankless task and people just refused to be helped, it was such a blessed relief – such a pressure valve – to have a little relaxing time with his picture gallery. Alone, behind his locked study door. He had thousands, categorised and indexed, backed up to the PC in his study at home – his own private collection, although he suspected that one of the boys may have found a way into it more than once. He always wanted to be able to add to his collection, wherever he was.

The garden was quiet, just the tick-tick-tick of the water sprinklers as they turned in slow circles, playing lazily over the lush green lawn. It was the way he liked it. He didn’t even mind being fully exposed out here in the sun – even though the heat was merciless – if it meant he could capture some truly spectacular images. Sweat soaked his vest top to his back and gathered beneath the leather twine pendant he wore around his neck.

The camera on a decent mobile phone nowadays was amazing. Not like the clunky piece of junk he’d had on his first phone, back in the nineties. His Samsung S9 had a twelve-megapixel camera, unlimited storage, dual apertures and super slow-mo video that shot nearly a thousand frames per second. The image quality was superb, even in low light, and it had a decent zoom that didn’t lose too much quality if you wanted to go in close.

There were other advantages to using the camera phone as well, of course. You could send images quickly and easily to your other devices, back them up to the cloud easily, filter, edit and stream live video if you wanted to, all on a device small enough to fit in your pocket.

And the best thing? Everyone was on their phones all the time.