I have asked him once why, gently, about a year afterward, and he thought about it for a long time and said: “Because he’d have had an answer.

He always has an answer.

And I’d have taken it.”

Then he called me, and I picked up, and he said turn the power off.

The other thing about those nineteen days is that I had to send him back to school.

I drove out there on the second day, and we sat in a car park, and I told him what the detective had told me — an edited version, but not a false one — and I said that the police needed three weeks and that I was going to be at home for them.

And my fourteen-year-old said, “No.”