His ten-year-old son had been missing for almost a year.
He was a widower and the boy obviously meant a lot to him. The youngster had been playing in the front garden on the day. Only one witness, a woman who lived on the same street, saw him wandering off towards the end of the road. The father could have no complaints about the massive effort put in by the police. Now, registered officially as a missing person and all activity on the case faded away, he turned to the internet for some sort of agency that dealt with this kind of thing. Some company that took on the job of searching beyond where the police had left off.
He had never been good at searching on the computer and had inadvertently ended up with a site that looked positively gothic. Even to his untrained eye, the area of the internet he was looking at seemed somewhat irregular. It claimed that it had a track record second to none for finding lost children. It wasn’t cheap, but the testimonials were impressive. Reading through the introduction he learnt that it guaranteed to locate and return the missing child within twenty-four hours from the time payment was received. With little hesitation, he sat down that evening and began the registration process. It involved filling out an extremely detailed application form that went on for several pages. At the end of a gruelling hour and a half, he paid the fee using the account details provided.
It was early evening on the following day that he was startled by a knock at the front door. Opening it, he found he was looking at a young girl.
She said, “My name is Rosy, I have been returned to you. Where’s my mummy?”
He had also never been good at filling out forms.