crazier at that moment than Jack Gantry ever had. He might have tried to hit me, but I thrust out a hand and seized his collar, holding him at bay.
'No. Not me,' I said, quietly. 'What have you done?'
I looked at him, but I couldn't see anyone I knew.
He seemed to break down then; he sagged in my grasp and his face crumpled. 'I've been a fool, son,' said this antithesis of my Dad, in a pathetic, whining voice that filled me with disgust, yet also with a sadness that it pains me to recall.
'You've been a dirty old swine,' I told him, quietly, 'that's what you've been. You have actually fed your face on to that site. You've seen the disgusting things they've done with them, but do you really believe that it was just for your own gratification? Fat chance. How many perverts like you do you think there are out there leering at you right now? But forget about you and think about this. If I'm reacting like this, how the hell do you think Mary, and Ellie, and Susie, and even Jonathan will feel if it ever goes public?'
I didn't need to wait for an answer. 'When did you buy the computer?'
I asked.
'A few months ago,' he replied, in something like his normal voice.
'Jonny and Colin were on at me so much that I decided I'd better join the twenty-first century. I didn't tell anyone, though; after all the fuss I'd made about it I was too embarrassed. I tried it out, and I used it at night in the surgery, after Mary had gone to bed.'
He looked down at his feet. He was calmer now so I released him from my grasp. 'It all got out of hand,' he whispered, but I wasn't in the mood to take anything that resembled an excuse.
'Did it fuck get out of hand!' I snapped at him. 'This is what happened. You set yourself up an e-mail address, yes?' He nodded.
'But before you even learned to use it, the spam started to arrive.'
'Spam?'
'You must know what that is. It means junk e-mail: Viagra by post, debt management, and most of all, the porn sites. You get e-mails asking, for example, if you'd like to see someone who looks like someone famous sucking someone's cock. Normal e-mail users filter these things out, so that hardly any of them reach them. Not you, though, you stupid old sod; you let them come through, and more than that, when they did, you opened them. Am I on the case?' He nodded again, mute. 'But you did even more than that, didn't you. You clicked on the links, you visited the sites, and… you… were… hooked.' I felt my lip curl with distaste. 'All that indescribable shagging, at your fingertips; I mean how could you resist?'
I felt myself start to shake with anger, but I controlled it. 'You did the really stupid thing next, though.' I felt like a dark side version of Michael Aspel, with the red 'This is Your Life' book. 'You signed up as a member, at a number of sites probably, not just Neptune. And you paid with your credit card.' Nod. 'And the form asked for your address, and you gave that too.' Nod again.
'How many times?'
He shrugged his shoulders; if I'd let him, he'd have turned his back on me. He certainly couldn't look me in the eye. 'I don't know,' he whispered. 'Maybe half a dozen.'
'Maybe. Maybe if I checked your credit card statements I'd find lots more.' I shook my head, struck by an irony. 'You know, in recent times, I've come to think of myself as one of the luckiest guys on the planet. You, on the other hand, must be one of the unluckiest. Most of these sites are run from places like Thailand or Mexico. You just happened to sign up for a do-it-yourself operation run out of Pitten-fucking-weem! And you told them where you lived!'
I tried to catch his eye, but still he looked away. 'There never was a surgery incident, was there?' I asked. 'I'll bet if I look at your list I'll find that Andrea Neiporte wasn't even a patient. Right?' I barked it out.
His shoulders gave a great heave as he sighed. 'Of course you're right. I made that story up, Oz, in the hope… Oh, I don't know in what hope.'
'I do. You did it in the hope that I'd take care of it in some way.
Pay them off, scare them off; you didn't care as long as I fixed it for you.'
'I suppose so.' Finally, he did look at me. 'Son, I was desperate. It was like living a nightmare. The first thing that happened was that an envelope arrived in the mail, addressed to me, personal and confidential. When I opened it, I found print-outs of some of that stuff you saw in the computer.'
'Let me guess. The personal stuff?'
'Yes, graphic, blown up so you couldn't fail to recognise my face.
There was no note with it, but next day Andrea Neiporte phoned me in the surgery. She told me that the next envelope would go to Mary, unless…'
He sat on the edge of the table. 'The first time it was five hundred.
I agreed, and I posted it to her, in cash. I thought that would be it, but a week or so later, she called again. She said that they'd spent the five hundred, so would I give her a thousand, please. I did, of course. It was the third phone call that asked for the fifty grand. I said that I didn't have that sort of ready cash. She laughed and said that you did. She said she'd call me in a couple of weeks, and that when she did, they'd be expecting the money. It was a couple of days after that that you came up.'
'What would you have done if I hadn't?'
'I don't know. Paid her, I suppose.'
'But instead you turned me loose on them.' He nodded.
'When did you know that hadn't worked?'
'I had that first nasty, spitting phone call from her, the one I told you about. She said she'd show me how scared they were, then she'd be back in touch.'
'The can of paint at the premiere; that was a message for you, not me?'
'That's right. When she called me again, the day after, she said that the time scale had shortened. They wanted the money in three days, or Mary got the photos.'
'So,' I said, 'finally, you plucked up the courage and you killed them.
And that show of outrage on the golf course afterwards, that was all a sham.'
'No!' he shouted, violently, vehemently. 'No, I did not kill them! I wasn't kidding that day. I really thought you killed them, or you had your man Jay do it. If you want to know the truth, I still do.'
'Well you're wrong,' I told him, 'although you might have been on the mark. I sent Jay up to life to put them off for good, and I gave him an open ticket. Our deal was that we wouldn't talk about it when he got back, and when the bodies were found, I will admit that I thought the same as you. But then the police published the date and time of death, and I knew it couldn't have been him.'
'And that's how I can prove it wasn't me,' my father exclaimed, with a sudden exultation that struck me as shameless, given the circumstances.
'When it happened, Mary and I were in Kirkcaldy, at a life Rotary and Inner Wheel joint fundraiser. I have a couple of hundred witnesses to say I didn't do it.'
I looked at him for a while. I knew that my life wasn't the same any more, and that it never would be. My Dad… I always thought of him with a capital letter, like God… didn't exist any more, not as such. I could never think of him in that light again, in the special way I always had until then. I realised that I had suffered a bereavement as real as I had when Jack Gantry's overenthusiastic messengers had killed Jan.
Is there no forgiveness in me, do I hear you ask? Truly I wish that there could be. I wish that I could excuse him by rational ising that every one of us has a weakness, something that's beyond our control.
But I can't, not completely: for there were people on that computer, victims, who were no more than kids, and I'm a father myself.
'What would you have done?' I asked him.
'I don't know,' he replied. 'I sat at home waiting for a phone call but it never came. If it had, I might have called you again, or I might just have paid them.'
'And hoped that it was over?'
'Yes,' he whispered.
'Just as you think it's over now?' He frowned up at me, puzzled. 'The website's still open,' I pointed out. 'I just logged on to it, using your woefully insecure passwords. It'll stay open until the unscrupulous service provider who maintains it stops getting paid and shuts it down. Then there's the police investigation. You're not fucking
