Jon was discharged. He ended up with Mr and Mrs Theobalds. A middle-aged couple who live in a semi on a boring street in Duerdale. He works at the bank in the middle of town and she’s an administrator for Tunnel Cement. On Thursday nights they play badminton in a mixed league at the local sports centre. They aren’t very good really, but they enjoy the social side of it and it helps keep them fit. They have two grown-up kids who’ve left home and moved away and who only make it back for Christmas and big birthdays. For the last twenty years they’ve offered short-term foster care to children whose lives are in limbo, whose lives have reached a crisis point. They provide shelter for a few days or weeks before a decision is reached and the child disappears. Sometimes it goes well, everyone gets on and the child remembers them fondly and grows up and sends them a card at Christmas and then photos of their own children. Other times it’s trickier. Fifteen-year-old Julian Rodgers smashed every window in the house and pissed on their bed when they at were badminton one Thursday. They had to stay at a hotel that night. Even the Theobalds’ legendary patience was tested to the limit on that occasion. But like Mr Theobalds said the next day when the glaziers were fitting the new glass and their scrubbed mattress was drying in the back garden and he’d had time to reflect: if what’d happened to Julian had happened to him, he said, he’d probably smash a load of windows and piss on a bed.