On Monday, the police came to see me, and I was glad that they should. The local station had been very supportive of us, taking seriously the threats against Annie and myself, and being sure that anything we could offer about those making them was carefully noted down. They kept us up to date while the Cybercrime team untangled the inevitable web of anonymous email accounts and virtual-presence networks. One of Annie’s most persistent abusers turned out to be a church warden from Somerset; another was a teenager living in New Mexico. The majority were young, stupid men living with their parents in houses from Southampton to Glasgow, who had taken for whatever reason against the idea that my granddaughter should speak her mind. Some had been cautioned, some arrested, and some had mended their ways so far as to apologise—dragged by one ear to the telephone, I rather thought, hearing the unmistakable suffused silence of maternal rage at the far end of the line—and some had seen the inside of a cell. Celebrity, I knew, was having an effect on our treatment. Most of the time such things go largely unanswered.