One day it could be headquarters for the Power Rangers. The next a soldier’s dugout. Or a ninja training camp. Most of all, though, it was theirs. It had just the right amount of foliage cover to provide a shelter of sorts in the rain and shade in the summer. And the old lunch box they had buried, telling the long-suffering Mrs Heaney it had been lost, held a trove of treasures fit for any ten-year-old boy. Chewing gum. Match Attax trading cards. A box of matches. Two cigarettes they’d secreted from their daddy’s stash but hadn’t dared smoke yet, half a packet of bourbon creams, fifty-six pence exactly in loose change, a pair of dice, a knife that had been blunted a long time ago and a folded page from one of their school jotters in which they gave the girls in their class marks out of ten.

They didn’t need much more. They had their imaginations, after all, and they used whatever they could get their hands on as props for whatever world they created that day.

They knew that Kelly Doherty was missing. Of course they did. Everyone in the estate did. They imagined that probably everyone in Derry, maybe even all of Northern Ireland knew about Kelly. She’d gone out collecting for Halloween with her friends and had become separated from them at some stage. It was now a whole three days later and she still hadn’t come home, so the search had shifted to the land surrounding the reservoir.

Kevin McCay had told them that he heard his mammy and daddy say that poor Kelly was probably dead now and it was probably better for her that she was. Neither Kevin nor the Heaney twins understood what that meant, but they were happy to parrot it anyway.

‘We have to go and maybe help look for her,’ Niall had said. ‘This is like something off the TV or a movie.’

Declan had resisted at first, but his brother had a point. It was a big deal and besides, if they went home, their mammy would just make them do their homework straight away like she always did. It would be more interesting to see the search in full swing, but he didn’t actually want to look for her, especially if Kevin McCay’s mammy and daddy were right.

They’d watched as a group of maybe a hundred grown-ups had set off walking around the country park at the top of the reservoir. They were wearing bright yellow jackets, carrying torches and sticks, which they used to poke around in the grass. From where Niall and Declan sat in their den, close to the water’s edge, they could hear the repeated shouts of Kelly’s name.

‘They’ve a van up there with tea and soup and biscuits and stuff,’ Niall said. ‘For all them people searching. Do you think they would give us some?’