Declan had considered this for a moment and had shaken his head. ‘Nah. I bet it’s only the grown-ups that get that.’ He sniffed, drawing the sleeve of his duffel coat under his nose. It was cold and the sky looked like it could open and dump buckets of rain on them at any time.

‘Da says he’s going to go out and look with them later,’ Niall said, digging out the old lunch box from its bed of leaves and dirt and taking out two bourbon creams.

He bit into one and handed the other to his brother. They didn’t need those free biscuits or the soup anyway. They had their own supplies.

‘Do you think he’ll want us to go, too?’ Declan had asked. He’d shuddered at the thought of searching in the dark.

Niall shook his head. ‘Not a chance. Even if Da wanted us to go, Ma wouldn’t. Besides, we’ve homework to do tonight.’

‘Bloody sums. I hate the seven times tables,’ Declan had said dejectedly, finishing his biscuit. Declan lifted the stick he had been using as a sword earlier and started to poke at the leaves and mud, sending a fat black beetle scurrying for cover. ‘There’s no craic here today at all,’ Declan added. ‘And I’m freezing. Shall we just go home?’

Reluctantly Niall, the younger of the two by seventeen minutes, agreed and stood up, hefting his school bag onto his back.

‘C’mon, then,’ he said to his older brother and the pair started their walk along the banks of the reservoir, Declan still dragging his stick, leaving a line in the dirt as they went.

It was Declan who saw her first. Not that he knew what it was he saw when he first looked. He thought it was a piece of rubbish. Discarded carrier bags, floating on the water, lapping towards the shore. Dirty white plastic. He didn’t think anything of it at first glance. Then, as he bowed his head against the squally shower that had started, he spotted what looked like a black school shoe, patent leather, mired in the mud at the water’s edge, and he glanced up again.

The dirty white plastic had morphed into a white dress – lace and satin. A mottled hand, bloated and grey, had floated to the surface. He knew that Kelly Doherty was dressed as Glinda the Good Witch of the North from The Wizard of Oz when she disappeared. Recycling her first communion dress from the year before. And still, he couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing. It couldn’t be … His vivid imagination was playing tricks on him. This was just rubbish. The hand, it looked so unreal, so fake, it was probably a discarded Halloween prop. It couldn’t belong to a person.

It, this shape that refused to make sense, floated closer to him. The edges started to become more defined.