That day she was going to the University of Huddersfield. She kissed him—he didn’t savor it enough—and she told him again how to look after her cacti, after he had somehow managed to kill the last batch.

He looked away from the empty doorway to the kitchen windowsill. Her cacti were lined up on it. The same ones from that day. Alive and kicking. Waiting for her to come back.

Huddersfield.

What did it mean? Did it mean anything? He didn’t know. But it was another piece of the puzzle. There was no way the number, the nickname and Huddersfield could be a coincidence.

He pressed on.

The first website he clicked on was the Standedge Visitor Centre. Standedge was the longest canal tunnel in England and looked like it was a fairly successful tourist spot, with guided tours in the summer on canal boats. Was this what Matthew was talking about—going through?

The second website he visited detailed the history of the tunnel, which he skimmed. It seemed to have an extensive past—built over a period of sixteen years from 1795 to 1811, costing around sixteen thousand pounds, being the deepest and the longest canal tunnel in Britain, connecting a village called Marsden to one named Diggle. Any other time, he probably would have been quite happy to peruse these details with interest, but it wasn’t what he was looking for.

Scrolling through the rest of the results, he found nothing really relevant.

So he searched “Matthew Standedge.” This came up with mostly the same results.

He searched “Matthew Standedge disappearances,” and he finally found what he was searching for on the third result.

It was an article from a Huddersfield regional paper. The more he read, the closer he got to the screen.

This was it. He opened the copy of Without Her and ripped out the marked-up page, clicking his pen top.

The Mystery of the Standedge Five

by Jane Hargreaves

Police are baffled as five local young people go missing inside Britain’s longest canal tunnel. At 2.31 p.m. on the 26th of June 2018, six local university students and a Bedlington terrier entered Standedge canal tunnel from the Marsden end, on a traditional narrow boat. Two hours and twelve minutes later, the boat emerged on the other side (the Diggle end) with only one of the students, knocked unconscious on the deck, and the terrier. Five of the students, Tim Claypath (21), Rachel Claypath (21), Edmund Sunderland (20), Prudence Pack (21) and Robert Frost (20), disappeared without a trace inside Standedge. The survivor, Matthew McConnell (21), claims to have no knowledge of what happened to his fellow students.