The walls of the room were plastered in newspaper articles, printouts, images. All about the Standedge Five. All about Matthew McConnell. The articles about the Incident were on the right-hand wall—the things he had amassed while he was in Marsden, coupled with what had come out since. He’d cut out all the national newspapers’ articles that reported on the Incident, even if they did all basically say the same thing. On the left wall was information about the Five—social media page printouts, details of their university courses, any concrete information about where they lived and how they spent their time. Matthew McConnell took up the far wall—the wall above his desk. He had done a deep dive on the guy—found his birth certificate, school grades, property details, things like that—things that couldn’t possibly be relevant, but all helped to make up a picture of the young man who’d used him. Robin also kept track of potential sightings. Anyone who spied someone matching his description—and had something written about it online—Robin found and stuck on the wall.

He thought that doing all this would somehow unlock something, like he was putting together pieces of a puzzle, and once he’d found them all they would all make the big picture—and that big picture would make perfect sense.

But in reality it just looked like a mess—an impressive mess. But then, an impressive mess is just a bigger mess. Robin smiled at that.

He sat down at the desk and opened his laptop. His notebook was next to it—the notebook he had used in Marsden. He hadn’t touched it since leaving. He reached under the desk into a drawer and brought out a folder, which was full of the information on Sam’s disappearance. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to put that stuff up on the wall—probably wouldn’t have been able to come into this room if he did.

He opened the folder. On the first page, he’d just written—BLACK HOUND, HORSE HEAD. How many times had he searched these terms online? How many internet rabbit holes had he gone down? Were they names of pubs? Were they images, maybe pictures? Were they passcodes to something or even someone? He’d spent hours upon hours with four little words and he’d always come to the same old distressing conclusion.

It wasn’t enough.

And in all probability it wasn’t even real.