Did Robin think Matthew was guilty? Or innocent? He didn’t have enough to go on. But he was intrigued. Even without the fact that he had questions for Matthew. About Sam.

“Are you leading me somewhere, Sam?” Robin muttered, under his breath.

There was no answer. Except from the traffic noise on the street and a whoop from a passerby who was no doubt enjoying the benefits—and not yet suffering the drawbacks—of alcohol on a Saturday night.

Robin turned the light off again and decided to go to bed.

After a quick shower, he climbed into bed, lying on the right side of the double. Three years later and he still kept to his side, even when he was fast asleep and not consciously thinking.

He thought of Matthew McConnell and he thought about what he had said to him, and more important, how he’d said it. If he took everything Matthew said as true, Sam had told him that he, Robin, was someone to trust.

Why had she told that to a total stranger? Why had she called Matthew?

He lay in bed for half an hour—sleep nowhere to be found. One question swirled around in his head: How could six people go into a canal tunnel and only one come out?

Robin thought for a moment of the voice on the phone that morning, the young man asking for his help, realizing he had known what he would say for hours now.

Yes.

Chapter Four

“I don’t know, Robin. This sounds very odd,” she said, on the other end of the line. “I think this guy is manipulating you. I don’t know why you can’t see that—maybe you just don’t want to. But he’s using Sam to get you to do stupid things.”

“You’d never heard of Standedge. You said that yourself. I spent six hours researching the case. It’s real. Matthew is real. What happened is real.” Robin shifted the phone into his other hand so he could hike up the strap of the backpack onto his shoulder.

“Then why have I never heard of it?”

“I don’t know. I think maybe someone stopped it getting out to the wider media.”

“This isn’t the ’90s, Robin,” she said with an icy tone that reminded Robin of their mother. She and Emma had never got along—probably because they were so similar. They were both pragmatic—seeing the world in front of them as a problem to solve. He loved his sister, but sometimes she looked at him more as a project than a brother. “Things get out on the internet—every single hour, every single minute. I don’t see how we can’t have heard of this before.”

“I think this Red Door website is run by some kind of whistle-blower. Do you want me to send you the link?”