Not that he needed to see it. “There’s no Matthew.”

Amber smiled sadly. “This picture was taken three days before they went missing. Three days before Matthew piloted the boat through the tunnel, and the five of them disappeared. The only survivor in this photo is the bloody dog.” She thought for a moment, looking at the picture with wonder. “It’s all rather crazy, isn’t it? Something like this happening in Marsden.”

“What do you think? About it all?”

“About the Incident? I don’t know. It’s so bizarre. Almost supernatural, you know. What do you think? As an outsider.”

“I think that there has to be a logical explanation.”

Amber looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “Ah, you don’t understand yet. You will.” Amber moved the photo aside and picked up the salt and pepper shakers. She placed one at the edge of the table and then traced a line to the other side and placed the other. “Standedge Canal Tunnel. For all intents and purposes, a straight line. Point A—” she touched the top of the salt “—to Point B,” moving her hand to the pepper. “The Standedge Five and Matthew and the dog enter Point A in their boat.” She moved a finger slowly along a straight line from the salt. “There’s nowhere to go except Point B. But somehow—the Standedge Five go somewhere else. Against everything, Matthew and the dog come out the other side without the others. You start asking around, and you’ll hear a lot of theories. But I’ve never heard a single one that I believe. They are gone, but there’s no way they can be.”

“But people don’t just disappear,” Robin said. Even though a little voice inside him said, But Sam did.

“And yet, against all odds, the Standedge Five did,” Amber said. “They aren’t in any of the tunnels. They weren’t in the water. The searches were thorough. Gone into thin air.”

Robin felt a shiver course through him. “What are your thoughts about Matthew doing it?”

Amber shrugged. “Whether he did or didn’t, the major questions remain the same.”

Robin carried on. He didn’t want to address the subject of How? yet, if only because the implications of the question scared the hell out of him. “Do you think maybe Matthew was annoyed at being excluded?”

Amber thought for a moment, and then lightened, laughing. “It’s hard to think Matthew would be annoyed at the Five for anything. It was like the sun shone out of their arses for him. He worshipped them. He was like a...a rubber band. They could stretch him and twist him any way they wanted.”

“You make it sound manipulative.”

“No,” Amber said definitively. “Matthew knew what was going on and was only too happy to let it happen. If that’s manipulative, then he was welcoming it.”

Yet it still was.