“How can you do that?” Robin said, stepping forward and nearly sliding on the wet floor. He steadied himself on the door frame. “How can you be content with not knowing something which happened mere meters away?”

Martha scoffed. “You sound like one of them Ghosts of Marsden lot. Always wanting to find a way for it to be over. That’s how you start getting theories in your head like aliens and ghosts and monsters. Dangerous talk.”

“What could have possibly happened? Think.” He was getting angry, his voice ballooning in the quiet.

“I dunno,” Martha said, clearly thinking hard but coming up short. “He could have cloned the keycard, tied up the steering, hacked into the computer system and carried the bodies out the abandoned tunnel, rejoining the boat at a later cut-through.”

“Also hiding the bodies somewhere the police search would never find?” Robin said. “No. Be better, Martha.”

Martha looked around, as though she’d find an answer on a wall. “Maybe he hid the bodies in the boat somewhere and moved them again later.”

“Again, somewhere the police search didn’t find? Not to mention the fact he was unconscious in the hospital, no doubt with a guard on the door. Nope.”

“I don’t... Maybe...scuba equipment?”

“Scuba equipment? What about scuba equipment? No.”

“I don’t know, okay. Sometimes, in certain situations, being rational is difficult. But the police have McConnell. McConnell did it.”

Robin gritted his teeth, his temper flaring. “I came to this town to see if there was any way that Matthew McConnell could not have done what he has been accused of, but what I’ve found is no logical theory to say that he did it. This boy is about to go up against a court who are going to decide if he can come home or not, and the most damning thing I’ve found so far is his own goddamn testimony.”

Martha looked at him with a mix of contempt and poorly constructed anger. “Okay, city boy, since you’re all about the theories, what do you think happened?”

And that was when he realized he hadn’t been angry at Martha. He had been angry at himself.

Because he honestly had no idea.

Chapter Twenty-One

Martha slammed the door behind him and bolted it. He wasn’t getting inside Standedge anytime soon, not in any official capacity, anyhow.

He should have been ashamed at how irate he had got, but—it was the strangest thing—he wasn’t. He was relieved. He hadn’t got so upset at anything in a long time, not since Sam and the screaming at the police officers to take him seriously. He had thought the fire was gone.

But this case. This case that Sam led him to. This tunnel.