The girl emerged into a street he hadn’t been on before, and Robin was about to as well, when a noise behind stopped him.

Crying.

He looked back. Ethan Pack had collapsed by the bins, lying and writhing on the ground. He was wailing, screaming, crying—like a newborn baby. He didn’t look hurt; he just looked pathetic. In a way Robin could wholly understand. Pack’s sobs came thick and fast, bounding off the walls, consuming the alley in sadness.

Robin took an instinctual step toward Pack, instantly forgetting his fear of him. He wanted to help, tell him that it was going to be okay.

A hand clasped his shoulder, and he didn’t have to look to know it was the strange girl.

“We have to help him,” Robin said.

“We can’t,” the girl whispered, “at least not yet.”

And Robin knew the girl was right. Comforting Ethan Pack wasn’t going to help anything—not really. He would still wake up tomorrow without a wife, without a job, without his daughter. He would still go to The Hamlet and drink himself into a violent rage.

Helping Ethan Pack would be finding out what really happened.

Robin looked at the girl and she nodded as though agreeing.

“Come on,” she said. “I have somewhere we can go.” And with that, she turned away and started walking up the street.

And, with one final look at the sorry form of Pack convulsing on the ground, Robin followed.

Chapter Twenty-Five

The girl led him through the town, pausing by the clock tower to take a side road and get back onto the main street he was familiar with. She kept two or three steps in front of him, maintaining an unyielding pace. When he tried to catch up, she sped up too. They met no one else as they strode through the town—a bizarre convoy where Robin was to be the follower. They got to the duo of pubs at the bottom of the hill leading to the station before Robin recovered from the situation with Ethan Pack and managed to speak up.

“Who are you?” he called to her, as she started up the hill, him following. “Why were you watching me at the prison? Or at the vigil just now.”

She didn’t look back but she did speak. “I’ve been watching you ever since you got here.”

“Wait. What?”

“Don’t take it personally. I had to know why you were here. And now I do.” She stopped by the path about halfway up the hill. The one that led to the woods, where he had seen the sheep disappear just after he’d got to Marsden. “It’s because you’re an idiot.”