Chloe returned with her open laptop and sat back down beside him, their bodies sinking together. He dragged some of the blanket over her legs as though they were an old couple in a nursing home. Her unease was most noticeable around her restless fingers, and the feet that wouldn’t stay still, even when sitting.

‘That’s her,’ Chloe said, guiding his attention to the screen. ‘She was a history student, like you. She was only twenty-one.’

Carol Fortune somehow looked even younger. She had turned to face the camera, smiling, as though the photographer had caught her by surprise. Her shoulder-length dark hair had slipped behind her ear. She didn’t look lost or missing. Ben might have passed her on the street. She would have been another face in the crowd, too young to imagine the short time she had been given. The photograph was from a newspaper; a quarter page soliciting any information on her whereabouts. Ben had only seen missing person posters in movies. They were the same. Her brief description – the physical traits and the clothes she was last seen wearing.

How many days and weeks had they printed it before giving up hope? When does a missing person die if they’re never found?

‘Don’t they look familiar?’ Chloe said, pointing to Carol Fortune’s T-shirt.

A folded pair of sunglasses hung from its neck – aviators, identical to those discovered in Tír Mallacht’s cemetery. While Ben was passed out on the couch, Chloe had been busy concocting conspiracy theories in the kitchen.

‘They’re everywhere,’ he explained. ‘I’ve probably something similar in a drawer back home.’

‘But Sparling contacted her before she disappeared,’ Chloe reminded him. ‘Maybe it was some other little project of his. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that she was studying history either.’

The coincidences weren’t the worst part of it. Ben still couldn’t explain the breathing on the tape. And Nu’s words, as throwaway as he deemed them at the time, seemed to have stuck. The creeper was a man, she had told him. Well, if that’s the case, what the fuck is he now?

Ben had to be stronger than this, for Chloe and himself.

‘So, you’re telling me that Sparling sent Carol Fortune to Tír Mallacht?’ he asked. ‘But why would he? Like you said yesterday, there’s absolutely nothing there.’

‘Then why is someone following us?’

Ben shuddered at the question. He was quick to rub his palms together, unconvincingly ascribing his convulsion to the cold. Chloe must have seen right through it. Had it been the day before, she might have poked some fun at him. But not now. So much had changed in two nights.