Except that was entirely possible. She had made a meagre living out of looking into the unexplained, and she’d seen plenty of examples of how far people would take a hoax. How they’d devote vast amounts of time and money to something that would only result in the most fleeting attention from strangers on the internet. Plenty of those people knew her, Mal’s disappearance was public record, and there were hoaxers and Fortean buffs who had absolutely no grasp of what was or wasn’t fair game. Some of them had fallen through their hollow earths and Atlantean theories into all sorts of real-world political philosophies. Some of these philosophies didn’t have much room for someone like Lee Pryor. And so, yes, it could be something set up to piss her off.

It could also be something else.

The meeting place was a cafe in Camden—not too far from her own haunts, on those rare occasions she decided to check up on the LGBT community in that corner of London. She reckoned that internet murderers probably didn’t ply their trade in front of large crowds of people. However, she’d have to take serious stock if she got a text asking her to go into a dark alley and close her eyes.

She couldn’t believe how calmly she was taking all this.

She slung a bag across her shoulders. She had her phone, her purse, her e-reader and an illegal locking knife given to her by a six-foot Swedish woman who’d joined her hunt for giant serpents in the Storsjön lake the previous summer.

“Right,” she told the room, as though she wouldn’t see it again. Because let’s suppose…let’s just suppose it is Mal… Mal had gone “somewhere.” And if she had come back, then perhaps there was now a two-way door from there to here—although why Camden would suddenly be twinned with Narnia was anybody’s guess. Maybe Lee herself wouldn’t be coming back, and she should be thinking very seriously about the various people her absence would upset or at least inconvenience. Instead, she felt a swirling spiral of excitement in her stomach.

What if it is Mal, and she’s been Somewhere Else?

Which translated as, What if I really do remember everything, and I didn’t go crazy on Bodmin Moor.