He takes his phone from his back pocket and calls someone on speed dial. ‘Hey, Chuck,’ he says, ‘we’re gonna need – shit, I don’t know. Mainland force needs to get here, at least.’

‘What going on?’ I hear faintly from the other end of the line.

Booker looks me up and down. For a moment, I almost think he’s about to break into a smile. His eyes hold mine. ‘Kid found something.’

When he gets off the phone, Booker tells me to go home. I protest – I feel like I should be overseeing this, somehow – but he insists. He offers to drive me but I want to walk.

I can’t remember if I’ve texted Ellis yet so I check, and I did, last night, saying what I’d found – the jacket, bloodstained. He hasn’t replied.

I can’t stop looking at Lenore’s photo of Roxy, the emerald jacket hugging her arms, the same one that’s in the woods, covered in thirty-five years of decay and dust and maybe one moment’s worth of very important blood. Proof. Something that’s not words or hearsay or speculation. Proof of something real, finally. Something physical.

Something violent.

Peyton’s there when I finally return to the dorm – I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting her and her presence makes me jump.

‘You never came back last night,’ she says automatically. ‘The whole night. I was awake waiting for you, worried sick. Where the fuck were you? Where did you even sleep? Don’t lie this time. Please don’t lie to me, Mona.’ Her hair’s a mess. I’m secretly pleased she, for some reason, has matched my level of distress.

I remember, suddenly, that I’m starving. ‘Do you have any food?’

‘Mona.’

‘I absolutely wasn’t with Ellis, if that’s what you’re asking,’ I say.

‘Then where?’

‘I was in the woods.’

‘Oh yes, of course you were. Of course you were inexplicably in the woods. And what did you find there? Bigfoot?’

Sick of this. I pull up the pictures on my phone and show them to her. ‘This.’

Peyton quietens as I scroll. ‘And what is that?’

‘The jacket Roxy was wearing the night she was last seen. With bloodstains. Buried in the woods, with a cross.’

I show her the picture of Roxy on that night and watch her flick between them. Her seemingly stone-faced indifference makes me want to grab her by the shoulders and rattle her until she shouts, until she wails, You maniacal genius, you marvellous fool, I’m so sorry I doubted you …

‘Police are there now,’ I say. ‘Whole area’s blocked off. I’ll go back if you want. I’ll show you.’ I’ll rub your face in it.

Peyton rolls her lip between her fingers. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

‘Does Ellis know?’

‘I texted him last night but haven’t heard back.’