Emma just watched him, barely touching hers. “I took a look at your injuries while you were sleeping. You got beaten up pretty good. Your eye is fine—it looks worse than it is. It looks like you have swelling around your ribs, but from what I could see, I don’t think they’re broken. You were lucky.” Emma sighed. “But you’re fighting off a fever. That cut on your forehead’s deep. Should have had stitches straightaway. It might be infected.”
Robin said nothing, just unscrewed the top of the water bottle and upended the whole thing into his mouth.
Emma said nothing else, picking at her own bag of chips.
Over the next few hours, Robin finished his lunch? Dinner? And he packed up his things. Emma helped him as much as she could, but it was still slow going. His body was seizing up, and every movement seemed to be in slow motion. Every movement seemed to require a buildup and a cooldown, as though running on a motor.
Emma seemed shocked by every move.
He didn’t have much scattered around the room but he wanted to make sure he had everything. There were the important things—his notebook, his laptop. The things he could use to carry on searching for an answer. An answer to what happened to the Standedge Five. Because going home wasn’t a sign of defeat. It was a tactical retreat.
“Are you ready?” Emma said, as he finished up and put his bag and backpack on the bed.
Robin slowly nodded.
This wasn’t the end. Because Matthew McConnell was going to pay for how he’d used him. Robin Ferringham was once a man who would roll over and admit defeat, but not anymore. He swore to himself, to Sam, he was going to find that son of a bitch.
He was going to find Matthew McConnell.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Two months later...
Robin got home, anticipating the usual evening of a Pot Noodle, a television box set and some quiet. Maybe he would spend some time in the study if he felt like it. Not that he’d felt like it in about two weeks now.
As soon as he was through the door, he threw off his company branded T-shirt. The clucking chicken on his breast always burned his skin, some kind of rash brought on by the material used, like some kind of religious torment. It symbolized his hatred well.
He’d had multiple conversations with Stan, until eventually he just stopped answering his calls. For the first few weeks, it was multiple times a day. Then it became once. Then it became a few times a week. A letter came in the post saying that he had terminated their arrangement. He couldn’t represent him anymore due to circumstances beyond his control. Robin knew what he really meant. Standedge—and his actions in Marsden. Whereas before no one had heard of the Standedge Incident, now you would be hard-pressed to find a person in the whole of the British Isles who hadn’t. And with the details of the Incident there was always Robin’s name and how Matthew McConnell came to disappear. No one in publishing was interested in Robin Ferringham anymore, and he couldn’t exactly blame them.
He kept track of the news. Loamfield was finally out of hospital, Claypath was still hanging on to his job by a thread, the Monster and McConnell were still at large. People were apparently flooding Marsden just as the locals didn’t want—taking pictures by the tunnel and wanting to see the place where the Five disappeared into thin air.
Every day, hell, every hour practically, there was a new theory about how it had been done. There were websites dedicated to it, forums with strings of millions of comments. Some theories were outlandish—tales of lizard people and Star Trek beaming—stuff the Ghosts of Marsden could barely dream of. Some theories were less so—puzzles of body doubles and secret hatches. Robin let it wash over him—he couldn’t avoid it but he didn’t engage in it.
There was only one thing he was looking for.
He turned the kettle on for his Pot Noodle, switched on the television and used the bathroom. He surfed the channels for something to watch that definitely would not be about Standedge. He settled on an episode of Most Haunted, narrowly winning out over an episode of Resident Detective.
He started back toward the kitchen and passed the door. He saw it out of the corner of his eye, felt the weight of the key in his pocket. He could always work instead. He turned to the door and nodded.
He made his meal, then unlocked the door, reaching in to turn on the light. The small box room lit up. This was his work, the real work, not serving stupid chicken.
The walls of the room were plastered in newspaper articles, printouts, images. All about the Standedge Five. All about Matthew McConnell. The articles about the Incident were on the right-hand wall—the things he had amassed while he was in Marsden, coupled with what had come out since. He’d cut out all the national newspapers’ articles that reported on the Incident, even if they did all basically say the same thing. On the left wall was information about the Five—social media page printouts, details of their university courses, any concrete information about where they lived and how they spent their time. Matthew McConnell took up the far wall—the wall above his desk. He had done a deep dive on the guy—found his birth certificate, school grades, property details, things like that—things that couldn’t possibly be relevant, but all helped to make up a picture of the young man who’d used him. Robin also kept track of potential sightings. Anyone who spied someone matching his description—and had something written about it online—Robin found and stuck on the wall.
He thought that doing all this would somehow unlock something, like he was putting together pieces of a puzzle, and once he’d found them all they would all make the big picture—and that big picture would make perfect sense.
But in reality it just looked like a mess—an impressive mess. But then, an impressive mess is just a bigger mess. Robin smiled at that.
He sat down at the desk and opened his laptop. His notebook was next to it—the notebook he had used in Marsden. He hadn’t touched it since leaving. He reached under the desk into a drawer and brought out a folder, which was full of the information on Sam’s disappearance. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to put that stuff up on the wall—probably wouldn’t have been able to come into this room if he did.
He opened the folder. On the first page, he’d just written—BLACK HOUND, HORSE HEAD. How many times had he searched these terms online? How many internet rabbit holes had he gone down? Were they names of pubs? Were they images, maybe pictures? Were they passcodes to something or even someone? He’d spent hours upon hours with four little words and he’d always come to the same old distressing conclusion.
It wasn’t enough.
And in all probability it wasn’t even real.
Matthew had made the call up. He had found out the information on Sam and he had used it to get Robin to help. Why him? Maybe because it was easy. Maybe because he had the opportunity, so he took it. But after all the anger—and there was plenty—Robin came back to a couple of questions: How did Matthew know that Robin would be able to get him out of prison? And how did he know that he would be able to escape?
And that only added to even more questions: Why were the Standedge Five attending the Ascend group at the church? What were they hiding from Matthew, forcing him to feel dangerously exiled? And the big one, the glorious one-million-pound question—how did he do it?
Robin closed Sam’s folder and settled into the chair. He opened his web browser and made the scan of all the usual news outlets, conspiracy sites and forums. Nothing new of note, just another ridiculous theory about mirrors and refracting light. A load of rubbish.
He rubbed his eyes and made the rounds again, looking at all the sites that even slightly referenced the Standedge Five and then looking at all the records of the sightings of Matthew McConnell, scanning all the comments sections to see if anyone had any new information. This process was absolutely exhausting and he wasn’t surprised when he looked at the clock and saw that three hours had gone by.
Three hours and nothi
ng.
Zero.
Zilch.
Just the same old shit. Over and over again. Robin ate his long-cold Pot Noodle and looked around the room. This was insanity—he had found absolutely nothing. Maybe it was time to give up. Maybe it was time to lock the door on this room for good.
Maybe Emma was right. He had to start to move on.
Let them go.
Let her go.
Robin found himself going to the Five’s Facebook pages. They were still up and running, basically a digital memorial at this point. He went to their About pages and went down to quotes. Maybe one of the Five had something inspirational to say to send him on his way.
All Robin found were cheesy one-liners, in the vein of “Every cloud has a silver lining.” Quotes that a teenager—someone who saw the world and thought they understood it perfectly—would find deep and poetic. But really they were just awful.
Robin stopped at Tim Claypath’s page last, and his eyes wandered to the box that showed his friends. He had comparatively fewer friends than the other members of the Five. Robin had just chalked that up to Tim liking to pick and choose, but it could have been what Benny had said—he was weird. Whatever it was, it didn’t really matter anymore.
But something did catch Robin’s eye. A small picture in Tim’s friend box, accompanied by a name he knew. Amber Crusher. She smiled out of the picture, and Robin clicked on it.
Her profile picture was just Amber’s face, doing some kind of half smile that was obviously a pose. Her profile opened on the About page, although her profile was totally public, so he could see her feed too. He looked down her page, not really knowing what he was looking for. Nothing stood out. So he clicked onto her feed.
She hadn’t used the page in about a year and he wasn’t surprised. The kids had deemed Facebook “uncool” now after all—probably something to do with the fact their parents had decided it was “cool.” The latest post was from June 2018, and was about some TV show or something. He scrolled down to see a few more posts in a similar vein, until he stopped on a picture.
His stomach dropped out of the world. His cold Pot Noodle dropped out of his hands and synthetic chicken and mushroom splashed onto the floor. He didn’t hear it. He just shuffled his chair as close to the desk as he could.
Amber’s picture was labeled NEW TATTOOS :). It was a picture of her holding up both wrists.
She had sweatbands on. Whenever he saw her, whenever he talked to her, she had sweatbands on her wrists. Obviously, he had thought nothing of it. No reason to.
He looked at the picture, unable to wrench his eyes from it. Unable to think. His pulse was hammering in his temples.
He reached out with a shaking hand and found his phone, dialing a number he didn’t know he’d call again. And the images in front of him burned into his eyes.
Amber was smiling, her two wrists held up. On the left, she had a small tattoo of a dog, colored in black. On the right, she had a silhouette of a horse from the shoulders up.
The phone kept ringing and Robin willed her to pick up.
He kept looking. Knowing what he was seeing.
Her.
A black hound.
And a horse head.
Chapter Forty-Nine
She dusted off the record player, moving all the junk off the top. Circuit boards, frayed wires, hard drives—all stuff she thought she would need but knew, in her heart of hearts, she actually wouldn’t. She opened the record player lid, slipped in the Stones’ greatest hits and pressed Play. “Not Fade Away” started playing and she smiled.
She cleared all the junk off the desk, just letting it fall to the floor in disgrace. One of these days she’d have to tidy up the place, but it wasn’t going to be today.
The sheep announced their arrival and she went to feed them. After that she came back, and checked all the connections on her computer towers. Everything was fine, as it always was, but you had to maintain these things. One connection slides just out of place, one fuse goes, and that would be a fifth of her income gone. Some guy in Iowa mining his Bitcoin would have off the drill—metaphorical drill, anyhow.
She sat down at her desk, checked her email. There were more sponsorship offers: Would The Red Door be interested in running banner ads for a festival in Guernsey? Would it like pop-ups for a Bingo app? An energy drink, titled simply ENERGY JUICE, wanted to become the official drink of The Red Door.
She moved all the emails to the trash folder. Not interested.
The site had received an insane amount of attention since the whole McConnell thing. For a news site, all news was good news, even if that did mean a possible—no, probable—killer was on the loose. Did she feel bad for her part in getting that dick out? Sure, of course, absolutely. But she also couldn’t help but reap the benefits of what may have occurred now, could she?
She flicked her mouse, clicking on the site stats. Still going up and up. Every outlet on this big stupid island was reporting about the Standedge Five now, but she was still the original, the OG. You couldn’t pay for that kind of luck.
Her phone started to ring, the tone layering over “Get Off of My Cloud” in a not-displeasing way. It could make for a nice remix even. She looked around herself. She couldn’t see it. She listened, trying to pinpoint it.
It was somewhere in the pile of junk under the record player. She cursed—of course. She bent down and started rummaging through the pile of broken hardware. Until she finally found her phone lighting up with a call. It was Robin.
She picked it up. She hadn’t talked to Robin since that day on the bench. In all reality, she didn’t think she would ever hear from him again. She went to press the green button.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
She looked around. There was someone standing in the doorway. She could only see the figure through the filing shelf. She put the phone in her pocket and walked out from behind the shelf to see a girl, a familiar girl with something shiny in her hand.
“Well, hello there.” The ringing stopped in her pocket. She put up her hands. “Did you knock? I’m pretty sure my front door was locked. Usually that’s a pretty clear indication that...”
“Who was it? On the phone,” Amber said, thrusting the barrel of the thing at her. She wasn’t exactly holding the gun like she knew how to use it. She wondered where the barmaid had got it—it looked like an old revolver, probably took standard bullets. Probably plucked from the Deep Web. “Was it Ferringham?”
“I don’t think I have to answer that.”
“Just answer the question. Can’t you see I have a gun?”
She smiled. “Pretty hard to miss, Polly. But you’re holding it like they do in the movies, not like real life. You need to move your bottom two fingers, otherwise they might get broken when that bastard recoils. Did you even check the safety’s off? This is all presuming that you are actually intending to fire it, of course.”
“Shut up,” Amber shouted, but looked uncertainly at the gun in her hand. She didn’t have a clue. “He wants to see you. I have to take you to him.”
“Why don’t you just put down the gun? And I promise, I’ll come voluntarily.”
“I know who you are,” Amber said, far from putting down the gun. “I know who you really are.”
“Well, you could have just asked,” she said, waving her hands. “Not like I’m trying to hide it. I mean, God, there’s been plenty of hints.” She looked in her periphery. There was a spanner on the desk by her—wouldn’t do much—but next to it, yes, next to it was a hammer. That would do nicely. She took a minute step toward it—a few more and she’d be able to make a grab for it. Amber would hesitate at pulling the trigger, weighing up the ramifications of what she was about to do. But she eventually would pull it, because she wouldn’t be able to deal with what would happen if she didn’t pull it.
Amber didn’t see
m to notice the move. “You’re going to have to come with me now, ‘Sally.’” She said it all twee-like, like she was a character in some kids’ show. She was most definitely not.
“Where are we going?” Another. Little. Step. “Who is ‘he’?”
“What does it matter to you?” Amber said, brandishing the gun.
She smiled. Another step. “Just want to know if I should pack a picnic.”
Amber didn’t smile. But her eyes alighted on something. She had seen. Damn it—she had seen the hammer. “Back up. Don’t you dare move for that hammer. I will shoot you.”
She waved her hands airily. “You’re not going to shoot me, Polly Pocket. Now, why don’t we...?”
Amber shot her.
She looked down to see blood blossoming on her stomach through her white tank top.
“I really didn’t want to do that,” Amber said plainly, her demeanor changing as easily as putting on a hat. “You’re such a stubborn bitch.”
She sank to her knees in front of Amber, clutching her stomach.
“No, no, no, I’m afraid you can’t rest. We have a walk ahead of us.” Amber put the gun in her waistband and hoisted her up.
“Where are we going?” she said through the pain.
Amber smiled. “We’re going to the end.”
Chapter Fifty
Robin tried Sally again and again, but she wasn’t answering. It rang and rang, and then one time when he tried, it went straight to voice mail and did that every time after. Where was she? He had to tell her about Amber. He had to do something—and being in London wasn’t going to help anything.
Amber was with Sam when she had called Matthew? What did that mean? He knew what he thought it meant but didn’t want to glorify it by thinking it.
He quickly made a decision. He had to go back. He stumbled out of the room, grabbing his empty backpack and shoving in only the essentials. A change of clothes. A jacket. After a moment’s thought, he also shoved in his laptop and his notebook. And then the folder he had on Sam.
Now You See Me Page 19