“Standedge is closed for the season. I’m afraid there are no tours going through the tunnel now until after the winter. Good day.” The small, frumpy woman in the blue polo shirt emblazoned with the Canal & River Trust insignia went to close the door, but Robin shot out a hand and stopped it.
He was standing outside the Visitor Centre with the tunnel, chained and gated, looming off to his left. The canal was deathly silent—no traffic, not even ducks. The Visitor Centre was similarly devoid of life, standing empty and dark. Robin wouldn’t have known anyone was in there if he hadn’t seen the woman arrive.
She clearly wished he hadn’t.
“Can I just ask a few questions at least?” Robin said through the open crack in the door.
The woman sighed. “I need to clean the cobwebs out of this place, and then go to my other two jobs, so you’ll have to be quick.”
“That’s fine,” Robin said, “of course.”
The woman opened the door to let Robin in, and quickly shut it behind him, as though there were a thousand other people demanding entry. Then she went round a corner and disappeared.
Robin looked around. He was in a small reception area with a wooden counter and a stand full of leaflets and brochures. Behind the counter there was a chalkboard with a faded menu written on it—a few months ago, it seemed a cheese ploughman’s was on offer, among other things. To the right of him, there was a cut-through to another room. It seemed the Visitor Centre doubled as a café.
Lining the walls were pictures of Standedge all throughout the years—modern ones, drawings of schematics, old photos of men in mustaches with pickaxes clunking away at rock. There was also a pinboard with pictures of all the Trust staff, although all Robin could discern before the woman came back was that Matthew was not there.
“Taken down,” the woman said, when she saw what Robin was looking at. She had dragged out a mop and bucket full of soapy water. She started sloshing the mop in the water.
“You’ve heard the gossip too?” Robin asked.
The woman tutted as the water sloshed over onto the floor, annoyed, even though Robin was sure that was going to be her endgame anyway. “Don’t need to hear anything. I can read your type like a book. Know what you city people would come to a place like this for.”
“And what am I here for?”
The woman looked up, rested the mop against a wall and folded her arms. “Blood.”
Robin got out his notebook, not even trying to hide it. In a way, he guessed the woman was right—as long as she was talking metaphorically. “Well, so long as the pleasantries are out of the way, I had a few questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Not before mine,” the woman said. “Who are you?”
“My name is Robin Ferringham. I’m a...”
“No, I know who you are,” the woman said. Gossip had attached itself to his name. Was it really making the rounds of Marsden already? Where did the chain begin—and did Roger Claypath have something to do with it? “What I’m asking is who you think you are. Waltzing around town with your little notebook like you’re Hercules frickin’ Poirot.”
He opened his mouth to correct her on the name, but shut it again—she didn’t seem like someone who would appreciate it.
“You should be ashamed of yourself. This was exactly what everyone didn’t want—what we were trying to avoid. The Chief said it best—Murder Tourists. That’s what you people are. Want me to take your photo by where McConnell killed them all? Be nice for your wall, wouldn’t it?”
“Wait,” Robin said. There was a lot to unpack and the woman wasn’t about to give him time. He put his notebook back into his pocket, partly for the act of it and partly because he couldn’t write fast enough anyway. “Sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
The woman almost looked like she wasn’t going to tell it. But eventually she conceded. “Martha. Martha Hobson.”
“Martha, what did you mean by ‘trying to avoid’?”
Martha turned her nose up, but talked nonetheless. “We didn’t want your kind coming here. All looking for the Standedge Five. Playing armchair detective. Pretty much exactly what you’re doing is what we didn’t want.”
“How did you try to stop this, though?”
“It was Chief Claypath mostly. Held a town meeting a week or so after the Incident. Pretty much everyone was there—to show solidarity to the Claypaths, as well as the other families—” She said other like they were lesser. “We all agreed unanimously that Marsden should be protected. We know that the guilty party is already found. No need to make a big fuss—no need for this to be a big thing. Because we knew it would be if the ghouls had their way.
“I mean, we’d seen it in action. How many god-awful people go to get a snap by the room where that television detective was held now, eh, ever since that awful thing happened up there last year? Our world is getting overrun by bad guys, and the idiots who romanticize their every move. Murder Tourists.
“Good was the Standedge Five. Those kids were wholly good. And now they’re gone. Because of a boy I used to eat my packed lunch with. Even went through Standedge with him on a couple of occasions. And we don’t want him to be glorified. We want to remember the Standedge Five without having to remember him too. That’s what Claypath proposed and that’s what we all agreed to.
“We kept our heads down about it and kept quiet. And when Matthew McConnell is behind bars for good, that’s when we can grieve more openly.”
“You’re putting a lot of stock in the fact that Matthew is guilty,” Robin said.
“That’s because he is, sweetheart. He’s a crafty bastard, but guilty as sin.”
“Can I ask what makes you so certain?”
“Well, the police say he is, even after their investigation. There are no other suspects. And there’s no way it could have been anyone else.”
Robin thought as Martha went back to squeezing the mop and then finally splatting it onto the stone floor. “Can you talk me through the logistics of going through the tunnel? Explain the ways, as someone who works here, that it couldn’t have been anyone else?”
“Ooh, fancy,” Martha said. “Sounds like a GCSE question, dunnit?”
“Please.”
“Okay, but not because I want to help you. I’m only telling you because it supports my argument,” she said, gliding the mop across the floor and sloshing Robin’s shoes in a way that was almost certainly deliberate. “The Five and him went through on a private boat. He had the keys to the gate across the front of the canal tunnel. He opened the tunnel before he went to get the boat at the mooring site about a mile out of Marsden. He piloted the boat through the tunnel. There was no third party, no bogeyman—him. He was the only one who could’ve done it.”
“What about the abandoned tunnel? The one you take the van through?”
She looked almost impressed. “You’ve done your homework—well done. That tunnel was locked up tight. We had trouble with kids getting in the tunnel a few years back—the whole thing is fenced off either side but they used to burrow under. So we poured concrete along the fence boundary. Those gates are unlocked with a keycard—a keycard that was locked up in here on that day. No one else could have done it.”
“Did Matthew have a key to the Visitor Centre?”
“You’re thinking he took the keycard and replaced it somehow. Benefits of it being a computer system on the gate—you can see when the gate was unlocked. It wasn’t—at all—that day. And anyhow, he took the tunnel gate key the day before. Visitor Centre was locked.”
“So Matthew couldn’t have used the abandoned tunnel to move the bodies of his friends?”
“He could have accessed the tunnel through the multiple cut-throughs in the canal tunnel but he couldn’t have got out.”
“What about the other side of the canal tunnel? The train tunnels?” He was saying and hearing tunnel so much, the word was starting to lose all meaning.
“There’s no real easy way to get to the live train tunnels. There are no paths or whatnot. And even if you did get in there—well, they’re called ‘live’ for a reason.”
Robin grew silent and watched Martha go up and down the floor. She paused and nodded to Robin to move and he stepped back, up the step into the doorway to the table area. “You’ve said that no one else could have done it, but by your description, it doesn’t seem like Matthew could have done it either. What do you think happened?”
Martha stopped, leaning on the mop. “I thought he drowned them. Then the divers came back and they weren’t in the water. Then I thought he’d hidden them in the abandoned tunnel. And that search was a bust too. Then I just sort of stopped wondering.”
“How can you do that?” Robin said, stepping forward and nearly sliding on the wet floor. He steadied himself on the door frame. “How can you be content with not knowing something which happened mere meters away?”
Martha scoffed. “You sound like one of them Ghosts of Marsden lot. Always wanting to find a way for it to be over. That’s how you start getting theories in your head like aliens and ghosts and monsters. Dangerous talk.”
“What could have possibly happened? Think.” He was getting angry, his voice ballooning in the quiet.
“I dunno,” Martha said, clearly thinking hard but coming up short. “He could have cloned the keycard, tied up the steering, hacked into the computer system and carried the bodies out the abandoned tunnel, rejoining the boat at a later cut-through.”
“Also hiding the bodies somewhere the police search would never find?” Robin said. “No. Be better, Martha.”
Martha looked around, as though she’d find an answer on a wall. “Maybe he hid the bodies in the boat somewhere and moved them again later.”
“Again, somewhere the police search didn’t find? Not to mention the fact he was unconscious in the hospital, no doubt with a guard on the door. Nope.”
“I don’t... Maybe...scuba equipment?”
“Scuba equipment? What about scuba equipment? No.”
“I don’t know, okay. Sometimes, in certain situations, being rational is difficult. But the police have McConnell. McConnell did it.”
Robin gritted his teeth, his temper flaring. “I came to this town to see if there was any way that Matthew McConnell could not have done what he has been accused of, but what I’ve found is no logical theory to say that he did it. This boy is about to go up against a court who are going to decide if he can come home or not, and the most damning thing I’ve found so far is his own goddamn testimony.”
Martha looked at him with a mix of contempt and poorly constructed anger. “Okay, city boy, since you’re all about the theories, what do you think happened?”
And that was when he realized he hadn’t been angry at Martha. He had been angry at himself.
Because he honestly had no idea.