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“You don’t have kids yourself?”
“Nope. You?”
“No, but I remember being one.”
As a teenager, Barbara and her best friend had made dens in the forest near the river. Constructed of fallen branches and twigs, covered in moss and dead leaves. They were basic and flimsy. But they were theirs. Being a kid was tough. Being a teen was even tougher. You’re told you’re almost an adult but with none of the power that adults have. You’re still helpless, still trapped in between. Teens needed escape. Places like this. A barely held together structure of rotten, falling-down wood. But it belonged to them.
“It’s just us here, Babs. They can’t touch us.”
She pushed open the creaky door, which was barely hanging on by two loose hinges.
The cabin was dark inside, lit by a few shards of wintry light slipping in through the many gaps in the wood and a larger hole in the roof. There was no real furniture apart from a few upturned crates. Melted candles were dotted around the place, along with crushed beer cans and the stubs of cigarettes and joints. Just what she would expect. About the only thing missing were a few discarded condoms.
“We searched it thoroughly before,” Nicholls said, defensively.
“I’m sure you did, sir,” Barbara replied. “I’m not really looking for anything you’ve missed.”
Not entirely true. Barbara hoped there might be something Nicholls had missed or at least not registered. Fresh eyes often found fresh evidence.
She reached into her pocket and took out her flashlight. She flicked it on and scanned the floor. Easy to spot where Marcus had died. Despite most of the blood having been removed, there was still a large dark stain. She moved around the cabin, shining the flashlight around the corners and over the walls. On the right-hand side of the ramshackle building, she spied a rusty nail sticking out of the splintered wood. She walked over and looked more closely. Something gray and wispy was caught on it. A thread. This was where the coat had been hung.
“You see this?” She turned to Nicholls.
He walked over and squinted at the thread. “Just about,” he said.
Barbara extracted a plastic bag from her backpack and slipped the thread inside. Not that she had the boy’s coat to compare it to, but still, you had to be like a magpie in this job. Pick up the things that caught your eye and hopefully use them to feather your nest of evidence.
She looked back around the room, trying to picture what could have happened here. The boys had met up as usual. Text messages confirmed it. They had hung out, smoked a little weed, drunk a little beer. Nothing out of the ordinary. At some point they had left, Marcus had come back for his phone—or maybe to rendezvous with someone else—and that was when he had been killed.
“What are you thinking?” Nicholls asked.
She wasn’t sure. Something about this scenario just wasn’t sitting right somehow, and she wasn’t sure why.
“Let’s run through it again,” she said. “The boys came up here at what time?”
“Around seven, seven thirty.”
“How long would you say it takes to walk here from town?”
“Around half an hour, forty minutes maybe.”
“The timestamp on the video was 9:18 p.m. Stephen and Jacob said they last saw Marcus around 9 p.m., when they were halfway home, and he realized he’d left his phone in the cabin and went back for it. Yes?”
“Ye-es.” Said more cautiously as Nicholls saw where she was going with this.
“What time did Stephen’s parents say he got home?”
“Around 10 p.m.”
“Why did it take so long? Must have only been a twenty-minute walk.”
“Maybe the boys waited for Marcus.”
“You told me that they didn’t wait. Boys don’t stick together like girls.”
Nicholls shook his head and touched his mustache again. Barbara noticed he did that when he was feeling uncomfortable. He should have caught this himself. Or maybe he did and just didn’t want to think about it too much.
“It might mean nothing,” he said eventually.
