Vic stopped pacing. Her green eyes were bright with tears she was refusing to shed. "I took the reins of Percy and Gloria and kicked Thompson into a gallop the moment they were out of sight. I don't know why. I just had a feeling. Something about the driver's eyes. He wouldn't look at me directly. By the time I reached the service road, the car was gone. I took the horses back to the yard as fast as I could, threw the reins at a groom, and ran." Vic's voice went ragged. "I ran all the way from the stables to the house. I couldn't get anyone on the radio. My phone had no signal in the woods. As soon as I reached the house and nobody knew what I was talking about and Florence wasn’ttherer I realised what had happened.”
"How long between the car leaving and you raising the alarm?"
Vic swallowed. "Ten minutes. Maybe twelve."
"Twelve minutes." Erin heard the flatness in her own voice. Twelve minutes was an eternity. A car travelling at sixty miles per hour covered twelve miles in twelve minutes. By the time Vic had galloped back to the stables and run to the house, Florence could have been anywhere within a twenty-mile radius, and from there the radius only grew. Every minute that passed expanded the search zone by another mile in every direction. Erin could see it in her head, a circle on a map swelling outward like a stain.
"Helena, show me the CCTV."
Helena moved to the monitor bank and pulled up a series of feeds. The footage was grainy but clear enough, a dark saloon car, identical to the half-dozen vehicles used by the estate's transport pool, turning onto the south service road. The windows were blacked out. The driver wore a dark cap and ahigh-visibility vest over a dark jacket. The angle of the camera caught the windscreen sticker — green, current, with the correct serial format. The car moved through the frame at a moderate speed, nothing hurried, nothing that would attract attention.
Erin watched the car disappear off the edge of the screen. Her jaw was clenched so tight she could hear her own teeth grinding. "That's the only camera angle?"
"There's a secondary camera at the main gate, but the car didn't use the main gate. It left via the service exit at the north-east corner. That camera was offline for maintenance between ten and noon today."
"Maintenance." Erin turned to look at Helena. "Who authorised the maintenance window?"
Helena's expression was neutral. "It was scheduled two weeks ago. Standard servicing of the camera housing. I signed off on it."
"So people knew there would be a gap in coverage at the north-east exit between ten and noon."
"The maintenance schedule is accessible to senior security staff. It's not classified."
Erin filed that. Her mind was already running timelines, calculating distances, mapping the road network around the estate. The A-roads, the motorway junction fifteen miles north, the smaller B-roads that wound through the Surrey countryside and offered dozens of places to switch vehicles or change direction.
"Have we contacted MI5?"
"Director Graves has been informed. His team is running the plates through ANPR. We should have camera hits from the surrounding road network within the hour. I've also flagged the vehicle description with every police force in the south-east."
"Roadblocks?"
"Being coordinated with Surrey Police and the Met."
Alexandra made a sound from the chair where Julia had placed her. It was quiet and broken and it hit Erin like a fist to the sternum. She looked over. Alex had her face in her hands. Her shoulders were shaking. Julia was kneeling beside her, one hand on her back, murmuring in that low, steady voice.
Erin wanted to go to her. Every molecule of her body was screaming at her to cross the room and take her wife in her arms and hold her until the shaking stopped. But she couldn't. If she went to Alex now, she would break too, and one of them had to stay standing.
"The driver," Erin said, turning back to the monitors. "Run facial recognition on every frame where his face is partially visible. Check against estate staff records, former employees, anyone who's had access to the property in the last five years."
"Already running, ma'am."
"And Jennings. Where is Jennings?"
Helena's pause was barely perceptible. A half-second of silence that Erin caught because she'd been trained to catch exactly that kind of hesitation. "Officer Jennings has not made contact since he entered the vehicle with Princess Florence."
"He has a radio. He has a phone. He has a GPS transponder."
"All three signals went dark approximately four minutes after the vehicle left the estate."
Erin stared at Helena. The implications hit her like cold water. A transponder didn't go dark on its own. It had to be disabled. Either Jennings had been overpowered and his equipment destroyed, or Jennings had switched it off himself.
She replayed Helena's words from last night in the palace security office.Transferred in from the Met's Diplomatic Protection Group three months ago. Clean record. I handpicked him myself.
Handpicked. Erin's stomach turned. She filed that too. Filed it beside the maintenance window on the north-east camera andthe perfect credentials on the car and the driver who wore the right vest and the right cap and drove at the right speed because he'd been briefed by someone who knew exactly whatrightlooked like.
This wasn't opportunistic. This was planned. Somebody with intimate knowledge of the estate's security protocols had engineered every detail: the timing, the vehicle, the camera gap, the bodyguard. The bodyguard who was supposed to protect Florence and instead got in the car with her and vanished.
The thought made Erin's vision blur at the edges. She gripped the table until her knuckles whitened.
