Erin stepped forward. “It’s Sergeant Kennedy.” Technically it wasn’t anymore, but Erin wasn’t going to let that stop her. “Where is Florence?"
"I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about."
"My daughter. Eight years old. Princess Florence. Taken from our estate five days ago. Your property was identified through phone records, financial trails, and surveillance. Where is she?"
Latimer's face was a mask. Polite. Impenetrable. The face of a man who had been lying to more powerful people than Erin for longer than she'd been alive. "I live alone,MrsKennedy. As I'm sure your people have told you. I have a housekeeper and occasional help. There are no children here."
"Then you won't mind if we search."
"I rather think you're going to regardless of whether I mind."
They searched. Every room, every cupboard, every closet. They opened doors and checked under beds and looked behind curtains and searched the attic and the cellar and the outbuildings. The stable yard man, a thick-necked, slow-moving individual who looked more like a farmhand than security, was found asleep in a camp bed in the tack room and was detained without incident. The silver Mercedes was searched. The summer house was searched. The walled garden was walked.
Florence was not there.
Erin stood in the first-floor rear bedroom, the room where the curtains had been drawn, where the silhouette had been seen, and looked at the empty bed. It was a child's bed. A narrow single with a white duvet and a pillow still dented from a head that had rested on it recently. The curtains were heavy and dark and had been drawn back by the search team, revealing a view of the garden below. On the nightstand was a glass of water, half empty, and a book:Charlotte's Web.
The room smelled of soap and something else, something faint and specific that Erin's body recognised before her brain did. She stood very still and breathed in and the smell hit her like a blow to the chest. Florence. The particular, unmistakable scent of her daughter: shampoo and clean skin and something indefinably Florence, the smell that clung to her pillow and her clothes and the stuffed rabbit that sat on her bed at home. Florence had been in this room. Recently. Perhaps hours ago.
She was gone now.
Erin turned slowly, scanning the room with the cold, methodical focus of someone who was holding herself together through sheer force of will. The wardrobe was open. Empty. The drawers had been pulled out. Empty. Whoever had moved Florence had done it quickly but thoroughly: no toys, no shoes, no personal items left behind.
Except one thing.
On the floor beside the bed, half hidden beneath the dust ruffle, was a sweater. Small. Navy blue with a white Peter Pan collar. Erin's hands shook as she picked it up. She knew this sweater. She'd bought it at Peter Jones three months ago because Florence had seen it in the window and said it was "exactly right." She'd worn it to school. She'd worn it on the morning she was taken. Vic had mentioned it in her statement. Navy sweater with a white collar.
Erin pressed the sweater to her face and breathed in and the smell of her daughter filled her completely and something inside her that had been holding for five days cracked along every seam. She did not cry. She would not cry. Not here, not now, not in front of the team. But her eyes burned and her throat closed and her hands on the sweater were shaking so badly that the fabric trembled.
She carried the sweater downstairs. Latimer was in the drawing room now, seated in a wingback chair with the careful dignity of a man receiving guests for tea rather than submitting to a search warrant. An MI5 officer stood by the door.
Erin held up the sweater. "This is my daughter's."
Latimer's eyes moved to the sweater. His expression didn't change. "I've never seen that before. Perhaps one of my housekeeper's grandchildren?—"
"Don't." Erin's voice was quiet and it was the most dangerous sound she'd made. "Don't insult me. I bought this sweater. I watched my daughter wear it. It smells of her. She was in your house and you moved her, and if anything has happened to her because you moved her instead of letting us bring her home safely, I will make it my life's work to ensure you spend whatever years you have left in a prison cell. Do you understand me?"
Latimer looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes, not fear, not guilt, but the cold calculation of a man assessing whether the threat was real. He appeared to conclude that it was.
"I want my solicitor," he said.
"You'll have one. After you tell me where my daughter is."
"I have nothing to tell you, Mrs Kennedy. I suggest you direct your enquiries to people who can actually help you."
Erin stared at him. The old man in his wingback chair. The striped pyjamas. The thin white hair. He looked like someone's grandfather. He looked like the kind of man who sent wreaths of white roses when babies were born and attended funerals with a walking stick and drank port after dinner in rooms lined with hunting prints. He looked like a hundred men she'd encountered since moving through the upper echelons of British society: polished, privileged, utterly certain of their own importance.
And he had kept her daughter in a bedroom upstairs and moved her in the night when the net closed in, and he was sitting there telling her he had nothing to say.
She turned to Garrett. "Arrest him. Take him to the local station. I want Agent Liu running the interrogation."
Garrett nodded. Two officers moved to Latimer's chair.
Erin walked out of the house and into the morning. The dawn had arrived fully now, the sky clear and pale blue, the garden sharp in the early light, the dew glittering on the grass. Birds were singing from every direction. The air was clean and cold and smelled of wet earth and roses from the walled garden. It was the kind of morning that should have been beautiful, and it was, and Erin hated every second of it because Florence was not here and the sweater in her hands was all she had.
She pressed the sweater to her chest. The fabric was soft against her collarbone and the smell of Florence rose from it and she stood in the garden of a stranger's house in the Surrey dawn and she breathed in her daughter's scent and she made a promise.
I will find you. However long it takes. Wherever they've taken you. I will find you and I will bring you home and every person who had a hand in this will answer for it.
