Before they left, Alexandra went upstairs one more time. After she changed her clothes, she opened the door to the children's room and stood in the threshold and listened to them breathe. Frank was sprawled diagonally across his bed with one arm hanging over the edge. Matilda was curled on her side, her hair spread across the pillow, the duvet pulled to her chin. Florence's bed was empty. The rabbit watched from the pillow with its button eyes.
"I'll bring her home," Alexandra whispered to the empty bed. It sounded like Erin. It sounded like a promise she wasn't sure she could keep. She closed the door and went downstairs.
The car ride to the safe house was quieter than last time. No card games. No children. Just Alexandra in the back seatand Julia beside her, and the dark Surrey countryside passing outside the windows, and the headlights cutting through a night that felt thick and heavy and full of possibility. The driver was silent. The security car following them was a dark shape in the rear-view mirror. Rain had started: a fine drizzle that blurred the headlights and dotted the windscreen and made the road shine like dark glass.
Julia was on her phone, coordinating quietly with Mills. Alexandra didn't listen. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the window the way she had last time, and she watched the darkness stream past, and she thought about Erin's kiss and Erin's promise and the satellite image of an estate where her daughter might or might not be sleeping.
The fear was different tonight. Last night's fear had been bright and sharp and laced with the manic energy of hope. Tonight's fear was slower, deeper, the fear of a woman who had been disappointed once and was preparing to be disappointed again. She couldn't stop it. She couldn't make herself believe the way she'd believed last night, because belief was a muscle that had been torn and the scar tissue hadn't healed yet.
But Erin had kissed her. Erin had saidI love youandI'm sorryand had held her face in both hands and had looked at her with eyes that were open and undefended. After hours of silence and distance and the terrible blankness of a woman who had shut herself behind the wall of operational focus, Erin had come back. Not all the way, not yet, but she'd cracked the door open and let the light in, and Alexandra would hold onto that crack the way she'd been holding onto everything else this week: with both hands and no intention of letting go. That mattered. Whatever happened at the Duke of Ashworth's estate, that mattered.
Julia set her phone down. The glow from the screen lit her face for a moment before it went dark. "Mills has the tacticalteam en route. Erin's convoy left the castle twenty minutes ago. They should be at the staging point within the hour."
"Twenty minutes ago." Erin had been driving through the dark for twenty minutes and Alexandra hadn't known. Twenty minutes of motorway and country lanes and hedgerows sliding past in the headlights while Erin moved toward whatever was waiting at the Duke of Ashworth's estate. She imagined Erin in the lead car, the same armoured Range Rover, the same tactical team around her, the same bandaged hand and fierce green eyes and the absolute refusal to stop that had defined her since the morning Florence was taken. "She'll call when they arrive?"
"She'll call," Julia said. Her voice carried the steady certainty of a woman who had known Erin Kennedy for a long time and understood that when Erin made a promise, it was not a courtesy. It was a contract.
The safe house appeared in the headlights: another anonymous cottage on another anonymous lane, its windows dark, its garden ordinary. They pulled in. The gravel crunched beneath the tyres. The security car stopped behind them and two officers took up positions at the front and back of the property with the practised efficiency of people who had done this before. Julia squeezed her hand once, firm and warm, and they got out and went inside, and Alexandra sat on another beige sofa in another sterile room and waited, again, in the dark, while the woman she loved drove toward a house that might hold everything or nothing.
18
The Duke of Ashworth's estate was larger than Latimer Hall and darker and older, and in the thin moonlight it looked like something from a gothic novel: a sprawling Jacobean house with stone mullioned windows and a tower at each corner and a long, sweeping drive lined with lime trees that had been there since before the house was built. The grounds stretched into darkness in every direction: formal gardens to the south, woodland to the north, and somewhere beyond the tree line the faint shimmer of water that might have been a lake or a river.
Erin stood in the staging area, a copse of beech trees two hundred metres from the main house, and listened to Garrett run the briefing. The tactical team was larger this time: ten officers, all armed, all in dark clothing, all carrying the focused, coiled energy of a unit that had been through one failed operation and was determined not to fail again. Garrett's voice was low and steady, her brown eyes moving across the satellite map that Osei held up on a tablet, the screen brightness turned to minimum.
"Main house entry through the kitchen wing, same as Latimer. Bravo team covers the front. We clear the ground floor,move to the first floor, then the second. The house has thirty-two rooms, so this takes time. Be methodical. Be thorough. Check every wardrobe, every cupboard, every space large enough to hide a child."
Erin's hand ached. Her body was running on caffeine and adrenaline and the brutal, mechanical determination that had replaced sleep and food and all the other things that human bodies needed but that she could not afford. She'd driven here from the castle in the lead car with Garrett and Osei and the MI5 communications officer who had replaced Liu, a young woman named Briggs who wore her headset like a second skin and spoke in the clipped, efficient sentences of someone who had trained her entire personality around the needs of operational communication.
The night was cold. The moon was three-quarters full and gave enough light to see shapes but not details. The trees were dark columns against a sky that was crowded with stars, and the house was a block of deeper darkness with its windows glinting faintly. The air smelled of wet grass and earth and the cold, mineral tang of stone. Somewhere in the woods an owl called and was answered from further away, and the sound was ancient and unhurried and had nothing to do with the small drama of a woman looking for her stolen child.
"Move on my signal," Garrett said. "Radio silence from here."
They moved. Through the copse, across a stretch of lawn that was wide and exposed and that Erin crossed at a sprint despite knowing the estate was not defended. Along the kitchen wing wall, in single file, boots silent on the gravel. The kitchen entrance was unlocked, a heavy wooden door that Garrett eased open with one hand while the other held her weapon.
Inside: darkness. The smell of a country kitchen: bread and cold ashes and the faint, sweet residue of something that had been baked that afternoon. They moved through it with torches,the beams cutting through the dark in sharp white lines. A long table with a bowl of fruit. A dresser lined with china. A dog bed in the corner, empty. The house was silent in the way that very old houses were silent: not an absence of sound but a thickness of it, as though the walls had absorbed centuries of noise and given nothing back.
They cleared the ground floor. Drawing room, library, study, dining room, morning room, billiard room, a small chapel with a stained-glass window that caught the moonlight and threw colours across the stone floor. No Florence. No evidence of a child's presence. No shoes by a door. No toys on a shelf. No glass of water on a nightstand. Each empty room was another weight added to the growing certainty in Erin's chest that this was Latimer all over again: another beautiful house, another dead end, another morning when she'd have to call Alexandra and say the words she couldn't bear to say again.
First floor. Guest bedrooms, all empty. A nursery that hadn't been used in decades, its wallpaper peeling and its crib dusty. A music room with a grand piano beneath a dust sheet. More silence. More emptiness. More rooms that held nothing but furniture and history and the quiet, patient indifference of a house that didn't care about the people searching it.
Second floor. Servants' quarters, converted to storage. Boxes of papers. Old clothes in garment bags. A collection of walking sticks in an umbrella stand. Nothing.
The master bedroom was on the first floor, the east wing. Garrett opened the door and the Duke of Ashworth and his wife were in bed, both elderly, both blinking in the sudden light of the tactical torches, both wearing expressions that moved rapidly from confusion to alarm to the particular, cornered fury of people who understood exactly why ten armed officers were standing in their bedroom at midnight.
"What is the meaning of—" the Duke began.
"MI5. We have a warrant to search this property in connection with the kidnapping of Princess Florence.”
The Duchess pulled her bedcovers to her chin and looked at her husband with an expression that contained, in its careful blankness, a hundred unspoken conversations and a calculation that was already ahead of the game. The Duke's face went white, then red, then hardened into the composed mask of a man who had been trained since birth to show nothing.
"There are no children in this house," the Duke said. "This is an outrage."
"We'll determine that, sir."
They searched the attic. The cellar. The boot room. The laundry. The garage: four cars, all empty. The stable block: horses shifting in their stalls, the smell of hay and manure, no child. The coach house: garden equipment, a lawnmower, nothing. Every building, every room, every space that could conceal a person.
Florence was not in the house.
