“Cynthia must have taken some of Eve’s belongings, including this painting, to the Cancer Research charity shop in Port Gowan, where Nova bought it. From the looks of this photo, my guess is the cottage is a holiday house they used to go to when Michael was a child. And the fact Eve owned a painting of it suggests it wasn’t just somewhere they rented, but a place that belonged to them. Maybe it still does.”
“Good lord, so you think—” Arthur said, but Phyllis got there first.
“Assuming he’s still alive, this might be where Michael is. If we can find this cottage, maybe we can find him and the missing money.”
There was a moment of silence as they all took in what this meant.
“This cottage could be anywhere,” Arthur said. “It might not even be in the UK.”
“Let me have a look at that photo,” Nova said, and Phyllis handed her the frame. Nova turned it over and began to unclip the back. “My dad loved photography; he had this old SLR camera he took with us whenever we went traveling. He used to develop the photos himself when we got home and then…” She stopped, lifting the old photo out of the frame with a smile. “He always used to write on the back where the photo was taken and when. Just like Michael’s parents did.”
“What’s it say?” Phyllis said, as Nova raised the photo closer to her face. It must be at least fifty years old and the pencil writing was faded, but she could just make out two words and a date.
“Chy Pysk, 1969.”
“Fish house?” Arthur said. “That’s a funny name for a place.”
“We need to search for it online,” Phyllis said.
“Already on it.”
They all turned to see Ash tapping away on his phone.
“It looks like there are seven—no, eight—Chy Pysks in Cornwall,” he said after a moment.
“We don’t need eight, we just need the one on Bodmin Moor,” Phyllis said.
Ash shook his head, not taking his eyes off the screen. “There isn’t one coming up near Bodmin. All of these are on the coast.”
“Makes sense, what with the name,” Arthur said.
“Give me a minute and I’ll get them up on a map,” Ash said.
“We need to go to these houses and look for Michael,” Phyllis said, reaching out and grasping Nova’s arm. “Michael’s going to be in one of them, I know it. The only question is whether he’s there of his own volition, or if he’s being held against his will.”
“Ash did suggest he might have been abducted, didn’t you, lad?” Arthur said, but the teenager didn’t reply, his attention fixed on his phone.
“Here.” He turned it round so they could all see the screen. There was a map of Cornwall, and marked on it were eight red dots.
“Oh no, they’re all over the place,” Arthur said with a groan. “Look, there’s one near Looe, there’s one up by Padstow, and another all the way down near Lizard Point. It would take us days to visit all of these.”
“We don’t have days,” Phyllis said with a growl of frustration.
Nova tried to zone out their conversation. Something was tugging in the back of her brain, something small and faint but insistent. Something about…
“Lizards!”
The other three all stared at her.
“What are you talking about?” Phyllis demanded.
“There was a bookmark in Michael’s copy ofWhere the Crawdads Sing, the one he left at the book club. It was an old leather National Trust one and the lettering was really faded, but I remember seeing the wordlizard. I thought it was about the reptiles, but I think it might have said Lizard Point. What if that’s the Chy Pysk we need?”
“My God, we’ve got him!” Phyllis’s face was flushed with excitement. “We need to get down there now.”
“Awesome,” Ash said, grinning.
“Actually, not you, Ash,” Phyllis said. “You need to keep trying to get into that Michael file; I still think it contains vital evidence against Cynthia.”
