Chapter 15
Alexandra sat on a beige sofa in the living room and waited.
Julia was on her phone in the kitchen, her voice low and professional, coordinating with Charlotte's office about something that Alexandra couldn't bring herself to care about.
Vic was on the floor with the children, playing a card game that she appeared to be losing badly.
Frank was on his knees, slapping cards down with the ferocious intensity he brought to all competitive activities.
Matilda was sitting cross-legged beside him, her moves slower and more considered, her hair falling across her face as she studied her hand.
Hyzenthlay was on the armchair in the corner, her legs tucked beneath her, her hazel eyes watching the room with the composed attention of a child who processed the world by observing it.
The clock on the wall said five forty-seven.
Dawn. The rescue team would be approaching Latimer Hall now.
Erin would be with them, walking through the dark, breathing the cold air, moving toward the house where Florence was waiting.
In fourteen minutes, if Helena's estimate was right, the team would reach the kitchen entrance.
In twenty minutes, they would be inside.
In thirty minutes, maybe less, maybe more, the variables impossible to calculate from a beige sofa in a village without a pub, Erin would call.
Alexandra's phone was in her right hand.
She'd been gripping it for forty minutes and the case was warm from her palm and the screen was locked but she kept checking it anyway, pressing the side button to illuminate the display, confirming that the signal was strong, that the volume was at maximum, that nothing had been missed.
She'd sent Erin two words at five fifteen: Be safe, and Erin had replied with one: Always, and since then there had been nothing.
Silence. The particular, excruciating silence of a woman waiting for news that would determine everything.
She could hear Vic explaining the rules to Frank for the third time.
Something about trumps and tricks and the importance of following suit.
Frank was not interested in rules. He was interested in winning, and he appeared to be achieving this through a combination of speed, enthusiasm, and a cheerful disregard for the conventions of card play that Vic found simultaneously infuriating and charming.
"You can't play a king on top of an ace, mate. That's not how it works."
"Why not? A king outranks an ace. Kings are the highest."
"Not in cards. In cards, the ace is—"
"Cards are wrong, then."
Matilda, without looking up from her hand, said quietly: "He does this every time. Just let him win."
"I don't want to let him win. I want him to learn the rules so I can beat him fairly."
"You're not going to beat him fairly. He doesn't care about fairly."
Alexandra almost smiled. The dynamic between the triplets, Frank's relentless energy, Matilda's quiet pragmatism, and the invisible presence of Florence who would normally have been the mediator, the peacemaker, the one who found the compromise, was so familiar and so incomplete that the almost-smile caught in her throat and became something else entirely.
She kept thinking about the silhouette. The child at the window.
Florence standing behind drawn curtains in a stranger's house, looking out at a garden she didn't know, and Alexandra wondered what she'd been thinking.
Whether she'd been afraid. Whether she'd been hoping someone would see her.
Whether she understood, at eight years old, that the people who loved her were tearing the country apart to find her.
Or whether she felt alone and forgotten, which was the thought Alexandra could not bear and which kept returning despite every effort to push it away.
The clock said five fifty-two. Five minutes since she'd last checked. It felt like thirty.
Her phone rang.
The sound went through her like electricity. Every nerve, every muscle, every fibre of her body responded simultaneously. She pressed the answer button before the first ring had finished.
"Erin?"
Silence on the line. Not dead silence. The ambient sound of being outside, wind and distant voices and the static crackle of a phone connection under strain. Then Erin's voice, and the sound of it told Alexandra everything before the words did.
"She's not here."
The room contracted. The beige sofa, the generic curtains, the clock on the wall, Vic's card game, Matilda's quiet pragmatism, all of it compressed into a single point of white-hot pain that bloomed behind Alexandra's sternum and spread outward until it filled her completely.
She heard a sound. A small, involuntary sound, like something breaking. She realised it had come from her.
"The bed was slept in. Her — her sweater was there.
Florence's sweater. She was here, Alex. Recently.
But they moved her. Sometime in the night.
Before we arrived." Erin's voice was flat in a way that Alexandra recognised: the controlled blankness of a woman holding back something enormous by sheer force of training.
"Latimer's been arrested. He's not talking.
Liu's running the interrogation but he won't give us anything. He knows what he's doing."
"Where—" Alexandra's voice cracked. She pressed her hand over her mouth, breathed in through her nose, fought for control. The children were in the room. Frank had stopped playing cards. He was looking at her with wide eyes that understood more than they should. "Where did they take her?"
"We don't know yet. MI5 is pulling CCTV, ANPR, traffic cameras, everything within a twenty-mile radius. If a vehicle left this property in the last twelve hours, they'll find it. But it takes time." A pause. The wind on the line. "I'm sorry, Alex. I'm so sorry."
"Come here. Come to the safe house. Please."
Another pause. Longer. "I can't. I need to be at the command post. They're setting up here. Helena's team is coordinating from the property."
"Erin—"
"I'll come when I can. I have to go."
The line went dead. Alexandra stared at the phone in her hand. The screen dimmed, then went dark, and her own face stared back at her from the black glass, pale, drawn, the face of a woman whose hope had just been surgically removed.
Frank said: "She's not there, is she?"
Alexandra looked at her son. His small face was set in an expression that was too old for eight, the fierce, comprehending gravity of a child who had absorbed enough adult conversations to understand the weight of a three-word phone call.
Beside him, Matilda had gone very still.
Her cards were held loosely in her lap and her eyes were dark and wide and fixed on Alexandra with an intensity that was painful to meet.
"Not yet, darling. But the team found important clues. They're still looking."
"Mummy Erin sounded angry."
"She is angry. She's angry because she wants to find Florence and she hasn't found her yet. But angry is good. It means she won't stop."
Frank processed this. His jaw tightened, a tiny, fierce gesture that was pure Erin, and he nodded once. "Good. I'd be angry too."
Matilda said nothing. She set her cards down on the floor, rose, and crossed the room to Alexandra.
She climbed onto the sofa and pressed herself against Alexandra's side, and her small body was trembling finely, like a string that had been plucked.
Alexandra wrapped her arm around her daughter and held on and felt the tremor pass through both of them, shared and absorbed and held.
Julia appeared in the doorway. Her phone was still in her hand but she wasn't looking at it. She was looking at Alexandra with the expression of a woman who had many years of experience managing royal crises and had never seen one that looked like this.
"I heard," Julia said quietly. "I've spoken to Helena. They're establishing a new command post at the property and MI5 is redirecting resources. Charlotte's office is prepared to issue an updated statement if needed."
"I want to go home," Alexandra said. The words came out raw and small and nothing like a Queen's voice. "I want to take the children home."
"I'll arrange it immediately.”
Vic was on her feet. She gathered the scattered cards from the floor and slipped them into her pocket and her face was tight with the controlled fury of a woman who had been sitting on the sidelines while someone she loved walked into a building that didn't hold what they needed.
She crouched in front of Alexandra and took her hands.
"She'll find her, Alex. Erin doesn't lose. She's never lost at anything in her life and she's not going to start with this."
Alexandra wanted to believe it. She searched Vic's eyes for the certainty that her voice carried and she found it, fierce, absolute, the certainty of a woman who had known Erin for years now and had watched her refuse to be defeated by things that would have broken anyone else.
She held onto it because it was all she had.