Chapter 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. "
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.
Erin walked out through the kitchen door and into the night.
The cold air hit her face and she breathed it in, deep and ragged, and the stars were bright overhead and the moon was high and the grounds of the Duke of Ashworth's estate stretched out before her in silver and shadow, and Florence was not here.
Again.
The word was a stone in her chest. Again.
Another empty house. Another lead that had ended in nothing.
Another night standing in a stranger's garden while her daughter was somewhere else, somewhere she couldn't reach, somewhere behind another locked door in another privileged house owned by another man who served at Arthur's pleasure.
She pressed her hands against her face. The bandaged one throbbed.
The night air was cold against the backs of her fingers.
The owl called again from the woods, closer this time, and the sound was mournful and absurd and she wanted to scream at it, to fill the quiet with something as vast as the fury and the grief and the terrible, crushing weight of failure.
She stood there. The team was behind her in the house, finishing the search, documenting the scene, detaining the Duke and Duchess.
Garrett would handle it. Garrett was good at handling things.
Erin was not handling anything. She was standing in the dark with her hands over her face and the last thread of her composure fraying to nothing.
She dropped her hands. Breathed. Looked up.
The grounds sloped away from the house toward the south, a long sweep of lawn that disappeared into ornamental gardens and then into darkness.
The formal garden was visible in the moonlight: sculpted hedges, gravel paths, a stone fountain.
Beyond it, the land rose gently toward the tree line, and beyond the trees was the shimmer of water she'd noticed earlier.
And between the garden and the water, half hidden by a stand of willows, was a building.
Small. Single storey. Stone walls, slate roof, arched windows.
A summer house. The kind of ornamental building that estates like this scattered across their grounds, places for tea and reading and looking at the view.
It was dark. Or almost dark. From this distance, in the silvered moonlight, it was hard to tell.
But as Erin stared at it, her eyes adjusting to the contrast between moonlight and shadow, she saw it.
A light. Faint. Warm. The glow of a lamp behind a curtain, barely visible, the kind of light you'd miss entirely if you weren't looking. If you weren't standing in exactly this spot, at exactly this angle, in exactly this state of desperate, searching attention.
The world narrowed to a single point. Then her pulse came roaring back, too fast, slamming against her ribs with a force that she could feel in her teeth.
She didn't call Garrett. She didn't radio the team.
She didn't do any of the sensible, professional, operationally correct things that her training demanded.
She walked. Down the slope, across the lawn, past the formal garden with its sculptured hedges casting sharp-edged shadows in the moonlight.
Her boots were wet from the grass. The cold air burned in her lungs.
She was walking fast now, then faster, the summer house growing larger with each step, the faint glow in its window becoming more distinct, more certain, more real.
The willows parted around her, their trailing branches brushing her face and arms like curtains.
The summer house stood in a clearing by the water, a pretty building, well maintained, its stone walls pale in the moonlight and its door painted dark green.
A gravel path led to the entrance. Flower pots flanked the door, filled with lavender that she could smell even in the cold: sharp and clean and familiar, the same lavender that grew in the kitchen garden at the castle.
The door was locked.
Erin tried the handle. Solid. A mortice lock, brass, old but functional.
She stepped back. She looked at the window, curtained, the warm glow behind it steady and domestic and impossibly ordinary.
Someone was inside this building, at midnight, with a lamp on and the curtains drawn, in a summer house at the far edge of an estate where a man had just told MI5 that there were no children present.