Kensy pulled mugs from the cupboard as they awaited the impending arrival of Cordelia and Anna. Song was making a pot of tea and hot chocolates and didn’t need the help, but Kensy had to do something to keep her mind off the fact that her father had just been kidnapped.
Curtis and Max had taken their things upstairs to Max’s room, arriving back in the kitchen as Cordelia and Anna walked up from the basement.
‘Mum!’ Kensy exclaimed, running to the woman. Anna cuddled her daughter and whispered words of reassurance in her native French.
After a moment, Kensy made herself step back. ‘Do you know who took him, Granny?’
Cordelia shook her head. ‘The assailants were wearing masks – nothing as sophisticated as our Pharos face-altering technology, but certainly enough to impede our investigations. We don’t have any firm leads yet, but there are more than a few suspects.’
Kensy remembered some of the people who’d crossed the family’s path most recently, not to mention the cast of thousands her parents had talked about at times. Pharos’s highest-ranking family had made many enemies over the years.
‘Do you think it could have something to do with Mrs Vanden Boom?’ Max asked. He was thinking about all the attacks their family had suffered since Fitz had first brought the twins to Alexandria two years ago, and whether the same people might be responsible for all of it.
‘I’m not ruling out anything at this stage,’ Cordelia replied.
‘Shouldn’t we be out there searching?’ Kensy said. It felt as if she’d swallowed a stone that was now sitting in her stomach like a dead weight.
‘Peter and Sidney are on it. With everything that’s been going on, I want to keep things close,’ Cordelia said. ‘We need to understand what we’re potentially dealing with. I, for one, am heartily sick of the attacks on our family.’ She paused and took in a deep breath. ‘I know your father has just been targeted, but we have to strategise. It’s time to lay the facts out and see what connections we can make to get to the bottom of things once and for all.’
Worried faces nodded back at her.
‘Right, Fitz can you set us up?’ Cordelia instructed. ‘I want you all to think if there’s anything out of the ordinary – anything that might help us join the dots.’
Everyone followed Fitz to the family room, where he pressed a button on the wall. A screen with a map of the world and a considerable amount of blank space lowered from the ceiling. Kensy and Song doled out the hot drinks as they found seats on the sectional sofa.
‘Let’s make a start – we could be here for some time, and we have none to lose,’ Cordelia said.
Soon, Fitz had scattered labelled photographs of various people across the screen, placed according to their last known locations. At the bottom was a copy of Magoo’s coded note – annotated with the parts the children had managed to decode.
‘Dash is at Alexandria and never going to escape again,’ Anna said, eyeballing the man’s photograph and then her mother-in-law.
‘If Dash can get out of there, then I think he deserves his freedom,’ Cordelia said.
Kensy’s jaw dropped.
‘I’m kidding, darling, but if you thought Moonlight Cove was impenetrable then the place where Dash is now is even more so, and there is virtually no chance of an earthquake. I’d say a nuclear attack from the Swiss was more likely,’ Cordelia said.
Kensy frowned. ‘But Switzerland’s a neutral country and they don’t have nuclear . . .’ She stopped, realising her grandmother’s point.
‘Where exactly at Alexandria is Dash?’ Max asked.
‘It’s best you don’t know, Max,’ Cordelia said. ‘Let’s just say that the prison doesn’t require human caretakers, and that if anything happened to the rest of us, I imagine he’d never be found.’
‘How big is the prison?’ Kensy asked.
‘Big enough that if we managed to take down everyone on Pharos’s Most-Wanted list they’d have a suitable place to stay for a very long time,’ Cordelia said.
Kensy and Max looked at each other, both wondering where on earth that facility could be. It sounded huge.
‘Who else knows about the prison? Apart from Mim? There must be others,’ Kensy said.
‘Darling, I’ve told you – it’s really best you don’t know,’ the woman said.
‘But what if everyone goes missing?’ Kensy said.
Her grandmother looked at her, ever so slightly raising her left eyebrow. ‘If everyone went missing – the odds of which are very slim – then the contents of my secure vault will be released to you, and you’ll have everything you need. Please, darling, just leave it.’
Kensy pouted, but she knew when to stop. There were more important things to think about, like finding her father. And they still had no idea where to start looking.
‘What else do we know?’ Cordelia asked.
‘Percy is most likely dead,’ Fitz said.
‘I would be almost positive about that,’ Song said. ‘To survive for any length of time in the freezing waters of Lake Wakatipu is extremely unlikely.’
Anna frowned. ‘The human body is an incredible organism, and people have survived situations they shouldn’t have before. I hope I’m wrong, but it is possible he’s still alive.’
Fitz wrote the words ‘presumed dead’ on Percy’s photograph.
‘The man that Magoo knows as Michael Smith is definitely Percy’s twin, Lawrence,’ Max said. ‘What do we have on him?’
‘Last known location was a narrowboat on the Thames just down the road from here. Your mother saw him and Magoo together. Magoo told us Michael was heading for Old Windsor, but we found no sign of him there, and none of the other boat owners had any recollection of him or the vessel in question,’ Cordelia said.
‘He could have renamed the boat and gone somewhere else,’ Kensy said. ‘That’s happened before.’
Cordelia nodded. ‘Yes, and given we reported the boat and its passenger missing, and had the entire London police force on the case, that’s perhaps the most likely scenario.’
Curtis hadn’t said a word so far. He had been sitting quietly, deep in thought, but there was something he was curious about.
‘What about the MacGregors?’ the boy asked. ‘Why did Magoo write that line, My wife T must be stopped, inside the first code that made it look like it was Mrs Vanden Boom he was talking about. Do you think it means anything?’
Anna and Cordelia exchanged glances before Anna explained in detail what had happened when Cordelia had summoned Magoo and challenged him about Lawrence MacGregor.
‘He did seem to be desperately upset Tippie was receiving attention from “Michael”. And his acknowledgement that the man could pass for an older Percy really does suggest he has no idea of his real identity. It’s all very bizarre,’ she said. ‘Tippie was ostensibly attacked by Romilly before the woman disappeared. The evidence was clear. Her DNA was under Tippie’s fingernails.’
‘We haven’t shared that information with Tippie or Magoo,’ Cordelia chimed in. ‘They’re both desperate to know who the DNA belongs to, but at this stage, given Romilly’s disappearance hasn’t been made public within Pharos yet, I haven’t wanted to add fuel to the fire. At some stage I’m going to have to tell them. Romilly is due back at school tomorrow.’
‘Tippie and Magoo have lied to you about other things, Granny,’ Max said. ‘They denied their cellar library.’
‘Yes. And if they do know that our mystery man is actually Lawrence MacGregor, it changes everything. We need to find out where he is and how he’s been alive all this time. Who raised him and where? And how on earth did he become involved with Tippie?’
The family continued this way for some time, adding more and more information to the screen about potential threats – including some people Kensy and Max had never heard of – until there was barely a square inch of empty screen left.
Kensy could almost forget that her father was missing, until Peter rang to say he and Sidney had located the van that had been used in Ed’s kidnapping – now a burnt-out shell on the side of the motorway.
Kensy felt sick to her stomach. Max did too. Just knowing that their father had been taken was bad enough – realising they had zero leads was even worse.
‘Will the kidnappers send a ransom note or something?’ Kensy asked.
‘It depends who they are, Kensy, and what they want,’ Fitz said. ‘If they do, it will help us track them down.’
‘But what if they don’t?’ Max seemed to say what everyone else was thinking. The room fell quiet for a moment – obviously no one wanted to answer the question.
It was Cordelia who broke the silence, promptly changing the subject.
‘Sidney is still hacking the traffic-management system, trying to get a glimpse of the van to see if we can make out who was driving it,’ the woman said.
Anna stood up and walked to the kitchen bench. Max followed her.
‘Are you okay, Mum?’ he asked.
Anna’s face was ashen, but he could tell she was trying to be brave.
‘I’m fine, darling,’ she said, and drew him into a hug. ‘But I’ll be much better once your father is home.’
Max hugged her back. He felt exactly the same way.