I felt guilty after that. Xander was the one with the broken leg; the pain medication he was on had probably prompted his dream. I should have been gracious enough to listen to it at least. But I was worried out of my head. I didn’t know where to put myself, so stood up and walked out into the hotel lobby, did a tour of the stupid pool area, and was surprised, stomping back into the restaurant, to find that Uncle Langdon and Caleb had turned up in my two-minute absence. My heartbeat sped up. I jogged over to the table and asked, ‘Any news?’

Langdon smiled weakly and said, ‘Yes and no.’

‘Is it good? Bad? What?!’

‘A bit of both, I suppose. I’ve finally got through to my people. That’s good, in that it means we have a proper channel of communication again …’

There was a but coming. I said it ahead of him. ‘But what?’

‘It’s not that Nicholas and Janine took a detour after visiting the mines, as I imagined.’ He shook his head in apparent wonder. ‘It turns out they went off-piste from the get-go and never showed up there.’

Amelia muttered, ‘He said he had good and bad news. In fact the good news seems to have been that he managed to speak to someone who gave him bad news. It doesn’t add up.’

Caleb, who had some sort of gel in his hair this morning, shrugged in agreement, as if Amelia was addressing this thinking-out-loud to him. His father noticed and shot him a look.

‘Unless of course he’s relying on the no-news-is-good-news adage, which would be ridiculous, given that we’re talking about a missing-persons case here.’

‘Never showed up?’ I repeated.

Langdon softened. ‘Apparently not,’ he said, pulling out a chair for me. ‘But look, you know your mother better than anyone. If she says a thing, she does it. She said she wanted to do her own research, as good as told me she wouldn’t just be taking my word – and the example of my company – as gospel. I admire that, in a way. I’ll bet they’re just doing their own digging. It’s a nuisance that they’ve gone AWOL for now, and a worry, I’ll admit it, but let’s not overreact.’

Amelia’s words – missing persons case – were rattling round my head unhelpfully. They sounded ominously official. But if Mum and Dad hadn’t arrived at Langdon’s mining operation it meant they’d been out of contact for nearly a week, without apparently having told anyone where exactly they were going. That meant they were indeed missing.