I turned to see Langdon, flanked by Amelia and Xander, standing in the entrance to the restaurant on the other side of the pool. He had his hands on his hips. There was no way that he could have heard my half of the conversation from over there, but he looked angry with me. Possibly he’d read my body language. I tried to walk tall as I returned to him.

‘That was the kidnapper, I take it,’ Langdon said.

‘One of them. They keep referring to “we”, so I guess there’s a team,’ I said.

‘That’s not a bad thing,’ said Xander, trying as ever to look on the bright side. ‘The more people are involved, the harder it will be for them to keep what they’re doing a secret.’

Langdon looked Xander up and down and said, ‘Good point. And with my connections, once I’ve put the word out for people to keep an ear to the ground, I’m sure we’ll turn up a lead.’

‘What do you mean by connections?’ asked Amelia.

Langdon ignored her. ‘So?’ he said to me. ‘What did they say?’

I told him what the kidnapper had said, relaying the unthinkable threat word for word. When I say unthinkable, I mean it: hearing myself repeat out loud what the kidnappers were threatening to do to my parents, my brain put up a kind of shield that stopped me connecting the horror to them. Instead it gave me two random memories in quick succession. The first was an image of Dad with his hands on his hips in a very Langdon-style way. They’re brothers after all. Dad was in the downstairs hall at home and I was viewing him from the top of the stairs. His hands were on his hips because I’d made myself some toast and left everything out with the lids off. He wasn’t particularly angry, just annoyed in an everyday sort of way. The second memory that came to me was equally standard issue. It was just me glancing across at Mum as she steered the car through traffic at night. Headlights swept across her and I saw she had her concentrating face on, lips pursed, eyes alert and glistening. That was it: two normal memories of my parents to blot out the horrible unknown of wherever they were now, and how I’d be unable to cope without them, in the aftermath of the kidnapper’s call.

‘They put Dad on,’ I whispered, once I’d lain the full horror of the threat at Langdon’s feet.

‘Bang goes your last theory,’ Amelia said to him. ‘It’s not a hoax.’

‘She doesn’t mean it triumphantly,’ I felt I had to tell Langdon.