Jack didn’t exactly rub his hands together, but Tom could feel his pleasure. He had a puzzle to solve, and he was loving every moment of it. Perhaps he and his brother weren’t so different after all. They had a shared obsession with unravelling tangled webs, even if their methodologies were somewhat different.

Tom felt a rising sense of excitement. He knew Jack was going to find something. The only problem was, he didn’t know what he would be able to do with it. The information would be illegally obtained. He had no means of passing it on.

Rules were there for a purpose, but sometimes Tom felt the urge to break them.

‘Got it!’ Jack shouted.

CHAPTER 55

55

The woman Hannah now knew to be Rosa – the woman with whom she had spent the last four months of her life, and about whom she had known nothing until a few hours ago – sat on the end of Hannah’s bed, her knees drawn up tight to her chest, her whole body trembling. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since they had been given anything to eat or drink, and they had no idea why they were being left alone.

Since the early bouts of sickness, Rosa’s system seemed to be reacting better than Hannah’s, although for months she had seemed weak and on the point of giving up.

‘They were ready to let me go,’ she told Hannah, who was lying down, curled up tightly, trying hard to stop the attacks of nausea. ‘Whatever they gave me didn’t calm me down, it made me depressed, which meant I was no use to them. The doctor changed my meds – I don’t know what to – and I felt more and more as if all I wanted was to die. He said he would help me when the time came, like he’d helped the others before.’

‘How many others?

‘There have been a couple since I’ve been here, but the doctor doesn’t seem to want to let anyone go until there’s a replacement. Who would clean for them then?’

Hannah felt the anxiety well up inside her again, and told herself it was only a withdrawal symptom. ‘To think that when they went away on holiday, I was scared they wouldn’t come back. I thought I needed them to protect me, to keep me safe. I was glad when they came back.’

Rosa gave a shaky laugh. ‘Clever Thea, making all our meals in advance. And providing a big supply of her so-called “vitamins” to keep us healthy.’

Hannah realised that Thea and the doctor had been sure they would not escape from the cellar while they were away. Even if she and Rosa hadn’t eaten the food or taken the drugs, they would still have been locked in. Nobody knew that Hannah had worked out which keys to press to open the door to their prison.