‘I’ll just be glad when Ally’s been located and we can move on with hearing whatever it is Pa Salt wanted to tell us,’ Tiggy said with a long sigh. ‘Excuse me, but I’m going up to bed.’

Kissing all of us, she left the room, followed by CeCe and Star a few minutes later.

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Marina, when it was just the two of us left alone at the table, ‘they’re all completely devastated. And I agree with Tiggy: the sooner we’ve located Ally and she’s back, the faster we can all move on.’

‘She’s obviously out of mobile phone range,’ I said. ‘You must be completely exhausted, Ma. Go to bed and I’ll stay up and wait for Electra to arrive.’

‘Are you sure, chérie?’

‘Yes, positive,’ I confirmed, knowing how difficult Marina had always found dealing with my youngest sister.

‘Thank you, Maia,’ she said, acquiescing without further protest. She rose from the table, kissed me gently on the top of my head and left the kitchen.

For the next half an hour, I insisted on helping Claudia clear up from the evening meal, simply grateful for something to do while I waited for Electra. Used to Claudia’s lack of small talk, tonight I found her steady and silent presence particularly comforting.

‘Shall I lock up, Miss Maia?’ she asked me.

‘No, you’ve had a long day too. Go to bed and I’ll see to it.’

‘As you wish. Gute Nacht,’ she said as she left the kitchen.

Wandering through the house, knowing it would be at least a couple of hours before Electra arrived and feeling wide awake due to my unusually long lie-in that morning, I arrived at the door to Pa Salt’s study. I had an urge to feel him around me, so I turned the door handle, only to find that it was locked.

This surprised and disturbed me; during the many hours he’d spent in the room working from home, the door had always been freely open to us girls. He’d never been too busy to offer a welcoming smile at my timid knock, and I’d always enjoyed sitting in his study, which contained the physical and material essence of him. Even though banks of computers sat on his desk and a large video screen hung on the wall in readiness for satellite conference calls, my eyes always strayed to the personal treasures placed randomly on the shelves behind the desk.

These were simple objects that he’d told me he’d collected during his constant travels around the world – amongst other things, a delicate gilt-framed miniature of the Madonna, which could fit in the palm of my hand, an old fiddle, a battered leather pouch and a tattered book by an English poet I’d never heard of.

Nothing rare, nothing particularly valuable that I knew of, just objects that all meant something to him.

Even though I was certain that a man such as Pa could have filled our home with priceless works of art and exquisite antiques if he’d so desired, in reality it did not contain many hugely costly artefacts. If anything, I’d always felt he’d had an aversion to inanimate material possessions of any great worth. He’d derided his wealthy contemporaries vociferously when they’d paid exorbitant sums for famous works of art, telling me that most of them ended up locked away in their strong rooms for fear of their being stolen.