Meggy looked up at Elspeth, who thought about it then nodded.

‘How long would it take for you to open up the floor again?’ he asked.

‘Not long. The carpet’s already loose. We just need to move the furniture again. Half an hour, no more, but it won’t help us. They’re definitely human. We could tell by the skulls. There’s no way of telling how old they are though.’

‘It’s not the bones I want to see,’ he said. ‘You nearly got through to the floor below. I understand why you stopped, but it’s the closest you’ve come to finding a way out. It seems like a waste to give up on it now.’

‘He owns the whole house,’ Elspeth said. ‘To start with, I was on the ground floor then he moved me up here. I saw the kitchen, other bedrooms below. If we start banging around again, he’ll hear us, and then whatever he did to the poor people who’re already buried in here …’ She let the sentence hang.

‘Whatever he did to them, he could do to us anyway, at any time. He’s not rational. You can’t reason with him. What I saw him do tonight …’ He looked at Meggy and broke off. ‘And your finger. How is it?’

‘Infected, I think. I did my best cleaning it with hot water, but it’s oozing and starting to itch.’

‘We need to get you to a doctor,’ he said. ‘You’re right that his bedroom might be below, but if we don’t investigate, we’ll never know if we missed an opportunity to get out.’

Elspeth sat in the armchair and pulled Meggy onto her lap.

‘It’s too quiet now. Wherever he is in the house, he’ll hear. If we’re going to do this, it needs to be in the daytime when we’ve some hope of traffic noises or pedestrians or even just birds singing.’

‘All right,’ Xavier said. ‘We’ll get some sleep. He took my mobile but not my watch. It’s midnight now. I say we start at eight a.m. I’m not sure exactly where we are, but I was in his car, and we didn’t drive for more than twenty minutes. We can’t be far outside the city, so if there’s going to be traffic or any other noise, that’s our best bet.’

‘Fine,’ Elspeth said.

Meggy kissed her cheek and laid a tired head on Elspeth’s shoulder.

‘Maybe, by some miracle, we’ll have been found by then anyway.’ Elspeth attempted a smile.

Xavier couldn’t find the words to respond.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Fergus stood in the supermarket and stared at the front-page spread of the newspapers. Almost all of them featured a series of photographs. Angela, Elspeth, Meggy, Xavier, and the other man he’d dispatched who was getting in his way. The name was irrelevant.