“What do you want with me?” I tried to make my voice sound calm and in control. “You could have gotten away by now and nobody would have noticed.”

She gave a little cackle in her throat. “You’re my ticket to freedom, duckie. We always planned to take a hostage and you were too good to turn down. Keep moving.”

And she prodded me forward. We stumbled upward in complete darkness, falling over rocks until we came to some kind of path, then we moved along more rapidly. Suddenly the woman froze.

“Hold on,” she said, listening, and sure enough we heard feet crunching up through the bracken toward us. “Don’t move. Don’t make a sound,” she whispered. “I’ve killed enough people recently that one more won’t be no trouble at all.”

I heard her cock the gun. It’s Darcy, I thought. He’s come to save me and he’s going to be shot. I made up my mind. I was going to shout out a warning and run as soon as he got close enough. Then a voice whispered, “Trix, is that you?”

“Over here,” she called back and Mr. Robbins himself came toward us. “Lost them easy enough,” he said. He had now shed his Willum disguise and was dressed head to toe in black, including a black balaclava so that he blended into the darkness of the night with only his face hovering, disembodied, which somehow made the whole thing more alarming. I was shivering now, and not just with cold. He came closer and noticed me.

“Who’s this?”

“We got ourselves a good hostage, Rob. She’s the one I told you about—relative of the king.”

He came up to me, took my chin in his hand and grinned at me.

“Well done, Trix. She should be good for a safe passage to South America.” He gave my head a nasty tweak as he released me. “Come on, then, let’s get moving. The motor’s this way, down behind that pub.”

I looked around me and saw no lights. The valley now lay hidden in mist. It was creeping upward toward us, moving like a live thing.

“Mist is coming in,” he said. “All the better for us. They’ll never find us now. Safe to use this, I think.”

He turned on a small torch, shining it on the ground around us. We started to move to our right. Far below us we heard a deep baying.

“They’ve got dogs, Rob,” Trixie said nervously.

“Don’t matter. They’ll never catch up with us in this.”