His Horizon - Con Riley Page 0,96
it before breaking eye-contact so completely that Jude was halfway across the kitchen before Rob managed to get out a desperate-sounding, “Wait!”
Jude didn’t. His hand was on the office door before Rob caught up with him, this time his grip on Jude’s arm was much tighter. “Jude…. Listen…. It might come to nothing,” he said, wincing as Jude pushed the door open.
Marc glanced up from where he was writing, the office phone cradled against his shoulder, frozen until someone on the end of the line must have repeated a question. “Oui,” he said, pen poised over a pad of paper. His next burst of French was impossible to keep up with, let alone try to translate.
“What’s he saying?” Jude stood to one side as Lou joined them, her fingers twining with his. “Who’s he speaking to?” Jude noticed what should have been obvious from the start. “And why have you brought one of Mum and Dad’s maps down here?” Four more steps brought him to it, Marc’s fast-paced conversation barely registering when Jude saw that someone had added new pushpins, red this time instead of blue, showing a different course than his parents had planned. He reached for one of the new pins at the same time Rob said, “Leave it.”
Marc interrupted, speaking English this time, his hand over the phone receiver as he spoke directly to Rob. “You were right. They were university students. Someone’s putting me through to the right department.”
“What university? What department?” Jude shook Rob’s hand off his arm as he tried to restrain him again from pulling out the pins that had been added, ones that confused an already muddied picture of where the One for Luck may have gone down.
“Leave them,” Rob repeated, then said, “This really might all come to nothing,” his brow so deeply furrowed that Jude took notice.
“Tell me.” Jude lifted an arm for Lou to scoot under his shoulder. “Tell us,” he almost shouted.
“Okay, okay,” Rob said, placating just as Marc spoke again on the phone. Rob reduced his tone to a whisper. “It was their T-shirts. The ones in the photo of—” he winced “—the wreckage.” He held Lou’s free hand very gently, cradling it really. “I couldn’t sleep, so I googled the logo, and then I wondered why students from a French university would have been the ones to find it.” He glanced at the noticeboard where a list of business ideas was pinned. He pointed to an idea written below spas and guided tours, that said geography field trips. “That’s when I figured out they must be on a field trip like the ones I thought might attract schools to Porthperrin. Losing a beach is a big deal, so I wondered what they had gone to research.”
He paused, Marc covered the phone with his hand again to say, “They were measuring the height of floodwaters inland on some islands, gathering measurements to make some kind of model.” He listened for a third time before adding some quick thanks in French and reading out the Anchor’s email address. “Okay. They’re going to email it to us.”
“Email us what?” Jude asked, wondering if he was actually still upstairs in bed, dreaming.
Marc said, “They’ll send the coordinates and the date as soon as they can.”
“Date?”
“Yes.” Marc nodded, not a trace of anything but compassion in his expression. “They found the wreckage far enough inland to pinpoint exactly when it washed up.”
The exact date?
That was one of the missing links Trevor said was needed.
Jude found himself braced then by his sister, sounding so much stronger than she looked as she asked, “What are these new red pushpins for?” only for Rob to seem nervous, his high colour paling.
“Rob,” Jude said, his whole world stuttering to a stop for the second time in twenty-four hours. “What have you done?”
“I….” Rob wet his lips as if they were as dry, his voice an arid croak too. “I used the postcards to plot where they actually went instead of the route they’d first planned.” His hand shook as he touched the last pin in an entirely different patch of the ocean than Jude had searched. “This island is where they sent the last card to Trevor.”
Marc made a small sound from his place at the desk. “The email. It’s here.”
“Jude,” Rob rushed. “It might come to nothing. I didn’t want to—”
“Get my hopes up?”
Rob’s brow creased again as he nodded. His gaze skittered between the map and Louise before settling on part of the