Deadline (5 page)

At 9.47 p.m. Andrea's Mercedes was moving at a
steady thirty miles an hour along a quiet country
B road with a cornfield stretching into the darkness
on one side and a bank of beech and oak trees
rising up on the other. A car passed them going
the other way and moving far too fast, but there
was no traffic behind. Andrea slowed as she
spotted the dilapidated sign for Gabriel's Saw
Mill nailed to a tree up ahead.

'This is it,' she whispered, indicating right.

Jimmy was hunched down in the front
passenger seat, a position he'd adopted ever since
they'd left the motorway.

'All right, babe,' he whispered. 'I'm out as soon as
you make the turning, unless I hear any different.'

'I don't like this, Jimmy, I really don't like this.'
The doubts were savaging her now.
If he makes a
mistake
. . .

'It's just an insurance policy. Better safe than
sorry.'

She steered the Mercedes into the turning, little
more than a dirt track which was only just wide
enough for the car. Ahead, the trees loomed, blotting
out the light of the moon.

'Wish me luck, babe.'

'Good luck,' she answered without looking at
him as she peered through the windscreen into
the darkness.

A second later the door opened – a foot, maybe
a foot and a half – and Jimmy slid through the
gap. Then he shut the door silently behind him
and Andrea drove on, risking a brief glance in the
rear-view mirror as he disappeared into the
woods.

Suddenly she was on her own.

Up ahead the trees seemed to rise up to greet
her, and the only sounds were the tyres crunching
on the track's loose gravel and her own low, tense
breathing. This was it, the moment of truth. Close
to all of Andrea's life savings were in the holdall
in the footwell of the front passenger seat. She
would have given everything, down to the clothes
on her back, to have Emma returned to her safely,
but if this failed and her tormentors didn't keep
their side of the bargain she didn't know what else
she could do, or where she could get any more
money from.

The track forked as the kidnapper had said it
would, and she followed it to the right as
instructed. The road surface became pitted and
potholed and she was forced to slow right down
as she manoeuvred the Mercedes round the worst
of the holes. Nothing moved in the darkness up
ahead and on either side of her the wall of trees
looked impenetrable.

And then it appeared to her right, a concrete
outbuilding with blackened walls set back a few
yards from the track, its roof all but gone, a black
hole where the front door was.

She stopped the car and jerked on the handbrake,
slipping the gearstick into neutral. For a
few seconds she just sat there, listening to the
silence, wondering if the man on the phone was
watching her now, the man who'd abducted her
daughter. Wondering too whether he'd hear
Jimmy's approach and call the whole thing off.

Nothing moved. Andrea could hear her heart
beating.

Finally, she bent down and pulled up the
holdall, leaning back against the weight, and
manoeuvred it awkwardly out of the car. As she
stood up, she took one last look around before
walking slowly up to the building, carrying the
holdall two-handed, stopping at the gap where
the front door had been.

It suddenly occurred to her that it might well be
easier for the kidnappers simply to lie in wait,
take the money and kill her, then go back and do
exactly the same to Emma. Job done.
Right now,
Andrea, there could be someone just inside this door, a
crowbar in his hand, ready to smash your skull in.

'Just do as he said,' she muttered to herself:
drop the money, leave, go to the phone box and
wait for the call that would reunite her with her
daughter.

She stepped inside. Pale shards of moonlight
shone through the huge hole in the roof, revealing
an empty room with cement flooring, and a few
tins of paint in one corner. To her right, a wooden
door hanging off one of its hinges led into a poky
little room which had probably once been a
storage cupboard. The air smelled musty and
vaguely of turps. There was no one there, no
crowbar-wielding maniac. Taking a deep breath,
she put the holdall on the floor next to the wall,
then quickly turned and walked back outside.

And stopped.

She thought she saw movement in the trees
ahead of her, something rustling. She stood still,
staring, but as she watched, the movement
stopped. But she knew she hadn't imagined it,
and, feeling a new and very strong urge to get out
of this place, she hurried over to where the car sat
idling and jumped inside, reversing back the way
she'd come in rather than going any further into
the woods and using the turning circle she'd been
told to use.

It was only when she was back on the road that
she sighed with relief. She may have just parted
with half a million pounds of her hard-earned
money, with still no sign of her daughter, but at
least she was out of that place. She wondered if it
had been Jimmy she'd heard. She hoped it wasn't.
If he could draw attention to himself like that then
it might not just be her who'd noticed his presence.
It wasn't something she wanted to think
about.

A few minutes later the phone box she was after
– a modern glass BT one – came into view at the
edge of a village which was little more than a tiny
collection of houses. It was up on a verge just
beyond a bus stop, and partly concealed by the
branches of a large oak tree. She pulled up twenty
yards short of it, parking her car as close to the
verge as possible, and banged on the hazard
lights.

Once she was inside the phone box, she stood
and waited for the last act, praying that this was
finally it. The end of the nightmare.

The time was 9.56 p.m.

The phone didn't ring. Ten minutes passed, then
twenty, and still Andrea stood in the bright light
of the booth, staring at the receiver as the occasional
car hissed past in the darkness outside,
willing the call to come through. Hoping,
praying . . .

A memory came back to her of a time years ago
when she'd lost Emma on a crowded beach in
Spain. They'd been on holiday with a new
boyfriend of Andrea's, an Aussie bar manager
called Bryan she'd met a few months earlier.
Andrea had been besotted with Bryan, who was
tall, blond and a lot younger, and for a very short
time she'd even thought he was going to be the
one. She was all over him on the beach that day,
and for just a few moments – no more than that,
because Emma was always the most important
thing in the world to her – just for those few
moments, she hadn't paid attention to her four-year-old
daughter, and when she'd pulled away
from Bryan and looked around, Emma wasn't
there any more.

God, the terror she'd felt. It had almost been
worse than when she'd got the call from the
kidnapper. She'd jumped up, called out her
daughter's name, looked round desperately, but
all she could see was a sea of half-naked strangers
stretching in both directions as far as the eye could
see, like something out of the worst kind of nightmare.
She'd panicked, really panicked. All she
could think was that Emma had been taken.
My
baby's been snatched by paedophiles, predators who'll
abuse her and kill her. I'll never see her again, and it
will all be my fault. Because I put myself before her.
She'd run round, not sure which way to go,
knowing that the wrong decision would take her
even further from Emma, ignoring the blank,
uncaring stares of the other beachgoers as she
called out, her voice an anguished howl.

In the end it was Bryan who found her, walking
along the shore several hundred yards away, all
alone, crying her eyes out. She was only missing
five minutes, but Andrea could still recall the
intense, almost physical joy she'd felt when she
saw Bryan coming back with Emma in his arms.
She'd never experienced anything like it, either
before or since.

Within weeks she'd finished with Bryan – not
because he was at fault, but because she would
forever associate him with her own selfishness –
and she'd sworn then never to let anyone get in
the way of her and Emma. She'd kept to her vow,
too. Until now.

There was a vibration in her jeans pocket. It was
the mobile Jimmy had given her. She looked at her
watch. It was 10.18. Pulling it from her pocket, she
saw that he'd sent a text.

She read the words on the screen, then read
them again.

GET BACK TO DROP-OFF POINT NOW.

It was half an hour since she'd dropped him off.

He'd specifically told her he wouldn't contact her
for an hour. Something had made him change his
mind. Could it be good news? But if so, why
hadn't he just called? She thought about calling
him back, but stopped herself. Far better simply to
wait here, as she'd been instructed, until the
kidnappers called. But why hadn't they done so
already? They must have counted the money by
now.

The minutes passed. Outside, another car drove
past, slowed down, then accelerated again. She
suddenly felt very exposed out here in the middle
of the country late at night, illuminated for all to
see by the phone booth's light.

God, what the hell was Jimmy doing? Had he
done something stupid, like confront the kidnappers?

Had he beaten a confession out of one of
them? If he had, she'd kill him. All she wanted
was her daughter back. Christ, they could have
the money. It was totally and utterly irrelevant to
her now without Emma. Everything was.

The phone vibrated again. It was another
message from Jimmy.

GET BACK TO DROP-OFF POINT NOW.
URGENT!

Andrea leaned against the glass panel of the
phone booth, staring down at the screen, her
stomach churning, wondering what the hell she
should do. Then she made a decision and called
Jimmy's number.

It rang and rang. She counted each ring, and
when the number hit twelve she hung up. What
the hell was he playing at?

She replaced the mobile in her pocket and
stared at the phone unit on the booth's wall. The
gunmetal-grey stand was covered in carved
teenage graffiti, and the receiver was scratched
and old. It was also not ringing.

What are you going to do, babe? They're not calling,
are they? You could be here for hours.

But if I go . . . If I go and they call . . . What then?

Andrea agonized. She clenched her fists, and
gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut. Tried,
tried, tried to make the right decision. Cursed
herself for bringing in Jimmy. Cursed Jimmy for
complicating things, and then not being there
when she needed to talk to him. And still the
fucking phone wasn't ringing, and it was now
10.35.

Flinging open the door in one angry movement,
Andrea hurried out of the phone booth, jumped
back in the car and executed a rapid three-point
turn in the road before driving back the way she'd
come, going fast and trying her best not to think
about the fact that even now the phone might be
ringing away as the kidnapper called to give her
instructions about where to find Emma.

She was back at the turning to Gabriel's Saw
Mill in under two minutes. Once again the track
was empty and silent as she drove down it, taking
the right-hand fork, looking for but not seeing any
sign of Jimmy. She could only assume that he'd
meant the abandoned outbuilding when he'd said
in the message to get back to the drop-off point,
but when she stopped the car outside, it looked
just as deserted as it had done before.

This time she killed the lights and the engine,
and put the keys in her pocket as she got out. It
was a risk – she might need to make a quick
getaway – but if she moved away from an idling
car, she fancied the idea of someone driving it off
and leaving her out here alone even less.

'Jimmy?' she called out, trying to keep her
voice down as she slid her gaze along the silent
tree line.

No answer.

She turned in the direction of the outbuilding,
and swallowed. She didn't want to go back in
there, but nor did she want to stay out here, with
just the slow, quiet rustling of the leaves in the
breeze for company.

'Jimmy?' she called again, a little louder this
time, but with exactly the same effect.

She walked up to the hole in the outbuilding
where the door had once been, and slowly poked
her head inside. The holdall containing the money
was gone. Aside from that, everything was just
like it was before. The smell of turps, the inner
door hanging off its hinges . . .

Except, now there was the sound of dripping.

At first she thought she was imagining it, that it
was the wind playing tricks. But it wasn't. It was
definitely there.

Drip, drip, drip . . .

Coming from the room off to the right.

'Jimmy,' she hissed, 'are you there?'

Nothing.

Fear ran its fingers up Andrea's spine. She
wanted to run. But where?

Get back to the phone box. Now. They might be
calling. You could miss them!

But where's that dripping coming from?

Suddenly every drop seemed loud inside her
head, and as her fear built, so too did her curiosity.

She took three paces inside the room, turned her
head and looked into the gloom beyond the
hanging door.

'Oh Jesus,' she gasped. 'Oh no.'

Her hand shot to her mouth, covering her
scream as she took a step backwards, unable to
take her eyes off Jimmy Galante's corpse. They'd
impaled him on a rusty butcher's hook, which
had been rigged up on an exposed wooden beam
running below the ceiling join. He hung there
unsteady and sprawling, like a stringless marionette,
head slumped forward, feet just about
touching the grimy stone floor, arms dangling
uselessly at his side. The sky blue polo shirt he'd
been wearing earlier was stained black in the
semi-darkness, and the dripping she could hear
was the blood splattering steadily on to the floor
from the gaping wound in his neck where his
throat had been sliced wide open.

But there was worse. All his fingers were
missing, on both hands. They'd been crudely
hacked off, leaving nothing more than uneven,
bloodied stumps.

She couldn't believe what she was seeing.
Jimmy had been such a powerful presence, and to
see him butchered like this was almost too much
to bear.

'Oh Jimmy,' she whispered. 'What have they
done to you?'

His right arm twitched. She was sure of it. She
stared hard into the darkness, asking herself if
she'd imagined it.

But then it twitched again.

Oh God, he was still alive.

She rushed forward, half-slipping in the pool of
blood that was forming on the floor, and leant
down in front of him.

'Jimmy, it's me,' she said urgently, putting one
arm round his shoulders and using her free hand
to lift up his chin. 'We're going to get you . . .'

She never finished the sentence, the shock of
Jimmy's sightless, dead eyes staring back at her
stopping her dead in her tracks. He was gone. The
man she'd been relying on was gone. She let go of
him and staggered backwards, wondering how
this nightmare could get any worse, unable to
believe what she'd just witnessed because to
believe it was to admit to herself that the animals
she was dealing with were capable of the worst
kind of atrocity.

And as she leaned against the opposite wall,
unable to move, she barely noticed the mobile
phone in her pocket as it started to vibrate.