Deadline (6 page)

Andrea ran outside into the darkness, desperate
to put some distance between her and Jimmy as
the mobile continued to vibrate. This wasn't a
message. It was a call.

She pulled it from her pocket and said 'Hello?'
breathlessly into the mouthpiece.

'Hello, Andrea.' It was the artificial voice of the
kidnapper, his tone neutral.

'You've got the money. Now where's my
daughter?'

'She's safe.'

'But where is she? I've given you the money,
every penny of it. I've kept my side of the
bargain—'

'But you haven't though, Andrea, have you? I
told you to come alone, didn't I?' He paused,
taking his time. 'And you didn't. You decided it
would be better to bring someone along to spy on
us. That was very stupid. I told you we were
watching your every move.'

Andrea felt her heart lurch. 'Please, I'm so sorry.
I just wasn't sure what to do. You've got your
money. Please let my daughter go.'

'It's going to cost you.'

'For Christ's sake, I've got no more money.
You've had everything.'

'There's always more.'

'Listen, please—'

'No, you listen, and you listen very carefully.
You fucked up. You didn't follow the simple
instructions you were given. So now it's going to
cost you another half a million if you want to see
your daughter alive again.'

'But I told you, I haven't got that sort of money.'

'You've got another forty-eight hours to find it.
That's the deadline. Use the time wisely. And
remember, do not tell anyone this time. No one at
all. Or Emma dies.'

'Let me speak to my daughter. You've got to let
me speak to her.'

'You'll speak to her again, but when we're
ready. Not now.'

The line went dead while Andrea was still
talking desperately into the mouthpiece, the
knowledge that she had indeed totally screwed
up ringing round her head. It was all Jimmy's
fault. Even after all these years he still had the
capacity to cause her pain. But this was pain like
she'd never felt before.

Hold together, Andrea. You owe it to Emma. Hold
together.

But God it was hard. It was so damn hard. Tears
stung her eyes and she wiped them away angrily
as she ran over to the car and jumped inside,
switching on the engine. She lit a cigarette and
took urgent drags, then drove down to the end of
the track and turned round.

As she got back on the main road and drove back
in the direction of London, she stared wide-eyed
out of the windscreen, silently repeating the mantra
over again:
Stay strong, stay strong, stay strong
. She
knew she couldn't collapse under the pressure,
because if she did she would never get up again,
and right now she couldn't afford that, not while
Emma remained in the clutches of those animals.

She thought about them now, the people she
was up against. Jimmy Galante was no pushover.
He was a hard man, a street fighter with the kind
of low cunning that only the truest criminals
possess, and yet he'd been discovered by the man
or men he was supposed to be watching, and
butchered like a dog. These people were ruthless.
And worse, they knew exactly what they were
doing. She couldn't fight them alone, she knew
that. Yet involving others had already backfired.
Which left what?

There was, of course, only one alternative. The
police. At least they might know what to do. It
was a huge risk, given how brutally efficient
Emma's kidnappers were. If they found out that
the police were involved, they might panic and
kill her, but then they might well kill her anyway,
especially if Andrea couldn't raise the new money
fast enough. Once again she was being forced into
a corner, knowing that the wrong move would
have terrifying ramifications.

So intensely was she concentrating that she
didn't notice that her car was veering into the
centre of the road until she saw headlights
rushing towards her and heard the sound of the
other car's horn. She swung the wheel hard left
and slammed on the brakes, going into a wild skid
that whirled the car round a hundred and eighty
degrees in a screech of tyres before she finally
came to a halt, facing the wrong way down the
empty road.

Except it wasn't empty. The car that had been
coming towards her had now stopped about
thirty yards ahead. As she watched, her hands
gripping the steering wheel as if it was the edge of
a cliff she was hanging from, it did a three-point
turn and started driving back towards her, the
lights on its roof flashing a bright blue against the
night sky.

Andrea cursed. Of all the bad luck, she had to
run into probably the only police patrol car in a
ten-mile radius.

Act natural. For Christ's sake, act natural.

She glanced briefly in the rear-view mirror and
was shocked by the face that stared back at her.

Her expression was tight and haunted, making
her look a good five years older than she was, her
hair a tangled mess.

Stay calm. Act natural.

The police car came to a halt five feet in front of
her bumper, and its two occupants slowly clambered
out of each side, donning their caps.

She wound down her window as the driver
stopped beside it and leaned down. He was
middle-aged, heavy-set but running to fat, with a
thick moustache and a gruff expression that
suggested whatever she said wasn't going to be
enough to stop her getting booked for careless
driving. But she had to try.

'I'm sorry, officer,' she announced before he had
a chance to speak. 'I think I must just have lost
concentration. I've had a very busy day at work.'

'I'm afraid that's not an excuse, madam,' he told
her sternly. 'You really shouldn't be driving if
you're tired.'

Typical copper
, she thought.
Always acting holier
than thou. I bet he's driven knackered plenty of times
. But
she knew she couldn't say anything to antagonize
him. Instead, she apologized for a second time.

'Where have you been this evening?' he asked,
his expression unchanged.

Belatedly, she realized her hands were still gripping
the steering wheel. She removed them, saw
that they were shaking, put them in her lap.

'Work,' she answered.

'Where do you work?'

Her mind went blank. Completely. For a
moment, she couldn't even remember where she
was. 'Erm . . .' Her hesitation sounded ridiculous,
she knew it. But she just couldn't think. 'Er . . .'

'Would you mind stepping out of the car,
madam?' he asked, reaching in with a gloved
hand and removing her keys from the ignition. 'I
have to tell you that I've got reason to believe
you've been drinking, so we're going to ask you to
take a breath test. Do you understand?'

She nodded weakly. 'Sure.'

Stay calm, Andrea, stay calm. You haven't been
drinking. One shot of brandy two hours ago, nowhere
near enough to make you over the limit. The worst that
can happen is they book you for dangerous driving.
They'll issue you with a ticket, let you go, and you can
go home and try to think of a way of finding another
half a million pounds in cash by Saturday to save your
fourteen-year-old daughter's life.

She stepped out of the car, unsteady on her feet
as all the knocks of the past forty-eight hours rose
up and battered her like winter waves on a sea
wall. She was finally crumbling, and she knew it.

'Are you all right, madam?' It was the driver's
colleague. He was a taller, younger guy, with the
air of the college graduate about him, and he was
holding a breathalyser under his arm.

'Yeah, thanks. I'm fine.' She tried to smile but
didn't quite make it.

The young cop was staring at her chest. 'What's
that?'

'What's what?'

She looked down, saw what he was staring at.

There was a thick patch of blood on her jacket
where she'd grabbed hold of Jimmy. Jesus, how
could she have missed that? There were further
flecks of it lower down, as well as a single thumbsized
spot on her T-shirt, which suddenly seemed
to stick out a mile in the flashing lights.

The older cop stepped forward, staring too.

'Have you been hurt?' he asked.

She turned round quickly. 'No, I'm fine.
Honestly.'

'This is blood,' he said. 'You'd better take your
jacket off. You might have cut yourself.'

'I haven't.'

The two cops were watching her closely. The
older one seemed to come to a decision.

'Take your jacket off, madam.'

She felt like asking why, but knew she was
going to have to cooperate eventually, so she
slipped it off and gave it to the older cop, who
lifted it to his nose and sniffed it suspiciously.

'This is definitely blood,' he said.

Andrea stood there, her heart pounding. Now
that they could see she wasn't hurt, one of them
was going to ask the obvious question. It was the
younger one who did.

'Care to explain how it got on your shirt and
jacket, madam?'

Andrea took a deep breath. The decision about
what her next move would be had finally been
made for her.

'Yes,' she said, looking at them both in turn. 'I
think I'd better.'

When SG3 Mike Bolt of SOCA, the Serious and
Organized Crime Agency, was woken at just after
5.30 a.m. on a Friday morning in mid-September
by a call from his boss telling him to get down to
their offices fast, he had no idea that one of the
hardest days of his life had just begun.

His team had just come off a job tracking a gang
of professional money-launderers who were now
safely banged up awaiting trial, and he'd booked
the day off as holiday. He had big plans for the
coming weekend, his first off in close to a month,
which involved driving down to Cornwall to
spend a few relaxing days with a twenty-eight year-old
artist from St Ives with raven hair and a
dirty laugh. He'd been introduced to Jenny
Byfleet a couple of months earlier when she'd
been up in London, and he was very keen to get to
know her better. Jenny was the kind of girl a man
could really fall for, and Bolt felt that he deserved
a bit of romance in his life, even the long-distance
kind. Things had been a bit sparse in that department
for some time now.

But the romantic weekend was going to have to
wait because this was an emergency: an ongoing
kidnap situation, according to the boss.

Most of the public don't know it, but kidnapping
is a comparatively common crime. On
average, there's one every day in London alone,
but the vast majority of these are drugs-related,
involving squabbles over money between criminal
gangs, particularly those from ethnic
minorities. This case was totally different, and far,
far rarer. A fourteen-year-old middle-class white
girl abducted for ransom was a frightening development,
and a senior cop's worst nightmare.
Although none of the top brass would ever admit
it, Bolt knew that the police service had no real
problem tolerating kidnappings involving a few
thugs snatching and torturing a crack addict over
an unpaid couple of hundred quid, because
frankly the press, and therefore the public,
weren't really that interested. But if the media got
hold of something like this, they'd have a field
day. It had all the elements of a great story, particularly
now that the kidnapper or kidnappers had
murdered a friend of the victim's mother during
an attempted ransom drop the previous evening.
The stakes, then, were extremely high, and the
pressure for a successful result was going to be
enormous.

And Mike Bolt was the one who was about to
be chucked headfirst into the eye of the storm.

The details he'd been given were still sketchy.
The victim's mother had been stopped at just
before eleven o'clock the previous night, having
been spotted driving erratically by a police traffic
vehicle containing two officers from Hertfordshire
Constabulary. As she'd got out of her car, she was
seen to have bloodstains on her clothing, and
when questioned about this, the woman, who'd
been in a distressed state, had told them about the
kidnapping and the subsequent murder of her
friend.

The woman had refused to return to the spot
where her friend's body was, claiming that the
kidnappers might still be there, but a second
patrol car had eventually been dispatched, only to
discover that the body had been set on fire and
was already badly burned. There was no sign of
anyone else in the vicinity and so, despite her
protestations of innocence, the woman had been
arrested on suspicion of murder and transferred
to Welwyn Garden City police station where she'd
given a lengthy statement explaining what had
happened to her over the previous two days.

It was a difficult and highly unusual situation
for Hertfordshire police. On the one hand they
had an obvious murder suspect in custody, but
one who nevertheless remained insistent that her
daughter had been kidnapped, and was acting
like someone telling the truth. In the end they'd
decided to escalate the inquiry, and because she'd
been picked up outside London's city limits, the
senior investigating officer on the case had
approached SOCA rather than the Met's overstretched
Kidnap Unit, hence the call to Bolt.

It had just turned seven a.m. when he arrived at
the office where his team was based. The
Glasshouse, as it was known, was a 1960s ten-storey
office block with windows that were tinted
with the grime of age rather than lavishness of
design, set on the corner of a lacklustre shopping
street a few hundred metres south of the river in
Vauxhall. It was a fine sunny morning, the fifth
such day in a warm spell that had followed one of
the wettest, most disappointing summers on
record – which for England was really saying
something – and if it hadn't been for the fact that
he was missing out on seeing Jenny, Bolt would
have been in a good mood. He liked cases he
could get his teeth into, and they didn't come
much more meaty than this. More and more these
days, his work took him and his team into long drawn-out
inquiries where the slow and usually
laborious process of evidence-gathering took
weeks, sometimes months, to complete. The
money-laundering job they'd just finished was a
case in point, having started right back in early
June; and he'd once been part of a people smuggling
investigation that had lasted the best
part of a year. During a career that had spanned
two decades, Bolt had learned the art of patience,
but even so, the idea of taking charge of a case
whose resolution could be measured in hours was
one he was never going to pass up.

Bolt's team was based in an open-plan office on
the fourth floor of the Glasshouse, and when he
arrived about half of its dozen members were
already there, drinking coffee and generally
looking pretty groggy. They'd all been rousted
from their beds earlier than they'd been expecting,
and Bolt knew he wasn't the only one whose day
off had been interrupted before it had even got
going. The team had had a major drink-up two
nights earlier in the West End to celebrate the
arrests of the money-launderers, and it looked like
one or two of his people had continued the celebration
the previous night as well.

At least Mo Khan looked fairly ship-shape. Mo
was one of Bolt's team leaders and the guy he
trusted most. They'd been colleagues for close to
five years now, first in the National Crime Squad,
then at SOCA, and though, with his big round
face and friendly, twinkling eyes, he bore more
than a passing resemblance to a short, squat
cuddly bear, the appearance was deceptive. Mo
Khan was tough, efficient and unflappable under
pressure, and these were three traits Bolt knew
were going to come in very useful today. There
was no sign yet of Tina Boyd, his other team
leader, or his overall boss, SG2 Barry Freud,
although Bolt knew he would be around somewhere
since he was the one phoning everyone up
at half past five.

He'd only just managed to say his hellos to the
team members when Mo came over and collared
him.

'Our mystery lady got here twenty minutes
ago,' he said as Bolt poured himself a cup of
strong black coffee from the percolator. 'Big Barry
wants us to start the interview straight away.
She's been up all night and he thinks that if we
leave it much longer she's going to be too
exhausted to talk.'

'Fair enough. Where is she?'

'Over in Interview Room B. Everything's set up
and we're ready to go.'

'Blimey, you're quick off the mark this
morning,' said Bolt, following him out the door
and down the corridor. 'What time did you get
in?'

'Half an hour ago. I was moving fast.'

Bolt grinned and gave him a playful punch on
the arm. 'You never move fast, Mr Khan. How did
you get here? Levitate?'

'I'm a man of many talents, boss.'

'So, have you seen her yet? This Mrs Devern?'

He nodded. 'I spoke to her briefly. She looks
absolutely shattered, but she's very keen to talk
to us.'

'I'll bet she is.'

Bolt slowed down to take a sip from his coffee,
burning his lip in the process.

'Have the Hertfordshire cops checked her story
out?'

'Parts of it. She's definitely got a fourteen-year-old
daughter, but they haven't searched her
house yet to check that she's actually missing.
They're leaving that to us, in case the place is
bugged.'

'So this whole thing could still be a load of bullshit?'

Mo shrugged. 'I talked to the cops who brought
her in. They think that if this is all an act, then
she's one hell of a good actress – but, yeah, it's
possible.' He stopped outside Interview Room B.
'Guess there's only one way to find out, isn't
there?'

Mo entered first, and as Bolt followed him in he
experienced a lurch of shock that almost knocked
him backwards. It had been a long, long time, but
even looking as drawn and exhausted as she was
now, with all the life sucked out of her features by
whatever ordeal she'd endured these past few
days, there was definitely no mistake. He knew
the woman sitting in front of him.

And at one time he'd known her far too well.