Deadline

by Simon Kernick

  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.

  Eight

  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.'

  Part Two

  Nine

  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 appea
rance 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?'