Deadline

by Simon Kernick

  'What about Emma?'

  'When you get back on to the road, turn right and keep going about half a mile and you'll come to a phone box on the left. Go inside and wait for our call. As soon as we've confirmed that all the money's there, and you haven't tried anything stupid, we'll make contact and give you instructions on where to collect your daughter.'

  'I need to speak to her.'

  'Not now. Do as you're instructed and you'll be seeing her soon enough. One other thing: turn off your mobile and don't bring it with you.'

  'OK,' she said reluctantly. She didn't like the idea of being without it.

  'Now get moving. You've got exactly forty-five minutes to get to the drop-off point. And remember, we're watching.'

  The line went dead and Andrea put the receiver down.

  'What's the plan?' asked Jimmy, looking at her closely.

  Briefly, she went through the instructions she'd been given. 'I don't think you should come,' she added when she'd finished. 'They said they were going to be watching me. If they see you, it could jeopardize things. I can't afford that.'

  'She's my daughter too,' he answered. 'I'm coming with you.'

  'What's the point, Jimmy? I'm delivering the money, that's all.'

  'Because I don't trust them. That's the point. What if they're bullshitting about letting her go?'

  'But you were the one who told me they just wanted cash. That they didn't want to hurt her.'

  'Well, maybe that is all they want, but there's still no guarantee they'll release her. They might hold out for more cash. But if you drop me off a couple of hundred yards from where you're making the drop, I'll make my own way down there and keep an eye on the place. I'll see who goes in, see if I recognize them. I might be able to get their registration number.'

  'What good'll that do?'

  'There's still a couple of coppers I know. They'll be able to trace who the car belongs to.'

  Andrea didn't like the sound of this at all.

  'But it's risky, isn't it? What happens if they see you? Then they're not going to let Emma go, are they? They might kill her.'

  Jimmy shook his head. 'They ain't going to kill her. She's worth more to them alive. And they ain't going to see me, either. I'll be quiet. And I'll be careful. I don't want anything to happen to Emma either, you know.'

  Andrea sighed, trying to think. Not following the kidnappers' instructions to the letter was a huge risk, but what if Jimmy was right? What if they weren't going to let Emma go? Surely it was better to have an insurance policy in the form of Jimmy watching the place – someone cunning enough to spot a double-cross, and hard enough, if necessary, to do something about it. But, did she even trust him? She wiped sweat from her brow, wrestling with the alternatives, knowing she had only seconds to make up her mind. Knowing that even one wrong move could end the life of her only child.

  She took several deep breaths, telling herself to keep calm, for Emma's sake.

  'What if they're out there now watching the house?' she asked. 'If they see us leaving together . . .'

  He shook his head. 'They're not watching the house. If they were, they'd already know I was here. Anyway, there won't be enough of them to do that.'

  'How do you know?' she demanded.

  'This ain't a big firm, babe. No way. There'll only be a couple of them. Any more and there'd be too much chance of a leak. Also, they'd stand out sitting in a car in a nice, quiet street like this for hours on end. They won't want to risk that. But we'll play it safe. You go out the front, and I'll come out nice and quiet behind you, and I'll stay down in the seat. It'll be dark, no one'll see.'

  His words were filled with a quiet confidence that was proving seductive.

  'What happens afterwards? Where will I pick you up from? They told me not to bring my mobile phone.'

  He reached into his pocket and retrieved a cheap Nokia handset. 'Take this,' he said. 'It's a spare one of mine.'

  'I told you, they don't want me to take one.'

  'No, babe, they don't want you to bring your mobile phone. There's a difference.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'They're just covering themselves. If you have gone to the police then one of the ways they can track your movements would be using your mobile. That's why they don't want you to have it. They probably know your number so they can phone to check whether it's switched off.' He handed her the Nokia. 'But they don't know the number of this one.'

  'OK,' she said uncertainly as he gave her the handset.

  'Put it on vibrate, OK? I've got another phone. You drop me off just before we get to the ransom drop. Then an hour after we part company, I'll text you. If it's safe for you, you call my number and we can arrange to meet.'

  She nodded, coming to a decision. 'All right, let's go.'

  Six

  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.

  Seven

  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.