Deadline

by Simon Kernick

  'And what exactly is your business, Miss Bailey?' Grindy had growled menacingly.

  'Read the card. Massage, of course.'

  And so it had gone on, with Grindy's attempts at intimidation failing dismally.

  'We can get a warrant to search this place,' he'd said at last.

  'I'm sure you can,' she'd answered with just the hint of a smirk. 'You're a policeman.'

  'In fact we've got it here,' he'd added, producing it from his raincoat pocket with a flourish, as if this would throw her off-balance.

  It didn't. She remained casually impassive, even giving Bolt a cheeky wink.

  Bolt knew she was trying to embarrass him, and didn't rise to the bait.

  'Have you got something in your eye, Miss Bailey?' he'd asked her coolly.

  'Just a twinkle,' came her answer, and he'd always remembered that. Cool and witty. It made Bolt wonder what she was doing in such a dump when there was a whole world out there she could have conquered.

  They'd searched the house from top to bottom, supposedly looking for the same kind of drugs that had killed Sir Marcus, and Bolt had had to go through her underwear drawer while she watched.

  'I don't enjoy doing this, you know,' he'd told her as he rummaged through the various lacy little numbers.

  'Course you don't,' she'd said with a chuckle. 'But ask yourself this: how many other blokes get into a pretty girl's knickers as part of their job?'

  They'd bantered on and off throughout the search. Andrea was a terrible flirt but there was something hugely engaging about the way nothing seemed to faze her, and Bolt was pleased she hadn't taken offence to them turning her house upside down.

  There hadn't been any drugs – there hadn't been anything illegal anywhere – and Grindy was in a horrendous mood when they left. 'Cheeky bitch,' he'd complained bitterly. 'You want to keep away from women like her, Mike. They're trouble. Take it from me. I know.'

  Grindy had never struck Bolt as an expert on women, but in this case his boss was right. Andrea, however, had definitely got under his skin, and he'd thought about her often afterwards.

  It was three years before he saw her again. He was still living in Holborn but had joined the Flying Squad, and was walking down the Strand one afternoon when he heard a woman's voice call out, 'Mr Bolt, are you ignoring me?' He'd turned round to see a woman with jet black hair, a good suntan and big sunglasses coming out of a designer clothes shop. She was dressed in a white sleeveless top, figure-hugging jeans and high heeled black court shoes, and was carrying several bags. There was something familiar about her, the voice especially.

  She smiled. 'Plaistow, 1989. My knickers drawer.' Then she removed the sunglasses and it came back to him in an instant.

  'Andrea Bailey?'

  She shook her head, coming forward. 'No, Andrea Bailey's dead. Meet Andrea Devern.' She put out a manicured hand, and they shook. 'I'm a married woman now,' she added, just in case he hadn't noticed the wedding band and diamond encrusted engagement ring.

  'Congratulations. You've dyed your hair.'

  She shrugged. 'I fancied a change.'

  'It's good to see you again,' he told her, and it was. 'You look well.'

  'Thanks. You don't look so bad yourself. Still a copper?'

  He nodded. 'Yeah, but not at Holborn any more. I'm in the Flying Squad these days.'

  She raised her eyebrows. 'The Sweeney? Very glamorous. So' – she looked around – 'you fancy buying me a drink, or are you too busy?'

  Bolt was single at the time. It was a Saturday afternoon and he'd just been wondering about doing a bit of shopping without any real plans.

  'Sure,' he answered, 'why not?'

  So they'd found a wine bar round the corner, got themselves a nice quiet table and proceeded to demolish a bottle of Chablis.

  It was one of those occasions when everything just clicked. They'd only met that one time years earlier, and hardly under ideal circumstances, but even so they talked like old friends. Andrea told him about her upbringing in a council flat, the middle of three daughters brought up by a single mother; how she'd left school at a young age with no qualifications and got herself a job in a local corner shop which she really enjoyed, before a friend turned her on to drugs. 'I got in far too deep, far too fast. Problem was, with my wages, I couldn't pay for them, so my mate told me a great way of earning big money.' She rolled her eyes. 'I was young, and I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn't want to work for some pimp, though, so I set up on my own, got business cards printed, and worked through recommendations. I didn't enjoy it, but . . .' She shrugged. 'It got me money. My idea was to kick the coke, raise a couple of grand and put myself through college. I wanted to do a business course.'

  'But you never made it?'

  'Oh, I made it all right,' she told him with a smile. 'I kicked the gear, but I took a quicker route to the real money and married it.'

  'Always a good move,' he said.

  'He's a nice guy,' she told him, her expression suddenly serious. 'He looks after me.'

  But on that day at least, Andrea hadn't been in a hurry to get back to him, and with one bottle consumed she'd asked Bolt if he fancied sharing another. He knew it wasn't right to fool around with married women, but he was twenty-four, and the sad truth of the matter was that he was never going to say no.

  And so the afternoon drifted lazily on, the conversation veering here and there, covering both their lives. Andrea now lived in Cobham with her husband, a businessman twenty-five years her senior who was, she claimed, one of the nicest guys she'd ever met. 'Present company excepted, of course.'

  'Of course,' said Bolt with a smile.

  Eventually they got round to how they'd originally met, and with the case of Sir Marcus Dallarda now firmly set in the past, Andrea admitted that she'd been with him that night. 'I'd never met him before but a girl I knew in the business had and she said he was a decent bloke and a good payer, so I went along with her. I never normally did threesomes – I'm not that kind of girl, believe it or not.'

  Bolt wasn't sure that he did believe it, but as a trained detective he preferred to listen rather than pass immediate judgement.

  'Well,' she continued, 'to cut a long story short, there we were, doing the business, and he conked out. Just like that. Grabbed his chest and keeled over.' Her eyes widened as she recalled the events, and although she was clearly trying to stop herself, a small smile appeared. 'It was comical really, the way it happened. Like something off the TV. I know I shouldn't say that, but it just didn't seem real.

  'Anyway, we didn't know what to do. My friend was panicking. She thought we might get the blame for it, especially as he was a bit of a celebrity as well. So I said, let's just get the hell out of here. And that's what we did. But obviously we didn't want him to get found by the cleaner the next day, so we phoned the police and told them. I didn't want to bullshit you when you came round to interview me, but I didn't actually think I was doing anything wrong, you know.' She paused, fixing him with an expression of mild amusement, her eyes twinkling. 'So, what do you think of me now?'

  Bolt may have been mildly drunk, but what he thought was that Andrea was a liar. A funny, engaging, attractive and intelligent one, with beautiful twinkling eyes, and loyal too, because she'd never given up her friend, even when he and Grindy had turned her house upside down, but a liar nonetheless, and one who wasn't much good at remembering the details of the past either. Otherwise she would have recalled that the police had originally been led to her by the fact that it was her business card in Sir Marcus's wallet, and not her friend's, meaning that Sir Marcus had almost certainly known her before that night. It seemed a strange lie to tell, given that she'd already admitted that she'd been a prostitute. Why not simply admit that she was the one who'd approached her friend about the threesome, not the other way round?

  Not that Bolt said any of this, of course. Instead, he put down his glass and returned her gaze.

  'I think,' he said quietly, 'that if
I stay here much longer I'll do something I regret.'

  'Here's to regrets,' she said, and lifted her glass.

  Don't get involved, he told himself. You will regret it.

  'You're a married woman, Andrea,' he said, but it sounded lame, even to his own ears.

  She sat back in her seat with a wide smile on her face. She was a little drunk too, but her eyes remained sharp and focused. 'Ah, I forgot, I'm talking to a policeman.' She raised her hands in mock surrender. 'All right, you've convinced me. I shouldn't even think about making love to you.'

  But it was clear that neither of them was thinking about anything else. Andrea was in London on a weekend shopping trip, and she was staying at a hotel in Bloomsbury on her own. So once they'd finished their second bottle of Chablis Bolt had walked her back. She'd invited him in. This time he hadn't even bothered to resist, and they'd gone to her room and made love before ordering room service, making love again, and finally sinking into the slumber of the drunk and the contented.

  The next morning they'd made love a final time before Andrea told him she had to get back to Surrey. 'I'm really glad we met up,' she'd whispered, touching his cheek and leaning over to kiss him on the lips before getting off the bed and walking naked into the bathroom to shower.

  Bolt remembered what an effect she'd had on him: a potent mixture of lust, satisfaction, jealousy and anger. The anger was the worst part, because he wasn't used to getting so worked up over a woman. He'd had a great time with her, a fantastic time, but he couldn't get over the feeling that he'd been used and was now being discarded, which hurt his young man's pride. Even in those days he'd known that the best way to woo a woman was to play it cool, to pretend you didn't care that much, but it hadn't worked and he'd still left his card on top of her handbag, hating himself for it, before walking out and shutting the door behind him.

  And here he was fifteen years later, and still she was having an effect on him. The shock of seeing her again that morning was wearing off as the operation to find Emma cranked rapidly into gear and the team focused on the hunt for the kidnapper, but Andrea still possessed that 'something' Bolt had always found so irresistible, even in her current state. He wanted to help her. He told himself it was because she and her daughter were both crime victims, but he knew it was more than that. A part of him still wanted to impress her, to prove that he was the tough guy who could rescue a damsel in distress.

  As he walked down the corridor to his boss's office for a strategy meeting, he knew that, just like last time, Andrea's presence in his life spelled trouble.

  Twelve

  'What do you mean she wants to go home?' SG2 Barry Freud, the SOCA equivalent of a DCS, sat behind the huge slab of glass he called a desk, looking incredulous. 'That's not how we do things. There are procedures to follow in cases like this.'

  Bolt, who was sitting on the other side of the slab, told him she was insistent. 'She says that otherwise she's not going to cooperate.'

  'What choice does she have? She's got to cooperate if she wants her daughter back. It'll be far too much hassle allowing her to go home. I can tell you that for free, old mate. Far too much hassle.'

  Big Barry Freud called every man he knew 'old mate'. It was supposed to be a term of endearment, but it never came across like that. As bosses went, Bolt scored Barry as decent enough. A big bluff Yorkshireman with a bald, egg-shaped head and a pair of peculiarly small ears, he made a hearty effort to come across as one of the lads, but never quite managed to make it look natural. Like a lot of senior officers, both in SOCA and the police services beyond, he always had one eye on the next rung of the ladder and did what he thought would go down well with his own bosses. He also had an inflated idea of his own importance. Word, probably put about by Barry himself, had it that he was a distant relation to the great psychoanalyst with the same last name, which gave him a natural insight into the minds of the people he was paid to catch. But Bolt couldn't see it himself. If you were part of such a distinguished family tree, you really weren't going to name your first-born son Barry. However, he was a decent enough organizer and he usually left Bolt alone to do his job, for which he was thankful.

  That wasn't going to be the case today, though. Today, it was all hands on deck, and Big Barry was looking excited. He was the kind who tended to look at a crisis as a potential career opportunity.

  'Can't you persuade her to see sense? The logistics of getting her home'll be a nightmare.'

  'I've tried. I think it's going to be easier just to live with it.'

  'That's your opinion, is it?'

  Bolt nodded.

  'She's still under suspicion of murder.'

  'And we'll still be able to keep an eye on her there. I know it's unusual, but if we play it right, it won't compromise the op.'

  Barry sighed. 'Well, if she absolutely insists, I suppose we can do it. I'm going to trust your judgement on this one, old mate. But make sure she knows that it means using resources that could be used helping to locate her daughter.'

  'I will.'

  Barry lifted a huge mug of coffee to his lips and took a loud slurp.

  'What do you think of her story?' he asked.

  Bolt hadn't mentioned the fact he knew Andrea because to do so would almost certainly mean him being removed from the case, but he answered honestly. 'I think it's true. You don't make something like that up. We know her daughter kept her dental appointment on Tuesday afternoon at a quarter to five, but that's the last confirmed sighting.'

  'Have they got CCTV at the dentist's?'

  'They have. It covers the car park and the front entrance, but it works on a loop and gets wiped every forty-eight hours, so it's already gone.'

  Barry looked annoyed. 'Stupid woman. She should have come to us earlier. We could have had the daughter back by now if we'd been involved from the start. We need to know where she was snatched from, Mike. If it was in a public place, someone might have seen it.'

  'I've got Mo and his people on that,' said Bolt, 'but this is the interesting thing. So far there's been not a single reported abduction anywhere in Greater London on Tuesday between four forty-five, when we know Emma was at the dentist's, and eight forty-five, when Andrea received the first phone call from the kidnappers. Also, when Andrea arrived home that night, she specifically said in both her statements that the alarm was on. If anyone had snatched Emma from the house, there's no way they would have stopped to reset the alarm.'

  'So it looks like it could be an inside job? What about the old man, Phelan? What have we got on him?'

  Bolt consulted his notebook, even though he already knew Patrick Phelan's form. 'He's got old convictions for drug dealing and receiving,' he answered, wondering why a live wire like Andrea was so often attracted to deadbeats. 'Nothing major, but he served a year behind bars in the late nineties for receiving a load of hi-fis that had been lifted in a hijack a few weeks earlier. That was his last conviction. He's been straight since then. For what it's worth, Andrea doesn't think he was involved.'

  Barry grunted. 'She wouldn't, would she? It wouldn't say much for her judgement if her old man was capable of kidnapping his stepdaughter and holding her to ransom. The fact is, he's missing. Which means he's either dead, or he's one of the kidnappers. Fact.'

  'Phelan's car's missing too,' said Bolt. 'I've got Mo's people checking the ANPR to see if we can track it that way.'

  The automatic number plate recognition system was the latest technological tool available to the police in the twenty-first-century fight against crime. It used a huge network of CCTV cameras which automatically read car number plates to log the movement of vehicles along virtually every main road in Britain. These images – some thirty-five million a day – were then sent to a vast central database housed alongside the Police National Computer at Hendon HQ where they were stored for up to two years. Not only was it possible to trace the movements of Phelan's car on the day, but also where it had been in the days and weeks leading up to the kidnap, although Bolt knew it
would take time and effort to gather this information.

  'What are Tina Boyd's people doing?' Barry asked, taking another noisy slurp of his coffee.

  'Background checks on everyone involved in this. Looking for motives. Andrea told us she had a lot of cash stored in deposit boxes, which made up most of the half million she paid out to the kidnapper. I think someone knew she had those deposits, and we need to find out who.'

  Barry nodded. 'If it is personal, then it's someone who really hates her, isn't it? To kidnap her only child, take the half million, and then renege on the deal. You've got to be a truly nasty piece of work to do that.'

  'Well, these people are certainly nasty, and they took out Jimmy Galante, so they know what they're doing.'

  'You knew him?'

  'I knew the name from my days in the Flying Squad. He had a reputation as a hard bastard. We had him down as a suspect in a couple of armed robberies but we never pinned anything on him, and he ended up running a bar in Spain, like Andrea said.'

  'But why are they asking for more money? That's what I can't understand. They've got what they wanted. Why not just release the girl and have done with it?'

  Bolt shrugged. 'Because they're greedy, I suppose. Maybe they figure that if it only took Andrea forty-eight hours to come up with half a million, then maybe they were selling themselves short. I don't suppose the fact that she brought someone along to the ransom drop made any difference. I think that was just an excuse for them.'

  'So they were always going to keep squeezing . . .' Barry shook his head slowly. 'We're going to have to catch these bastards, Mike.'

  'All I'd say, sir, is, don't expect miracles. We haven't got a lot of time until the next deadline.' He looked at his watch and saw that it had just turned ten a.m. 'It's only about thirty-six hours until she's meant to come up with the next tranche of money.'

  'All right, point taken.' Barry put down his mug. 'So, what are we going to do about this one, old mate? Negotiate, or take them out?'