Target

by Simon Kernick

  'That's right. My wallet was in my jacket.'

  'Where do you live?'

  'Colindale.'

  'Do you want a lift home?'

  I nodded, thankful at least for this kindness. 'Please.'

  We drove back in silence. For a while I shut my eyes, but I didn't sleep. It was just easier than talking to DS Boyd. I knew she didn't believe me, and I could understand her scepticism, but it was an awful feeling to have witnessed a violent crime and know that a young woman's life was in danger yet have no one take you seriously.

  Traffic on the road was sparse and it was barely twenty minutes later when Tina turned into my street.

  'Whereabouts is your house?'

  'Anywhere round here's fine,' I said, not wanting her to see my crappy little pad after Jenny's flashy apartment.

  She pulled in a few doors down from Ramon's place and yawned. 'Get some sleep, Mr Fallon. And when you get up tomorrow have a good long shower. You're not smelling your best.'

  I nodded. 'Thanks for the lift, and please, don't give up on this. There's a young woman missing. If we don't do something...'

  'I'll make enquiries, I promise.'

  'Can I take your number? Please. Just in case I think of anything else.'

  She didn't look too happy but produced a business card from her handbag and handed it to me. 'I don't want you to take this as an excuse to keep calling me, Mr Fallon, because it won't help me locate Jenny. And I'm off duty in a couple of hours and I'll be sleeping. Understand?'

  'Sure, thanks.'

  Reluctantly, I got out of the car and stood in the darkness. DS Boyd pulled away with a small wave and her car quickly disappeared down the street, leaving me alone.

  The night was dark and cool, and for a few minutes I stayed where I was. I thought about going to Ramon's place and asking if I could stay there but there were no lights on in his flat and I really didn't want to have to recount what had happened to anyone else and endure their sceptical stares. So I slowly headed down the street.

  Home for me was a rented one-bed ground-floor flat in one of the 1950s terraced houses that lined both sides of the road. I'd been there over a year but had never really got used to it. It was small and characterless, and I'd spent far too many lonely hours in it.

  Approaching the front door now, I felt the tension rising in me, knowing it was possible that Jenny's kidnappers had already used the information in my wallet to find out where I lived. I looked over my shoulder but the street was silent. I checked the locks on the door but they were intact. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door and stepped inside.

  That night at least there was no one waiting for me. I switched on the light and went through to the kitchen, where I poured myself a glass of water and drank it down in one. For the first time that night I noticed how awful I smelled and it amazed me that Tina had volunteered to drive me home. Her car must have reeked, yet she hadn't made a fuss. She struck me as a good-hearted person, even though she had an impressive line in cutting looks, and a good detective as well. There was an air of quiet confidence about her which I liked, and I really hoped she'd do something with this investigation.

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It had just turned half past three. I needed my bed. But there was still something I could do before I gave up on Jenny for the night. Something that might shed some light on events.

  Even though I really didn't want to have to do it, I located the landline receiver and, taking a deep breath, dialled one of the few telephone numbers I knew by heart.

  Six

  Dom Moynihan and I had been friends since school. After university, when I was temporarily unemployed, he'd helped get me my first job in the City, at the stockbrokers where he was working; and when, years later, my marriage had finally broke up and I'd returned to London, bitter and defeated, it was him I'd gone to for support. The thing was, Dom had always been there for me when I needed him, and although I'd always appreciated everything he'd done for me, and had told him so on many occasions, I'd never actually done any major favours in return. I would have if he'd ever needed one, but the fact that I hadn't always made me feel that I owed him, even though I knew he'd never call in the debt.

  And when you owe someone, you really don't want to shit on them. Nevertheless, I picked up and put down the handset twice before finally forcing myself to make the call.

  'Rob?' he groaned into the phone. 'Is that you? What's happened? You all right?'

  'Yeah,' I said. 'Sort of.'

  'Listen, I'm in Dubai on business. I've got a breakfast meeting in ten minutes. Let me call you back.'

  'No, I need to talk to you now.'

  'What's wrong?' he asked. 'Is it anything to do with Yvonne and Chloe?'

  Dom, more than anyone, knew how hard I'd taken the break-up of my marriage and how much I missed the two of them. He sounded concerned, and I felt a rush of guilt so strong I almost burst into tears. But I forced myself to stay calm.

  'They're fine,' I replied. 'The reason I phoned you was...It's about Jenny.'

  'Jenny?'

  'Jenny Brakspear. You know, your ex-girlfriend. When was the last time you saw her?'

  'Christ, ages ago. Why?'

  'She's a normal girl, right? She doesn't have any secrets or anything, does she?'

  'Of course she's normal. Why are you asking me all this?'

  I took a deep breath. 'She was kidnapped tonight. About three hours ago.'

  'What? How do you know?'

  'I was there.'

  'Where?'

  I paused before answering. 'At her apartment.'

  He asked me what I'd been doing there, and then listened while I gave him a brief explanation.

  'I'm really sorry, Dom. I didn't mean to do it. It just happened, you know? And when she told me that you were still trying to get back with her, that was it. I said I wasn't interested.' This was bullshit of course, but sometimes a lie causes far less harm than the truth.

  There was a long silence on the other end of the phone and I waited, wondering if this meant the end of our friendship.

  'Did she honestly tell you I was trying to get back with her?' he asked eventually.

  'That's right, and when she said it, I told her—'

  'Are you sure?'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Are you sure that she actually said it?'

  'Of course I'm sure. It was only a few hours ago.'

  'That's weird.'

  'Why?'

  'Because,' he replied, sounding strangely distant, 'I haven't spoken to her in at least six months.'

  Seven

  Unlike everyone else I'd spoken to that night, Dom didn't question my version of events, and he sounded genuinely worried about Jenny. But then, like me, he knew her personally, and I was beginning to realize what a difference that made.

  He wasn't back from Dubai until Wednesday morning but said he'd do anything he could to help before then. Unfortunately, he didn't even have her mobile number any more, so I wasn't sure what he'd be able to manage from three thousand miles away. In the meantime, he told me not to give up pressing the police for action, and we agreed to talk the next day when I'd update him on where we were with things.

  No mention was made of where all this left our friendship, but I knew that one way or another it was going to be affected. However, for the moment, it was going to be put aside while we tried to find out what the hell had happened to Jenny.

  'I can't understand it, mate,' Dom said before he rang off. 'She's just a normal girl,' he added, using my exact description of her. 'Just like anyone else.'

  Just a normal girl.

  But she wasn't, was she? Jenny Brakspear was a liar. And if she'd lied about something like that, then what else had she lied about? It could have been the sort of white lie I'd just told Dom, but the thing was, I couldn't think of an innocent or beneficial reason for her telling me that he was trying to get back with her when he wasn't. Given the events of that night, something about it seemed suspici
ous, and I wondered what it was that Jenny had got herself involved in.

  As I finally got into bed and pulled the covers over me, I was determined more than ever to find out.

  Eight

  DS Tina Boyd leaned back in her seat and yawned as she surveyed the morgue-like emptiness of the CID office – a drab, impersonal place littered with cheap furniture that always had that just-been-abandoned-in-an-awful-hurry look – and wondered what had happened to her career. Five years ago she'd been on the fast track to success – one of the new breed of female graduates who were destined for senior positions within the police service – the Met, if not the world, at her feet, yet here she was, stuck in the office alone at four a.m., desperate for a cigarette she wasn't allowed to smoke and a drink she wasn't allowed to drink. And with no one to talk this new case through with, because the other shift guy, DC Hunsdon, had done the sensible thing and phoned in sick with one of his all-too-regular bouts of 'the flu'.

  Tina wasn't sure what to make of Rob Fallon's story. On the one hand it was truly outlandish, with no evidence at all to back it up. Yet her instincts were telling her that something wasn't right. First and foremost, he was acting too much like a man telling the truth. It was, of course, possible that he'd had some kind of episode and as a consequence did genuinely believe what he was saying, but Tina had come across plenty of mentally ill people in her ten years in law enforcement, and even though Fallon had smelled pretty appalling, which was sometimes a sign of mental illness, he just didn't fit the bill. He'd been lucid and detailed in his account, had managed to give a plausible explanation for his unfortunate odour, and his details matched the layout of Miss Brakspear's building.

  Even so, Tina might still have left it at that if there hadn't been a second reason for doubt. There are four million CCTV cameras in the UK – the biggest number per capita in the world – and at any time something like ten per cent are out of action due to technical faults; but in modern apartment complexes like Miss Brakspear's, where the cameras are new and state-of-the-art, that figure is almost certainly going to be less – five per cent at most. So it jarred with her that the one covering the back of the building had been out of use on the night a serious crime was reported.

  Resisting the urge to sneak a cigarette in the toilet, she looked up Jenny Brakspear's name on the PNC.

  If anyone had snatched her it was likely to be drugs-related. Tina was no estate agent but, even in the housing market's current parlous state, Jenny's apartment was going to be worth at least three hundred thousand pounds, which was a lot more than a girl who worked in a travel agent's could afford.

  But it soon transpired that Jenny Brakspear didn't have a criminal record, and when Tina checked her address on the Land Registry, she saw that the apartment was owned by a Mr Roy Brakspear, who was probably her father. It wasn't uncommon for parents with a bit of money to buy properties for their grown-up children to live in, but it also represented a problem for Tina, because it took away an obvious motive.

  It didn't take her long to get an address and telephone number for Roy Brakspear. He lived in a village just outside Cambridge. It was still the middle of the night, but she knew that if something had happened to Jenny then every minute wasted in the search for her could prove fatal.

  He answered on the fifth ring, his voice sounding groggy. 'Hello?'

  'Mr Roy Brakspear?'

  'Yes.'

  'This is DS Tina Boyd from Islington CID. I'm sorry to bother you at this time in the morning.'

  'What do you want?' he asked, sounding nervous now.

  'Are you related to a Miss Jenny Louise Brakspear of 9C Wolverton Villas in London?'

  'She's my daughter. Why?'

  'I don't want to unduly alarm you, sir, but we've had a report that she was abducted from her apartment in the early hours of this morning.'

  'She can't have been.'

  Tina was taken aback by the firmness of his response. 'Why not?'

  'Because she phoned me from Gatwick airport at eleven o'clock last night. She was just about to board a plane to go on holiday. I could hear the noise in the background so she was definitely at the airport. Who was it who reported this?'

  'A friend of hers,' Tina answered, aware of the doubt in her own voice.

  'Well it sounds to me like her friend was playing some sort of joke. Jenny's been talking about this holiday for weeks.'

  'Do you have a mobile number I can get her on? So I can speak to her just to satisfy myself that everything's all right?'

  He came back to the phone a few seconds later. Tina wrote down the number and thanked him. 'I'm really sorry to have bothered you, sir,' she added. 'The person who made the abduction claim wasn't the most reliable source. As it happens, the doorman of her building said she was off on holiday to Spain, but unfortunately we still have to follow up every report otherwise we wouldn't be doing our job. I hope I haven't caused you too much distress.'

  Brakspear said that he understood and that she hadn't, and Tina ended the call.

  She immediately rang the number he'd given her for Jenny but an automated voice told her that the phone was currently switched off and that she should try again later. Somehow, she'd known that might happen.

  According to everyone she'd talked to bar Rob Fallon, Jenny Brakspear wasn't missing, she was on holiday. Except it seemed she was holidaying in different places. The doorman, John Gentleman, had said it was Barbados, but when Tina had suggested to Jenny's father that he'd said Spain, Roy Brakspear hadn't contradicted her.

  It could have been an innocent oversight, of course. After all, the poor guy had been half asleep. But taken along with everything else, her uneasy feeling remained, bolstered by the fact that Jenny's father had been so adamant that his daughter couldn't have been abducted. Tina wasn't a parent, but she was pretty damn sure that if a police officer had rung her in the middle of the night to give her the same news she wouldn't have been anything like as confident as him, and would have demanded further investigation.

  But he hadn't.

  And Jenny wasn't answering her phone.

  Tina knew her boss, DCI Knox, wouldn't allow her to put too much time into this. They had way too much on at the moment, and without anything concrete to back up her case it was inevitably going to end up on the backburner. She'd keep trying Jenny's number, and would call her work too, when she got the chance, to see if they could verify the story. But right now that was the best she could do.

  She yawned again and rubbed her eyes. Only another hour and a half of the shift before she finished and it became someone else's problem. Just enough time to file a report.

  But first, there were a couple of things she needed to do.

  Reaching into the bottom drawer of her desk, she pulled a stainless-steel hipflask from her make-up bag and slipped it into her jeans pocket, resisting the urge to take a slug then and there. Then, popping an unlit cigarette into her mouth, and ignoring the guilty voice in her head that told her she couldn't keep on like this, she got up from her desk and headed to the toilet.

  Monday

  Nine

  I slept badly, and I slept late, not waking up for the final time until gone eleven o'clock. Straight away I recalled the previous night's events, but this time they felt like a bad, strangely distant dream. Bright sunlight filtered in through the curtains, and outside I could hear the sound of traffic. I lay staring at the ceiling for several minutes, relieved at the normality of the scene but still unable to extinguish the memory of the man trying to cut my throat in the underground car park, and the nagging question of what had happened to the girl I'd been planning to make love to only minutes before that.

  I had a lunch meeting with my literary agent Murray scheduled for one p.m.: we were going to discuss the next ten chapters of my gangster masterpiece. But I didn't think I could take it today. I knew Murray was pleased with what I'd done because he'd already told me so, and normally I'd have jumped at the chance to leave the PC and the book behind and enjoy
a long, boozy lunch, but there was no way I'd be able to concentrate on it today.

  As I showered, all I could think about was Jenny Brakspear. Before the previous night I'd met her maybe ten, fifteen times socially. When she'd started going out with Dom I was already staying at his place, and I remember a couple of evenings when the three of us had lounged around drinking beers and watching DVDs. They were fun nights, reminding me a little of long-ago student days, and even though I felt a little like the odd one out, the two of them had always made me feel welcome. Jenny had talked to me about my relationship with Yvonne, and had tried to get me to think positively. That she partially succeeded was no mean feat.

  Even after I'd moved out the three of us had met up for occasional drinks, and when I got my first post-wife girlfriend, Carly, the first people we invited round for dinner were Dom and Jenny.

  I suppose it was true that I'd never really known her that well – not long after that dinner party she and Dom had split up and we'd fallen out of touch – but I'd spent enough time with her to be convinced that she was a level-headed girl with her heart in the right place. So why had she lied to me about Dom? And more importantly, why had she been kidnapped by two men who'd broken into her apartment without leaving a single sign of forced entry? I was sure now that the motive wasn't sexual. There'd been no lust in the eyes of either of the two men who'd taken her. Just a cold professionalism. If anything, they'd seemed totally uninterested in her as a person, if the way she'd been chucked into the trolley was anything to go by. There had to be another reason, and I couldn't stop thinking about what it might be.

  I called Murray and postponed our lunch, feigning flu. He was disappointed – I think he was looking forward to a few drinks to start the working week – but said to call him as soon as I felt better and he'd absolutely make sure he found time in his diary. 'I know we're on to something extraordinary with this book, Robert,' he announced in that dramatic, vaguely camp manner of his. 'Maxwell's a horrible character. He'll sell millions. And the title, Enforcer. I absolutely love it.' To be honest, I thought the title was crap, but the whole thing now seemed hugely irrelevant.