29 Seconds: From the author of LIES. You will not put this thriller down until the final astonishing twist . . .

by TM Logan

  ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

  The recording was no good after all. It would just be her word against his again, with no evidence to back up her version of events. The sense of powerlessness was overwhelming. A plunging black hole that pulled her deeper and deeper. One she knew she could never escape.

  As she sat in the cold darkness of her car, staring through her half-misted windscreen at a blank brick wall, her white-knuckled hands on the steering wheel, she thought back to another conversation. A conversation with a powerful stranger. It was in this very car park, three days ago, that three men had lain in wait for her. Blank-eyed men who had most likely done things she could only guess at.

  In her head, she heard him again. She could almost smell the smoke from his cigar.

  Here is my offer. You give me one name. One person. And I will make them disappear.

  It was madness. Plain and simple. An unbelievable offer from a stranger.

  I will make them disappear.

  What would her life be like, if he was no longer in it? Would she still have that feeling of creeping dread, deep in her stomach, when she was driving to work in the morning? Of course not. Would she have a fair chance to move onwards and upwards, to have some security in her life, to provide a stable future for her children? Yes. Would the world be a better place, without Lovelock in it? Plenty of people who knew him, who really knew him, knew the answer to that question.

  She dug into her handbag, feeling in the front pocket for the small phone Volkov had given her. She hadn’t got around to throwing it away. Now she pulled it out and held it in her hand for a moment. She’d still not switched it on since she’d been given it. Staring at it for a full minute, her thumb brushed back and forth across the smooth dark cover. She flipped it open and held down the power button, some part of her brain hoping that it might be out of battery and she would not have to make this decision. So she would not have the option.

  Because every step was a step nearer.

  The phone’s screen glowed into life, illuminating the car’s dark interior. There was no unlock code, just the default start screen, a standard range of apps displayed. Sarah stared at it for a moment, the breath hot in her throat. She had the feeling she was standing on a high window ledge, looking down.

  Vertigo is not actually the fear of heights. Vertigo is the fear that when you are standing on the edge, you won’t be able to resist the urge to step off.

  She hit the orange ‘Contacts’ icon at the bottom of the screen.

  Lovelock created this situation. Not you. He passed you over for promotion again, and it was that anger – that rage – that boiled over when you saw the little girl on Wellington Avenue. Lovelock made it happen. He put you in an impossible situation. He set all of this in motion.

  There was only one number in the phone’s memory, a mobile. The name was simply listed as ‘AAA’. Her thumb hovered over the green ‘call’ icon for a few seconds, then away again. She pressed the back button, retreated to the home screen, and hit the power button again. The screen went black.

  She held the small mobile in her hands. Only a few ounces, but it felt as heavy as a rock: the power of life and death in her right hand.

  The power to reclaim some control over her own destiny.

  She checked her watch: 5.26. There was just over an hour left before the Russian’s seventy-two-hour deadline passed. Soon the offer would disappear – forever.

  She pressed the power button again, watched the screen glow to life for the second time, and selected the address book. Stared at the mobile number again. It was probably all nonsense anyway – just another man on a power trip. People just didn’t do this sort of thing. It didn’t happen in real life.

  But what other options did she have? Simply lie down, and let her boss ruin her life? Sack her, force her to move her family again, ruin her career? Or give him what he wanted?

  No. There had to be another way. A way in which she didn’t have to submit. Didn’t have to be humiliated. Didn’t have to lose.

  Perhaps sometimes in life, an impossible situation required an unthinkable solution.

  She pressed the green icon and put the phone to her ear.

  37

  Sleep wouldn’t come.

  She took a full dose of her pills but her brain was wired, replaying the conversation in her head, the enormity of what she had done pressing in from every direction. She turned over again and again, looking at the clock radio each time she moved onto her right side. Seeing how few minutes had passed since she last checked the display. The white heat of her anger from earlier in the evening had subsided into a low throbbing in her temples, a headache that just wouldn’t quit.

  The phone call crowded out every other thought.

  She saw it now for what it was: a deal with the Devil. And she knew only too well how that had gone for Dr Faustus. He had enjoyed his twenty-four years of good fortune and success and adulation, but it had ended – as he knew it would when he signed his name in blood – with the Devil coming for his soul.

  The phone call had been a moment of madness. There was no doubt that Lovelock was a man who used his power to prey on others, presenting one face to the world and an entirely different one in private. A highly intelligent, devious sexual predator who probably had a list of victims going back decades. But it couldn’t be right, to do what Volkov had offered her. No matter what Lovelock had done or would do in the future, it couldn’t be right. Could it?

  She wavered back and forth like this all night, finally slipping into a shallow restless doze as dawn approached. She dreamed of Volkov, but there were knives where his hands should be. Wicked curving blades that tapered to a shining point. She dreamed of Lovelock sitting at her kitchen table, his skin grey and his eye sockets empty red holes. When he spoke, maggots crawled out from between his lips.

  She woke with a start, her heart fluttering against her ribcage, one thought overpowering all others.

  Oh God. What have I done?

  The full enormity of what she might have set in motion settled on her at 4.41 a.m. And by the time dawn had spread its cold, grey light into the room, she knew what she had to do. She put on her dressing gown and slippers and crept out of the bedroom, careful not to disturb the children as she crossed the landing. Harry was a light sleeper and would stir at any sign of movement in the house, coming to find his mother wherever she was. And once he was up, he was up for the day. What she had to do now, she needed to concentrate for.

  Walking on the balls of her feet as quietly as she could, she went downstairs to the kitchen. Jonesy was sitting on the kitchen worktop and greeted her with a slow-blinking stare. She pulled the kitchen door closed behind her, searching in her handbag for the little black Alcatel phone. Switched it on and watched the screen light up.

  She felt heavy-headed from lack of sleep. But she forced herself to concentrate, to think about what she would say, how she would phrase it. She needed to be clear and unequivocal. It was a very kind offer but I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake. I’ve had more time to think about it and I’d like to withdraw my request. Please disregard what I said last night. Very sorry to have wasted your time, but I hope you understand. I hope your daughter is able to forget what happened to her, just as I hope to forget it.

  Jonesy jumped up onto her lap and began kneading her dressing gown, purring deeply. Sarah dialled the number for the second time in twelve hours and put the phone to her ear.

  A few seconds of silence, followed by a woman’s electronic voice.

  ‘I’m sorry, this number is not available. Please check and try again.’ Click. Nothing.

  She frowned and dialled again, only to get the same recorded message. This can’t be right. Panic rising in her throat, she checked the phone’s contact list and call history again: one number, one call, 29 seconds long at 5.27 p.m. yesterday. Her call, as she sat in the car park at work shaking with fury.

  She felt her face growing hot. With a trembling hand, she stabbed the number
a third time. The electronic voice came on again. It was no good: the number was disconnected.

  Whatever she had set in motion could not now be stopped.

  38

  Sarah made a strong coffee, chewing her thumbnail anxiously as the kettle boiled, and opened her laptop on the kitchen table. She should still have an hour or so before Harry woke up. She would find out who the mysterious Russian was, and contact him somehow, explain that it had been a mistake. That she wanted to withdraw the name she had given last night. She’d half-convinced herself already that it was a good sign the phone number no longer worked: perhaps all that meant was that it had been a con trick right from the start. Just an ego trip, a bit of a joke at the gullible Englishwoman’s expense – and she had fallen for it.

  But she still wanted to find out who the stranger was, to be certain. And how hard would it be to find the identity of such a rich man? He must have a sizeable footprint on the web, if he was as wealthy as he appeared to be. He certainly had a base in London, she knew that from the night they had taken her. But where was it, and how did he make his money?

  She googled ‘Volkov’, even though he’d said it wasn’t his real name. There were lots of hits; famous and not so famous. None that looked like him. She put his name into Google Translate.

  Volkov meant ‘wolf’.

  Next, she googled ‘Russian businessmen London’. More than 450,000 results came up. She spent fifteen minutes combing through the links on the first five pages, but found nothing that rang any bells. She might not know his name, but she knew what he looked like, so she switched to the image results. A seemingly endless drop of pictures dominated by shots of Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky. She started at the top, working her way down the page, carefully scanning every face to see if it was familiar. A couple of hundred images down she found one that resembled the mysterious Russian. She clicked on it to blow it up, a side profile taken outside on a windy day by the looks of it. All the caption revealed was a name: Andrei Ivanov. Was it him? There was a resemblance in the shape of the chin, the hairline. It wasn’t a particularly good photograph.

  She opened another tab and googled the name. The top result was a Wikipedia page:

  Andrei Ivanov, billionaire businessman and owner of a string of hotels in Russia, Europe and South America. Believed by some to have links to organised crime and connections at a high level within the Russian government. Ivanov was shot dead, along with his bodyguard, in the stairwell of an apartment building in Moscow’s Rublyovka district on 12 January 2014. He was believed to have been targeted by a business rival over a long-running disagreement. His killer has never been found.

  No good. This man had been dead for several years. Sarah looked at the photo on the screen again. Now that she studied it more closely, it was obvious that the eyes were wrong. Too deep-set. And he looked to be in his early forties, whereas the man she had met must have been in his mid-fifties.

  She went back to scrolling through pictures, taking her time so she didn’t miss anything. But after another fifteen minutes, she had still drawn a blank. This was useless. She needed a name.

  She thought back to Monday night, when Volkov’s men had taken her from the campus. Hooded and laid flat on the back seat of the BMW, she had tried to estimate the amount of time that had gone by. Counting minutes in her head she had got to fourteen, give or take. Call it twelve. At an average urban speed of twenty miles an hour, twelve minutes of driving gave a potential driving distance of four miles from campus. Basically, this created a circle across north London, from Barnet on one side to Edmonton on the other, from Palmers Green in the south to the M25 in the north. Maybe six or seven miles from one side to the other.

  Just a population of about two million people, then.

  And what if her calculation was wrong? If the time was too high, or her guestimate of speed too low? Then she’d be way off.

  She was about to try another Google search when Harry appeared in the kitchen doorway, hair sticking up at all angles and eyes still heavy with sleep. Without a word, he held his arms out to her and she picked him up, setting him in her lap for a cuddle. They sat like that for a long time, hugging in silence, Sarah breathing in his sweet little boy smell, cotton sheets and talcum powder and baby shampoo from last night’s bath. For that one moment she forgot everything, closing her eyes and letting all her worries fall away in the warmth of her son’s embrace. She rocked him gently in her lap, as she’d done when he was a baby. She kissed the top of his head as it rested on her chest, blond hair still tousled from sleep.

  Then everything came rushing back at her, the knowledge of what she might have done.

  She opened her eyes again and shut the laptop with her free hand.

  Harry looked up at her.

  ‘Is it Saturday yet, Mummy?’

  ‘Not yet, darling. Soon.’

  ‘So is it a school day?’

  ‘Yes. Come on, let’s get you ready, shall we?’

  Half an hour later, while Grace and Harry ate their breakfast, she dug the little Alcatel phone out of her handbag and switched it on again. Checked the recent calls log in case someone had tried to ring her back when she was in the shower.

  There was still just one dialled number, one call out, at 5.27 p.m. yesterday. Then three failed calls to the same number this morning.

  The decision was made, it seemed. She tried to focus on what a future would be like without Lovelock in it, feeling herself buffeted by emotions from every side. Remorse. Anxiety. Fear. A tiny, guilty sliver of relief, too. But it still didn’t seem real, not at all.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by Grace’s inquisitive voice.

  ‘Have you got a new phone, Mummy?’ her daughter asked.

  ‘Oh, this? No. I’m . . . looking after it for a friend.’

  She hit the phone’s power button and the screen went black again.

  ‘Can I have a go on it?’

  ‘It’s almost out of battery,’ Sarah said, putting it back at the bottom of her handbag.

  ‘Can I have a iPhone, Mummy?’

  ‘Not yet, Gracie, when you’re a bit older. Perhaps when you go to big school.’

  ‘Olivia Bellamy in my class has got a phone already.’

  ‘Really?’

  Olivia bloody Bellamy has everything, Sarah thought, not for the first time.

  ‘It’s an iPhone 7. She brought it in last week but Mrs Brooke got cross and took it away and she had to go and collect it with her mum at the end of school.’

  Sarah had a brief vision of Grace’s headteacher, the formidable Mrs Brooke, giving a stern talking-to to Olivia’s mother.

  ‘Good for Mrs Brooke, I say.’

  ‘She’s on Instagram. She’s got one hundred followers.’

  ‘Mrs Brooke?’

  ‘No, silly!’ Grace pulled a face. ‘Olivia.’

  ‘That’s really for teenagers, I think. And grown-ups.’

  Harry piped up, leaning across the kitchen table.

  ‘Can I have an ice phone, Mummy?’

  ‘A what, darling?’

  ‘An ice phone, like Olivia.’

  Grace snorted.

  ‘Not an ice phone, an iPhone. Idiot.’

  Harry pouted at his mother.

  ‘Mummy, she called me idiot.’

  ‘Don’t be horrible to your brother, Grace.’

  ‘He is, though.’

  Harry reached over and pulled one of his sister’s pigtails, snatching his hand back before she could grab it.

  ‘Now you’re going to get it!’ Grace said, moving around to retaliate.

  ‘Mum!’ Harry wailed.

  Sarah stretched her arms out on both sides, like a policeman directing traffic, catching one child in each hand and holding them at arm’s length. Nick was gone. It was down to her alone to keep the peace.

  ‘That’s enough, both of you. Grace, go and clean your teeth. Harry, finish your cereal please. We have to go in five minutes.’

  Grace harrum
phed and stomped off towards the stairs. Harry took one tiny mouthful of his Rice Krispies and pushed the bowl away, jumping off his chair and hurrying back to the lounge for five more minutes of Lego. Just a normal day, Sarah thought as she watched him go. A normal morning. Get the kids dressed, breakfast, brush teeth, school drop-off, commute, work.

  Except it wasn’t normal. Because of one phone call.

  39

  The guilt gnawed at her as Friday wore on.

  Her appetite seemed to have disappeared and she found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. She had a growing sense of things happening just beyond her eyeline, of wheels in motion, but all of it was outside her control. A runaway train with no brakes. And with the number on the mobile disconnected she had no way of changing its course. It was no problem being busy all the time, to take her mind off it, but whenever her mind had a few moments to wander, she found herself thinking about Volkov. While she was sitting in a meeting, or at her desk, or waiting for the kettle to boil in the little staff kitchen, her mind would slip back to the moment she had made that phone call, sitting alone in her car in the dark.

  And then she would have the sick, plunging feeling in her stomach again. As if a china vase had slipped out of her hands and she knew it would shatter into a thousand pieces as soon as it hit the cold hard ground. Watching it fall, as if in slow motion.

  One phone call. Less than half a minute. Perhaps this would be the moment that divided her old life from the new, moving her from innocence to guilt. The moment her life jumped the tracks and took off in a whole new direction.

  Or was it all just a bluff, an elaborate ruse, a rich man’s power trip at her expense?

  Because nothing had happened. At least, not yet. She’d not known what to expect, she hadn’t asked the person who answered the phone what would happen or how long it would take – if anything happened at all. Life simply went on, seemingly undisturbed.