Deadline (8 page)

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.

'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?'

It was the big question. Bolt knew only too well
that the problem with kidnap cases, what made
them so different from other equally serious
crimes, was the fact that the investigators had far
less control over events. It was the kidnapper who
set the tempo, and since the circumstances of
kidnappings varied so much, the police procedures
for dealing with them had to be far more
flexible than they would be in, say, a murder case
where a set of very specific rules applied.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

'I think the girl's still alive,' Bolt said at last.
'And I think they'll keep her alive while they need
her as a bargaining chip. They've already said that
Andrea can speak to her again before the next
ransom drop, and there's no reason at the moment
to believe that they'll renege on that.'

'But?'

'But, as we both know, they're ruthless. They've
killed once. They may well have killed Phelan too
for all we know. So if we spook them by trying to
negotiate when they next make contact, my guess
is they'll disappear back into the woodwork and
that'll be the last we see of them. And there's no
guarantee they'll let Emma go either. Especially if
they think there's the remotest chance she can
identify them. To them, she's just a loose end. We
go the negotiation path, I think there's a good
chance they'll kill her.'

Barry didn't look convinced. 'But there are a lot
of things that can go wrong if we try to trap them,
and if we mess it up it could be disastrous for
SOCA. We're in need of some high-profile
successes at the moment, so the public can see
where all their tax money's going. A high-profile
failure's going to set us back years.'

'You asked my opinion, sir. I think negotiation's
the wrong move. If we can put trackers with the
ransom money and play things right, we should
be able to get our kidnappers to lead us right to
Emma. It's risky, and there's a chance it might not
work, but there's also a chance she's dead already.
If we want to catch these guys, and we can't ID
them before they make contact, then this is the
best way.'

Barry massaged his head with pudgy hands,
and tipped his chair back. 'Well, I'm going to send
it upstairs. See what the head honchos have to say.
I'll let you know their decision as soon as I've got
it.'

As Bolt got to his feet, sensing that the meeting
was over, there was a knock on the door and Tina
Boyd entered the room, carrying several sheaves
of paper in one hand.

Tina was a relatively new member of the team,
whom Bolt had brought on board after he'd met
her during a case a few years earlier. At the time
she'd just resigned from the force, and it had
taken a lot of persuading to get her to join the
team. An attractive woman just short of thirty,
with dark hair cut into a jaunty bob and smooth,
delicate features that shaved five years off her
easily, she had that look that was unmistakably
educated and middle-class, and she could have
passed as a primary school teacher just as much as
a cop. But the look belied the tough time she'd
had down the years. Bolt knew that Tina had seen
and done it all. Shot during a hostage-taking
drama four years earlier, she'd also lost two
colleagues, both murdered. One of them had been
her lover, earning her the unwelcome nickname of
the Black Widow in some quarters.

When she'd finally joined the team a year or so
back, Bolt had harboured the odd romantic aspiration
where Tina was concerned, but any attempt
at warmth or even flattery had come up against a
brick wall, and he'd quickly realized that he was
on a hiding to nothing. Tina was polite and she
was pleasant, but it seemed you didn't get close to
her. Even when she socialized with the team, she
was always one of the first to leave, making her
excuses before heading home alone.

'I've got some interesting news,' she said,
approaching the giant glass desk.

'Tell us more, Tina,' said Barry with something
approaching a leer.

She looked at them both in turn. 'Andrea
Devern might be a high-flying businesswoman
but her company's not doing that well. Turnover
in the last financial year was £4.81 million but the
overall operating profit was only forty-eight thousand
pounds, which for a company that size is
piss poor. It's also a seventy per cent drop on the
year before on a higher turnover, and they've got
serious debt to service with the banks. Andrea
owns sixty per cent of the company. Her main
business partner, and fellow director, is a woman
called Isobel Wheeler.' Tina consulted one of the
sheets of A4. 'She's a forty-two-year-old lawyer,
divorced with no children, who bought into the
company ten years ago and now owns the
remaining forty per cent. Both women pay themselves
generously. They draw salaries of one
hundred and sixty grand each.'

'Nice work if you can get it,' grunted Barry.

'Very nice, but it's not going to last. With profits
that feeble, the banks are going to be having
serious words. And Andrea and her husband are
big spenders. Their joint credit card bills mount
up to a hundred and twenty K a year.'

'So, what's the interesting part, Tina?' asked
Barry, cutting to the chase. 'They're big spenders.

So are most other people in this country. It's why
the economy keeps doing so well.'

Tina gave him a mildly dismissive look, but
when she spoke her tone was even. 'Well, I
Googled Andrea's name and her company, and it
seems that there've been a couple of articles about
her in trade publications, but nothing of any
significance. She certainly hasn't got a public
profile. She earns good money but nothing
special, so the question is, why on earth target
her?'

Bolt nodded. 'It's what I've been thinking. This
isn't random. It's personal.'

'You need to talk to Andrea herself, old mate,'
Barry told him, manoeuvring himself slowly to
his feet, 'and find out who the hell knew she was
sitting on that half million in cash.'