Target (5 page)

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 suspicious, 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.

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.

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.

As soon as I was off the phone to him I cancelled every one of my credit cards and ordered new ones before deciding to try to put everything to do with the previous night out of my mind and simply carry on with the book. I was currently on chapter twenty-two, almost two-thirds of the way through now, and at one of the most violent points, where Maxwell was in his armed robbery phase, just before he ended up on the wrong end of a Flying Squad ambush followed by a six-year stretch in Pentonville. In the real version of events no one had got hurt, but in mine, one of Maxwell's fellow robbers had been killed, while Maxwell himself had shot and badly wounded a cop (a legitimate target in Maxwell's eyes, because he'd been armed) before taking a bullet in the gut himself.

But the writing just didn't work that day. Suddenly, Maxwell didn't seem such an exotic and exciting character. For the first time I was seeing him for the thug he actually was, someone who made his money from intimidating people and, where intimidation failed, hurting them. No different, in fact, from the men who'd attacked me. I felt pissed off that I'd been in such thrall to him. I put it down to the fact that I'd never been the victim of crime before and so was far more inclined to glamorize it. I wondered if my view had now changed for ever, and what implications this was going to have for the book.

I sat staring at the computer screen for the best part of an hour before giving up and eating some lunch in front of the BBC news, which was the usual diet of doom and gloom and reminded me all too vividly why I avoided newspapers and news programmes these days. I was hoping that the break might provide some inspiration. It didn't. All I could think about was Jenny. Where she might be now and what I could be doing to locate her, because at that moment I was doing nothing.

Eventually I could hold back no longer. I called Islington police station and asked to be put through to CID. Without a crime reference number I found myself placed on hold, then sent through to an automated messaging service. When I tried again, the switchboard operator offered to take my details and get someone to call me back (I declined). It was only on my third attempt, when I told a different switchboard operator I wanted to report a murder but would only speak to someone in Islington CID, that I was reluctantly put through.

Incredibly, the phone still rang for a good minute and a half before it was picked up, which made me wonder what the hell you needed to do to get taken seriously by the police these days.

'DS Storey,' said a nasal voice, laced with a strange mixture of excitement and irritation. 'I understand you want to report a murder.'

'No,' I answered, feigning innocence. 'I'm following up on an abduction I reported last night.'

'So you're not reporting a murder?'

'No. I don't know where you got that from. There must have been some mistake.'

DS Storey sighed impatiently. In the background, I could hear a lot of noise. 'Have you got a crime reference number?' he demanded.

I told him I hadn't and started to explain what had happened but he stopped me dead, asking who I'd dealt with. When I told him it was DS Tina Boyd, he said she was who I needed to speak with, and she'd be back on duty at six o'clock.

I couldn't believe it. Jenny had been kidnapped and her kidnappers had tried to murder me yet no one appeared to be doing anything about it. 'This is an abduction I'm reporting,' I said, my patience finally snapping, 'not a fucking parking offence. Why is no one taking it seriously?'

'Listen, sir,' snapped Storey in return, snarling out the 'sir', 'if I don't know anything about it and you don't have a crime reference number then I can't help you. All right? Now, my advice is to contact DS Boyd direct when she comes in tonight because right now we have an emergency on at this station and I do not have the time to talk. OK?'

It wasn't OK, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I rang off.

I looked at my watch. It was half past two. I was angry with Tina Boyd. I'd thought she would take things seriously enough to pass the information on to her colleagues, but it was clear she hadn't. Figuring that I had nothing to lose, I dug out her mobile number and dialled it.

She answered after a fair number of rings and identified herself with a single hello, sounding half asleep.

'It's me,' I said, 'Rob Fallon. From last night. The kidnapping.'

A sigh of irritation echoed down the phone. 'I haven't forgotten you, Mr Fallon, but I was actually sleeping.'

'I'm sorry,' I lied. 'I didn't mean to wake you up.'

'You knew I was on night duty so I'd have thought it was pretty obvious that I'd be sleeping during the day.' She paused. 'What can I do for you now?'

'I want you to know I'm not bullshitting, DS Boyd.'

'You already told me that last night.'

'I've just been on the phone to one of your colleagues in CID, a DS Storey, and he didn't know anything about Jenny's kidnapping. Now I don't know why those men took her, or even if she's alive or dead, but the thing is, I cannot just sit here and do nothing while her life might be in danger.'

Tina gave another exaggerated sigh. 'I want you to forget about this, Mr Fallon.'

'Why? She could be in a lot of danger.'

'I spoke to her father before I came off duty this morning, and he told me that she couldn't have been abducted because she phoned him from Gatwick airport late last night on her way out of the country on holiday.'

'But she was with me late last night. And she never mentioned anything about a holiday. In fact, she said she'd just come back from somewhere, on business.'

'Well, that's what he said, Mr Fallon.'

'And have you managed to speak to her work? What have they said?'

'Ah, her work...that's an interesting one.'

I didn't like the way she said that.

'It took me a while to find the name of her employer with the limited information I had to work on, and I was off duty when I finally called them. I even put off my sleep for it, because I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt. But I got through to her boss, a Miss Murton, and guess what?'

I began to get an ominous feeling in my gut. 'What?'

'She left three weeks ago.'