James Patterson - Private London

‘How are Chloe and Laura?’ she asked, her voice even more tremulous.

‘Laura suffered a cut to her arm but she’s okay.’

‘And Chloe?’

‘Is still in hospital, Hannah. But she’s going to be fine.’

I figured that if I said it confidently enough it might make it so. People were still pouring out of the train, heading for the eastbound platform of the Jubilee Line. A guard was waiting for them to clear so he could whistle the train on. I went up to him and told him that I had seen an unattended bag on one of the storage racks over the seats.

It held up the train long enough for me to have a word with the driver. He had stopped in the tunnel due to signalling. It was a common enough occurrence when a train was waiting for traffic to clear ahead. There would be trains doing the very same thing now because we had backed up the system.

Fifteen minutes later and we were outside in one of Private’s mobile offices. A large black van with blacked-out windows and a state-of-the-art communications system inside.

We had put a transmitting device on Harlan Shapiro, strong enough to track from above the tunnel. That section wasn’t very deep, after all: it was classified as subsurface, not really underground at all. The device was disguised as a tie clip and the signal it was broadcasting translated as a flashing dot on our computer monitor displaying a map of central London. I called up the schematic of the London Underground system and superimposed it. Sure enough, the flashing light corresponded with where the train had stopped in the tunnel. The dot wasn’t moving.

‘He can’t still be down there,’ said Sam who was standing beside me with Del Rio.

Hannah Shapiro was sitting huddled on one of the bench seats along the left side of the van, holding a cup of tea but not really drinking it. I guessed she was lost in dark memories and darker imaginings about what might be happening to her father. Personally, I was kicking myself. Harlan Shapiro had been the target all along. Never mind the golden egg, they had wanted the golden goddamned goose.

I moved the remote-control mouse and clicked it, this time synchronising Google Street View with the flashing symbol.

‘Son of a bitch,’ I said out loud.

‘What is it?’ asked Del Rio.

It was unlikely he would know what it was. Not a lot of people in London did, either.

We were looking at a bricked-up building. A series of arches all filled in with the same dark grey brick as the rest of it. It looked like a church or a Victorian orangery, maybe, if the arches had been filled with glass. Up until a few years ago, the building had housed a Chinese restaurant but now it was standing empty, waiting to become part of the infrastructure again as a substation. It had been built in 1868 and closed in 1939 when England was at war with Germany and the USA was still watching from the sidelines.

‘It’s Marlborough Road,’ I said.

‘Which is?’

‘Marlborough Road Tube Station,’ I explained. ‘One of many old Tube stations hidden throughout the Underground network. The platform for it isn’t even underground – they walked up and out and could be anywhere by now.’

‘So where does that leave us?’ asked Del Rio.

I looked over at Hannah Shapiro looking into her mug of hot tea as if the answers might be found within it. Somehow I doubted it.

‘It leaves us with a job to do,’ I said determinedly. ‘And I know just where to start.’

DI Kirsty Webb was feeling the kind of excitement she got when the ‘tide’ of a case changed.

She’d considered taking the information to her superiors but she would have had to explain where and how she had got the identification.

She didn’t want to do that. It could cost her her detective-inspector status. It would certainly cost her the shot at the promotion she wanted and the move to Manchester that she’d thought she wanted – and wasn’t the hell sure about now. Damn Dan Carter! Why did she have to go and jump into bed with him again like some drunken teenager!

Kirsty shook away the thought and concentrated on her computer screen. Adriana Kisslinger had come into the country over a year ago and had worked on a temporary basis at a number of hospitals. Moving around London as an agency nurse: Northwick Park Hospital, the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead. Then, bingo, she had also worked a three-month stint at Stoke Mandeville in Buckinghamshire. After that nothing was showing for a few months. If she had been working anywhere she’d been doing it off the books. Unless she had gone back to her sideline, of course. Not every prostitute filled in a tax return.

A couple of calls later and Kirsty had Adriana Kisslinger’s last known address. It was in Punch Bowl Lane in Chesham.

Back in the office I had assembled the troops.

The bad feeling in the air was palpable. We had brought back Hannah Shapiro. But no one was celebrating. Harlan Shapiro had known what was at stake. He had been very clear: he had lost his daughter once – he wasn’t about to lose her again. Whatever the cost. And he knew full well it was not just a monetary cost.

We didn’t have a clue what their next move would be. Harlan Shapiro was worth billions. His daughter had been a sprat set to catch a diamond-studded mackerel. The ransom demand had always seemed small to us. Now we knew why. Looked like it was seed money to set up the real deal. The stakes were about to go very high.

Kirsty had been as good as her word and had copied everything the Met had on the case over to me. Maybe there was something in all the data that had been missed.

Del Rio had taken Hannah back to her college rooms. She needed a shower and clean clothes. Suzy had gone with them.

I was sitting with Adrian Tuttle, working our way through the photographs that the SOCO team had collected. They were all digital, not as good as Adrian would have taken, and were displayed on his widescreen Apple monitor.

Doctor Wendy Lee, meanwhile, was looking at the other forensic reports. Sam was reading through the police interviews of the students and staff who had been in the bar, or near it, when the abduction had gone down.

On the screen Adrian Tuttle had yet another shot of the cobbled street. Close-ups of the blood which we already knew was Laura Skelton’s.

He clicked his mouse and moved onto a wide-angle shot of the street. Pretty much an exact version of the same pictures that we had taken when our people had got to the scene. Except that had been later and the police had gone by then.

I moved the mouse and clicked on the next photo.

Another wide-angle shot of the scene from another perspective. But Adrian muttered something and snatched the mouse from me, clicking back to the previous shot.

I looked at the picture, puzzled. He’d seen something I hadn’t. ‘What?’ I asked.

Adrian Tuttle ignored me, clicking on a series of icons and drop-down menus. The screen split in two and he pulled down more menus.

The picture we had been looking at remained on the left-hand screen. On the right he had called up our own forensic photos that had been taken on the night of the kidnapping. Adrian hadn’t been responsible for those: he had been working on the woman found in the lock-up in King’s Cross.

He flicked through the images until he found a wide-angle shot that matched the one the police had taken. If it was a spot-the-difference competition I couldn’t have circled one, let alone ten.

He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the first picture. ‘See that?’

I shrugged. ‘Just the differences of light,’ I said. ‘Ours were taken later, remember, and they had their lights set up in different positions.’