Simon Kernick - Deadline

'Has he acted at all differently around you and your daughter in the last few weeks?' asked Bolt.

'Not that I've noticed.'

'So, where do you think he might be?'

She threw up her hands. 'I honestly don't know. Maybe they've taken him as well.'

Mo made a show of consulting his notes. 'According to what you've told us, you never asked the kidnapper who phoned you whether he was also holding your husband, or what might have happened to him?'

'It's about priorities, isn't it? I've only had a few very short conversations with the man holding my daughter, and in all of them that's who I've been focusing on: Emma.' She sighed. 'Look, the thing is, I don't know whether Pat was involved or not, but I'm pretty damn certain he wasn't. He's not that sort of bloke. Besides, why would he bother? He's got a pretty good life. He doesn't have to do a lot. He drives a nice car, gets decent holidays. Goes out when he wants. If he asks me for money, I give it to him. I probably shouldn't do, because I'm hardly motivating him to get off his arse and get a proper job, but I do. So, why would he put all that at risk? For a share in half a million quid? I don't think so.'

It was, thought Bolt, a good point.

'Kidnapping a child for this kind of ransom is highly unusual,' he said, 'and it's clear that you weren't chosen at random. Is there anyone you can think of, in either your personal or your business life, who might have a motive for putting you through this?'

Andrea was silent again, then shook her head firmly. 'I can't think of anyone, no.'

But there was just the briefest flickering of hesitation in her eyes when she spoke, and Bolt, who was trained in such things, noticed it.

He looked at Mo. 'I think that's everything for the moment, isn't it?'

Mo nodded. 'I haven't got anything else.'

'So what happens now?' Andrea asked, her voice shaking.

'The kidnapper gave you forty-eight hours,' said Bolt, leaning forward in his seat. 'There's still nearly forty left until he makes contact again. During that time we're going to be gathering what clues we can as discreetly as possible in an attempt to ID him.'

'If they find out about you, though… I mean, these guys know what they're doing.'

Bolt fixed her with a calm stare. 'So do we, Andrea, so do we. In the meantime, you'll be supplied with a team of trained liaison officers. They'll look after your day-to-day needs and provide support until the situation's resolved. We'll also house you in secure and comfortable accommodation. Any calls to your home landline will be automatically re-directed to you there, so when the kidnapper makes contact you'll still be able to speak to him and we'll be able to monitor the conversation.'

'No. I want to go home.'

'That's not going to be possible,' said Mo. 'The logistics would be too difficult.'

'I don't care. I want to go home.' Her voice was panicky now. 'These people have been watching the house. They must have been to know that Jimmy was there. If they're watching it now and they see that I'm not at home, they'll suspect that I've gone to you. I can't risk it. They said they'd kill Emma if I went to the police, and I believe them.'

'It's very unlikely that your kidnapper or any of his accomplices are watching your house,' Bolt explained, knowing that Mo was right: letting her back home would be a real problem. 'They won't want to risk drawing attention to themselves, and there won't be many people involved in this either. Two, possibly three at most, so they won't be able to spare the manpower to keep watch on all your movements.'

'That's what Jimmy said,' Andrea countered, 'and look what happened to him. I'm sorry, but I want to go home. That's all there is to it.'

Bolt sighed, knowing from the decisive expression on her face that she wasn't going to budge on this. 'All right, we'll see what we can do.' He stood up, and Mo followed suit. 'Someone'll be along shortly to take you to a more comfortable room. But don't worry, I'll be giving you regular updates.'

He turned to go.

'Mike?'

Bolt flinched at her sudden familiarity, and Mo looked at him. He turned back, avoiding his colleague's gaze. Andrea's hazel eyes were full of anguish.

'Promise me you'll get her back. Please.'

Bolt felt his mouth go dry. This was hard, far harder than he was used to. He wanted to promise her but knew that there was absolutely no way he could. It would be a dereliction of duty. Emma's kidnappers had already killed once; it was entirely possible they could kill again. If he said one thing, and then another happened… well, it wouldn't look good.

'I can't provide a cast-iron guarantee on anything. I'm sorry.'

She turned to Mo. 'You've got children. You must have some idea of the pain I'm feeling.'

'I do,' he said softly. 'I really do.'

'Please…'

'We'll do absolutely everything in our power to get Emma back,' Bolt told her firmly. 'Absolutely everything.'

She gave a slight nod and reached for her cigarettes with shaking hands, ignoring a single tear that ran down her cheek.

For the moment, there was nothing more to say.

When he first started out as a nineteen-year-old probationary constable, having failed to secure the A Level results needed to get into the universities and polytechnics he'd applied for, Mike Bolt's first posting was Holborn Nick in the heart of central London, directly between the West End and the City. Having grown up on a diet of 1970s cop shows from Z Cars to Starsky and Hutch, he'd always quite fancied the idea of joining the police, but in an abstract way, like someone wanting to be an astronaut or a jockey. Had he made university, his life would probably have taken a completely different turn.

He'd spent five and a half years at Holborn, the first three in uniform, before joining the station's CID. One of his first cases as a detective was the death of Sir Marcus Dallarda, a fifty-eight year old City financier who'd made a fortune in the late 1980s developing rundown inner-city brown field sites and turning them into blocks of luxury flats. Sir Marcus was one of the few people to foresee the end of the property boom and had sold virtually all his property holdings before the great crash, and as interest rates soared, he'd lent his profits to the money markets where the returns were suddenly enormous. To some people Sir Marcus was the worst kind of capitalist, a man who created nothing and simply sat on a growing pot of money that had been gained through other people's sweat. But the media loved him. He was a good-looking, flamboyant figure with a ready stream of amusing one-liners, and he exuded the kind of unashamed joie-de-vivre that made him difficult to dislike. With two divorces, more than one love child, and a string of mistresses under his belt, he was tabloid heaven, and he possessed that strange upper-class ability of creating an affinity with the masses that someone middle-class could never dream of achieving.

So when he was found, after an anonymous tipoff, naked and dead in the penthouse suite of a renowned five-star hotel in the Strand, with several thin lines of white powder on the table beside him and a condom hanging rather forlornly from his flaccid penis, it was always going to be big news. Although a DCI was made the senior investigating officer in charge of the case, it was Bolt and his boss at the time, DS Simon Grindy, a world-weary forty-year-old for whom the term 'half-empty' could have been invented, who'd been given most of the legwork.

'Dirty old bastard,' Grindy had mused, with a gruff mixture of admiration and jealousy, as he and Bolt stood in the opulent bedroom looking down at Sir Marcus's rather spindly body. 'If you've got to go, I could think of worse ways.'

Bolt wasn't so sure. He always felt sorry for those whose deaths had to be investigated by the police. There was a certain indignity about being inspected by various people while you lay helpless, and in Sir Marcus's case in a somewhat humiliating pose. Like most people at the time, Bolt had enjoyed reading about Sir Marcus's rakish antics, and he remembered thinking at the time how powerful death was that it could crush even the most larger-than-life characters. It was something that had remained with him ever since.