Simon Kernick - Deadline

On the seat next to him were photographs of Emma and Pat Phelan which he was taking back to the incident room. Phelan's was face up, but Emma's was face down. He couldn't bear to look at her. Couldn't bear to think that she might be his flesh and blood, and the first he'd known about it was when he'd been put in charge of investigating her kidnapping.

He thought of Mikaela, the woman he'd met a couple of years after Andrea, who'd gone on to be his wife. Mikaela had always wanted children. A boy and a girl, she'd always said. Children, and the big, rambling house with a nice garden. It was Bolt who'd always held back. He'd feared the immense commitment required; with the long hours he worked, he didn't think he could provide the necessary support. But eventually, after seven years together, he'd reluctantly agreed to Mikaela's increasingly persistent requests that they should start trying for a baby.

She was two months pregnant when the car he was driving left the road and smashed into an oak tree, crunching it into a shape that made it unrecognizable.

He'd spent six weeks in hospital and now carried three small scars on his face as a permanent reminder of that night. Mikaela's life support system was turned off three days later, without her ever regaining consciousness. Bolt had been too ill to leave his bed to say goodbye. He hadn't even been told of the decision, made by her parents, until almost two days later because it was thought the news would be so traumatic it would worsen his condition.

And all that time – all the time he'd ever been with Mikaela, and through those long hard years since – he might already have had a child. A child growing up whom he'd never seen, and knew absolutely nothing about.

His fingers tightened on the steering wheel and he clenched his jaw, feeling a sudden burst of furious resentment towards Andrea. If he was the father, why had she said nothing to him all these years? And if he wasn't, how could she manipulate him like this?

He pulled over to the side of the road before the fury got the better of him, and took some long, deep breaths, trying to calm himself down. But it was hard. Incredibly hard. That morning he'd been a reasonably happy man with a new girlfriend, coasting towards his fortieth birthday – now only a few months away – having got used to the idea that he was probably never going to have children. And now he'd been told not only that he might have one, but that her life was in terrible danger, and he was the one responsible for getting her back safely.

He sat there for a full minute, his heart thumping so loudly it felt like the only thing he could hear. Then he picked up the photo of Emma – blonde, smiling, fourteen years old, in her school uniform – and stared at it, searching for resemblances. Was she his? There were similarities, there were differences. He thought of the man – the men – holding her. The men who might not want to return her alive. The men they were now going to try to set up. For the first time, he truly imagined what could happen if their plan went wrong, and his stomach lurched violently. The girl who could be his only child would die.

He put down Emma's photo, but he kept it face up so that he could see the girl he had to rescue. It was time to take responsibility and think straight. Technically, the position hadn't changed; it was just that the stakes had now become infinitely higher.

He took a final deep breath, flicked on the indicator, and pulled out into the traffic.

It was half past two on Friday afternoon when SG4 Tina Boyd stopped outside the Lively Lounge Club and Casino, a turd-coloured slab of a building straight out of the 1960s school of bland architecture, which sat at the Colindale end of the Edgware Road, about three miles and a thousand years as the crow flies from the leafy Hampstead suburb where Pat Phelan now lived. Looking at it made her feel mildly pleased that gambling wasn't one of her vices. It wasn't that she wasn't interested. She just didn't dare place a bet, even on something like the Grand National, because she knew if she got a bit of beginner's luck and started winning, she'd probably never stop. Tina had an addictive personality. It was part of her genetic make-up. All through her early and mid-teens she'd resisted the peer pressure to start smoking, then at seventeen she'd tried her first cigarette at a party and she'd been putting away twenty a day ever since, with every attempt to stop ending in rapid failure.

She wondered if Phelan was the same. Because he definitely had a gambling problem, and the Lively Lounge Club and Casino was where he sank the lion's share of the money he spent on his betting. And he spent a lot. Tina's team had got hold of copies of the previous year's statements for the five credit cards and one debit card held in his name, and during that period his outgoings amounted to a grand total of £87,288.36 – and this from a man with no actual income that they could find, other than a £1,500-a-month standing order paid into his personal bank account from Andrea's own account, which was held at a separate bank. There'd been a number of further payments into his account over the course of the year, more than twenty-five grand's worth in all, but they were sporadic which meant they almost certainly represented winnings. Even with his wife's £160,000-a-year salary it was an unsustainable amount, and already Phelan's credit limit was maxed out on every one of the credit cards, while he was currently overdrawn at the bank by more than six thousand.

It wasn't that someone getting himself into this situation was all that uncommon. As Big Barry had pointed out earlier that morning, people got themselves into serious debt the whole time. What was interesting about Pat Phelan's finances from a SOCA point of view was that his spending had tailed off dramatically in the last two months, by more than 90 per cent, and in the same period there'd been no deposits of winnings in his bank account. Either he'd turned over a new leaf or, in Tina's opinion far more likely, he was funding his habit from a different source. Since the financial statements all pointed to the Lively Lounge as the venue of choice for his gambling, Tina had decided that it was as good a place as any to start digging into Phelan's background. She could have left it to one of the more junior members of the team but, like a lot of detectives, she liked to get out and about; and if she was entirely honest with herself, she wasn't much of a delegator, preferring to rely on her own ability to get things done.

The needs of the compulsive gambler tend to be of the twenty-four-hour variety, and the club was open. Tina went through the tinted double doors and into the darkened lobby. A blonde girl was at the reception desk talking to an older woman with hair extensions and far too much make-up. The girl smiled politely as Tina approached, wishing her a good afternoon in a Polish accent. Her colleague, meanwhile, said nothing but gave her a more suspicious look, clocking immediately that she was police, even though Tina wasn't wearing a uniform and always made a conscious effort never to give off that aura. Some people simply have a nose for spotting coppers, and they're usually the ones who have the most to fear from them.

Tina smiled at the girl. 'Good afternoon, my name's Tina Boyd from the Serious and Organized Crime Agency.' She held up her warrant card. 'I'd like to speak to the owner, please.'

'I'll deal with this, Barbara,' said the older woman in a deep voice that was midway between a bear and Demi Moore. 'The owners aren't here.

They're not based in this country.' Her expression seemed to add, so what the hell are you going to do about that? 'Is there anything I can help with?'