Simon Kernick - Target

'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.