Deadline

'They have. It covers the car park and the front entrance, but it works on a loop and gets wiped every forty-eight hours, so it's already gone.'

Barry looked annoyed. 'Stupid woman. She should have come to us earlier. We could have had the daughter back by now if we'd been involved from the start. We need to know where she was snatched from, Mike. If it was in a public place, someone might have seen it.'

'I've got Mo and his people on that,' said Bolt, 'but this is the interesting thing. So far there's been not a single reported abduction anywhere in Greater London on Tuesday between four forty-five, when we know Emma was at the dentist's, and eight forty-five, when Andrea received the first phone call from the kidnappers. Also, when Andrea arrived home that night, she specifically said in both her statements that the alarm was on. If anyone had snatched Emma from the house, there's no way they would have stopped to reset the alarm.'

'So it looks like it could be an inside job? What about the old man, Phelan? What have we got on him?'

Bolt consulted his notebook, even though he already knew Patrick Phelan's form. 'He's got old convictions for drug dealing and receiving,' he answered, wondering why a live wire like Andrea was so often attracted to deadbeats. 'Nothing major, but he served a year behind bars in the late nineties for receiving a load of hi-fis that had been lifted in a hijack a few weeks earlier. That was his last conviction. He's been straight since then. For what it's worth, Andrea doesn't think he was involved.'

Barry grunted. 'She wouldn't, would she? It wouldn't say much for her judgement if her old man was capable of kidnapping his stepdaughter and holding her to ransom. The fact is, he's missing. Which means he's either dead, or he's one of the kidnappers. Fact.'

'Phelan's car's missing too,' said Bolt. 'I've got Mo's people checking the ANPR to see if we can track it that way.'

The automatic number plate recognition system was the latest technological tool available to the police in the twenty-first-century fight against crime. It used a huge network of CCTV cameras which automatically read car number plates to log the movement of vehicles along virtually every main road in Britain. These images – some thirty-five million a day – were then sent to a vast central database housed alongside the Police National Computer at Hendon HQ where they were stored for up to two years. Not only was it possible to trace the movements of Phelan's car on the day, but also where it had been in the days and weeks leading up to the kidnap, although Bolt knew it would take time and effort to gather this information.

'What are Tina Boyd's people doing?' Barry asked, taking another noisy slurp of his coffee.

'Background checks on everyone involved in this. Looking for motives. Andrea told us she had a lot of cash stored in deposit boxes, which made up most of the half million she paid out to the kidnapper. I think someone knew she had those deposits, and we need to find out who.'

Barry nodded. 'If it is personal, then it's someone who really hates her, isn't it? To kidnap her only child, take the half million, and then renege on the deal. You've got to be a truly nasty piece of work to do that.'

'Well, these people are certainly nasty, and they took out Jimmy Galante, so they know what they're doing.'

'You knew him?'

'I knew the name from my days in the Flying Squad. He had a reputation as a hard bastard. We had him down as a suspect in a couple of armed robberies but we never pinned anything on him, and he ended up running a bar in Spain, like Andrea said.'

'But why are they asking for more money? That's what I can't understand. They've got what they wanted. Why not just release the girl and have done with it?'

Bolt shrugged. 'Because they're greedy, I suppose. Maybe they figure that if it only took Andrea forty-eight hours to come up with half a million, then maybe they were selling themselves short. I don't suppose the fact that she brought someone along to the ransom drop made any difference. I think that was just an excuse for them.'

'So they were always going to keep squeezing . . .' Barry shook his head slowly. 'We're going to have to catch these bastards, Mike.'

'All I'd say, sir, is, don't expect miracles. We haven't got a lot of time until the next deadline.' He looked at his watch and saw that it had just turned ten a.m. 'It's only about thirty-six hours until she's meant to come up with the next tranche of money.'

'All right, point taken.' Barry put down his mug. 'So, what are we going to do about this one, old mate? Negotiate, or take them out?'

It was the big question. Bolt knew only too well that the problem with kidnap cases, what made them so different from other equally serious crimes, was the fact that the investigators had far less control over events. It was the kidnapper who set the tempo, and since the circumstances of kidnappings varied so much, the police procedures for dealing with them had to be far more flexible than they would be in, say, a murder case where a set of very specific rules applied.

There was an uncomfortable silence.

'I think the girl's still alive,' Bolt said at last. 'And I think they'll keep her alive while they need her as a bargaining chip. They've already said that Andrea can speak to her again before the next ransom drop, and there's no reason at the moment to believe that they'll renege on that.'

'But?'

'But, as we both know, they're ruthless. They've killed once. They may well have killed Phelan too for all we know. So if we spook them by trying to negotiate when they next make contact, my guess is they'll disappear back into the woodwork and that'll be the last we see of them. And there's no guarantee they'll let Emma go either. Especially if they think there's the remotest chance she can identify them. To them, she's just a loose end. We go the negotiation path, I think there's a good chance they'll kill her.'

Barry didn't look convinced. 'But there are a lot of things that can go wrong if we try to trap them, and if we mess it up it could be disastrous for SOCA. We're in need of some high-profile successes at the moment, so the public can see where all their tax money's going. A high-profile failure's going to set us back years.'

'You asked my opinion, sir. I think negotiation's the wrong move. If we can put trackers with the ransom money and play things right, we should be able to get our kidnappers to lead us right to Emma. It's risky, and there's a chance it might not work, but there's also a chance she's dead already. If we want to catch these guys, and we can't ID them before they make contact, then this is the best way.'

Barry massaged his head with pudgy hands, and tipped his chair back. 'Well, I'm going to send it upstairs. See what the head honchos have to say. I'll let you know their decision as soon as I've got it.'

As Bolt got to his feet, sensing that the meeting was over, there was a knock on the door and Tina Boyd entered the room, carrying several sheaves of paper in one hand.

Tina was a relatively new member of the team, whom Bolt had brought on board after he'd met her during a case a few years earlier. At the time she'd just resigned from the force, and it had taken a lot of persuading to get her to join the team. An attractive woman just short of thirty, with dark hair cut into a jaunty bob and smooth, delicate features that shaved five years off her easily, she had that look that was unmistakably educated and middle-class, and she could have passed as a primary school teacher just as much as a cop. But the look belied the tough time she'd had down the years. Bolt knew that Tina had seen and done it all. Shot during a hostage-taking drama four years earlier, she'd also lost two colleagues, both murdered. One of them had been her lover, earning her the unwelcome nickname of the Black Widow in some quarters.