Free Deadline by Simon Kernick

station where she'd
given a lengthy statement explaining what had
happened to her over the previous two days.
    It was a difficult and highly unusual situation
for Hertfordshire police. On the one hand they
had an obvious murder suspect in custody, but
one who nevertheless remained insistent that her
daughter had been kidnapped, and was acting
like someone telling the truth. In the end they'd
decided to escalate the inquiry, and because she'd
been picked up outside London's city limits, the
senior investigating officer on the case had
approached SOCA rather than the Met's overstretched
Kidnap Unit, hence the call to Bolt.
    It had just turned seven a.m. when he arrived at
the office where his team was based. The
Glasshouse, as it was known, was a 1960s ten-storey
office block with windows that were tinted
with the grime of age rather than lavishness of
design, set on the corner of a lacklustre shopping
street a few hundred metres south of the river in
Vauxhall. It was a fine sunny morning, the fifth
such day in a warm spell that had followed one of
the wettest, most disappointing summers on
record – which for England was really saying
something – and if it hadn't been for the fact that
he was missing out on seeing Jenny, Bolt would
have been in a good mood. He liked cases he
could get his teeth into, and they didn't come
much more meaty than this. More and more these
days, his work took him and his team into long drawn-out
inquiries where the slow and usually
laborious process of evidence-gathering took
weeks, sometimes months, to complete. The
money-laundering job they'd just finished was a
case in point, having started right back in early
June; and he'd once been part of a people smuggling
investigation that had lasted the best
part of a year. During a career that had spanned
two decades, Bolt had learned the art of patience,
but even so, the idea of taking charge of a case
whose resolution could be measured in hours was
one he was never going to pass up.
    Bolt's team was based in an open-plan office on
the fourth floor of the Glasshouse, and when he
arrived about half of its dozen members were
already there, drinking coffee and generally
looking pretty groggy. They'd all been rousted
from their beds earlier than they'd been expecting,
and Bolt knew he wasn't the only one whose day
off had been interrupted before it had even got
going. The team had had a major drink-up two
nights earlier in the West End to celebrate the
arrests of the money-launderers, and it looked like
one or two of his people had continued the celebration
the previous night as well.
    At least Mo Khan looked fairly ship-shape. Mo
was one of Bolt's team leaders and the guy he
trusted most. They'd been colleagues for close to
five years now, first in the National Crime Squad,
then at SOCA, and though, with his big round
face and friendly, twinkling eyes, he bore more
than a passing resemblance to a short, squat
cuddly bear, the appearance was deceptive. Mo
Khan was tough, efficient and unflappable under
pressure, and these were three traits Bolt knew
were going to come in very useful today. There
was no sign yet of Tina Boyd, his other team
leader, or his overall boss, SG2 Barry Freud,
although Bolt knew he would be around somewhere
since he was the one phoning everyone up
at half past five.
    He'd only just managed to say his hellos to the
team members when Mo came over and collared
him.
    'Our mystery lady got here twenty minutes
ago,' he said as Bolt poured himself a cup of
strong black coffee from the percolator. 'Big Barry
wants us to start the interview straight away.
She's been up all night and he thinks that if we
leave it much longer she's going to be too
exhausted to talk.'
    'Fair enough. Where is she?'
    'Over in Interview Room B. Everything's set up
and we're ready to go.'
    'Blimey, you're quick off the mark this
morning,' said Bolt, following him out the door
and down the corridor. 'What time did you get
in?'
    'Half an hour ago. I was moving