'Where have you been this evening?' he asked, his expression unchanged.

Belatedly, she realized her hands were still gripping the steering wheel. She removed them, saw that they were shaking, put them in her lap.

'Work,' she answered.

'Where do you work?'

Her mind went blank. Completely. For a moment, she couldn't even remember where she was. 'Erm…' Her hesitation sounded ridiculous, she knew it. But she just couldn't think. 'Er…'

'Would you mind stepping out of the car, madam?' he asked, reaching in with a gloved hand and removing her keys from the ignition. 'I have to tell you that I've got reason to believe you've been drinking, so we're going to ask you to take a breath test. Do you understand?'

She nodded weakly. 'Sure.'

Stay calm, Andrea, stay calm. You haven't been drinking. One shot of brandy two hours ago, nowhere near enough to make you over the limit. The worst that can happen is they book you for dangerous driving. They'll issue you with a ticket, let you go, and you can go home and try to think of a way of finding another half a million pounds in cash by Saturday to save your fourteen-year-old daughter's life.

She stepped out of the car, unsteady on her feet as all the knocks of the past forty-eight hours rose up and battered her like winter waves on a sea wall. She was finally crumbling, and she knew it.

'Are you all right, madam?' It was the driver's colleague. He was a taller, younger guy, with the air of the college graduate about him, and he was holding a breathalyser under his arm.

'Yeah, thanks. I'm fine.' She tried to smile but didn't quite make it.

The young cop was staring at her chest. 'What's that?'

'What's what?'

She looked down, saw what he was staring at.

There was a thick patch of blood on her jacket where she'd grabbed hold of Jimmy. Jesus, how could she have missed that? There were further flecks of it lower down, as well as a single thumbsized spot on her T-shirt, which suddenly seemed to stick out a mile in the flashing lights.

The older cop stepped forward, staring too.

'Have you been hurt?' he asked.

She turned round quickly. 'No, I'm fine. Honestly.'

'This is blood,' he said. 'You'd better take your jacket off. You might have cut yourself.'

'I haven't.'

The two cops were watching her closely. The older one seemed to come to a decision.

'Take your jacket off, madam.'

She felt like asking why, but knew she was going to have to cooperate eventually, so she slipped it off and gave it to the older cop, who lifted it to his nose and sniffed it suspiciously.

'This is definitely blood,' he said.

Andrea stood there, her heart pounding. Now that they could see she wasn't hurt, one of them was going to ask the obvious question. It was the younger one who did.

'Care to explain how it got on your shirt and jacket, madam?'

Andrea took a deep breath. The decision about what her next move would be had finally been made for her.

'Yes,' she said, looking at them both in turn. 'I think I'd better.'

When SG3 Mike Bolt of SOCA, the Serious and Organized Crime Agency, was woken at just after 5.30 a.m. on a Friday morning in mid-September by a call from his boss telling him to get down to their offices fast, he had no idea that one of the hardest days of his life had just begun.

His team had just come off a job tracking a gang of professional money-launderers who were now safely banged up awaiting trial, and he'd booked the day off as holiday. He had big plans for the coming weekend, his first off in close to a month, which involved driving down to Cornwall to spend a few relaxing days with a twenty-eight year-old artist from St Ives with raven hair and a dirty laugh. He'd been introduced to Jenny Byfleet a couple of months earlier when she'd been up in London, and he was very keen to get to know her better. Jenny was the kind of girl a man could really fall for, and Bolt felt that he deserved a bit of romance in his life, even the long-distance kind. Things had been a bit sparse in that department for some time now.

But the romantic weekend was going to have to wait because this was an emergency: an ongoing kidnap situation, according to the boss.

Most of the public don't know it, but kidnapping is a comparatively common crime. On average, there's one every day in London alone, but the vast majority of these are drugs-related, involving squabbles over money between criminal gangs, particularly those from ethnic minorities. This case was totally different, and far, far rarer. A fourteen-year-old middle-class white girl abducted for ransom was a frightening development, and a senior cop's worst nightmare. Although none of the top brass would ever admit it, Bolt knew that the police service had no real problem tolerating kidnappings involving a few thugs snatching and torturing a crack addict over an unpaid couple of hundred quid, because frankly the press, and therefore the public, weren't really that interested. But if the media got hold of something like this, they'd have a field day. It had all the elements of a great story, particularly now that the kidnapper or kidnappers had murdered a friend of the victim's mother during an attempted ransom drop the previous evening. The stakes, then, were extremely high, and the pressure for a successful result was going to be enormous.

And Mike Bolt was the one who was about to be chucked headfirst into the eye of the storm.

The details he'd been given were still sketchy. The victim's mother had been stopped at just before eleven o'clock the previous night, having been spotted driving erratically by a police traffic vehicle containing two officers from Hertfordshire Constabulary. As she'd got out of her car, she was seen to have bloodstains on her clothing, and when questioned about this, the woman, who'd been in a distressed state, had told them about the kidnapping and the subsequent murder of her friend.

The woman had refused to return to the spot where her friend's body was, claiming that the kidnappers might still be there, but a second patrol car had eventually been dispatched, only to discover that the body had been set on fire and was already badly burned. There was no sign of anyone else in the vicinity and so, despite her protestations of innocence, the woman had been arrested on suspicion of murder and transferred to Welwyn Garden City police 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.