The next morning they'd made love a final time before Andrea told him she had to get back to Surrey. 'I'm really glad we met up,' she'd whispered, touching his cheek and leaning over to kiss him on the lips before getting off the bed and walking naked into the bathroom to shower.

Bolt remembered what an effect she'd had on him: a potent mixture of lust, satisfaction, jealousy and anger. The anger was the worst part, because he wasn't used to getting so worked up over a woman. He'd had a great time with her, a fantastic time, but he couldn't get over the feeling that he'd been used and was now being discarded, which hurt his young man's pride. Even in those days he'd known that the best way to woo a woman was to play it cool, to pretend you didn't care that much, but it hadn't worked and he'd still left his card on top of her handbag, hating himself for it, before walking out and shutting the door behind him.

And here he was fifteen years later, and still she was having an effect on him. The shock of seeing her again that morning was wearing off as the operation to find Emma cranked rapidly into gear and the team focused on the hunt for the kidnapper, but Andrea still possessed that 'something' Bolt had always found so irresistible, even in her current state. He wanted to help her. He told himself it was because she and her daughter were both crime victims, but he knew it was more than that. A part of him still wanted to impress her, to prove that he was the tough guy who could rescue a damsel in distress.

As he walked down the corridor to his boss's office for a strategy meeting, he knew that, just like last time, Andrea's presence in his life spelled trouble.

'What do you mean she wants to go home?' SG2 Barry Freud, the SOCA equivalent of a DCS, sat behind the huge slab of glass he called a desk, looking incredulous. 'That's not how we do things. There are procedures to follow in cases like this.'

Bolt, who was sitting on the other side of the slab, told him she was insistent. 'She says that otherwise she's not going to cooperate.'

'What choice does she have? She's got to cooperate if she wants her daughter back. It'll be far too much hassle allowing her to go home. I can tell you that for free, old mate. Far too much hassle.'

Big Barry Freud called every man he knew 'old mate'. It was supposed to be a term of endearment, but it never came across like that. As bosses went, Bolt scored Barry as decent enough. A big bluff Yorkshireman with a bald, egg-shaped head and a pair of peculiarly small ears, he made a hearty effort to come across as one of the lads, but never quite managed to make it look natural. Like a lot of senior officers, both in SOCA and the police services beyond, he always had one eye on the next rung of the ladder and did what he thought would go down well with his own bosses. He also had an inflated idea of his own importance. Word, probably put about by Barry himself, had it that he was a distant relation to the great psychoanalyst with the same last name, which gave him a natural insight into the minds of the people he was paid to catch. But Bolt couldn't see it himself. If you were part of such a distinguished family tree, you really weren't going to name your first-born son Barry. However, he was a decent enough organizer and he usually left Bolt alone to do his job, for which he was thankful.

That wasn't going to be the case today, though. Today, it was all hands on deck, and Big Barry was looking excited. He was the kind who tended to look at a crisis as a potential career opportunity.

'Can't you persuade her to see sense? The logistics of getting her home'll be a nightmare.'

'I've tried. I think it's going to be easier just to live with it.'

'That's your opinion, is it?'

Bolt nodded.

'She's still under suspicion of murder.'

'And we'll still be able to keep an eye on her there. I know it's unusual, but if we play it right, it won't compromise the op.'

Barry sighed. 'Well, if she absolutely insists, I suppose we can do it. I'm going to trust your judgement on this one, old mate. But make sure she knows that it means using resources that could be used helping to locate her daughter.'

'I will.'

Barry lifted a huge mug of coffee to his lips and took a loud slurp.

'What do you think of her story?' he asked.

Bolt hadn't mentioned the fact he knew Andrea because to do so would almost certainly mean him being removed from the case, but he answered honestly. 'I think it's true. You don't make something like that up. We know her daughter kept her dental appointment on Tuesday afternoon at a quarter to five, but that's the last confirmed sighting.'

'Have they got CCTV at the dentist's?'

'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.'