Deadline

Six

At 9.47 p.m. Andrea's Mercedes was moving at a steady thirty miles an hour along a quiet country B road with a cornfield stretching into the darkness on one side and a bank of beech and oak trees rising up on the other. A car passed them going the other way and moving far too fast, but there was no traffic behind. Andrea slowed as she spotted the dilapidated sign for Gabriel's Saw Mill nailed to a tree up ahead.

'This is it,' she whispered, indicating right.

Jimmy was hunched down in the front passenger seat, a position he'd adopted ever since they'd left the motorway.

'All right, babe,' he whispered. 'I'm out as soon as you make the turning, unless I hear any different.'

'I don't like this, Jimmy, I really don't like this.' The doubts were savaging her now. If he makes a mistake . . .

'It's just an insurance policy. Better safe than sorry.'

She steered the Mercedes into the turning, little more than a dirt track which was only just wide enough for the car. Ahead, the trees loomed, blotting out the light of the moon.

'Wish me luck, babe.'

'Good luck,' she answered without looking at him as she peered through the windscreen into the darkness.

A second later the door opened – a foot, maybe a foot and a half – and Jimmy slid through the gap. Then he shut the door silently behind him and Andrea drove on, risking a brief glance in the rear-view mirror as he disappeared into the woods.

Suddenly she was on her own.

Up ahead the trees seemed to rise up to greet her, and the only sounds were the tyres crunching on the track's loose gravel and her own low, tense breathing. This was it, the moment of truth. Close to all of Andrea's life savings were in the holdall in the footwell of the front passenger seat. She would have given everything, down to the clothes on her back, to have Emma returned to her safely, but if this failed and her tormentors didn't keep their side of the bargain she didn't know what else she could do, or where she could get any more money from.

The track forked as the kidnapper had said it would, and she followed it to the right as instructed. The road surface became pitted and potholed and she was forced to slow right down as she manoeuvred the Mercedes round the worst of the holes. Nothing moved in the darkness up ahead and on either side of her the wall of trees looked impenetrable.

And then it appeared to her right, a concrete outbuilding with blackened walls set back a few yards from the track, its roof all but gone, a black hole where the front door was.

She stopped the car and jerked on the handbrake, slipping the gearstick into neutral. For a few seconds she just sat there, listening to the silence, wondering if the man on the phone was watching her now, the man who'd abducted her daughter. Wondering too whether he'd hear Jimmy's approach and call the whole thing off.

Nothing moved. Andrea could hear her heart beating.

Finally, she bent down and pulled up the holdall, leaning back against the weight, and manoeuvred it awkwardly out of the car. As she stood up, she took one last look around before walking slowly up to the building, carrying the holdall two-handed, stopping at the gap where the front door had been.

It suddenly occurred to her that it might well be easier for the kidnappers simply to lie in wait, take the money and kill her, then go back and do exactly the same to Emma. Job done. Right now, Andrea, there could be someone just inside this door, a crowbar in his hand, ready to smash your skull in.

'Just do as he said,' she muttered to herself: drop the money, leave, go to the phone box and wait for the call that would reunite her with her daughter.

She stepped inside. Pale shards of moonlight shone through the huge hole in the roof, revealing an empty room with cement flooring, and a few tins of paint in one corner. To her right, a wooden door hanging off one of its hinges led into a poky little room which had probably once been a storage cupboard. The air smelled musty and vaguely of turps. There was no one there, no crowbar-wielding maniac. Taking a deep breath, she put the holdall on the floor next to the wall, then quickly turned and walked back outside.

And stopped.

She thought she saw movement in the trees ahead of her, something rustling. She stood still, staring, but as she watched, the movement stopped. But she knew she hadn't imagined it, and, feeling a new and very strong urge to get out of this place, she hurried over to where the car sat idling and jumped inside, reversing back the way she'd come in rather than going any further into the woods and using the turning circle she'd been told to use.

It was only when she was back on the road that she sighed with relief. She may have just parted with half a million pounds of her hard-earned money, with still no sign of her daughter, but at least she was out of that place. She wondered if it had been Jimmy she'd heard. She hoped it wasn't. If he could draw attention to himself like that then it might not just be her who'd noticed his presence. It wasn't something she wanted to think about.

A few minutes later the phone box she was after – a modern glass BT one – came into view at the edge of a village which was little more than a tiny collection of houses. It was up on a verge just beyond a bus stop, and partly concealed by the branches of a large oak tree. She pulled up twenty yards short of it, parking her car as close to the verge as possible, and banged on the hazard lights.

Once she was inside the phone box, she stood and waited for the last act, praying that this was finally it. The end of the nightmare.

The time was 9.56 p.m.