Sir Henry swallowed. He felt nauseous. He'd had no great feelings for Nadia, but the thought that it could just as easily be his beautiful daughter lying there made him want to throw up the three-course meal he'd enjoyed only a few hours earlier. 'What are you going to do with her?' he asked.

'Don't worry about it. We know the owners of this establishment. She'll be made to disappear. If I were you, I'd worry about yourself.'

'I will.'

'I know you will. The lives of your family depend on it.'

With a sudden movement, the man's knife hand darted out and the next second Sir Henry felt a sharp pain at the base of his penis, and the warm sensation of blood trickling down on to his balls. He started to cry out, afraid of what had been done to him, but the man put a gloved finger to his snarling wolf lips, stopping him instantly. He knew better than even to think about defying his tormentor.

'It's just a little taster of what might happen, Sir Henry,' he said casually. 'No permanent damage.'

He leaned over and cut the bond securing Sir Henry's right wrist to the bed, then turned and walked out of the room, leaving him there, naked, bleeding and alone, wondering whether his conscience would ever forgive him for what he was about to do.

Sunday

One

Sometimes a person's fate rests on a single, seemingly innocuous decision. For me it was the moment I agreed to go out for a quick beer that Sunday afternoon with my neighbour from down the road, a balding hipster called Ramon who taught salsa at the local community centre and who, against all the evidence, considered himself a magnet for female attention. I'd been cooped up working at home for most of the weekend, and although I didn't tend to like being seen in public with Ramon, who always wore a red or black bandanna, the idea of a relaxing afternoon drink round the corner from where we both lived in the bland but pleasant north London suburb of Colindale seemed like a decent enough idea.

But we all know what it's like. Where alcohol's concerned, things rarely turn out like you expect them to, and our relaxing drink quickly turned into four or five, followed by a cheap all-you-can-eat Chinese meal on the high street, and finally a trip into the West End, which was where I found myself at half past ten that night, wandering round a sweaty, heaving bar just off Long Acre, having lost a salsa-ing Ramon somewhere among the crowds a good twenty minutes before.

By this point, I'd had enough. At one time I'd liked this place. Back in the old days, when I was working in the City, I'd come here most weeks, and had even known most of the bar staff by name. But plenty of water had passed under the bridge since then, and now, at thirty-four, I felt old and out of place, the booze making me maudlin as it offered up memories of times when life was fun and easy and I was the same age as everyone else there. It was definitely time to go, but as I put down the half-full bottle of Becks I'd been nursing for the best part of an hour and headed for the exit, I spotted her coming the other way.

I hadn't seen Jenny in close to a year but the moment she caught my eye she grinned and came over, giving me a hug and landing a sloppy kiss on each cheek. 'Rob Fallon, long time no see,' she shouted above the noise, taking a step back and looking me up and down. 'You look good.'

I doubted if that was the case, not in my current state, but I wasn't going to argue. 'So do you,' I answered in that inane way people tend to do, except in this case I was telling the truth.

Jenny always looked good. She was tall and pretty with long blonde hair that was at least four-fifths natural, and the kind of golden skin the experts like to tell you is unhealthy for Caucasians, but which in her case looked anything but. I think she was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, but she could easily have passed for five years younger. It was her eyes that were her standout feature, though. They were very big and very brown, and when she fixed you with them it took a supreme effort to look away. Not that many men would want to.

If you're concluding from this that I was in love with this girl, then you'd be wrong. There was definitely an attraction there – from my point of view anyway – and we'd always got on extremely well. But there were two things that had always held me back. One: I was still in love with someone else, although after two years I knew my ex-wife Yvonne was never going to take me back. And two: I would never have met Jenny if it hadn't been for the fact that she'd been my best mate Dom's girlfriend. Because of this we'd only ever spent time together in situations where Dom was present, and since they were no longer an item, we'd lost touch. Until now.

It could have been a brief throwaway conversation, the kind people who don't really know each other have all the time, but I'd been feeling pretty lonely lately, and maybe it was the booze too, because the attraction that had probably always been there began to kick in again, and pretty hard too. So, as we shouted in each other's ears over the noise and I caught the soft scent of her perfume, I took the plunge and asked her if she fancied going somewhere else.

To be honest, I wouldn't normally have been so forward, but again, I think it was the booze. I wasn't expecting a yes either. The chances were she was here with friends who were more reliable than Ramon, and she wasn't going to leave them to go off with her ex-boyfriend's mate.

But she said she would.

And in that one moment, my fate was sealed.

We went round the corner to a quieter, more traditional pub where there were plenty of spare tables. I bought the drinks – sparkling water for me, a dry white wine spritzer for her – and we caught up on things.

Jenny worked for a web-based travel agency and she'd just come back from a nine-day trip to Mauritius and the Seychelles checking out hotels, which she told me, rather unconvincingly, was harder work than it sounded. That was the cue for us to talk about travelling and share the usual backpacker stories.

The thing I found about talking to Jenny was that the conversation always flowed naturally. I never felt like I had to put on a front, or be someone I wasn't. Maybe that was because as Dom's girlfriend she'd always been untouchable so there'd never been any need. But tonight we both avoided any mention of Dom, and when we finished our drinks Jenny bought another round, insisting I have something alcoholic so she didn't have the guilt of drinking alone. I plumped for a vodka Red Bull, hoping it would perk me up.

'So,' she said, returning to the table with the drinks, 'did you ever finish that book you were writing?'

A little bit of background here. In the days when Jenny was seeing Dom, I was working on a book. In fact, I'd been working on it for a grand total of three years, ever since I'd cashed in my share options and left the investment bank where I was employed to begin a new life in rural France with Yvonne and our then one-year-old daughter Chloe. It had always been my ambition to be an author, and I'd done enough writing in my spare time to think it was worth trying to make a go of it. It was going to be my retirement plan. Pen a succession of popular and critically acclaimed novels while growing organic fruit and vegetables on our idyllic patch of Burgundy countryside.

Unfortunately, it hadn't worked out quite like that. The book in question – Conspiracy: A Thriller, a high-octane page-turner set in the murky world of high finance (that was my tag line) – turned out to be one hell of a lot harder to write than I'd thought. I just couldn't get the plot right, and when I did, the end result was seven hundred pages long and possibly the most unthrilling thriller I've ever had to read in my life. During all this I'd become almost impossible to live with, and the idyllic Burgundy countryside, all those hundreds of square miles of it, had begun to drive me mad. Worse still, Yvonne loved it.