'But we don't know for certain that the kidnapper took Brakspear with him. Maybe I could go back to the house and talk to him, persuade him to-'

'Mr Fallon,' Tina interrupted, 'do you honestly believe that after your unscheduled appearance the kidnapper hasn't taken Brakspear with him?'

Her words silenced him temporarily. When he finally spoke, he sounded weary. 'You say don't go to the police, just lie low for a while, but for how long? And what are we going to do in the meantime?'

'We need to change tactics,' she said quietly. 'Up the ante a little.'

'How?'

'Leave it with me. I've got a few calls to make, then I'll get back to you. In the meantime, stay away from home.'

'Don't leave it too long, DC Boyd.' Fallon sounded angry and frustrated, and Tina couldn't blame him. 'Pretty soon, the guy who threatened to kill me is going to know that I didn't heed his warning, and he's not going to give me a second chance. I'm a target now.'

'Killing you will only risk drawing attention to themselves, so try to keep calm.'

There was a long pause at the other end before Fallon said something about keeping calm being a lot easier said than done. Then he cut the connection.

Poor sod, thought Tina. She felt bad for putting him in such a precarious position, but knew too that what she'd said about the likely police scepticism if he requested protection was true. Even so, she felt she needed guidance on a way forward. She hadn't wanted to involve Mike Bolt but no longer felt she had any choice. He also had the resources to track down Brakspear's location, using either his mobile number or the registration plate of the mysterious Mazda that had been on his drive that morning, and which was soon going to be on Tina's own phone.

Mike wasn't answering. She left a message asking her to call him urgently, then lit a cigarette. She had a plan B, one that she'd been formulating in the shower, but it was risky, and she'd hoped she wouldn't have to use it.

She looked at her watch. It had just turned eleven, and the clock was ticking inexorably onwards. She'd give Mike until 11.30 to call her back. If he didn't, she knew she'd simply have to take her chances.

There was no other way.

Twenty-three

Where I was going to lay my head was a problem, and one I thought about for most of the journey back to London. Under normal circumstances I would have gone to Dom, but he was away until the following day and I'd promised myself that I wouldn't involve him now. There was always Yvonne and Chloe (and Nigel, of course), but they were away too, and even if they'd been back at home in France I'd never have risked hurting them by my presence.

There wasn't really anyone else. Not even family-wise. My mum had died when I was fifteen after a long and protracted battle against cancer. My older brother lived in New Zealand, where he'd been for most of the last decade, and my dad now lived with my stepmother (a pleasant woman, it has to be said) in South Africa. So I was pretty much on my own.

It crossed my mind to try Maxwell, but he'd only ask too many questions, and I really didn't want to have to tell him anything.

In the end, I decided to go online and find a cheap hotel somewhere in the sprawling anonymity of the West End, where I wasn't going to be found.

First, though, I needed to eat. Hardly a thing had passed my lips in the last forty-eight hours, and anything that had had come straight back up again. I was in dire need of sustenance. When I got back into north London, I headed south until I found a suitably grimy-looking café on the Edgware Road where I consumed a huge fry-up of bacon, sausage, black pudding and just about anything else greasy and coronary-inducing they could fling on the plate, washed down with orange juice and two cups of strong coffee.

After I'd polished off the lot, I sat back and relaxed for the first time since all this started. True, I was in the most serious danger I'd been so far, because the people I was up against must now want me dead, whatever Tina Boyd might be saying to the contrary. But at that moment in time, in a busy café far from my usual haunts, it didn't feel that way. It felt instead like I was doing something good, something worthwhile. Maybe for the first time in my life.

Maybe this was the reason I was throwing myself so wholeheartedly into the hunt for a girl who, in reality, I hardly knew. Maybe, too, a part of me enjoyed the adventure. I've travelled the world and visited other cultures. Dived with sharks on the Barrier Reef; travelled up the Amazon in a steamboat; climbed to the summit of Kilimanjaro. But all those things are sanitized adventures. Now I was doing something that was truly risky – suicidal some might say, given that I was unarmed and untrained. But I didn't care. If I got through it in one piece and found out what had happened to Jenny, then at the very least Yvonne might think there was more to me than she'd always thought.

I was on the way back to the car, having paid my bill, when Tina called. I looked at my watch. Twenty past one.

'I want to escalate things, Mr Fallon,' she told me, 'and I'm going to need your help.'

There was a grim seriousness to her tone that I hadn't heard before. 'OK,' I said uncertainly, stopping by the car.

'I'll be totally honest with you. It's potentially going to put you in a lot of danger.'

'I'm already in a lot of danger,' I said, sounding braver than I felt. 'What is it?'

I listened as she gave me the details, and when she'd finished she asked me if I was prepared to go through with it. 'Right now, I believe this is our best way forward,' she added. 'I'll keep the situation under review and if we get any hard evidence of what's happened then I'll bring it straight to my colleagues, and get you full protection.'

I could hear my heart beating hard in my chest as I thought about what was being asked of me.

'You don't have to do it,' she said, then paused. 'The ball's in your court.'

I thought of Jenny. I thought of Ramon. I had no choice. 'Let's go for it.'

Twenty-four

John Gentleman, the doorman on duty at Jenny Brakspear's apartment building the night she was abducted, lived in a grimy-looking three-storey tenement building in one of the less attractive parts of Hackney which backed on to a well-used railway bridge. Unlike Jenny's place, there was no security door, and Tina walked straight inside.

Gentleman's flat was on the second floor and Tina didn't meet anyone on the walk up. The flooring in the corridor outside was cheap linoleum and she moved quietly along it, trying to remain as casual as possible. She stopped at his door and put her ear against it, hearing nothing beyond. The door was protected by three separate locks – no surprise in a place as rundown as this, where drug-related burglary was bound to be common, and no real obstacle to someone who knew what he or she was doing.

During her time in SOCA, Tina had learned to break into buildings quickly and efficiently. It was all part of the job. Most people didn't realize that it was perfectly legal for the authorities to break in and bug any property if they had grounds to believe that the individuals living there were committing serious crime.

But as Tina got to work on the new five-bar lock using a small set of hand picks from her SOCA days, she knew that what she was doing would cost her her job immediately if she was caught. It didn't deter her. Nor was it the first time she'd been in this position, breaking the laws she was meant to uphold. It wasn't that Tina didn't believe in the rule of law. She did – broadly speaking, anyway – but she'd also seen its weaknesses at first hand. Justice wasn't always done, and the wrong people sometimes walked free. Paul Wise, her lover's murderer, was a glaring example of this, and she used him as her justification whenever she bent the rules, as she was doing now. She hadn't wanted to go this far, though. It was only because she still hadn't heard from Mike Bolt, even though she'd left a second message on his voicemail, that she'd reluctantly concluded that she had to act on her own.