The Final Minute Read online

  His tone was calm and reasonable, as if he was talking to a misbehaving kid, but I wasn’t fooled. Something was wrong here, I could tell. The problem was, what did I do about it? It was four against one and, although the two security guards didn’t look like they’d pose much threat, I could tell the bearded cop would be a real issue. His hands were touching the lapels of his suit jacket ready for any sudden move, and he was staring at me intently.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I don’t need handcuffs. I’m happy to come along quietly.’

  ‘It’s for your own safety, sir,’ continued Combover, a pair of handcuffs suddenly materializing in his hand.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked, thinking there was no way I was going to allow them to cuff me voluntarily.

  ‘We will arrest you if we have to.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  ‘Murder,’ he said, loud enough for several of the people in the waiting area to hear. I heard Jordan’s mum gasp from behind the wall of bodies surrounding me. The security guards visibly stiffened, and the tension in the room was suddenly ratcheted up a couple of notches.

  ‘Look,’ I told them, ‘there must be some mistake. I haven’t killed anyone.’

  As I said this, I gave Combover a hard shove and swung round fast, trying to make a break for it.

  But I’d missed my chance. Blackbeard had clearly been expecting exactly that kind of move from me, and he grabbed me in a bear hug, driving me forward into the chairs. His weight, plus the weight of the two fat security guards, meant I didn’t have a chance. I sank to my knees before being pushed face first on to the hard floor so I was lying on my front. I struggled, terrified of where these guys were going to take me, but it was no use. I was helpless. I felt my wrists being forced together and the cuffs roughly applied.

  ‘These men aren’t police!’ I blurted out, but I could hardly breathe under all that weight and my words were barely audible.

  ‘Come on, Mr Barron, this isn’t helping,’ said Combover, crouching down next to me. ‘All we want to do is talk to you.’

  I tried to look up at him, but in the position I was being held in I could only see his shoe. He continued to talk to me, and I stopped struggling, but the next second I felt my shirt being lifted ever so slightly from behind – presumably by Blackbeard – followed by a sharp prick.

  I started struggling again, trying to speak, but this time no words came out and I suddenly felt dizzy and weak, as if all my energy was leaking out of me.

  ‘I think we can take it from here, gents,’ said Combover as he and Blackbeard lifted me to my feet.

  I could hardly stand now and the two of them had to hold me upright. I also noticed that Combover picked up the bundle of papers Tina had given me.

  ‘Is he all right?’ asked one of the security guards.

  ‘He’s just play-acting,’ answered Blackbeard, speaking for the first time, his voice gruff. ‘He’s renowned for doing this. Can you get us a wheelchair for him?’

  The guard pushed past, giving me an uncertain look as he did so. I tried to catch his eye, because if these guys were police officers, they were definitely the dodgy kind. No cop injects a prisoner with a debilitating drug while trying to restrain him. But the guard had already looked away, and now all my efforts were concentrated on trying to stay awake and on my feet.

  A few seconds later, the guard came back with a wheelchair and the two detectives bundled me into it. Combover continued talking to the two guards, and as I sat there in the seat, unable to move, I saw all the waiting people staring at me as if I was some kind of circus exhibit. But as I met their gazes they seemed to melt into one another until they became a single watery blur, and my eyes seemed to close involuntarily.

  I felt myself being wheeled through the A and E double doors and out into the fresh air, and then Combover leaned down so his mouth was right by my ear. ‘Who gave you all this stuff, Sean?’ he hissed, hitting me on the side of the head with the bundle of papers.

  So he knew my real name. I wasn’t surprised. Everyone I was meeting at the moment seemed to know a lot more about me than I did. I didn’t answer his question. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to. The power of speech had now well and truly left me.

  ‘You’d better not have done anything stupid,’ he whispered. ‘Because I’m telling you, you’re just as much use to us dead as you are alive.’

  And on that cheery note, I fell asleep.

  Fifteen

  Pen de Souza despised men. They’d mistreated her from the very beginning. Her father had started it. A frustrated alcoholic who thought the world owed him a living, he blamed everyone else for the fact that he was a nobody and had taken his anger out on the two people closest to him – Pen and her mother. Pen’s childhood had been a sickening blur of beatings and mental and sexual abuse. Her mom had tried to escape from him many times, but it never worked. She always went back, trailing Pen on her arm, taken in by his repeated empty promises that this time things would be different.

  He’d first raped Pen when she was ten years old. She hadn’t been Pen then. Her name had been … No, she wouldn’t even repeat the name of the person she used to be. That person was gone. He said that if she told her mom what he’d done, he’d kill both of them. It was to be their little secret, and if she did what she was told, he’d treat her like a princess. He didn’t treat her like a princess. He raped her again, even though she begged him not to. Pen couldn’t remember how many times it had happened after that. She didn’t like to dwell on it. She didn’t like to dwell on any part of her childhood, except for the day when, aged fifteen, she finally fought back.

  It was a hot, dry afternoon. Her mom was out and the bastard was drunk, and Pen knew what was coming before it happened. She could feel and smell the tension in the air, and he was watching her in that sneaky way of his.

  When he came at her, his movements lumbering and awkward, a lopsided smile on his face, she’d acted instinctively, grabbing an empty Coors bottle from the sideboard. She remembered perfectly the look of surprise on his face and the way the smile faded as he saw her expression. She’d struck him hard round the side of the head. The bottle didn’t break but it was a good hit and, as he fell to his knees, one hand pawing at the blood that was already soaking his hair, she’d danced out of his line of sight and brought the bottle down with everything she had on the top of his skull. It shattered then, leaving a broken, jagged neck in her hand, and suddenly she was filled with a sense of power she’d never experienced before. She’d smiled then, and when the bastard had looked up and seen that smile, his eyes had widened in fear. ‘Please don’t, Princess,’ he’d pleaded drunkenly, his eyes half closed as the blood poured from the deep cut on his head. But there’d been no mercy in Pen that day, or on any other day since. Mercy was for the weak. And she would never be weak again.

  In a single flash of movement, she’d raked the broken bottle down his face, splitting open his flesh as if it was a ripe watermelon, before slicing off the top half of his left ear, absorbing the delicious sound of his screams, revelling in the pain she was inflicting.

  She could have killed him then. She’d wanted to desperately. All it would have taken was a single deep slash across the throat and that would have been the end of his pathetic, hollow life. But Pen was no fool. She knew that it might not be looked upon as justifiable homicide by a judge, and that she could end up spending years in prison, and he wasn’t worth sacrificing a part of her life for. So she’d thrown the bottle in the trash and left the bastard bleeding on the floor while she called her mom at work to tell her what had happened.

  Foolishly, Pen had thought her mom would understand, but the stupid weak bitch was so much in his thrall that she’d driven straight home, taken one look at her husband’s ruined face and burst into tears as she cradled him in her arms. She’d called an ambulance, tried everything to clean up his wounds, and when Pen had tried to explain what had happened and why, her mom had screamed that she was no daughter of h
ers, that she was the spawn of the Devil and she never wanted to speak to her again.

  As soon as he’d recovered, her father pressed charges like the piece of shit he was, and Pen had been arrested. At her trial for assault and battery, her own mother had backed up her father’s story that he’d never laid a finger on his daughter, that she was making up her stories of abuse. The judge, a sour-faced old man who probably wore ladies’ underwear under his robes, had told Pen she was a cold, sadistic young woman with anger issues and had sentenced her to five years in juvenile prison. It was the second of the many betrayals perpetrated on her by men, but those were other stories, not to be dwelt upon right now. And anyway, now she’d found Tank. He was the only man she cared about, because he was so different from all the rest. They were soulmates; they understood everything about each other; they were one.

  Pen was still getting over the fact that she’d come close to losing him the previous night when she and Tank walked over to where a middle-aged man in a suit stood next to his car, holding a briefcase. They were in the middle of a disused airstrip west of London, and it was drizzling with rain.

  ‘What happened last night?’ demanded the man in the suit, not bothering with any introductions, even though this was the first time the three of them had met. ‘I hear the target got away. That’s not what my client’s paying you for.’ He addressed Tank as he spoke, but the sleazy bastard couldn’t help molesting Pen with his eyes.

  Both she and Tank had been expecting exactly this kind of question, and had prepared accordingly, but it was Pen who answered, staring down the man in the suit as she spoke. ‘I don’t know how, but he must have known we were coming. He wasn’t in the house when we arrived. We found out from the two looking after him that he’d gone absent without leave late that afternoon, and they didn’t know where he was. They also told us that they’d been using a hypnotherapist to try to get the location of the bodies from him but they’d had no success. Apparently the target’s suffering from acute amnesia.’

  The man in the suit grunted. ‘But he’s got enough sense to escape from you two.’

  ‘He didn’t come back in the house. We heard him stealing a car from the garage, attempted to stop him, but weren’t able to.’

  ‘So you’re saying it’s not your fault?’

  Pen remained coolly impassive. ‘No, it’s not our fault. First of all, it was a rush job, and they’re always the riskiest kind. Secondly, the target knew something was wrong before we arrived. There was no way we could have planned for that. So we neutralized the two witnesses and burned the place down.’

  The man in the suit nodded slowly as he digested this information, unable to resist another glance at Pen’s chest. ‘We need the target killed urgently. I don’t care how you find him, but find him. Don’t bother with the interrogation. We’ve moved beyond that now, and if he’s still suffering from amnesia, he won’t divulge anything to anyone else. Just kill him, and kill him fast.’

  ‘We don’t have enough information about him,’ said Pen, ‘and we’re operating in a foreign country. It’s not going to be easy.’

  The man in the suit reached into his briefcase, removed a slim A4 card folder, and handed it to Pen. ‘I’ve got a full dossier on the target’s background in there. His real name’s Sean Egan and we’ll be using all our contacts to help you track him down. But it’s essential that he dies before he has a chance to impart the information he’s holding.’

  ‘Are you sure he has the information you think he has?’

  ‘Oh, he’s got it. The accident may have made him forget it temporarily but his memory will come back at some point, and when it does he’ll realize the importance of what he knows. Kill him, and my client’s prepared to pay you an extra half a million dollars, on top of the generous sum he’s already paying for the job. But fail and he’ll be …’ He paused, as if searching for the right words. ‘Very upset indeed.’ He let the words hang in the air, so that they were in no doubt of their meaning.

  Pen knew the identity of the client. Not only was he a ruthless killer himself but he had immense wealth and resources to back him up. It was she who’d accepted the job, and it was she who took responsibility for it now. ‘We’ll find him,’ she said simply. She nodded to Tank and they turned and walked back to their car in silence. They were taking a big risk agreeing to find a man on the run, but Pen was already thinking about the extra money and the possibility of finally retiring with her lover and living out the rest of their days in a state of bliss.

  Kill Sean Egan, and that dream came a whole lot closer. It was all the motivation she needed.

  As they got back in the car, Pen squeezed Tank’s arm and kissed his massive shoulder through the material of his jacket. ‘It’s time to hunt, baby,’ she whispered, feeling a frisson of excitement.

  Sixteen

  When I woke up I was in darkness. From the sound of the engine, and the fact that I was crouched in the foetal position and being banged about a fair amount, it didn’t take me long to work out that I was in a car boot. My head felt heavy and thick and I experienced a rush of panic as I remembered what had happened to me. I was in the hands of the two men who were meant to be cops but who clearly weren’t, and wherever they were taking me, it wasn’t going to be good.

  I also found out something else about myself that I didn’t know: I was claustrophobic. I experienced an immediate rush of sweat-inducing panic as I lay there in the darkness. My hands were still secured behind my back, and I could hardly move. I wanted to cry out but stopped myself. I had to calm down. It was pitch black in the boot and it smelled of dirt and oil, but sooner or later they were going to let me out, and until that time I had to concentrate on thinking of a way out.

  The car was moving erratically, with plenty of slowing down and speeding up and going round sharp bends, so I guessed we were out in the country somewhere. I had no idea how long I’d been out for. It could have been five minutes, it could have been five hours – it was impossible to tell. I wondered how they’d tracked me down to the hospital. The fact they weren’t legitimate cops meant Tina had had nothing to do with it, and no one else could possibly have known where I was.

  But these guys, whoever they were, had known.

  It struck me then that maybe at some point during my stay at the house in Wales I’d been fitted with a tracking device similar to the one Tina had given me. That would also explain the fact that Tom had seemed to know where to look for me the previous day. I realized with a sinking feeling that it was probably in my watch. I could feel through the cuffs that I was still wearing it, but when I turned over and managed to lie on my front I could no longer feel the mobile Tina had given me in my front pocket. So they’d clearly searched me, and now they had a phone and a load of articles about my past history that I was going to have to try to explain away without involving Tina.

  There was one thing in my favour though, and that was the fact that the tracker Tina had given me had been well hidden in my sock. I was almost certain they wouldn’t have searched me there, which meant there was a chance she could still find me if she decided to look. It wasn’t much to cling to, of course, but then beggars can’t be choosers.

  For the next half an hour or so I concentrated on breathing slowly, ignoring my nausea and the fact that I was lying trapped in darkness, as the car continued its meandering journey. I thought about my brother, John. A good man who’d been murdered for trying to do the right thing. I focused on trying to remember more about growing up with him. It was hard, but slowly, very slowly, tiny video clips of memories popped up in my consciousness. John and me fishing at the side of a narrow river as kids; John teaching me to ride a bike on the road outside a vaguely familiar family house; John in his army uniform with the woman I believed to be my mother kissing him on the cheek while I looked on, feeling incredibly happy and proud.

  My brother. The man I’d forgotten. The man who’d been dead twenty years.

  A conflicting mix of emotions swirled throug
h me. Happiness that my memories were coming back, but a sense of gloom and frustration that the people I most cared about were long gone, and that no one had replaced them. And fear too, because I had no idea what was going to happen next.

  The car slowed and turned down a bumpy track. It hit a pothole and I banged my head on the boot lid. A minute later, the car turned again, then stopped. One of the doors opened and I heard the faint clatter of gates being opened, then we were moving again, but only for a few seconds this time before the car came to a halt and I heard the engine being turned off.

  I closed my eyes, deciding that for the moment feigning sleep was my best bet to avoid answering any awkward questions.

  The lid flew open and I was manhandled out. I kept my body floppy and fell on to my side, eyes still shut.

  ‘Listen, you fuck, get up. We know you’re awake.’ The voice belonged to Blackbeard, and he sounded angry.

  I didn’t respond, and it was Combover who spoke next, his voice calmer: ‘Come on, Sean. We only gave you a very small amount of anaesthetic. The effects would have worn off a while ago, so play-acting’s not going to help you.’

  Again I saw no advantage in responding, so I didn’t.

  Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bad move because a couple of seconds later I felt an excruciating pain as one of them – I strongly suspected it was Blackbeard – kicked me very hard right in the balls.

  My eyes shot open and I was unable to stop myself from crying out. The pain was horrible, and I rolled round on the hard gravel surface, wanting to clutch the affected area but unable to, with my hands cuffed behind my back. I also got my first glimpse of where I was. I could see the bottom of a large wooden building about twenty yards away, with trees and greenery beyond. Birds sang and the sun had even managed to fight its way through the clouds, which somehow made the whole thing far worse.

  ‘I told you the fucker was bluffing,’ said Blackbeard, and the next second I saw his foot come hurtling towards me. He caught me right in the gut. The blow hurt, but it was nothing compared to my nuts, which felt like they’d been driven back into my bladder and were now permanently jammed in there.