The Last 10 Seconds: A Novel Page 10

  I talked about it with Simon and his colleagues for a few minutes, and it was clear they were all pretty elated that they’d nicked such a high-profile suspect, and that there seemed to be enough evidence to secure a conviction, which is always the hard part. I was pleased for them, but I also couldn’t avoid the feeling that I was an impostor. This was their result, not mine. Their celebration. Simon might have been making an effort to make me feel welcome, but it wasn’t really working, and I found myself quickly growing bored. And with the boredom came the reminder that I was a man potentially in a lot of trouble.

  It was then that I saw her, standing on the edge of another group of people I didn’t know, looking a little like me – someone who didn’t belong. I recognized her instantly, of course. Tina Boyd was one of the most high-profile police officers around, having had the kind of career that made mine look uneventful. Kidnapped. Shot on two separate occasions. And last year, she’d run down and killed a fleeing suspect who later turned out to be responsible for a string of killings and a major terrorist plot. I’d heard that she’d joined Dougie MacLeod’s team, and I remember Simon admitting grudgingly that she was a good detective, although she was also a bit up herself.

  I watched her as she walked towards the pub’s exit, reaching into the pocket of her suit for a pack of cigarettes. She was an attractive woman with classic Celtic features of dark hair and pale skin, but there was also something serious about her, as if she neither smiled that much nor suffered fools gladly. She was frowning as she left the pub, walking purposefully, and people instinctively moved out of her way.

  I’ve never been the kind of guy to go for the right woman, so I moved effortlessly away from the conversation, pulling out my own cigarettes. I could no longer see Dougie, and Simon didn’t notice me go. He was too busy talking to a young Spanish-looking woman at the bar, and getting in way too close to her.

  When I got outside, Tina Boyd was leaning against a wall, smoking and looking deep in thought.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, lighting a cigarette and walking over. ‘I don’t think we’ve met. My name’s Sean Egan,’ I told her, using my real name for the first time in what felt like weeks. ‘I used to work with Dougie MacLeod in CID.’

  She turned to me and I noticed she had eyes the colour of mahogany. ‘I know,’ she said with the hint of a smile, putting out a hand. ‘I’m Tina.’

  ‘How do you know I used to work with Dougie?’ I asked as we shook.

  ‘He told me.’

  I was pleased. It meant she’d been asking about me. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘He said I should keep away from you. He said you were trouble.’ Her expression had turned serious, but I got the feeling that she didn’t care whether I was or not.

  I thought about that one for a moment. ‘I wouldn’t say I’m trouble,’ I concluded, ‘but I have to admit I quite enjoy looking for it.’

  ‘What do you do now?’

  ‘I’m with CO10. Undercover work.’

  ‘Must be pretty stressful.’

  ‘It has its moments,’ I said, recalling my brush with death earlier that day. ‘But no more stressful than some of the things that have happened to you.’

  She shrugged, and I got the feeling that she didn’t want to talk about it, which was fair enough. Usually, I’d have left things at that. Had my smoke and gone back inside. But there was something about her that made me want to persist with the conversation. I had the impression she was an outsider like me; someone I could relate to if only I could get past the hard shell.

  I took a long pull on the cigarette, looking out towards the steady stream of passing traffic. ‘It’s a thankless life we lead sometimes, don’t you think? Chasing all these arseholes, just for more of them to pop up. You know, occasionally I feel like chucking it all in and doing something completely different. Running an organic farm, or a surf school.’ As I spoke the words, I realized with something of a shock that I genuinely believed what I was saying.

  ‘You’d be bored out of your mind within a week.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  She smiled, wider this time. ‘I’m sure of it. Perhaps you just need a holiday.’

  I thought about that one. I hadn’t had a holiday for years. The last time was a two-week trip to Antigua with a girl called Britt, who wasn’t even Scandinavian. It had rained a lot and we’d fallen out by about day three.

  I was about to tell Tina about this last trip, throwing in a couple of amusing anecdotes before asking her if she fancied a drink, because I had a feeling I was getting through to her, when the mobile I’d been using for the past few weeks to talk to Tommy jolted me from my thoughts. The ringtone was a bone-rattling, old-fashioned car horn I’d put on there so that I would never forget which phone it was. I thought about not answering, just forgetting about Wolfe, Haddock, Tommy, all of them for one night, but the world doesn’t work like that. When you’re undercover, there’s no such thing as time off.

  ‘That’s a horrible ringtone,’ said Tina.

  ‘It’s designed to make me answer,’ I told her ruefully as I pulled it from my pocket. Once again it was a number I didn’t recognize. ‘Excuse me for a moment. I need to take this.’

  I walked rapidly up the street, putting a good twenty yards between us before answering.

  ‘Where are you?’ demanded Tyrone Wolfe, and I knew immediately it was serious.

  ‘Out for a drink with an old mate.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Holborn. Just down the road from where I live. Why?’

  ‘Because the job’s on, Seany boy.’

  I froze. ‘What do you mean it’s on? When?’

  ‘Now,’ he growled. ‘Right now.’

  Sixteen

  I kept walking, the phone pressed to my ear and my mind racing. ‘But I told you I wanted thirty K up front.’

  ‘And I’ve got it for you here. Things have moved on quicker than we thought they would. How much have you had to drink?’

  ‘Only a pint. I’m fine.’

  ‘And what’s your exact location?’

  ‘I’ll be at the junction of High Holborn and Grays Inn Road in two minutes. Where are you?’

  ‘Not far away,’ said Wolfe ominously, and I suddenly had this horrible idea that he’d been following me. In which case he’d know I’d been drinking in a coppers’ pub full of coppers.

  I told myself to stop being paranoid and to get details of the job so I could feed the information to Captain Bob, who’d blow a gasket when he found out what I was up to, but was also pro fessional enough to act on the information. ‘You’re going to have to tell me more first.’

  ‘All in good time, Seany boy. You just get yourself to that junction and wait for us. Then you get your advance and we can talk.’

  ‘And you’ve got the guns?’

  ‘Watch what you’re saying over the phone,’ he hissed, and cut the connection without another word.

  I wondered then if I’d overstepped the mark, but I had to find out if we’d be armed so that I could feed this to Captain Bob as well. He could then use the signal from my mobile phone to track my movements, while at the same time organizing an arrest team of armed officers who could intercept us before we carried out the kidnap. If Wolfe had the guns with him, he could be nicked on a host of charges, and it would be job done. I’d be in all kinds of shit, of course, but that was something to worry about later.

  The problem was, until I knew for certain they had guns, there was no point trying to get them nicked, because I didn’t have a shred of concrete evidence against them.

  I was still trying to figure out my best move as I walked along the quiet, tree-lined thoroughfare of Doughty Street, once home to Charles Dickens, when a dark vehicle with tinted windows, and bearing more than a passing resemblance to the old A Team van, pulled up beside me, the power-sliding side door opening automatically. There was no one in the back but I could see the figures of Wolfe and Haddock in the front.

  ‘Get in,’ called Wolfe, and
as I stepped inside I realized my decision had been made for me.

  Seventeen

  ‘What are you thinking of, talking about guns over the phone?’ snarled Wolfe as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘Are you some sort of rank amateur?’

  ‘I told you we couldn’t trust him,’ grunted Haddock, turning round and giving me a cold glare.

  The atmosphere in the car was tense, and both men seemed agitated and jumpy, which told me, if I hadn’t known it already, that the job was imminent.

  ‘All right, all right, calm down,’ I said, putting up my hands in a defensive gesture. ‘You caught me off guard, that’s all. When you said the job was soon, I didn’t think you meant tonight.’ I made a play of looking at my watch, at the same time flicking the switch to turn on the recorder.

  ‘We only just found out ourselves,’ said Wolfe.

  ‘That’s the problem with doing stuff for other people,’ grunted Haddock, who didn’t seem too pleased about the way things were going either.

  I got the feeling then that I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who the client was: Haddock didn’t either. This surprised me. I’d always been under the impression that he and Wolfe were as thick as the thieves they were.

  ‘I haven’t even told you I’ll do it yet,’ I protested. ‘And where the hell’s Tommy?’

  ‘Tommy’s nearby. Don’t worry about that.’

  But I was worried. Tommy was my only ally in the group, and I wanted him around while this was going down, just in case Wolfe and Haddock decided to get rid of me afterwards.

  ‘You said you’d do the job if we gave you thirty grand up front,’ continued Wolfe. He turned to Haddock. ‘Clarence, can you do the honours?’

  Haddock produced a white jiffy bag and handed it to me, eyeing me carefully as he did so. ‘You got a phone on you?’ he demanded as I took the bag and tore it open to reveal three phonebook-thick wads of used twenties.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Give it to me. Now.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Haddock’s piggy eyes narrowed to angry slits and I saw that he was clenching his massive fists. But I stood my ground. I needed that damn phone so that I could text Bob and get him to track my location.

  ‘Do me a favour, Sean, and give him the phone,’ said Wolfe, his tone conciliatory. ‘We’re just going to turn it off and keep it while we do the job. It’s more secure that way. You ought to know that. Mobiles are a copper’s best friend.’

  Reluctantly, I pulled the mobile – the only one I was carrying – from my pocket and switched it off before handing it over. ‘I want it back afterwards,’ I told them both angrily, but inside I was growing increasingly nervous because it looked like I was going to have to carry out the job with them, which was against every rule and regulation in the book.

  Wolfe was watching me in the rearview mirror. ‘So,’ he said, ‘are you in?’

  ‘This is a kidnap, right? Not a killing. I’m not killing anyone. Not even for a hundred grand.’

  ‘That’s right. We spring him from his escort, and deliver him to the client. That’s all.’

  ‘But what’s the client going to do with him?’ I asked, knowing that if I could get enough information on the recorder, I might get the evidence I needed to convict them later.

  ‘The less you know about that the better,’ Wolfe answered with an air of finality.

  ‘At least tell me the name of the person we’re kidnapping.’

  Wolfe nodded to himself, seeming to come to a decision. ‘He’s a real piece of shit,’ he answered. ‘The sort who rapes and murders defenceless women.’

  And even before he said it, I knew it was going to be the man my former colleagues had arrested only twenty-four hours earlier, the man whose name was known to no one outside the Metropolitan Police.

  Andrew Kent.

  Eighteen

  Tina watched Sean Egan walk off down the street. On a different night she might have been interested in talking to him. The fact that Dougie MacLeod had called him trouble intrigued her, and he was a good-looking guy, who looked like he might be good company. But right now she was preoccupied with the Night Creeper case, and more specifically, with Andrew Kent’s alibi.

  Before leaving the station to come to the pub she’d run a check on the General Register Office database and found that Kent’s father had indeed died just before the murder of Roisín O’Neill. She’d then called the vicar of the church in Inverness where his funeral had taken place and they had buried him on the day the coroner claimed Roisín had died. What was more, the vicar remembered meeting Kent before the service when he’d greeted the deceased’s immediate family. When the vicar had asked the reason for Tina’s call, she’d replied that it was in connection with a routine inquiry, and asked that he not mention it to anyone else. She had no desire to give him the full details of the case, even though she knew that Kent’s brief Jacobs would be contacting him to do just that soon enough.

  By the time she’d got off the phone, the rest of the team had already gone to the pub, and when she’d walked in fifteen minutes later and seen them clicking glasses in celebration of catching the man who’d been terrorizing London’s young women for the past two years, she hadn’t had the heart to say anything about Kent’s alibi. But she hadn’t had the heart to join in the celebrations either, and had forced herself to drink orange juice rather than a real drink because she needed to think.

  All the available evidence suggested Kent was their killer, yet his alibi seemed cast-iron, and he was screaming his innocence from the rooftops. She felt the familiar stirring of excitement at the prospect of working alone to solve a puzzle that no one else seemed interested in.

  Now that she’d done her bit and shown her face at the pub, her plan was to go back to the station and look through Roisín O’Neill’s file to see if she could find any clues. Roisín was the fourth victim, murdered only a few months before Tina joined the team. Perhaps the coroner had made a mistake with the timing of the death? That kind of thing occasionally happened, and right now it seemed like the obvious alternative. Or that, at least, was what she was hoping as she stubbed her cigarette underfoot.

  She noticed that Sean had disappeared, and thought fleetingly that it was a pity they’d not said goodbye. She wondered if she’d have given him her number if he’d asked for it, and concluded that she probably would have done.

  As she turned to walk back to the station, Dan Grier hurried out of the pub door, and she asked him if he was off home.

  He nodded. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m heading back to the station. I’ve got some more work to do.’

  ‘What kind of work?’ he asked as they fell into step. ‘I thought we’d solved the case.’

  ‘We have,’ she answered, ‘but there are a few ends that need tying up.’

  ‘Anything I can help with?’

  ‘You were on the team when Roisín O’Neill was murdered, weren’t you? Do you remember if anything stood out about her case? That made it different from the others?’

  ‘I heard talk that Kent’s claiming he’s got an alibi for the O’Neill murder.’ Grier looked at her. ‘Is that right?’

  She and MacLeod had agreed to keep Kent’s alibi quiet, but it was always going to get out and she saw no reason not to say anything about it now. ‘It looks like he has, yes. That’s why I wanted to go back and have a look at the file. Roisín’s murder was before my time so I need to read up on it.’

  Grier was silent for a few seconds. ‘There was no footage on Kent’s laptop relating to it. And it was the only one for which there wasn’t, which I suppose in the light of his alibi seems a bit strange.’

  ‘This whole thing seems bloody strange. Try to think, Dan – was the MO exactly the same as the others?’

  ‘Jesus.’

  She put a hand on his arm. ‘What?’

  ‘The MO was the same, but . . .’ He screwed up his face in concentration. ‘But not exactly. There were minor differences.�
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  ‘What kind of differences?’

  ‘The hammer blows. Roisín had her face pummelled in like the others, but if I remember rightly, the actual cause of death was strangulation. He laid into her with the hammer, like he did with all the others, but the difference was he did it after she was already dead.’

  They stood in the middle of the pavement stock-still as the full ramifications of what Grier was saying washed over them both.

  ‘His alibi’s watertight,’ said Tina at last.

  ‘But if he didn’t kill Roisín O’Neill, then who did? And what about the other four girls? Did he kill them, or didn’t he?’

  Tina sighed. ‘I don’t know. But that’s exactly what we need to find out.’

  Nineteen

  ‘You don’t have to help me, Dan,’ Tina told him as they headed back up to the incident room. ‘I know you’ve put in the hours, and I don’t mind doing this myself.’ In truth, she preferred the idea of working alone, especially in an empty office. It meant she could sneak a quick drink if she needed one without arousing suspicion.

  ‘If there are problems with the case then I’d like to help,’ he answered coolly. ‘I’m in no hurry to get home. Melinda’s not expecting me until late anyway.’

  Melinda was Grier’s wife. They’d met at university, and had been together ever since. Tina had never been introduced to her, but she’d noted that whenever Grier spoke about her it was with an obvious fondness in his voice, which was very different to the rest of the married men in the team when they spoke about their wives. It should have made her like him more. Instead it made her jealous.

  Tina split the task of trawling through the Roisín O’Neill file into two, Grier concentrating on Roisín’s background while she looked into the mechanics of the murder itself.

  The first thing Tina noticed was that Roisín fitted the profile of one of the Night Creeper’s victims perfectly. A successful brand manager for a pharmaceutical company, she was physically attractive and, at twenty-nine, right in his age range. She also lived alone and was apparently single. Most importantly, she’d ordered a new alarm system for her West End apartment three months before her death, and it had been installed by Andrew Kent.