The Final Minute Page 16

  The office phone started ringing as she put out the cigarette, and she hurried back inside, seeing a mobile number she didn’t recognize up on the screen.

  It was Sean.

  ‘This is good timing,’ she said. ‘I was just about to call you.’

  ‘We’ve got a real problem,’ he said breathlessly. It sounded like he was outside somewhere in a car. ‘They found me.’

  ‘Jesus. How? We removed the bug.’

  ‘I don’t know, but they were waiting in my hotel room for me when I came back this afternoon.’

  That was when it dawned on Tina. Whoever these people were, they’d clearly identified her by checking the recent location history of Sean’s tracking device and had traced him that way, probably through his phone call to her office that morning. Which meant her office, and her phone, were almost certainly bugged.

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ she said, writing down his mobile number on a piece of paper. ‘I’m going to call you back on your number in two minutes.’

  Hanging up, Tina grabbed the slip of paper and hurried out the door, checking it briefly for any signs of a break-in. But nothing looked tampered with. Which scared her even more. Only professionals of the highest calibre would be able to break into this building without tripping the alarm, then get into her office and have the wherewithal and the technical gadgetry to bug her phone so they could trace the location of incoming calls. She might be wrong, of course. It was possible that there was another tracker somewhere on Sean’s body, but she doubted it. It was hard enough implanting one without it being discovered; implanting two would have been near impossible. There just weren’t enough locations.

  There was a phone box about two hundred yards away on the next road along. Tina ran all the way down to it and dialled Sean’s number. He answered immediately, still sounding like he was in a car.

  ‘Where did you call me from this morning when you left the message on my office phone?’ she demanded.

  ‘My room. I didn’t have a mobile.’

  ‘There’s only two ways they could have found you. One’s if they’ve implanted you with a secondary tracking device.’

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘After last night, I checked every inch of my body. And I mean every inch. There’s no way I’m carrying another. I’d have found it.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s what I suspected. The only other way is if they’ve bugged my offices.’ She explained how they could have done it.

  ‘Shit,’ he said when she’d finished. ‘These guys are good.’

  ‘Not that good. I’m assuming you got away.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s what I wanted to talk about.’

  Something in his tone of voice put Tina on her guard. ‘What happened?’

  ‘There was an altercation in my room. They were trying to get me to go with them again but they got disturbed by the cleaner. One of them had a gun and I got hold of it.’ There was a heavy pause. ‘I shot the guy with the beard, the one you Tasered last night. Then I got the hell out of there. I had to borrow a car in the process.’

  ‘The guy you shot. Is he …?’ Tina let the sentence trail off, not wanting to hear the answer.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said slowly. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake, Sean. You’ve got to go to the police.’

  ‘Before I do, I need to speak to you. And not on the phone either. It’s too dangerous.’

  ‘Meeting you’s just as dangerous after what’s just happened.’

  ‘Please, Tina. I’m begging.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘There’s a layby about a mile north of Cheshunt on the A10. If you come off at junction twenty-six of the M25 it’s about a ten-minute drive. I’m parked in a blue Ford Fiesta with white stripes on the side.’

  ‘Classy,’ said Tina. ‘All right, I’ll meet you there.’

  Twenty-seven

  It had just turned 3.30 when Tina pulled in behind the Ford Fiesta that Sean had somehow liberated from its rightful owner. She really didn’t want to hear how he’d managed that. On the way there she’d driven past the hotel and the sight of the ambulance and dozen or so police vehicles in its car park had reminded her in the starkest terms that she couldn’t keep her association with him secret any longer. It would only take the investigating officers a matter of hours, if that, to link the hotel’s fugitive guest to her credit card, and then they’d be knocking on her door.

  The layby was on a straight stretch of semi-rural dual carriageway, with fields on both sides, and aside from her car and Sean’s, it was empty. Tina got out and walked over to the Fiesta, surprised to find there was no one in the driver’s seat. Then she saw Sean waving at her from under a tree about twenty yards away. She had to climb over a fence to get to him, and as she approached she saw he was looking tired and dishevelled, even though he was wearing new clothes.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Tina,’ he said with a big smile. He seemed genuinely happy to see her.

  ‘This can’t carry on, Sean.’

  He sighed. ‘I can’t go to the police yet. They’ll never believe my story.’

  ‘But you can’t keep running. Where are you going to go?’

  ‘I don’t know, but my memory’s coming back fast now, and if you can locate the psychotherapist who was treating me back at the place in Wales, then I think he can fill in some of the gaps. We used to have these hypnotherapy sessions and I think he was planting false memories in me to keep me confused. You know, I’m still convinced somewhere in my subconscious that Jane was my sister, even though I know in my head she can’t have been. Because I know I had no sister.’ He was talking fast, bouncing on his toes as he spoke, and constantly running his hand through his hair, giving Tina glimpses of the thick pink scar that ran across the top of his forehead, and which had snatched away the first thirty-eight years of his life in one life-changing instant.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do to find him, Sean.’

  ‘His name’s Dr Bronson, and he’s in his mid-fifties. Big guy, black hair going slightly grey. Wears glasses. He’s the one who’s been trying to extract the information about the location of the bodies that all the people after me keep talking about, and I assume he’s been doing that under hypnotherapy as well.’

  ‘And you haven’t had any further memories about that dream involving the girls?’ Tina asked, deciding against telling Sean what she’d found out about Lauren and Jen’s potential work as prostitutes.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m sure the women in the dream are the ones whose bodies they’re after, though.’

  Tina sighed, and thought of Alan Donaldson. ‘I have a feeling you could be right. But why is their location so important?’

  ‘I have no idea, but the couple who tortured and killed Tom and Jane at the house are working against the two guys who kidnapped me from A and E and who came after me today. And I have no idea who any of them are. I did manage to pull the wallet of the guy I shot, but there was no ID on him. Just some cash.’

  ‘And you’re going to spend that, right?’

  He frowned. ‘Look, I know how it looks, but it was self-defence. It was their gun. They were going to kidnap me. I resisted.’

  ‘But you still found the time to rifle through your victim’s pockets. That suggests to me you’re either very cool under pressure or you’re not actually that bothered that you’ve killed someone.’

  ‘Look, Tina. I didn’t ask for any of this. All I’m trying to do is find out why I’m being targeted. You know I’m not a cold-blooded killer. I was a copper for most of my adult life, for Christ’s sake. I saved your life once, remember?’

  ‘So you keep telling me,’ she said, but she wasn’t convinced. In fact, standing there out of sight of the traffic on the road, she realized that she was a little scared of the man in front of her. ‘But people aren’t going to believe you’re innocent if you shoot a man dead, steal his wallet and then go on the run. Where’s the gun?’

  He gesture
d towards a thick tangle of bushes behind him. ‘In there. I unloaded it, then buried it and the bullets separately.’ He sighed. ‘I will go to the police, I promise, but I want to face them knowing exactly who I am, and what I’ve done.’

  ‘That’s a laudable aim, Sean, but I’m not sure it’s going to work out like that.’

  ‘I won’t involve you with anything, I promise.’

  ‘You already have. I booked you into the hotel room on my credit card, remember?’

  ‘But you haven’t actually done anything wrong. I came to you asking for help, you tried to provide it, and now you can cut all your ties with me, and that’ll be that.’

  ‘You know I’m going to have to talk to the police.’

  He nodded. ‘Of course I do. Tell them whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. You don’t know where I’m going so you can’t help them in that way.’ He reached into his back pocket and pulled out the tracking device she’d given him. ‘Take this. I don’t need it any more. And I’m going to turn off the phone I’m carrying, and dump the car, so there’s no way you can reach me. If I remember anything about Lauren Donaldson, I’ll call you.’

  ‘If you do, be careful about leaving messages. The police will be monitoring my phones. And so, I suspect, will the people after you.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry for getting you into all this. I didn’t mean to get you into any trouble.’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Sometimes these things happen. Especially to me.’ She managed a smile. ‘You’ve certainly provided some excitement.’

  ‘And that’s got to be a good thing, right?’ He took a step closer. ‘Thanks for everything, Tina. I’ll pay you back the money too, I promise.’

  Then, without warning, he moved right into her space, took her in his arms and started to kiss her.

  The move was so sudden, Tina was caught completely off-guard, and for a second she was too shocked to react.

  But only for a second.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she snapped, shoving him away with both hands.

  He stumbled backwards, looking as surprised as she was. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.’

  ‘Jesus, Sean. What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m just very attracted to you that’s all. I have been since the moment we met.’ He tried a boyish smile.

  It didn’t work. ‘You’re a convicted rapist, and a man who’s got quite enough on his plate without alienating me.’

  And with that she turned away and headed back to her car, without wishing him luck.

  Twenty-eight

  The Sunny View Hotel was bedlam when DCI Mike Bolt arrived. A whole section of the building including the reception area and the emergency staircase was now a crime scene, and its 180 rooms were in the process of being evacuated. Quite a few of those guests, some of them angry at being herded out on to the street and not being able to get to their cars, milled around the edges of the scene-of-crime tape that lined the central third of the car park, arguing with the uniforms protecting the crime scene’s perimeter. There were also plenty of bystanders gathered at the car park entrance eager to see what all the fuss was about, while police vehicles lined the street on both sides, causing a traffic bottleneck that stretched for several hundred yards in both directions.

  It had just turned 4.15 on a sunny afternoon, and any hope that Bolt had had of getting away on time that night had evaporated the minute they’d been given news of the fatal shooting in Room 305. As the head of one of the Met’s more local Murder Investigation Teams, this was always going to be his case.

  He found a parking spot outside a giant B&Q about fifty yards further down the street, got himself kitted up inside the cordon and called his long-time colleague Mo Khan, who’d arrived separately half an hour earlier.

  Mo met him on the front steps of the hotel and they shook hands, even though they’d seen each other earlier that day. It was a habit of theirs.

  ‘What have we got exactly?’ Bolt asked.

  Mo opened up the notebook he always carried with him. ‘It’s a bit of a strange one, boss, to be honest. We’ve got an altercation in a hotel room. The cleaner’s cleaning the room next door. She sees one of the guests walk back to his room, then when she knocks on his door to see if she can clean his room, she hears the sounds of a struggle, followed by a succession of gunshots. Next thing, the guest’s running out the hotel with a gun leaving behind a dead male. There’s a witness too. A guy who was in the room with the two of them.’

  ‘And he’s unhurt?’

  ‘Yeah. He’s sitting in the car over there.’ He pointed at a patrol car on the far edge of the car park, away from the crowds. Two uniforms stood next to it. ‘We’ve cuffed him to be on the safe side. He hasn’t been searched.’

  ‘We need to get an incident room set up at Barnet and get him down there ASAP.’

  ‘I’ve got Grier on it now. We should be operational in the next hour.’

  ‘Has anyone spoken to this witness yet?’

  ‘Well, that’s the strange thing, boss. He’s refusing to speak to anyone below the rank of DCI. The DI from Barnet tried. So did I. But no go, and he’s not saying why either.’

  ‘What about the victim? What have we got on him?’

  Mo shook his head. ‘Nothing. He’s an IC1 male, early to mid-forties, shot four times at pretty close range. He wasn’t carrying any ID, but interestingly he was wearing gloves.’

  ‘That is interesting,’ Bolt agreed. Not many people wore gloves inside on a warm sunny day, and most people carried ID. ‘What about the other guy? The witness. Did he have gloves on?’

  ‘No, but if he’s tried to get rid of them, we’ll find them.’

  ‘And when our suspect was walking past the cleaner back to his room, he was alone, right?’

  ‘That’s right. And apparently acting normally. He even said hello to her.’

  ‘And how long after that did she think the shooting occurred?’

  ‘Not long. She reckons she’d almost finished cleaning the room when she saw the suspect, and she was doing his one next. Only a couple of minutes. And she says she didn’t hear any sound of an argument before that. In fact she said she heard nothing.’

  Bolt nodded slowly. ‘So these two guys were waiting for him in his room. He turns up, and a few minutes later one of them’s dead and the suspect’s charging through the hotel with a gun. Have we got an ID on the suspect yet?’

  ‘A couple of guys from Barnet CID are talking to reception. I was just on my way to see if they’d got a name when you called.’

  ‘OK, why don’t you do that now? In the meantime, let me see if our witness fancies breaking his silence with me and telling us what the hell’s going on.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, boss,’ said Mo as Bolt turned away. ‘He doesn’t look much like your average criminal.’

  Bolt smiled. ‘The best ones never do.’

  But in truth, he was already a little perplexed. If their witness had been part of some kind of ambush, or dodgy business deal gone wrong, why had he hung around waiting to be questioned? Most criminals were stupid and their motives simple. Greed, jealousy or drunkenness generally covered the whole spectrum. If something went wrong during one of their crimes, and especially if someone ended up dead, they tended to panic and run. But this guy hadn’t. Then again, by refusing to speak, he wasn’t acting like a frightened witness either. Bolt was intrigued.

  He was even more so when he opened the back door to the patrol car and looked down at a fairly ordinary-looking man of about fifty, dressed like he was sixty, with a badly fashioned comb-over that had clearly come somewhat askew during the events upstairs. His hands were cuffed behind his back but he didn’t look remotely scared. There was a confidence about him that belied his appearance, and he looked more pissed off as Bolt introduced himself as a DCI and the SIO of the team that would be investigating the murder, and climbed inside next to him.

  The witness asked
to see Bolt’s ID, and Bolt held the warrant card in front of him so he could read it properly.

  ‘Can I have these restraints taken off?’ he said in an educated accent that suggested he’d probably gone to a half-decent public school.

  ‘Not until we establish who you are. I understand you didn’t want to talk to any of the other officers.’

  ‘I was waiting for the head of any investigation.’

  ‘Well, you’ve got him now. So, who are you?’

  ‘If you reach into the inside breast pocket of my jacket, you’ll find my ID.’

  Bolt did as requested, and pulled out a small plastic card. One look and he knew why the man in front of him, who according to his MI5 identity card was called Carl Hughie, wasn’t talking.

  Bolt sighed. ‘You’re a spook.’

  ‘Yes. I’m going to give you the name and number of a man right at the top who can establish my bona fides. My colleague and I have been involved in a very sensitive operation. We were at the hotel room this afternoon to meet an individual of interest. However, the individual produced a handgun and shot my colleague before fleeing the scene.’ He spoke the words calmly and matter-of-factly as if he’d been rehearsing them in the car.

  ‘What was your colleague’s name? And why was he carrying no ID?’

  ‘I’ve said everything I’m prepared to say. You need to speak to my superior. You can have his number.’

  ‘This is a murder investigation, Mr Hughie. You’re a witness. In fact, right now you’re actually a suspect. You can’t just pick and choose the questions you answer.’

  ‘I’m involved in a matter of national security, DCI Bolt, and there are very good reasons why I can’t help you right now. My superior will give you, or your superiors, a more detailed explanation.’