The Last 10 Seconds: A Novel Page 4

  The hammer came out of nowhere, striking Adrienne full in the face, only the head and the top of the handle visible.

  Tina flinched and turned away. She’d seen some terrible things in her career, including a young woman being shot dead in front of her, but this was somehow worse, because it felt sickeningly voyeuristic, almost as if she was giving the killer her tacit support by watching.

  She could hear the crunching sound of the hammer as it struck Adrienne again and again, but it wasn’t that sound that Tina would remember. It was the rasping, gurgling wail of pain and terror that Adrienne made in time with her tortured but surprisingly deep breathing as she lay dying.

  Tina forced herself to turn back, knowing that it was part of her job to view the evidence. She kept her eyes rigidly on the screen, her world reduced to this laptop and the savagery being played out on it.

  It seemed to last for an interminably long time, although she found out later that the film was only seven minutes and twenty seconds long, and it involved the killer doing other things to his victim, terrible sexual things that she recalled from the autopsy reports. And throughout it all there was not a single glimpse of him, not even a gloved hand at the end of the hammer. Even in the midst of his bloodlust he was being careful and controlled in his actions, and when he’d finished, and what was left of Adrienne Menzies was no longer moving, the camera shut off abruptly. Just like that.

  Tina swallowed hard, and for a number of seconds continued to stare at the blank screen, conscious of how hard and fast her heart was beating – a thought that made her feel ashamed. Beside her, she could hear DCI MacLeod’s laboured breathing. Then he stepped forward and shut the laptop’s lid, as if by doing so he could shut out the horror they’d just witnessed.

  ‘Good God,’ he said quietly. ‘What drives some people?’

  There was no answer to this. All Tina knew for sure was that she’d met far too many of them in her police career, and the crimes they committed never got any easier to handle. More than once in recent months, her parents and brother, still reeling from the fact that she’d killed a man in the line of duty, and even more horrified that she’d joined the team tasked with tracking down a serial killer, had suggested that her job was doing her more harm than good. They were almost certainly right, yet Tina was capable neither of leaving the career that she seemed to love and loathe in equal measure, nor of coping with its constant pressures.

  ‘The hammer looked like the one we found at Kent’s place, didn’t it?’ she said at last.

  ‘Impossible to tell for sure, and that’s exactly what a defence lawyer would say in court. There must be plenty of hammers like that one in existence.’

  ‘It’ll be a lot harder for him to argue about the fact that Adrienne’s DNA was on it, and that there’s a video of the murder on his laptop.’ She shook her head, annoyed with herself for doubting even for a moment that Kent was the Night Creeper. He was just one of the better actors she’d come across in the interview room, and she should have remembered that that was exactly what true psychopaths were. Consummate actors who liked nothing more than pulling the wool over the eyes of those around them.

  MacLeod gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch that, Tina. I hope it doesn’t bring back any memories.’

  She guessed he was referring to when she’d been kidnapped and shot the previous year, but if so, he was wrong, because the memories had never gone away, and as far as Tina was concerned they were her business and no one else’s. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch it too, sir,’ she told him. ‘And don’t worry, it didn’t.’

  ‘Good,’ he said simply, then turned to face DC Grier, who was approaching the two of them almost gingerly. He still looked pale, and Tina felt a renewed respect for him. At least he wasn’t trying to be all macho about it, pretending that it hadn’t affected him.

  ‘There’s another film on there along the same lines,’ he said. ‘It captures Diane Woodward’s murder.’ Diane was the third victim, and at thirty-seven, the oldest. She’d died ten months earlier in very similar circumstances.

  ‘Any clues as to the identity of the perpetrator on that one?’ asked MacLeod.

  Grier shook his head. ‘It was all handheld stuff similar to the one you’ve just seen. There’s also a lot of further footage of the victims taken while they were still alive, but before he broke in to kill them.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he must have put hidden cameras in the apartments when he was fitting the alarms because it shows the victims going about their daily lives. It’s clear he’s edited it down a lot because it’s mainly of an intimate nature. Them getting changed, walking round naked. In one case having sex. That sort of thing. I suppose it made it more fun for him. Stalking them like that but without running any risk of getting caught.’

  ‘And is there footage like this of all of the victims?’

  ‘Three that we’ve found so far.’

  MacLeod ran a hand across his brow. ‘Good God.’

  ‘Is there any way it could have been planted on his laptop?’ Tina asked.

  Grier looked at her like she was mad, and she remembered immediately why she didn’t like him. ‘No way. There’s so much of it for a start, and the dates the footage was first added to the system tie in with the dates of the murders. This stuff’s been put on there over a long period of time. It’s authentic, and it belongs to that computer.’

  ‘Were the files well hidden?’

  ‘They were in a folder within a folder within a folder, squirrelled away among a lot of other files in the My Documents section, all with bland, irrelevant names. It was quite a trawl to locate them.’

  ‘They weren’t that well hidden though, were they? They didn’t have password protection or an encryption system like some of the paedophile networks put on their PCs to stop us accessing the hard drive?’

  Grier looked defensive. ‘Are you suggesting they were easy to find, ma’am?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t think Tina’s saying that at all, Dan,’ put in MacLeod hastily.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’m just checking the facts. That’s all, Dan. OK?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, it’s just I’ve been here with that laptop for most of the last twelve hours trawling through reams of crap until I finally found them.’

  ‘We’ve all had a bit of a traumatic few minutes,’ said DCI MacLeod, ‘so let’s just concentrate on the most important task, which is keeping the evidence safe and secure. Download all the relevant files to a memory stick, Dan, then get the laptop bagged up and sent over to the lab. I want it tested for Kent’s DNA, fingerprints, the lot. I don’t want him trying to deny it belongs to him.’

  Grier looked surprised. ‘He won’t do that, will he, sir?’

  ‘He’s denied everything so far. We need to keep building up the case until it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference how good an actor he is, because the jury’ll have no choice but to find him guilty.’

  When Grier had gone with the laptop, MacLeod turned to Tina. ‘All right, are you ready to finish this bastard off?’

  She nodded firmly. ‘Never readier.’

  ‘Let’s see how he responds to the fact that we’ve found all his home videos.’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You had a big part in bringing him in, Tina. When we’re ready, do you want to be the one who charges him?’

  But had it all been too easy? Andrew Kent had been delivered to them on a plate with the murder weapon in his bedroom and his laptop full of hugely incriminating video evidence. But even as this nagged at her, Tina pushed it aside, knowing that she was just ignoring the obvious explanation, which was that Kent was like all the other cold-blooded killers who’d begun to believe the hype of their invincibility and had become too complacent.

  ‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I want to watch him squirm.’

  Six

  The job Tyrone Wolfe wanted me to carry out was to buy some guns from a
n underworld dealer based in Canning Town. Although he’d told Tommy to drive me to the destination, he’d made it clear that I was to go in and make the purchase alone. His rationale was simple: if I bought the guns, I was committing a serious crime and therefore couldn’t be a copper. But the rationale was flawed, because by sending me on my way with Tommy driving they’d put me in a position where I had no choice but to commit it, since failure to do so would have blown my cover. I wasn’t sure whether my handler at CO10 would see it quite like that, of course. DI Robin Samuel-Smith, or Captain Bob as he was universally known behind his back, liked to play things by the book. But I’d worry about that one later.

  Wolfe had given me an envelope containing five grand in cash – payment for two automatic shotguns and a handgun – handed me back the rest of my possessions, including my recording watch, and told me that I was expected at the dealer’s place half an hour ago, and that he’d see me with the goods later.

  We were now in Tommy’s car en route. In the back seat, sitting up with his tongue lolling out, was Tommy’s dog, Tommy Junior, an unhealthy-looking mongrel with a mangled ear who always smelled of old raincoats. The story went that Tommy had rescued him from a gang of teenage thugs who’d tied his front and back paws together and were about to dump him in the murky waters of Regent’s Canal. Tommy had thrown in one of the thugs instead, and when a second pulled a knife on him, he’d produced an extendable baton and broken his nose with it before sending him in with his mate. The others had done the sensible thing and fled.

  Tommy Junior loved his master and, perhaps unsurprisingly, distrusted everyone else. He seemed to have taken a particular dislike to me because in the last three months I’d become something of a regular in the front seat, which was the one he liked to occupy.

  It had taken me a month of hanging round the periphery of the north London underworld, drinking in grimy little backstreet pubs with small-time crims and putting my name about as Sean Tatelli, an ex-con on the lookout for decent work, before I got introduced to Tommy. That was three months ago now, and we’d spent a lot of time together since. For a while that had involved nothing more than going out drinking and shooting the breeze. Like a lot of criminals, Tommy was good company, with a wealth of amusing stories to tell. Slowly, though, he’d begun to take me into his confidence, giving me bits and pieces of work to do, always suggesting that something bigger would come along, until finally, today, he’d pulled up outside the flat I used for my undercover ops and told me that he had work for me. Real work this time.

  ‘Who’s it we’re meant to be snatching?’ I asked Tommy, keen to have something to go back to Captain Bob with.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, fixing me with deep-set eyes that always had a melancholy expression in them, even when he was telling a good story. ‘I don’t work with Wolfe as much as I used to these days. But you said he offered you a hundred grand. Well, heoffered me one fifty, so I’m thinking him and Haddock must be making at least two apiece, maybe more, which means whoever it is we’re after’s worth a lot of money to someone. All I know is it’s one man, and his escort’s not going to be armed. That’s it. I don’t even know the location.’

  ‘Do you know how Wolfe got to hear of the job?’

  He shook his head. ‘He’s keeping everything close to his chest, and he’s even more jumpy than usual about it. That’s why he’s being all cloak and dagger with you. He doesn’t like using people from outside the crew for work, but he needed a fourth man, and seeing as you and me are mates, and you need the work . . .’

  ‘Thanks for thinking of me,’ I said, feeling an unusual twinge of guilt that I was going to betray him. Tommy Allen was a violent criminal, but I’d grown closer to him than I’d have liked. At forty-five, he was only twelve years older than me, but sometimes he acted as if I was the son he’d never had.

  The car fell silent, and he lit a cigarette.

  I looked at it longingly. I only allow myself two cigarettes per day, one after lunch, one after supper. It’s my routine, and I stick to it. But I was sorely tempted to make an exception now, knowing that I was heading out of the frying pan and possibly straight into the fire.

  I stared out of the car window, trying hard to ignore the pounding of my heart as the hotels, theatres and pavement cafés of the West End gave way to the grand Victorian buildings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the legal quarter, and then the steel-and-glass high-rises of the City. Finally, the wealth slipped away and we were into the poorer tenements and terraced housing that was the sprawling East End. This area of London had suffered most under the bombardment of the Luftwaffe in the Second World War, and it showed in the slapdash nature of much of the architecture: Victorian tenements, 1950s terraces, 1960s tower blocks, all running into one another to the cheerful beats of Tommy’s Best of Level 42 CD.

  Tommy, I’d found out in the time I’d known him, was a big fan of 1980s music, and particularly Level 42. He’d been singing along pretty much non-stop to the tracks throughout the journey, occasionally accompanied by Tommy Junior howling from the back seat, creating an out-of-tune cacophony that would have made me gouge out my own eyes if I hadn’t been so preoccupied. Finally, as one of the band’s lesser hits, ‘Microkid’, came on, Tommy seemed to notice for the first time that I wasn’t saying much.

  He turned down the music. ‘Listen, Sean, you’re not scared, are you?’

  ‘No, I’ve just been struck dumb by the quality of your and Tommy Junior’s singing.’

  He chuckled. ‘“Lessons in Love” is Tommy Junior’s favourite. He really catches the high notes on that one.’ He turned to me, his face growing serious again. ‘I can vouch for these blokes, you know. The ones you’re buying off. I’ve done stuff with them myself before. They’re reliable.’

  Which was a refrain I’d heard plenty of times before about criminals. They’re reliable. The problem was, for the most part, they weren’t. They tended to be paranoid, highly strung, violent, and often drugged up, which was a pretty lethal combination. In the course of my career I’ve had two guns pulled on me, four knives, an axe, a tyre iron, baseball bats, even a fake medieval ball and chain. I’ve been held down by a gang of crazed thugs, flying on a diet of vodka and crack, who doused me in petrol and threatened to burn me alive unless I gave them the drugs I was supposed to be carrying (I didn’t, and they didn’t), and many’s the time I’ve woken up in the morning wondering when my luck’s going to run out.

  But in spite of all that, I knew I could never give up the job. I was too much of a believer in the old adage: evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Evil was doing pretty well as it was these days, and there was no shortage of those doing nothing. When I was a young kid, I went to sleep at night thinking that there was a copper standing guard on the street outside my window, there to protect me from all the creatures who haunt the nightmares of children, and it always comforted me to believe he was there. Now I was that copper, and there were plenty of people out there relying on me.

  It was just after one p.m. when Tommy pulled into a decrepit-looking street of pre-war terraced housing north of the Barking Road. One end of the terrace ended suddenly where part of the last house had collapsed into a pile of rubble, and was then replaced by a strip of uneven wasteland on which a burned-out car sat, missing its wheels. Forlorn pieces of litter scattered and drifted across the tarmac in the dusty breeze, and in the distance, red and blue tower cranes rose like mantises above the crumbling skyline. Facing the wasteland on the other side of the road was a line of cheap, windswept shops, the majority of which were either boarded up or had the shutters down.

  ‘There’s the place,’ said Tommy, parking up and motioning towards a takeaway restaurant called Zafiah’s Fine Jamaican Cuisine, which sat hunched and uninviting next to an empty unit with scorchmarks up its front, like it had been petrol-bombed. A couple of kids in hoodies, their faces hidden, sat on mountain bikes outside, sharing what looked like a joint.

  ‘It looks closed,’ I said.


  ‘It is, but they’re expecting us. Just go round to the side door and ask for Mitchell. And check the guns work before you give him any money. I’ll wait here for you.’

  I stared at him. ‘You’re really not coming in with me?’

  He gave me a regretful, hangdog look that made his fleshy jowls hang down. ‘I can’t, mate. Wolfe wants you to do this alone. It’s his orders. That way he knows he can definitely trust you.’

  ‘But Wolfe’s not here, Tommy. I don’t even know these guys. You’ve got to help me out here.’

  ‘There’ll be no problem, Sean. Honest. You’ll be all right.’

  It was then that I realized Tommy didn’t trust me entirely either. That I was doing this to prove myself to him as well as to Wolfe. I was well and truly on my own.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ I said, opening the door. ‘If I’m not out in ten minutes, come and get me.’

  He gave me a reassuring smile, said sure, no problem, there was nothing to worry about. But in my game there always is.

  It had already been a bad morning, and I had to force myself to get out of the car. At that moment I felt like jacking the whole thing in and applying for desk duties at Scotland Yard, far away from all this crap. The envelope containing the five grand was tucked into the front of my jeans, with my shirt covering it, and even though it was out of sight, I knew I was still vulnerable.

  I crossed the road and walked past the kids in their hoodies, ignoring their stares and keeping my pace casual, before passing by the front of the takeaway. The interior was dark and empty, and as I rounded the corner and moved into the alleyway leading down to the side door I pondered calling Captain Bob to let him know my current status, maybe even get some emergency back-up in case things didn’t run as smoothly as Tommy was claiming they would. But Bob would never have authorized me to go inside alone. I was just going to have to hope this deal went OK, then I could pass on the information about the gun dealer, and in a few days’ or weeks’ time, when the memory of my visit had faded, the dealer could be arrested without fuss or hassle. That was the good thing about undercover work. The domino effect. Infiltrate one gang and you soon get leads on another. The underworld, like the legitimate one, is all about people doing business together.