The Final Minute Read online

  Mrs Whatret had been intending to use any evidence the camera garnered to secure a decent settlement in a divorce, but she’d been so mortified by what she saw that she’d gone straight to the police, who’d arrested Whatret in his offices the same day (thankfully he’d been with a male patient at the time). What had followed had been entirely predictable: professional disgrace, divorce, the loss of what was left of his assets in damages claims, and eventually a three-year prison sentence.

  Since his release more than two years earlier he’d come close to suicide on more than one occasion, and had begun to hit the bottle in earnest. Funnily enough, that had cured him of his desire to chase women. He no longer had the inclination or the energy, and he would almost certainly have succumbed to his suicidal inclinations by now if it hadn’t been for the mysterious job offer he’d received a few months earlier.

  Whatret had never met his employer. He knew him only as Mr H, and they only ever spoke on the phone. Mr H wanted him to carry out a particular, and highly illegal, form of therapy on a patient living in Wales. Ordinarily Whatret would have turned down the job immediately, having no desire to see the inside of a prison again. But the money was big. Very big. Mr H had left an envelope containing ten grand in cash for him at a deposit box in Hendon, and that was just the retainer. He received another thousand in cash for each of his twice-weekly trips to Wales, plus travelling expenses, and in the absence of anything else, other than state benefits that barely covered the cost of cheap food, it was his only lifeline.

  Now, though, sitting in his flat on a threadbare sofa and staring at the cobwebs on his nicotine-stained ceiling, with only his thoughts and his fears for company, Whatret wished he’d never got involved. The guilt was playing havoc with him, as it always did. He had no wish to be complicit in keeping a vulnerable man in a mentally impaired state while he tried to extract information from him, but this was exactly what he was being paid to do. And when he finally did extract that information, what then? He had a bad feeling that once he and Matthew Barron were no longer of any use to Mr H, their days might well be numbered.

  But was there any other option? He was finished anyway. He might as well try to enjoy his money while he still could. He took another sip of the whisky – he’d splashed out on Black Label – and wondered what he was going to do with his day.

  Which was when the phone rang.

  Straight away he knew who it was. Steeling himself, he picked it up.

  ‘We’ve got a problem,’ said Mr H in that matter-of-fact tone of his. ‘Barron’s gone.’

  Whatret tensed, not liking the sound of this at all. ‘Gone where?’

  ‘We don’t know. The two people looking after him are dead, and the house is burned down. Do you know anything about any of this?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Whatret, trying to keep the nerves out of his voice. ‘I went to see him yesterday as usual, and everything was fine when I left.’

  ‘I’m assuming you haven’t yet got the information out of him.’

  ‘I’d have called if I had.’ He had been given a number to call the moment Barron told him what Mr H needed to hear, but so far that prize had eluded him. ‘I’m getting close, though.’

  ‘That’s not much use to us now he’s gone AWOL, is it? You’ve had two months to get it out of him, and you’ve failed.’

  ‘It’s not easy, Mr H. Barron experienced a catastrophic head injury and you’ve asked me to find out things that he was involved in literally hours before the accident happened. Those memories aren’t going to come back to him just like that. They may never do.’

  ‘That’s not what I want to hear.’ There was a real edge to Mr H’s voice now. ‘How long is his amnesia going to last without his medication and your … therapy?’ He spoke the last word as if it was some kind of voodoo.

  Whatret knew that lying now wasn’t going to help him. He sighed. ‘His memories will start to come back. I’ve had to work very hard to suppress the older ones. With the type of retrograde amnesia Mr Barron’s suffering from, those memories closest to the time of the injury will be the ones that come back last.’ He didn’t bother adding the ‘if at all’ this time, knowing it wouldn’t help. ‘But everything else – those from his childhood, his twenties, his thirties – they’ll all start returning.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  ‘It’s impossible to tell. Retrograde amnesia isn’t a predictable condition. It depends on the individ—’

  ‘How long?’

  This was why Whatret hated dealing with laymen. They had no concept of the complexity of the workings of the various parts of the brain. They just wanted easy answers. ‘Without the drugs and regular hypnotherapy, the first memories, the long-term ones, will start coming back almost immediately. It’s possible – not probable, but possible – that he’ll be remembering a lot of his adult life within days.’

  He heard Mr H curse down the other end of the line.

  ‘There are certain things he’ll never remember, of course,’ Whatret added hurriedly. ‘I spent a long time during the hypnotherapy implanting false memories in Barron’s mind, and also making sure he never remembers some things. I followed your instructions to the letter in that regard.’

  ‘The problems will come when he finds out who he really is. Then he becomes extremely dangerous to us.’

  Whatret had no idea who the ‘us’ were, nor did he want to know. He had a strong feeling that the less information he had the better it would be for his long-term health. ‘It’ll take time for Barron to piece things together,’ he assured Mr H. ‘He’s been in a state of perpetual confusion for the past two months. At the moment, he’s pretty helpless.’

  Mr H was silent for a few moments. ‘If he was being held against his will by people who were prepared to torture him, how much could he reveal?’

  Jesus, thought Whatret, what am I getting involved in here? ‘He doesn’t know much. Certainly not the information you want from him.’ But even as he spoke these words, he experienced a niggling doubt. Barron had been dreaming about the incident in the house with the murders. It wasn’t a complete stretch for him to have remembered what had happened afterwards. But there was no way he could tell Mr H this. Instead he said, ‘He won’t reveal anything about that night. He knows nothing about it. So, do you think he might have been kidnapped?’

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Mr H. ‘But we believe he’s still alive.’

  ‘Am I going to be all right?’ asked Whatret. ‘I mean, after what happened to the other two?’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Sit tight and keep your phone with you at all times. We may well need you.’

  The line went dead, but as Whatret stared at the receiver, he had a terrible feeling that he wasn’t going to be all right. He was in far too deep with some very dangerous people. Worse, he was expendable.

  Mr H put the phone down and shook his head angrily, frustrated with the continued lack of results.

  He was certain that Sean Egan, a man with information that could be worth tens of millions of pounds hidden somewhere in his addled brain, was still alive and had made it out of the house where he was being held without being compromised by the people who’d come to kill him.

  So now he needed to be located and taken out of circulation.

  It was time to put the contingency plan into action.

  Twelve

  I tried to persuade Tina to let me stay at her place but, unsurprisingly, she was having none of it. I could hardly blame her. I looked a mess, my story sounded insane, and, as far as she was concerned, I was a rapist. It hardly made me ideal house-guest material.

  The revelation about the rape had hit me hard. I didn’t see myself as an aggressive or violent man, and the idea of forcing myself on a woman felt completely alien to me. Yet the problem remained that because I didn’t know who I really was, I had no idea whether I was capable of such an act. I’d always acted honourably around Jane, even if my thoughts had been impure at times, but maybe that ha
d been because I relied on her to look after me and didn’t want to risk ruining things between us. Or, of course, because I believed she was my sister. In the end, I was left with the cold, hard facts that not only could I be the rapist Tina had said I was, I could also have been responsible for the killing in that house in my dream.

  Until I got my memory back, anything was possible.

  But at least with Tina on board I had a chance of finding out the truth, however unpalatable it might be.

  We were now in her car on the way to the local hospital so that I could hand myself over to the Accident and Emergency department. I didn’t want to go but didn’t see that I had an alternative. Tina had given me a mobile phone with her number in it so we could contact each other at any time. She’d made me protect it with a passcode, and had told me that if I needed to call her I should phone and leave her a message and she’d call me right back. When I’d asked why her answer had been blunt. ‘No offence, Sean, but I don’t want to be associated with you, and I need to protect myself in case this phone falls into the wrong hands.’

  I could see her point so I didn’t complain. To be fair, Tina had been good to me under the circumstances. She’d also lent me a hundred pounds she’d drawn from the cashpoint, and had treated me to a ham baguette from the local sandwich shop. Since I was the one who was meant to be paying her, I was pretty grateful.

  ‘What do you think they’re going to do with me?’ I asked her as we waited for the lights up ahead to change. The sky had turned a heavy, brooding grey and it had begun to spit with rain.

  She shrugged without looking at me. ‘I don’t know. They might keep you in for observation, or more likely they’ll get you sent to a specialist psychiatric unit, or a care home. Either way, you’ll have a roof over your head.’

  ‘And what are you going to do in the meantime?’

  ‘I’ll make some enquiries into your background. I’ve still got a lot of contacts in the force and I should be able to fill in some of the missing pieces in your story. I’ll also see if you have any family members you can stay with, but the problem is that if you’re right, and there are people after you, you might be putting them in danger.’

  I shook my head wearily. ‘I have so many unanswered questions. Not the least of which is why does someone want me dead?’ I felt the familiar wave of frustration surging over me, followed by a deep, bitter gloom as I pondered the hardest question of all. ‘And what kind of man am I?’

  This time Tina put a sympathetic hand on my arm. ‘We’ll find out the answers, Sean. It might take some time but we’ll get there. I’ve got the licences you took from your sister and your nurse, and they’ve given me something to go on. The info I’ve printed off for you might help too. It doesn’t give you a full picture of your life, or your career, by any means. A lot of what happened to you, particularly where your path crossed with mine, was kept out of the public domain, but again, it’s a start.’

  I looked down at the dozen or so sheets of A4 paper I was holding, and wondered whether anything in there would drag back memories from the abyss, and whether I actually wanted them to.

  The lights turned green and we made a turn before pulling up beside a very modern high-rise building with funky blue windows.

  Tina pulled up on the road outside where a big red sign said Accident and Emergency. ‘OK, this is St Mary’s Hospital A and E. You go up the pedestrian walkway and it’s on the right.’

  Now that it came to it, I didn’t want to leave her. ‘What if they take my phone and I can’t get hold of you?’ I said, not liking the edge of panic in my voice. ‘Look, I don’t want to sound needy, Tina, or weak, but right now … right now, I have no one except you.’ I felt a well of emotion building in me as I spoke the words, and I actually thought that – God forbid – I was going to cry. I hadn’t cried at all during my time at Jane’s; I think the drugs they’d been feeding me had put paid to any emotional outbursts. But now I was having to use every ounce of my willpower to hold back the tears. ‘You can’t imagine what it’s like being me. This city; these streets; this hospital. They all scare the hell out of me.’

  ‘I can’t pretend to know what you’re feeling, Sean, and I can only imagine how horrible it must be having no memory, but St Mary’s is a world-class hospital and the people here will be able to help you.’

  I knew she was right, and that begging to stay with her wasn’t going to help. The well of emotion receded as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Sure, OK. But please keep in contact.’

  I started to get out of the car but Tina put a hand on my arm again. ‘Wait.’ She reached into the glove compartment and took something out of what looked like a jewellery box. ‘Take this, but keep it hidden.’ She handed me a small plastic coin-shaped object.

  I inspected it. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a miniature tracking device. It means I can find out your exact location to the nearest five metres wherever you are, so if you lose the phone, or it gets taken away, I can still find you.’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘That’s impressive.’ Which it was.

  ‘And it’s an expensive piece of kit too, so don’t lose it. The battery life’s only forty-eight hours, so after that time we’ll have to work out what to do, but hopefully things will have settled by then.’

  I leaned down and slipped it into my sock, figuring that was as inconspicuous a place as any. ‘Thanks, Tina. I really appreciate this.’

  She looked at me but didn’t smile. ‘Don’t let me down, Sean.’

  I nodded, and stepped out into the rain.

  Thirteen

  Tina’s next appointment was with Sheryl Warner, the girl who’d rung earlier in the day to talk about Alan Donaldson’s daughter, Lauren, having seen the piece in the Mail. It seemed the two of them had been friends, and after a short conversation with her, Tina had decided that she was well worth visiting.

  On the drive to her house, she thought about Sean Egan. The problem was she couldn’t make up her mind about him. She was almost certain he wasn’t lying about what had happened to him (although the dream in which he’d described Lauren appearing seemed too coincidental), and he’d never struck her as the kind of man who’d rape a woman. But Tina had learned from her long career in the police that seemingly charming, balanced people were capable of doing some terrible things when the mood took them, and Sean had certainly proved capable of violence during that very short space of time he’d been in her orbit all those years back. He’d taken the law into his own hands by unofficially infiltrating a gang of armed robbers and being directly involved in the kidnap of a murder suspect. The murder suspect and all the gang, with the exception of Sean, had ended up dead, and although he’d not been charged in connection with the events, it didn’t mean he hadn’t been responsible for at least some of the killings. It crossed her mind to report what Sean had told her to her former colleagues in the police. After all, by his own admission he had important information about two murders, and if she didn’t say anything she was leaving herself open to charges of perverting the course of justice and assisting an offender.

  Even so, she decided that for now she’d keep quiet and play things by ear. It would be useful to talk to the woman who’d accused Sean of rape, and whose evidence had put him behind bars, but it wouldn’t be easy. Like all rape victims, the woman had lifelong anonymity and Tina would have to pull some strings with old contacts if she was going to track her down. And then what? Even if Sean was completely innocent, the woman was never going to admit it. That was the problem with date rape: it was one person’s word against another. And yet Tina knew she’d feel better about working with Sean once she’d at least had the chance to talk to the woman who, as far as a jury was concerned, had been his victim.

  Sheryl Warner lived at the southern end of Camden Town, close to Morningside tube station. Tina knew the area well. It wasn’t far from where she’d lived for a while with her then boyfriend, a fellow cop called John Gallan; there was an Italian restaurant call
ed Conti’s they’d both liked just off the high street. That had been the last time she’d lived with anyone, and it was a long time back now. John had been dead eight years, and it made her wonder where the time had gone, and what she’d be doing in another eight years.

  There was no parking near the flats so Tina found a spot on a meter a few streets away. It had been raining but the sky was now beginning to clear. Her route took her past the street where Conti’s was and she couldn’t resist a glance to see if it was still there. But it was gone, replaced with a coffee shop that looked to be doing a roaring trade, and in a way that pleased Tina because she knew that seeing Conti’s as she remembered it, with its traditional red and white chequered tablecloths and empty wine bottles lining the walls, would have just made her sad.

  Sheryl’s flat was on the first floor of a large townhouse opposite a well-kept park. At first glance it all looked very nice, like an estate agent’s photo, but a closer look revealed that the park was clearly a hangout for drunks, and barely twenty yards from Sheryl’s front door, but just out of sight, was a dilapidated pre-fab pub that looked more like a fortress, backing on to a huge high-rise estate. As was so often the case in London, Tina thought: turn a corner into the next street and everything changes.

  After being buzzed in, Tina climbed a creaking staircase that smelled vaguely of damp. Before she could knock on the door at the top it was opened by a petite blonde girl in her mid-twenties looking effortlessly pretty and cool in a pink vest, grey track pants and thick socks. She smiled widely, revealing newly whitened teeth that were a bit too big for her mouth. ‘Hi Tina,’ she said in a voice that veered dangerously close to cutesy. ‘Nice to meet you.’ She stuck out a hand, and Tina shook it. ‘Come in.’