The Last 10 Seconds (17 page)

As they reached the bottom of the road, where it joined the A404 heading back into London, Tina stopped the car. She was feeling frustrated. They were still fumbling about in the dark, and she knew that Grier was rapidly losing interest in her theories, if he’d ever had any at all.

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked as she opened the car door.

She pointed up to a CCTV camera on top of a metal pole, partially obscured by one of the oak trees that lined both sides of the road, which she’d spotted on the way in. It covered the entrance to the cul-de-sac, and any vehicle that came in or out of it would have to pass under its gaze. Beneath the camera was a sign advertising the twenty-four-hour security company that operated it. ‘Maybe the operator saw something,’ she said, walking over to take down the company’s number.

The drizzling rain had stopped now and the night was warm.

‘Listen, ma’am.’ Grier had also got out of the car, and walked up beside her. ‘I think we could be wasting time here.’

She pulled out a cigarette. ‘I know. You’ve made that clear.’

‘O’Neill died of a heart attack. Not a bullet to the head. He was a big guy in his late fifties who’d had heart trouble before, and who’d been under a lot of pressure since his daughter’s death. This could just be the culmination of it.’

‘His daughter died eight months ago.’

‘I think you’re becoming a conspiracy theorist.’

Tina felt a punch of anger. ‘And I can’t believe you can’t see what’s happening. Kent’s been snatched for a reason. There are a lot of people involved, and now, when we look more closely at the one victim where the MO’s not like the others, we find that her father, who hasn’t had any recent health problems, has suddenly dropped dead. There is a conspiracy, and there’s no theory about it. It’s real.’

‘But even if Roisín’s murder is different, and wasn’t committed by Kent, why would the person who did it kill her father? And why, then, would they also snatch Kent? It just doesn’t make sense.’

Ignoring the rain, Tina lit the cigarette, noticing that Grier was giving her a look that might be construed as pitying. She’d received a fair number like that over the years from people who professed to admire her determination and tenacity, and her excellent record for helping solve high-profile cases, but who also wondered how someone who’d lost several colleagues in the line of duty and who’d been kidnapped herself, not to mention shot twice, could genuinely be ‘all there’. In truth, she should never have been a DI, since she was a far better detective than a manager, but the reason she’d been promoted was because she didn’t give up.

‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am barking up the wrong tree. But it’s better than barking up no tree at all.’

Grier made a play of looking at his watch. ‘There’s nothing else we can realistically do tonight, ma’am. It’s not long ’til midnight, we’ve been on duty for fifteen hours, and phoning doctors or security companies, or whoever else, isn’t going to help us find Andrew Kent. But a good night’s sleep might.’

Tina was beginning to realize she didn’t like being called ma’am. It suggested she had a responsibility towards the people reporting to her that she wasn’t sure she could handle. After all, today she’d almost got Grier killed. ‘Do me a favour, Dan. For tonight at least, call me Tina.’

He sighed. ‘OK, Tina. Just for one night, why don’t you take a step back, relax a little, and get a decent night’s sleep?’

She wanted to say because this job, and the fact that I’m good at it, is all I’ve got. Instead, she turned and walked back to the car, wondering how long she had left before she finally burned out.

Thirty-two

I lay in the darkness for a long time, wondering why Wolfe hadn’t killed me when he’d had the opportunity, but without coming to any conclusions. All I knew was that I had to try to get out of there.

But when I finally felt ready to get to my feet and try the door, I found it was stuck fast, and it wasn’t budging, however hard I pushed. So I sat back down and waited for Wolfe and Haddock to come back and finish off what they’d started, trying to recover as much as possible from the beating in the meantime so that I’d be ready to make a break when the opportunity arose. My injuries, though painful – especially the ribs, one of which was definitely fractured – were tolerable and wouldn’t stop me from making my move.

But it was hard being trapped in there, unarmed and waiting to die, trying to ignore a growing feeling of claustrophobia. I could hear occasional noises coming from downstairs – mainly banging about, no voices – and at some point I thought I heard the sound of a car driving away.

This was followed by silence, and I wondered whether the others had left the building. At first, the thought filled me with a delirious hope – if they’d left me here, it meant they weren’t going to kill me – but the realization quickly dawned that I was also imprisoned in an abandoned building miles from anywhere, and would almost certainly starve to death before I was discovered.

So I got back up and repeatedly shoulder-barged the door, no longer concerned about drawing attention to myself, until finally, my shoulder sore with trying, I gave up and sat back down again. Waiting. Although for what, I wasn’t sure.

I wondered if Kent was still here, if he was even still alive. More than that, though, I wondered why he’d been snatched in the first place. He’d claimed to know something, and Wolfe had been extremely keen to shut him up before he said any more. What could he have known that was so important that it was worthwhile for someone to pay for him to be broken out at gunpoint? And what did it have to do with the killings he’d been accused of ?

I was in the process of cursing myself for ever getting involved in such a terrible mess when something happened. All the lights in the building went out. I could tell this because even though I was in a tiny windowless room, there’d been a thin orange glow in the crack beneath the door. Now, suddenly, it was gone.

I got up and listened at the door.

For several minutes there was nothing, then I heard the sound of footsteps, quiet yet unmistakable, coming up the staircase, accompanied by the creaking of old wood.

I clenched my fists, took a deep breath, and waited.

The footsteps came closer, slow and cautious.

I could hear my heart beating. This was it.

‘Hello?’ The footsteps stopped. ‘Hello?’

The voice was female and heavily accented. It was Lee, Wolfe’s girlfriend, and she sounded worried.

Straight away I decided it couldn’t be a trick. ‘I’m in here,’ I called out, rapping on the door. ‘It’s bolted from the outside.’

I heard the bolt being pulled across, and stepped back as the door opened.

Lee stood in the doorway, only just visible in the gloom. ‘Are you OK?’ she asked, then, as she stepped forward to get a better look at me, she gasped as her question was answered. ‘You are hurt badly.’ She touched my face in a strangely erotic gesture, running her fingers along the bruising.

‘I’m OK,’ I said, removing the hand and stepping out into the darkened hallway. ‘But what’s going on?’

‘I don’t know. Ty had to go off and bury the guns somewhere.’

‘Do you know where?’ I asked, thinking once again about gathering evidence.

She shook her head. ‘No, but he promised he wouldn’t be long. He told Clarence to look after me, but Clarence . . . him and me, we’re not friends. He goes off to another room, leaves me in kitchen, and then, ten minutes ago, boom, all the lights go out. Now I can’t find Clarence anywhere. I call out his name, he doesn’t answer.’

‘What about Tommy? Where’s he?’

‘The other one? He was around earlier but I haven’t seen him for long time now.’

‘And has the client turned up?’

‘No. No one’s come here.’

I frowned. Had Haddock and Tommy abandoned the place while Wolfe was gone? From the silence in the house, I had to assume they had, but I couldn’t understand why, particularly if the client hadn’t arrived.

‘How long’s Wolfe been gone?’

‘Half an hour. Maybe longer.’

‘Was he on foot?’

She nodded. ‘Yes.’

So he was burying the guns somewhere near the building, which meant it probably wouldn’t be long until he got back.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Sean.’

‘I’m Lee.’ She moved closer to me. ‘I’m scared, Sean.’

‘We need to get out of here.’

I moved past her in the direction of the stairs, listening for the sound of anyone else, but not hearing anything.

‘What about Ty?’ she asked, following.

‘You can do a lot better than Ty, Lee.’

‘He says he’ll kill me if I leave him.’

I put a finger to my lips and we moved as quietly as we could down the staircase. But it still creaked angrily under our combined weight, sounding like it was going to give way at any moment. The silence in the gloom was loud in my ears, and I could hear my heart beating hard as I felt the first stirrings of hope. After coming so close to death, it actually looked like I might get out of here in one piece after all. I had Lee to thank for this, which was why I was taking her with me. I was going to do her a major favour by getting Tyrone Wolfe out of her life.

The door was unlocked and the air cool as I stepped outside. Woodland surrounded us on all sides, and aside from the faint orange glow of London in the distance, there was just more silence. The night was clear and starry, and I felt the first yearning for freedom. The minibus we’d come here in was still on the driveway where Wolfe had parked it earlier, which puzzled me, because it meant that if Haddock and Tommy had left, they’d used some other form of transport.

I turned to Lee. ‘How did you get here tonight?’

‘I came on a motorbike.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Round the side of the house.’

‘Have you still got the keys?’

She nodded, feeling in her pocket. ‘Yes.’

‘Good. We’re leaving on that, then. I just need to collect something.’

I went up to the minibus window and peered inside, looking for the jiffy bag containing the thirty grand that Haddock had given me, and wasn’t surprised to see that it was gone, doubtless removed by one of them earlier.

But as I turned away, keen to get going as quickly as possible, I saw something that stopped me dead.

It was the tyres on the minibus. There were deep, uneven gashes in them.

‘What is it?’ asked Lee uncertainly.

I didn’t say anything, wondering who could have done this. And why. Then I went round the other side. It was the same.

‘Someone’s slashed the tyres.’

‘Who?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

I looked out into the trees, scanning them for any sign of life. But there was nothing, no movement at all, and I experienced a growing dread.

I grabbed her by the hand and we hurried round the side of the building, with me leading, just in case whoever had sabotaged the minibus was waiting for us.

But they weren’t.

There was only a 125 motorbike, leaning up against the exterior wall. I looked down at the tyres and my worst fears were confirmed. They too had been slashed.

‘What’s going on here, Sean? Who’s doing this?’

‘God knows,’ I whispered, looking round in the silence, wondering if whoever had done this was watching us now.

Finally, I turned back to Lee. She suddenly looked more like a terrified girl than the confident über-bitch who’d greeted us at the door earlier. ‘This place is abandoned. How did you get the lights on earlier?’

‘Generator,’ she said, pointing to a brick outbuilding a few yards away. ‘But I shut the door when I got it working.’

The door was now wide open.

So, whoever had slashed the tyres had gone to work on the generator as well.

I approached the door slowly, hoping there might be some tools in there we could use for basic weapons, but wary too of going inside. Lee stayed a few yards back as I slowly entered the doorway and stared into the gloom. Boxes, most of them empty, were piled up untidily on both sides of the room, while the generator itself – a clapped-out old thing that had probably been put in when the place was still a farm – took up most of the opposite wall.

The place looked deserted and there didn’t seem to be anywhere to hide so I went inside, making my way slowly over to the generator itself, conscious of my own breathing. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my lighter and flicked it on, glancing round nervously.

As I’d expected, the flap to the electrics box was open and a bundle of severed wires poked out.

Trying hard to ignore the fear running up my spine, I started to turn away.

And jumped back in shock as the lighter picked up the figure in the shadows.

It was Haddock. He was standing in the corner, watching me.

Except he wasn’t moving, and the expression in his wide, staring eyes was blank and sightless.

I took a step forward, holding up the lighter. And that was when I saw the hunting knife embedded to the hilt in his chest, impaling him against the wall, and the huge bloody gash across his throat where it had been cut from ear to ear.

Clarence Haddock, the six-foot-three, nineteen-stone killer – said, I recall, by one police officer to be the most frightening man he’d ever met – had been butchered like a stuck pig.

Thirty-three

It had just turned one a.m. when Tina finally walked in her front door, physically exhausted but mentally wide awake. The first thing she did was open a bottle of Rioja, pour a third of it into a giant tumbler, and take a long, deep gulp, savouring the strong, rich taste. Keeping the glass tight to her lips, she took several more, feeling herself relaxing, then refilled the glass and carried it with her into the apartment’s shoebox-sized lounge, collapsing into the sofa and lighting a cigarette.

During the drive back home, she’d called the local GP who had certified Kevin O’Neill dead. He hadn’t been best pleased to hear from her, since the call had got him out of bed, but Tina was used to receiving less-than-warm welcomes and she’d brushed aside his complaints by telling him foul play was suspected, which had quickly galvanized him into action. He’d been able to say with some certainty that O’Neill had died between six p.m. and midnight the previous night.

Tina wasn’t a hundred per cent sure what ‘some certainty’ meant. Either you were certain, or you weren’t.

However, it had given her enough information to go on for her second call, to the security company operating the CCTV cameras covering the entrance to O’Neill’s cul-de-sac. After about ten minutes of being shunted around between those staff members still working at that time of night, none of whom seemed to be of any use to her, and being put on hold more than once, she’d finally been put through to someone who was willing to help her. His name was Jim, and he was a retired copper who liked to talk a lot.

But at least he didn’t faint when she told him what she needed, which was for him to go through all the footage taken by a particular camera from four p.m. to midnight the previous night, making a list of the plates of all vehicles captured that didn’t belong to residents of the road in question, and to get the results back to her as soon as possible.

While Tina remained on the line, Jim had looked up the account in question and told her that the footage from Thursday night was still there, and it should be possible to find her the information she needed, since the company kept a database of all the residents’ vehicles. ‘Will it help solve a case?’ he’d asked her, sounding excited at the prospect that he might be a part of something important once again.

In truth, though, it was the longest of long shots. There was, as Grier had pointed out several times, no evidence that O’Neill had been murdered, and even if he had been, it didn’t necessarily mean that the killer had driven up to his house. But that wasn’t what Tina told Jim. Instead, she’d said that she genuinely hoped so.

‘You don’t give up, do you?’ Grier had said with a mixture of admiration and exasperation when she finally got off the phone.

‘Someone once said there was a solution to every problem.’ ‘Do you believe that?’

She’d thought about her alcoholism, about the way her life had turned out, a long battle that never seemed close to completion, let alone victory. ‘No.’ She’d managed a smile. ‘But I always live in hope.’

When she dropped him off at home a little while later, he’d given her a strange look, as if he wanted to say something. But then the look had gone, and he’d got out of the car, asking if he was going to be needed tomorrow.

‘I’ll let you know,’ she’d said, and watched as he let himself in to his attractive redbrick townhouse where his wife, a successful corporate lawyer, was waiting.

Now, sitting in her poky little living room with her cigarette and her booze, Tina concentrated on the case, because she knew that as soon as she stopped thinking about it she’d slip into the inevitable self-pity. And there was plenty to think about. This case was one of the most puzzling she’d ever been involved in. On the one hand, they had a man against whom the evidence seemed overwhelming. There was the murder weapon in his flat, incriminating footage showing a number of the murders on his computer, and he had a direct link with every one of the victims. Yet, at the same time, they also had a murder that was different from the others, and for which their suspect had a cast-iron alibi. Added to the mix was Kent’s claim to have important information, something which he thought was worth killing him for. Whether or not he’d faked his poisoning in the cell back at the station, the fact remained that an armed gang had been prepared to break him free from police custody at gunpoint. Which meant that one way or another he was important to someone.

But who? And why?

She took another gulp of the Rioja. Booze wasn’t usually that helpful where intensive thinking was concerned, but she was hoping now that it might give her a new angle on things.

Because she knew she was missing something. Everything happened for a reason. The solution was in there somewhere, it was simply a matter of finding it, and the way to do that was to follow the Sherlock Holmes route of removing every scenario that was impossible until you were left with one that fitted. And that would be the truth.

Kent did not murder Roisín O’Neill. Someone else did. That person had strangled her, although there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. But the killer had known the Night Creeper’s MO, even though the information wasn’t available to the public, and had tried to make her death look like one of his, in order to cover up his own guilt. But what did that killer then need from Andrew Kent?

Think . . . Think
. . .

And then she slammed her glass down on the coffee table as the answer came to her in a mad rush. She didn’t even notice the wine spilling and dripping down on to the carpet. She was too excited for that because for the first time she was sure she knew what had happened, and why Kent had been targeted.

Now they just had to find him.