The Last 10 Seconds (2 page)

Two

The media had dubbed him the Night Creeper. For a period of twenty-three months, he’d terrorized London, raping and murdering a total of five women in their own homes. The victims were, it seemed, all picked at random, but they also fitted a broad profile. They were white, single, successful in their careers, and physically attractive. The youngest was aged just twenty-five, the oldest thirty-seven, and what had particularly focused media attention was that there was never any sign of forced entry to the victim’s homes, even though all the properties were considered secure, and fitted with new alarm systems. This gave an almost mystical power to the Night Creeper – a man who could break in anywhere at will, making no sound, and leaving no trace – and it had increased the fear among attractive and single London career women, and their families, no end.

When Tina had joined CMIT four months earlier, successfully applying for a vacant DI’s position, the pressure on the police for an arrest had been intense. But leads had been scarce. The killer was forensically aware, leaving behind little in the way of clues, and no witnesses had ever reported seeing him.

In the end, it was that old classic ‘good old-fashioned police-work’ that finally led to the arrest, and the person who’d spotted the clue was Tina herself.

While interviewing a close friend of the last victim, Adrienne Menzies, Tina had discovered that the alarm system in Adrienne’s apartment had only been installed a few weeks earlier and that the man who’d installed it had, in the words of the friend, ‘given Adrienne the shivers’. Because of the length of time between the installation and the murder, and the vagueness of the friend’s words, Tina hadn’t initially been optimistic of a link, and the colleague who was with her at the interview, young, up-and-coming DC Dan Grier, had discounted it immediately. But when Tina thought about it more, it had struck her that one foolproof way of getting through alarms on buildings and residences was if you’d fitted them yourself, so she’d contacted the companies who’d installed the alarms at the other properties and asked them to supply the name of the engineer who’d carried out the work.

She would always remember that feeling she got, that utter exhilaration, when they all came back with the same name. Andrew Kent. Freelance engineer. Using his freelance status to keep one step ahead of the police, and his position to pick his victims at leisure. Their killer.

And now, thanks in large part to Tina, they’d finally got him.

She took a long drag on her cigarette and stubbed it underfoot, ignoring the sour expression on the face of a middle-aged woman among the throng of onlookers now gathering at the edge of the cordon that had been set up around Andrew Kent’s building. It was dusk now and Kent himself had already been taken away to Holborn police station to have a DNA swab taken, await questioning, and, of course, get any medical treatment he needed as a result of Tina’s enthusiastic arrest technique.

In the meantime, the team needed to search his flat for any evidence linking him to the crimes. They’d managed to get a warrant two days earlier, just as Kent emerged as their chief suspect, but the place was so heavily alarmed that they hadn’t been able to bypass the security without potentially alerting him, even with the expertise they had available. Now, though, they had Kent’s keys, and as Tina put on her plastic coveralls and walked past the assembled police vehicles towards his flat, ignoring the dull ache in her bad foot, she hoped it was going to give up something good. Because they still didn’t have that much linking him with the crimes, other than the fact that he’d been inside all the victims’ properties. This might be too much of a coincidence to explain away, but it was still nowhere near enough to secure a conviction for mass murder.

‘How’s the neck?’ she asked Dan Grier as they ran into each other at the front door of the building.

‘He caught me with a lucky shot,’ he answered, with just the faintest hint of belligerence in his tone, rubbing his throat through the material of the coverall. ‘I wasn’t expecting it.’

‘No, I saw that. Quite a feisty little bugger, wasn’t he?’

‘He definitely had some kind of martial arts expertise. I think we should have researched his background better.’

Tina smiled, thinking Grier was a pompous sod sometimes. They’d never really seen eye to eye, right from the word go. She thought him precious and over-serious; he clearly didn’t think she should be his boss. Things had been even more strained since the interview with Adrienne Menzies’ friend, when Grier had discounted her lead and Tina had followed it up on her own, and she had the feeling that he thought she’d deliberately set him up to look an idiot, which she hadn’t. It was just that generally she liked to work alone, relying on her own instincts. ‘Well, you know how it is, Dan,’ she said to him. ‘You live and learn. And at least we’ve got him now.’ She put out a hand. ‘After you.’

Grier didn’t reply, just walked inside in silence.

As Tina went to follow, someone called her name. She turned and saw DCI MacLeod walking towards her, his phone in one hand, his coveralls in the other. His face was still red from his earlier exertions, even though by Tina’s calculations he’d only run the best part of thirty yards, and there were obvious sweat stains on the underarms of his shirt. With his middle-aged spread spreading way too quickly, and an unhealthy pallor that matched the grey in his hair, he looked like a heart attack waiting to happen.

‘Sir?’ She hadn’t spoken to him since the arrest – he’d been on the phone non-stop ever since – and she wondered what he wanted to say.

‘Well done on stopping Kent,’ he said as he reached her. ‘It could have been embarrassing if he’d got away.’

She liked that about him. The fact that, unlike many of the senior officers she’d dealt with over the years, he was honest, and said what he was thinking. ‘No problem. It’s nice to have had the chance to get involved.’

MacLeod frowned. ‘You know I’d have you back on active duty like a shot if I could, Tina. But it’s the bloody regulations. You know how it is. They swamp us.’

‘If there’s anything you can do, it’d be a help. I didn’t join up to watch other people do the glory jobs.’

‘I’ll have a word.’ He breathed in deeply, and Tina could tell he hadn’t just come over to congratulate her. ‘I don’t suppose there’ll be any complaints from Kent about any inappropriate use of force . . .’

‘I should imagine right now that’s the least of his problems.’

‘But you’re going to have to be careful, Tina,’ he continued, leaning in closer, clearly choosing his words carefully. ‘Sometimes you can let your enthusiasm for stopping a suspect get the better of you. You laid into Kent pretty hard back there.’

‘He needed to be stopped.’

‘I know that, and quite frankly, on a personal level I think he deserves everything he gets, and plenty more besides. But you’re a high-profile officer.’

She started to argue but he held up a hand. ‘I know it’s not your fault that people know who you are, but like it or not, you’re just going to have to accept it. And you’re going to have to remember that your actions get noticed. You step out of line, people are going to come down hard on you. I’m only saying this because you’re one of my people, and I want to protect you. I also think you’re an extremely good police officer. It was you who got the break with Kent, you who should get the credit. Don’t ruin it by kicking hell out of our suspect in the middle of the street in broad daylight.’

Tina felt defensive, and her first instinct was to fight back, to say that she’d only used the minimum amount of force necessary, and if people couldn’t handle that then frankly that was their lookout. But she didn’t. She had no desire to have a run-in with her boss, and, if she was honest with herself, he was right. ‘Thanks, sir. I’ll bear that in mind. Is that everything?’

He smiled. ‘Yeah, that’s everything. Lecture over. And well done again.’

She turned away and went inside, making her way up the threadbare staircase to the first floor, conscious that her foot was playing up again. It was the second time she’d been shot in the space of five years. Add to that the fact that she’d killed a man and that two of her colleagues, one a lover, had been murdered, and it was hardly a wonder she had such a high profile.

The Black Widow, they’d called her at one time. Perhaps they still did, she wasn’t entirely sure. Either way, people tended to keep their distance from her, as if she was some kind of jinx, and because of this she’d become something of a loner. She was a nomad too, unable to settle fully in any one job. She’d already left the force once before coming back a year later and joining Soca, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, where she’d lasted a year before returning to where she’d first been a wet-behind-the-ears DC, at Islington CID. But regular detective work hadn’t lived up to her expectations either, so when a slot on CMIT had come up with a chance for promotion, she’d jumped at it. Perhaps her profile hadn’t done her as much harm as she’d thought, because she’d got the job, and was making a pretty decent go of it too, although she preferred detective work to the management of others.

The reinforced door to Andrew Kent’s flat had been propped open with a telephone directory and there was a vague smell of stale sweat coming from inside, mixed with cheap air freshener. It was a cramped little one-bed place with a narrow corridor connecting the rooms, and it was already busy with members of the team, working two and three to a room, meticulously going through Kent’s possessions. They would take this place apart piece by piece over the next few days until they’d searched every last inch of it. A man who’d brutally murdered five women was always going to keep some kind of trophy from his experiences – a means of helping him to relive them – and however well he might have hidden it, they’d find it. Because now they had him in custody, time was on their side.

Tina made her way down the corridor, flicking on the light as she did so, and stopped at Kent’s bedroom.

It was surprisingly spacious, with ancient-looking wardrobes rising up on either side of an unmade double bed with sheets that were badly in need of a wash. A framed Van Gogh print of a night scene hung, slightly crooked, above the bed and there was a stack of paperback books on the bedside table, one of which was
Nicholas Nickleby
.

DCs Anji Rodriguez and Grier were already in there. Rodriguez was going through one of the wardrobes, patting down various items of Kent’s clothing with the kind of ferocity that suggested she was imagining he was still in them, before chucking each item on to a pile next to her. She looked in a bad mood, courtesy no doubt of being made to look a fool during the arrest, and she didn’t look round as Tina came in. Grier, meanwhile, was on his hands and knees pulling open the bedside table drawers, and sifting through Kent’s underwear. He gave her a brief nod and went back to his work while she stood in the doorway thinking that it was hard to come to terms with what made murderers tick. To all intents and purposes, they lived just like anyone else. Watching soap operas, eating takeaways, reading Charles Dickens novels. Yet they could carry out crimes so horrific that it was almost impossible for a normal human being to comprehend them. And Andrew Kent’s crimes were about as bad as they got. Tina had seen what his victims had looked like after he’d finished with them. Tied helpless to their beds and beaten so savagely that they were rendered utterly unrecognizable. Mutilated both before and after death in ways that had made some of the officers on the scene physically sick. It was the main reason Tina had taken so much pleasure in spraying the bastard with the gas and hitting him with all her strength as he’d lain incapacitated in front of her.

‘What’s this then?’ said Grier, his voice interrupting her thoughts. He was tugging at something behind the bedside table. A second later there was the sound of tape being torn away from the woodwork, then Grier slowly got to his feet with his back to Tina and Rodriguez, who both stared at him, waiting.

And then, as he turned to them, a wide smile on his face beneath the coveralls, Tina saw what he was holding in his hand.

She tensed, her mouth suddenly dry, experiencing a curious mixture of elation and nausea.

It was the evidence they were looking for.

Part Two

YESTERDAY

Three

All my life I wanted to be a police officer. To protect the weak and the vulnerable and take on the bad guys. As far back as I can remember, I had this burning desire for justice. At school I confronted bullies if I saw them picking on smaller kids. If they didn’t back down, I’d fight them. In the early days I lost more times than I won, so I took up boxing, and the ratio quickly changed. My dad always said I should join the army, which is what my brother John ended up doing. He said I was too aggressive for the police, and maybe I was, because my first three years in uniform were an exercise in boredom and gradual disillusionment. I could never quite get over the fact that the public could abuse and assault me at will, with little fear of prosecution, whereas I couldn’t do the same back to them. So I decided to become a detective, only to find that life in CID is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent detective work, and one per cent excitement, and that’s if you’re lucky. Not exactly Dirty Harry.

My boss at the time, and the man who, with the possible exception of my dad, I’ve always respected most in the world, saw my frustration, and told me that maybe I should try undercover work.

DCI Dougie MacLeod – he taught me one hell of a lot, including the art of patience, which was something I thought I’d never pick up. Right up until yesterday, I always thought his greatest service to me was that particular suggestion, because for the past nine years of my life I’ve been working with CO10, Scotland Yard’s elite (their word, not mine) undercover unit. Working undercover, I’ve finally found the excitement I was looking for, and I’ve also put away some extremely nasty characters, many of whom still want me dead. And as I stood in the windowless back room of a grimy Soho nightclub that morning, I had the feeling that there weren’t many much nastier than the two men sitting across the table opposite me.

‘I hear you’re looking for work,’ said the one on the right. He was in his mid-forties, with closely cropped silver hair, a noticeable squint in one eye, and features that were long, sharp and unforgiving, as if they’d been hand-carved from hardwood, and dominated by a nose skewed by a long-ago breakage and missing a lump at the bridge. He was wearing a faded Lonsdale T-shirt that showed off wiry, muscular arms peppered with faded tattoos, and his good eye homed in on me now, hunting for weaknesses. His name was Tyrone Wolfe, and he was suspected of involvement in at least five murders.

The man sitting next to him was called Clarence Haddock. It was, speaking frankly, a ridiculous name, and one that simply didn’t do justice to the huge, terrifying-looking thug with the beard and dreadlocks who for the past five years had been Tyrone Wolfe’s closest associate. More than a dozen gold labret studs peppered his face, including one that went horizontally straight through his fat, splayed nose, giving him the appearance of an angry bull preparing to charge. He sat with his trunk-like forearms on the table, glaring up at me in silence, the barely suppressed rage he’d become legendary for seeming to emanate from him in short, brutal waves. It was said that Clarence Haddock had once cut a man’s throat with such force that he’d decapitated him with a single pull of the knife, and looking at him now I could picture him feeding on the still-twitching corpse afterwards. I knew all about him, of course, but even so, standing a few feet away from him in a claustrophobic room reminded me of the first time I’d seen a great white shark in real life while on a cage-diving trip off Gansbaii in South Africa. A mixture of primeval fear and sheer awe.

I held both their gazes, ignoring the drop of sweat running down my temple. ‘Yeah, I could be. What have you got?’

Wolfe turned to the third man in the room, a big middle-aged guy with long, greying blond hair and a face with more lines than the Bible, who was leaning against the wall. This was Tommy Allen, another of Wolfe’s close associates, and the man I’d spent the last three months getting to know. He was the one who’d brought me to this nightclub at ten thirty in the morning to make the introductions.

‘Yeah, he’s clean,’ said Tommy confidently, his voice a cockney, cigarette-fuelled growl. ‘I had the RF detector on in the car and it didn’t pick up anything. I’ve searched him too.’ He winked at me. ‘I think he enjoyed that part.’

Wolfe didn’t smile. ‘Watch?’

‘I’ve taken his watch, his mobile, everything. Even his shoes. It’s all outside.’

These guys were very thorough, and totally surveillance aware, knowing all the tricks of the trade. Never using the same phones for too long, regularly sweeping their meeting places for bugs, always checking for tails. I’d been hoping to record this meeting using the microscopic recording device in my watch, but now they’d scuppered that, which was going to make my job even harder than it was already. But then, when you were armed robbers turned drug smugglers, running nightclubs staffed by illegal immigrants who were little more than sex slaves, it paid to be careful, which was why I was here.

Because conventional methods for putting these guys away weren’t working.

‘I once heard of an undercover copper who wore a listening device up his arse,’ said Wolfe, speaking slowly, almost languidly, enunciating every word in a strong east London accent. ‘It was on a smack deal. Apparently, it picked up every word. Two people went down for twelve years apiece.’

I didn’t like the sound of this. One, because not surprisingly I didn’t much fancy the idea of a detailed rectal examination, and two, and more importantly, because the undercover copper in question had been me. And yes, it had been bloody uncomfortable, although, as Wolfe pointed out, it had also been successful, which had pleased the bosses no end. There was no way Wolfe could have known my identity since he’d had nothing to do with the dealers I’d put down, but I still felt a twinge of anxiety.

Criminals are just like hyenas, or the playground bullies I used to fight: they sniff out fear immediately, and go straight for whoever’s exhibiting it. I’d been in the game long enough to stand my ground, so I glared contemptuously at Wolfe. ‘I’m not a copper,’ I told him firmly, ‘and no one’s feeling my arsehole from the inside, either. Understand that? If you’ve got something for me, tell me now. I haven’t got all day.’

‘He sat down pretty easily in the car, boss,’ Tommy chuckled throatily, ‘so I don’t think he’s wearing anything up there.’

‘Don’t worry, no one’s going to search your arsehole,’ said Wolfe as if he was doing me some massive favour. ‘But I need to be sure about you.’

‘And I need to be sure about you, too,’ I said, knowing I couldn’t take these kinds of liberties lying down. ‘I mean, how do I know you’re not coppers?’

‘I’m no fucking copper,’ growled Haddock, speaking for the first time, fixing me with his big dark eyes. His voice was higher-pitched than I’d been expecting, with the faintest sign of a lisp. It was, however, no less menacing for that, and I could feel the atmosphere in this shitty little room darkening.

At this point, Tommy peeled himself off the wall and came over to the table. ‘Listen, Sean,’ he said, addressing me, ‘I can vouch for these two men. I’ve known them years, and you know I’m kosher, so I wouldn’t be messing you about.’

This was true enough. In the three months since I’d met Tommy in a well-known villains’ pub in Stepney, we’d not only spent a lot of time together shooting the breeze in various drinking holes, I’d also done work for him on his sideline operations. This had involved delivering quantities of coke to some of his wholesale customers, as well as going with him to collect a debt from a dealer who owed him money. I’d had to hold the guy’s legs while Tommy lifted him off the floor and repeatedly dunked his head down the toilet. I hadn’t wanted to do it but knew I had to prove myself to my new boss, and thankfully the dealer had coughed up the money before any real pain was inflicted on him.

I nodded slowly, appearing satisfied. ‘I trust you, Tommy, so if you vouch for them, that’s OK with me.’

His face cracked an almost paternalistic smile, even though he was only a dozen years my senior. ‘Good lad.’ He turned to Wolfe. ‘I can vouch for Sean as well, Ty. He’s reliable.’

‘I don’t like the look of him,’ Haddock grunted.

‘I don’t like the look of you, either,’ I snapped back, ‘but I’m not complaining, am I?’

Haddock’s eyes narrowed and he glowered at me with an almost theatrical rage, but the other two laughed. ‘Lighten up, Clarence,’ said Wolfe, standing up. ‘Come on, Sean,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you, me and Clarence take a walk?’

I could think of any number of reasons why not, but I knew that unless I went with them, this op was dead before it had even begun. I glanced over at Tommy and he gave me a nod in return to tell me it would be OK. He might have been a thug and a career criminal, but there was something about Tommy I implicitly trusted (maybe it was this paternal air he had), so when he let me know that it would be OK, I believed him.

Wolfe led the way out of the door, and I followed him, conscious of Haddock’s looming form falling into place behind me, so close that I could hear his low breathing. I tensed, not liking the fact that I was vulnerable, but knowing better than to act scared.

We walked through a narrow corridor and then out into the nightclub proper – a dimly lit, windowless space of low balconies, cluttered with tables and chairs, surrounding a dancefloor and stage. The decor was cheap and tired, the two gleaming poles in the middle of the stage the only things looking less than twenty years old.

‘You ever been married, Sean?’ asked Wolfe without looking back as we slowly circumnavigated the room in single file.

‘No.’

‘You ever served time?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How long?’

‘Seven years.’

‘Where did you serve it?’

‘Parkhurst. Then Ford.’

The questions came thick and fast as we did slow laps of the club, but always delivered in a casual manner, as if he wasn’t too worried about the answers. What wing was I in at Parkhurst? Who did I know in Ford? Did I have kids? When did I get out? Did I know such-and-such the armed robber? Where did I grow up?

Wolfe was testing my legend, hoping to trip me into a mistake, but I’d learned my part perfectly, every last detail. Because if you don’t, you’re dead. You have to go through this rigmarole on every op you do, and the higher up the food chain the target, the more detailed the interrogation. I answered everything. Without complaint. And, more importantly, without a pause.

I was using an old alias I’d first used several years earlier when I was seconded to Soca, that of Sean Tatelli, an ex-con from Coventry who’d served a seven-year stretch in the 1990s for supplying class A drugs, firearms offences, and the attempted murder of a police officer during the course of his arrest. Anyone making detailed enquiries would find that Sean Tatelli had indeed served seven years, first at Parkhurst Prison, then at Ford Open, and that his partner in crime was a Midlands-based gangster called Alan ‘Hocus’ Pocus, who’d ended up serving five years for drugs offences.

It was all bullshit, of course. My details had simply been made up by Soca and put on all the relevant databases, including the PNC, with flags in place so that if anyone accessed them looking for information, Soca would know. And Hocus might be a kosher criminal who had actually served his time, but he was also now a police informant who’d been drilled to give me a glowing reference.

Finally, Wolfe stopped at the top of a flight of steps leading down to the stage and turned to face me, his hard, narrow features lit up bizarrely in the pink fluorescent glow of an overhead light. ‘You ever shot someone, Sean?’ he asked, fixing me with his squint.

I was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable. The room was quiet and I was boxed in, with railings on one side, a cluster of tables and chairs on the other, and Haddock looming up behind me. But the trick when you’re cornered is to do the same as they do in the animal world: make yourself big, not small. So, straight away I went on the offensive. ‘Hold on here. You’re getting a little bit personal for someone I don’t even know. Now why don’t you help me out here and tell me who the hell you are, and why I should be answering your questions. Because right now you haven’t exactly made it clear.’ At the same time, I turned round and faced down Haddock. ‘And why don’t you give me some space as well, instead of breathing down my neck like something out of the fucking Munsters?’

To my surprise, he took a step backwards, while Tyrone actually apologized and immediately introduced himself and Haddock. ‘The reason you’re here,’ he explained, ‘is because I’ve got a vacancy in my firm for the right person and Tommy tells me you’re a decent bloke who might fit the bill. So, consider this a job interview.’

‘What sort of work do you do?’

‘A bit of this,’ he answered, with the beginnings of an unpleasant smile, ‘a bit of that. Not all of it strictly legal.’

‘Well, let me tell you something. I’ve been out of nick eight months. No one wants to hire me for legit work. I’ve done some jobs for Tommy but I’ve still got debts up to my eyeballs, and I need something now. Not minimum-wage shit, or flipping burgers in McDonald’s. Real work, that pays real money. You know my background – I know you’ve checked me out, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here now – so you know I’m not afraid to handle a gun, and you know I’m no hotheaded kid who pulls the trigger and asks questions later. I’m reliable, so if you’ve got something you want to talk about, talk about it now. Otherwise I’m out of here. Your choice. But do me a favour and make it now.’

I knew that whole spiel back to front. I must have delivered it a thousand times in front of my mirror, probably another twenty out in the field in situations like this one, occasionally substituting the odd word and phrase, but always with the utter conviction of a man at ease with his conscience. To work in undercover as long as I have, you’ve got to be the consummate method actor, a copper’s Robert de Niro, immersing yourself in the part, working with an ever-changing script, which means you’ve got to ad lib on demand and be able to bullshit your way out of every tight corner. Let me tell you something else, too. That spiel never fails. It’s always the one that breaks the ice and gets me in.