The Last 10 Seconds (3 page)

Wolfe and Haddock exchanged glances, Wolfe’s expression questioning, as if he was deferring to his immense colleague.

Haddock nodded once, and Wolfe turned back my way. ‘I’ve got one day’s work,’ he said quietly. ‘Short notice, definitely in the next few days, but the date’s not finalized yet. The pay’s a straight hundred thousand cash. Interested?’

Of course I was interested. I hadn’t been expecting much from the initial meeting but already I had Wolfe offering me an armed job. I didn’t show too much enthusiasm, though, because that kind of thing sets people’s alarm bells ringing as well. Instead, I shrugged and said, ‘Depends what it is.’

‘It’s a job against an unarmed vehicle in transit.’

‘I’d prefer a share of the proceeds.’

Wolfe shook his head. ‘It’s not that kind of job. The cargo’s human. One man.’

‘Who?’

‘I can’t tell you that. Not yet. But I can tell you that it’s thirty grand up front. Seventy on completion.’

I acted like I was thinking about it. I wanted to find out more because that way I could finish the job pretty much on the spot, but knew better than to push things at this early stage. ‘I like the sound of thirty grand, but I’ll need to know more before I commit.’

‘I’ll tell you everything, but first I want you to do a little job.’

‘What kind of job?’

It was Haddock who answered, leaning down so his mouth was uncomfortably close to my ear, his words delivered in that strangely effeminate voice. ‘The kind that’ll prove to us beyond doubt that you’re not a copper.’

Four

It was hot and stuffy in the interview room and DI Tina Boyd was longing for a cigarette. ‘If you’re innocent of all charges, why did you run away from us, violently assaulting two police officers in the process?’ she asked.

‘Why do you think?’ demanded Andrew Kent, wearing the same panic-stricken expression he’d been wearing since Tina and her boss, DCI MacLeod, had begun questioning him in the interview room almost two hours earlier. ‘I was on my way home from work and suddenly all these people came out of nowhere screaming and shouting. I panicked and made a run for it.’

‘But they clearly identified themselves as police officers,’ Tina persisted.

‘I didn’t hear them, OK?’ protested Kent, in tones not far short of hysteria. ‘I just ran, and when they grabbed me, I thought they were trying to mug me or something, so I fought back. I’m sorry I hurt those officers, but it wasn’t my fault.’

His brief – a young, studious-looking duty solicitor wearing big glasses with the Nike emblem on the frames, and reeking of ambition – put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Andrew,’ he said soothingly. ‘You can answer in your own time.’

Kent nodded.

Across the table, he looked even smaller and more harmless than he had done when Tina watched him walking home the previous evening, just before his arrest. His whole demeanour was one of submissive fear, his pale eyes awash with confusion. But Tina had seen the way he’d fought the arresting officers, the cold determination he’d shown, and she wasn’t fooled, although she had to give him full marks for his acting abilities.

‘For a terrified civilian, you gave a pretty good account of yourself, Mr Kent,’ she continued. ‘Both officers needed medical treatment, and I had to use CS spray to subdue you.’

‘I’m a black belt in karate,’ said Kent with a sigh. ‘I’ve been mugged twice in the past so I wanted to make sure I was able to defend myself when it happened again. I’ve been going to classes for the past six years, and I’m not going to make any apologies for it.’

‘It doesn’t make my client guilty of anything either,’ put in his solicitor, whose name was Jacobs.

Tina ignored him. ‘So you’re still protesting your innocence about these murders?’ she asked Kent.

‘Of course I am. I’ve never killed anyone, and I don’t understand why you think—’

‘How do you explain your DNA being at the properties of every one of the five victims then?’

‘Because I fitted the alarms at all the different properties. I’ve already told you this.’

‘Not very good systems then, were they, Mr Kent, if the killer managed to bypass every one of them?’ said DCI MacLeod.

‘I thought they were.’

‘My client’s not being questioned about his skills as an engineer, now is he?’ Jacobs looked at MacLeod over his half-rimmed glasses with the gravitas of a man twice his age.

MacLeod wasn’t deterred. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that every one of our five victims had their brand-new alarms fitted by you? What do you reckon the odds of that are?’

‘Look, I’ve fitted thousands of alarms over the years. I’m a hard worker. I can do two or three clients in one day, so the odds probably aren’t that great.’

‘What about the odds of the killer being able to bypass every one of your alarms?’

Again Kent protested his innocence, and again Jacobs intervened with the same objection – that it wasn’t his client’s work-related capabilities that he’d been arrested for.

‘So, how come your DNA was found in four of the victims’ bedrooms if you were only fitting the alarms?’ Tina asked, keen to move the interview on.

‘I had to have access to the whole of each property while I was doing the work, because I needed to fit sensors in different rooms.’

‘But you didn’t fit sensors in any of the victim’s bedrooms. We checked. Nor did any of your employers think you should have been in them. So what was your DNA doing in there?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Kent. ‘Maybe it got carried in there somehow from other places in the house. Is that kind of thing possible?’

Technically, it was within the realms of possibility, but only just. When Tina pointed this out to him, Kent gave an exaggerated shrug and said he couldn’t understand it.

‘Our understanding is that the victims were subjected to violent sexual assaults before being murdered in a brutal fashion. Were any of the DNA samples from the bedrooms that you say match that of my client found on the bodies themselves?’ Jacobs asked, his tone carrying just the right mix of weariness and scepticism.

Tina and MacLeod exchanged glances. This was their big problem. The killer had cleaned up the bodies scrupulously, using bleach, and so far they’d given up no DNA evidence at all.

‘No,’ MacLeod admitted reluctantly, ‘but that doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘Well it does, DCI MacLeod, because my client’s already provided a perfectly adequate explanation as to why his DNA might have been in the bedrooms of some of the victims. Now, if you have no further evidence then I’m asking that you release him immediately.’

Tina fixed Kent with a cold stare. ‘Tell us about the hammer,’ she said baldly.

Kent’s eyes widened. ‘What hammer? What are you talking about?’

‘The hammer we found in your bedroom, Mr Kent. The one covered in blood and brain matter, which we’ve just been told belonged to your last victim, Adrienne Menzies. Your DNA was also on the handle.’

Kent shook his head. ‘No. No way.’

‘Yes. The lab did the tests twice, just to make sure.’

‘I . . . I don’t know anything about a hammer,’ he stuttered. ‘I really don’t. Jesus, this can’t be happening.’ He looked desperately at Jacobs, who also seemed caught out by this revelation, then back at Tina and MacLeod. ‘I’m innocent, I promise you. Someone must be setting me up.’

He resembled a frightened child, sitting there barely as tall as Tina and with a skinnier build, seeming to shrink in the chair as the evidence was steadily laid out against him. For the first time, Tina began to doubt that they had the right man. All the evidence seemed to point to him but it was the way he was reacting. He came across like an innocent man. Most of the people she faced didn’t. Most of them were guilty, and tended to limit their answers to a monotonous refrain of ‘no comment’, but Andrew Kent was acting like an ordinary man caught up in a terrifying situation over which he had no control.

‘Who do you think set you up?’ demanded MacLeod, his voice laden with scepticism.

‘I told you, I don’t know. I honestly don’t. If I was ever going to do something like this, why would I keep the murder weapon in my room? That would be madness . . .’

The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on his interrogators’ faces.

Tina was just about to respond when MacLeod tapped her arm and shook his head. ‘OK, you probably need some time with your client, Mr Jacobs, so you can discuss this latest piece of evidence. Interview suspended at eleven forty-six a.m.’ He got to his feet, motioning for Tina to follow him out the door.

‘We had him on the rack there. Why did we stop?’ Tina asked when they were out in the corridor.

‘There’s been a development. DC Grier just called through on the earpiece. Apparently, there’s something we need to see.’

‘Any details?’

‘No,’ he said, looking at her seriously, ‘but I don’t like the sound of it.’

Five

The incident room on the fourth floor of Holborn station, where CMIT had been carrying out the Night Creeper murder inquiry, was absolutely silent as Tina and MacLeod entered.

Half a dozen officers, all members of Andrew Kent’s arrest team, were gathered in a loose circle around a widescreen Apple Mac laptop on a desk in the middle of the room. DC Grier stood closest to the desk, his features pale and drawn, his prominent Adam’s apple, still bruised from its encounter with Kent’s hand, visibly pulsating, as if he was trying to keep something down. The expressions on the faces of the other officers present – a grim mixture of nauseated, depressed, tense and stoical – told the same story. Whatever they’d just witnessed had affected every one of them, and the eyes of DC Rodriguez were wet with tears.

‘What have we got then?’ asked DCI MacLeod, his soft Edinburgh burr somehow easing the tension in the air. There was a quiet decency about MacLeod that naturally drew people to him, as did his air of calm unflappability, that made you look beyond the beer belly, the thinning grey hair and unfashionable moustache, and see only a natural leader. Once again, Tina was glad she worked for him.

‘We’ve found stuff on here,’ sighed Grier, running a hand roughly across his face as if he were trying to remove the memory of whatever it was. ‘Films.’

‘What kind?’ asked Tina, feeling a twitch of morbid excitement.

‘Footage of the murder of two of the victims. It looks like he filmed it himself.’ Grier paused. ‘It’s extremely graphic.’

‘It’s more than that,’ said DS Simon Tilley, normally an exuberant copper with a big personality and a laugh like a bass drum, but who was also the father of two young children. ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’

MacLeod took a deep breath. A father himself, he clearly had little appetite for the task ahead, but was far too professional to let that stop him. ‘We’d better take a look then.’

He turned to Tina, his expression suggesting she didn’t have to watch if she didn’t want to. She noticed some of the others looking at her, including Grier and Rodriguez, and had this feeling they were willing her to back out of it.

‘Don’t worry,’ she told MacLeod bluntly without looking at them. ‘I can take it.’

‘I can’t,’ said Grier, getting to his feet. ‘Not again. Just press the play button when you’re ready to begin.’

There were murmurs of agreement from the other officers and they moved away from the desk. Although they remained in the incident room, it seemed to Tina as though they were keeping as far away from the laptop as possible, as if whatever was on it was somehow infectious.

MacLeod leaned forward and pressed the button on the screen. Then he and Tina stood side by side as the screen lit up to reveal a lengthways shot of a young woman lying on a bed. Tina immediately recognized her as the final victim, Adrienne Menzies, a thirty-three-year-old accountant from Highgate with hair the same dark colour and style as her own, and whose DNA was on the hammer found at Kent’s apartment. She remembered the bed’s expensive yet old-fashioned teak headboard, which she later found out had been handmade by Adrienne’s father. It was always the little details that stayed with you, even amid the horror. And the horror here was unrelenting.

Adrienne was naked and bound to the bed with black PVC bondage straps of the kind Kent had used in all but one of his murders, and her mouth was gagged with duct tape. The picture quality was very good and Tina could make out the bruises and scratches on her thighs and round her breasts. The camera moved in slow, jerky movements more akin to a homemade film as the person holding it walked carefully round the edge of the bed, filming Adrienne’s vain struggle to free herself from the bonds that kept her firmly in place. Beneath the gag, her muffled cries of fear grew steadily more desperate and her eyes widened and bulged as if the fear in them was a living thing trying to squeeze its way out.

The cameraman stopped moving and focused in on her face so that it filled the screen entirely with a pleading expression Tina found hard to bear because she knew exactly what was about to happen to this pretty young woman who, until a few hours before this, had lived a generally happy, ordinary life with family and friends who cared for her. Tina had been at the murder scene. She had stood in that bedroom, looking down at the unrecognizable face in a mask of coagulated blood; the thick splatters on the bed linen and the walls; the long smear only just visible on the teak headboard . . .

The camera panned out and the screen suddenly went black. Tina’s mouth was dry and she was conscious that she was rubbing her hands together with such force that it was almost painful. She needed a drink. More than she’d needed one in ages. A bottle of good Rioja with a couple of vodka chasers. Anything just to forget about all this.

The screen lit up again, and this time the camera had been placed in a fixed position about three feet away from Adrienne’s head, and slightly above it – most likely on a bedside table. Tina couldn’t remember if Adrienne had had a bedside table or not. Her head swung from side to side, the moans loud beneath the gag. There was music playing in the background. ‘Beautiful Day’ by U2. Only just audible. Tina would never be able to listen to that song again without being reminded of Adrienne Menzies’ bloody murder.

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.’