The Last 10 Seconds: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  The whole thing, glass and frame, toppled down to the ground, and I only just stopped myself from going down with it. Desperately, I breathed in the fresher air as the smoke billowed all around me, then swung myself out of the gap I’d created so that I was hanging by my fingertips. The drop to ground level was probably ten feet but I had to get out of this place as fast as possible, so I swung out my legs, let go and landed hard, jarring my ankles and rolling across broken glass.

  I was almost opposite the outbuilding where I’d discovered Haddock’s body. Ten yards beyond it was the first of the trees, and relative safety.

  Ignoring the pain in my ankles – Jesus, everywhere – I started running for it. But as I did so, I heard the heavy click of a shotgun being cocked only yards behind me. I turned, caught the faintest glimpse of a man in a boiler suit like the ones we’d all been wearing, and a balaclava. He was aiming the shotgun at me.

  I zigzagged, keeping low, and as the shotgun blasted into life I dived behind the outbuilding wall, temporarily out of sight, before scrambling back to my feet again and running for my life.

  I hit the trees at a pace I didn’t think I was capable of at the best of times, let alone after everything that had happened to me, and tore through the undergrowth. There was another blast from the shotgun, which passed quite close, but I kept on going, through bushes and foliage, leaping over dips, covering as much ground as I possibly could before finally stumbling and falling to the ground.

  I couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit behind me so I slid under a holly bush and stayed where I was, my breathing coming in low pants that I found hard to keep quiet. The whole forest was lit up by the flames coming from the building as they danced high into the night sky, and I looked around cautiously, trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible.

  Two minutes passed. My breathing became more regular and gradually I started to think that maybe the worst was over.

  Then I heard the sound of a twig breaking close by.

  I froze. From my position lying in the dirt, I saw a pair of boots moving slowly and purposefully through the undergrowth straight towards me. Five yards, four yards, three. I had no energy left. None at all. I’d been through hell these past few hours, and every part of me burned and ached. I still had enough of my wits about me to stay silent and hope, but if it came to it, and I ended up looking down the barrel of the shotgun, I’d take what was coming to me.

  The boots stopped a yard away from my face. Could my pursuer see me? My body tensed, waiting for that final shot that would end every experience and every emotion I’d ever felt.

  But it never came. A siren wailed in the distance, followed moments later by another, and the man who was hunting me turned and walked away.

  I lay there for a long time, listening to the sirens getting closer, and, although I was almost too exhausted to think straight, two questions kept running through my head. The first was, why had the man with the shotgun tried to kill me, and then taken a risk by trying to hunt me down in the forest? I could only assume he was the client we were working for, yet he must have known that I couldn’t ID him.

  But it was the second question that was really bothering me. If Tyrone Wolfe hadn’t killed my brother, then who the hell had?

  Thirty-nine

  Despite the hour, Tina was wide awake. She had a theory. It was basic, and far from watertight, but it fitted the facts.

  She finished her glass of wine, drank some water to clear her head, and logged on to the CMIT database where the details from the Night Creeper inquiry were kept electronically. Working as fast as was possible when you’d done a sixteen-hour day and just polished off most of a bottle of wine, she found the witness statements pertaining to the Roisín O’Neill case and began skim-reading them. As with any major inquiry, the police were obliged to take detailed statements from as many people as possible to minimize the chances of missing something. In this case, though, because they already suspected Roisín’s death to be the work of a serial killer who had no prior connection with his victim, and whose motive was clearly established, the background questioning of friends and family was less detailed. Instead, more effort had been aimed at Roisín’s neighbours and anyone who’d been in the area around the time of her death. It was these individuals Tina concentrated on now.

  Even so, this involved sixty-three different people, and it was twenty minutes before she found what she was looking for. It was a single sentence from a woman who lived in one of the flats overlooking Roisín’s apartment block, a throwaway comment that at the time would never have aroused any interest but which now added another, albeit tenuous, layer of support to Tina’s theory.

  Five minutes later she found something else. Another comment, this time from Beatrice Glover, the woman who lived in the flat below, whom Dan Grier had spoken to earlier about her separate sighting of Andrew Kent on the staircase. Again it was in significant when put against the background of a major serial killer inquiry, and something that would never have been linked to the statement made by the woman across the road, but now it made Tina’s heart race.

  She was on the right track.

  Next, she hunted down Roisín’s mobile phone records. It was standard practice in any murder inquiry to check the phone records of the victim, although as far as she remembered, in Roisín’s case they’d been used primarily to give a more accurate time of death. That was the beauty of the plan hatched by whoever had killed her: he’d known that her murder would be lumped in with the others committed by the Night Creeper, so all the police resources would be pushed at trying to locate, identify and gather evidence against the Night Creeper himself. None of the people involved in the inquiry at the time had assumed for one moment that Roisín wasn’t his fourth victim, because it seemed inconceivable.

  Roisín’s phone records had been scanned on to an electronic file after being thoroughly checked by the investigating officers, so there were handwritten notes next to the phone numbers listed, identifying to whom the numbers belonged. This made Tina’s task a lot easier. Roisín had clearly been a popular girl. The numbers of calls she made and received averaged some thirty a day. Most of them were to friends and family members. She was in regular contact with her father and Derval. There were work calls in there as well.

  But one particular number stood out. A mobile from which she’d received eight calls in the four weeks before her death, and made a total of sixteen calls to, eleven of which had gone to voicemail. Someone she was obviously very interested in talking to but who wasn’t always interested in talking to her. Their calls were sometimes brief, but other times they were a lot longer. One she’d received had lasted for ninety-seven minutes. But what really interested Tina was the handwritten word next to the number, made by whichever officer had checked the records.

  Dead.

  She tried the number again now and was given the automatic message that it was out of service. No one had followed this up at the time, but again, there’d been no reason to. Roisín was the victim of the Night Creeper. End of story.

  But she hadn’t been. Someone else had killed her.

  Tina sat back on the sofa and lit a cigarette, wondering to whom that number belonged, and how she was going to find out.

  Her own mobile rang. She picked it up and frowned. It was a blocked call.

  ‘Miss Boyd?’ came an uncertain-sounding voice as Tina picked up.

  She recognized it instantly. It was the guy from the security company whose cameras covered Kevin O’Neill’s road. ‘Hello, Jim. Thanks for getting back to me.’

  ‘I haven’t woken you up, have I? You did say call back whatever the time.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m still working.’

  ‘God, at this time? You must be keen.’

  Keen or obsessed, she wasn’t sure which. ‘What have you got for me?’ she asked, trying not to sound impatient but wanting to get him off the phone nevertheless, now that she had a new lead to follow up.

  ‘You asked
me to check through the Mayflower Lane footage from Thursday night, and give you a list of all the non-residents’ cars that went in and out. I’ve got it.’

  ‘Is it long?’

  ‘No. Just three cars.’

  She took down the numbers and the times they’d passed by the camera, and thanked him for his efforts.

  ‘It must be pretty important if you’re still working on it at this time,’ he said.

  ‘I promise I’ll let you know what it is the minute I can,’ she told him, and hung up.

  Tina didn’t have particularly high hopes that Jim’s information would provide another lead, but since there were only three cars on the list, she logged on to the PNC and ran a check to see if any of them were stolen, hitting gold with the very first one, a silver Honda Accord sedan. The plates were false and had been removed from a silver Honda Accord coupé in Islington four days earlier.

  She sat back and rubbed her eyes. It was the killer’s car. It had to be.

  She finished the cigarette and stubbed it in an ashtray that was close to overflowing, resisting the urge to have another drink. She was getting somewhere now, narrowing things down, getting closer to the truth. But she also needed help.

  She looked at her watch. It was 1.30 a.m. She knew who she had to call.

  Forty

  Mike Bolt had been Tina Boyd’s boss at Soca, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, for more than a year, but that was only telling a small part of the story. He’d recruited her when Tina was at a low ebb, and had done a lot to get her back on her feet. During that time, a close friendship had developed between them, which had almost ended in a love affair, and was the main reason why she’d left Soca and returned to the Met. But the feelings she’d had for him, and which she knew he’d had for her, had never gone away, and they were solidified a year later when he risked his own life to save hers after she’d been kidnapped by a psychotic thug in a case that had thrown them both into the limelight.

  It was that incident that had left Tina with the gunshot injury to the foot. She’d also managed to kill the thug in question, and for weeks afterwards she’d retreated into her shell while on sick leave, ignoring all offers of help, including those from Mike Bolt. It was only after she’d returned to work and made the transfer to CMIT that she’d felt confident enough to contact him again. She’d spent a long time musing over whether she should finally make her feelings known, before finally deciding that she should, and after plucking up the courage and pushing down her doubts, she’d made the call.

  He’d sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her and they’d talked for a good five minutes before he dropped the bombshell. He had a new girlfriend. Her name was Claire and it was going well. He hadn’t elaborated – he’d always been careful not to hurt other people’s feelings – but she’d known the truth. He was happy with someone else.

  They’d kept talking for another ten minutes, during which time she did a solid job of keeping the sinking feeling she had in her gut out of her voice. As the conversation wound up, he said that they would have to catch up over a drink some time, but his tone was vague and noncommittal, and she knew he didn’t mean it.

  When she got off the phone that time, she’d cried her eyes out, before getting hideously drunk in the poky little lounge where she sat now, rueing her self-destructiveness and all the opportunities she’d deliberately missed over the years.

  And now she had to call him at 1.30 on a Saturday morning, having drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Rioja. It wasn’t a thought she relished, but it needed to be done. Mike Bolt was one of the best detectives she’d ever worked with. More importantly, he was a high-flyer with excellent contacts within both Soca and the Met.

  ‘God knows what his girlfriend’s going to think,’ she said aloud as she dialled his number. But she knew he, at least, would understand.

  He answered on the fourth ring, sounding tired. ‘Tina?’

  So he hadn’t removed her number from his phone. ‘Hi, Mike. Sorry to bother you at this time of night, but I need your help urgently,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t slurring her words. As far as she knew, he didn’t know anything about her drinking.

  He yawned. ‘That’s OK. I was only half asleep anyway, and Claire’s away. What’s the problem?’

  ‘Have you been watching the news tonight?’

  ‘Are you talking about the Night Creeper snatch from outside my old nick? They’ve got wall-to-wall coverage on every news channel going. That’s your case, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I thought it was. I was actually going to phone you about it tomorrow. I thought you’d be too busy tonight. Any news on how the hunt for him’s going?’

  ‘Nothing yet,’ she answered, realizing that she should be talking to Dougie MacLeod about this. Yet she felt more comfortable talking it through with Mike, whom she knew would be more receptive to her theories. In spite of herself, she was also glad that he’d been thinking about phoning her to discuss the case. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

  ‘Kent and his abductors could be anywhere by now. But they’re incredible circumstances. What’s the story behind it?’

  She told him everything that had happened since Kent’s arrest, starting with the initial interviews and his passionate denials; and then the huge reams of evidence against him, his iron-clad alibi for Roisín O’Neill’s murder, the attempted poisoning in the cell, the highly professional snatch and, finally, Roisín’s father’s suspicious death. ‘I’ve got a car with false plates that was spotted driving into Kevin O’Neill’s cul-de-sac on the night he died that doesn’t belong to anyone living there. I need a check on the ANPR to see where it is now.’

  ‘Can’t you get your boss to authorize that?’

  ‘Right now, no one’s interested in looking for weaknesses in our case against Kent. They’re just interested in finding him.’

  ‘Which I can understand.’

  ‘So can I, but there are plenty of other people out there looking for him. I need to find out why it happened. And in my opinion, the key’s Roisín.’

  ‘But how? You said yourself, there’s a huge amount of evidence against Andrew Kent.’

  ‘There is, and I’m sure he killed the other four women. But he didn’t kill Roisín. He couldn’t have done.’

  She heard Mike yawning down the end of the line again. ‘Blimey, Tina, this is quite hard to get my head round at half one in the morning. Let me get up. I need a drink of water.’

  She waited a couple of minutes, lighting her last cigarette of the night while she listened to him moving about in his flat.

  ‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘It’s clear you’ve got a theory. What is it?’

  She suddenly felt uncharacteristically nervous about discussing it, just in case he dismissed it out of hand, although she knew in her heart he wouldn’t. He was one of the few people in the force who’d always believed in her. He thought she was good, and she needed that reassurance now. ‘I told you we found a lot of film footage of his crimes on Kent’s computer. Well, he didn’t just like to film himself killing the victims, he liked to film them in the days running up to the actual act itself. It was a form of cyber-stalking. He’d break into their homes, bypassing the alarm systems he’d installed, which was no problem for him to do, then set up hidden cameras so that he could watch them going about their daily lives, knowing he was going to snuff them out. It must have been quite a power trip for him.’

  ‘And there was film of Roisín on his laptop, was there?’

  ‘No. There was no footage at all of Roisín. But I think that was deliberate.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way I see it, Kent had every intention of killing Roisín. He’d installed her alarm system, just like he had with all his other victims, and I believe he also broke into her apartment in the days before she was murdered, to set up hidden cameras. We have a witness who lived in the same block of flats who saw a man coming down the stairs from her apartment a
couple of days earlier, and when we showed her Kent’s photo she thought that it might well be him.’

  ‘But not a definite ID?’

  ‘It’s been a long time, Mike, but she was sure enough for me. And it fits. I think he set up the camera, then before he had a chance to carry out his crime, his father died in Scotland and he had to go up there for the funeral. Except by the time he came back, Roisín was already dead. So someone else killed her.’

  ‘I still don’t quite get it, Tina. If the Night Creeper didn’t kill her, then who did?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘But Andrew Kent knows.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because he filmed it. Don’t you see? The footage must have been on the camera he’d already installed.’

  Forty-one

  Mike Bolt exhaled loudly. ‘That’s some theory.’

  ‘It fits the facts, Mike. And right now, it’s the only one that does.’

  ‘But you said there was no footage on Kent’s laptop.’

  This was where Tina knew her theory became tenuous. ‘I think he must have removed it for some reason.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ asked Mike. ‘It’s not as if he was expecting to be caught. There’d be no point removing it.’

  But she’d thought about that. ‘There was if he was blackmailing someone. Let’s say Kent filmed the murder and managed to find out who the murderer was. He then makes contact and demands money. At the same time he removes the footage from his laptop and keeps it safe somewhere. Think about it, Mike,’ she continued. ‘It would explain why he was broken out of prison. The person he was blackmailing would know that Kent possessed explosive knowledge about him, so he set up the abduction. And now he’s got Kent somewhere. He can find out where the incriminating evidence is, get rid of it, and then get rid of Kent. End of threat. End of story.’