The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  ‘Then make sure you don’t get caught.’

  Mr H’s tone was hard and businesslike, and contained not a shred of empathy. Whatret felt a cold dread flush through his bloodstream, making him shiver involuntarily. He cursed himself silently for getting involved in this whole business.

  ‘What do you need me to do with him?’ he asked.

  ‘Make him remember where the bodies are. I don’t care how you do it, or how long it takes, so bring an overnight bag because you’re staying with him until he coughs up the answer.’

  ‘I can’t just—’

  ‘Shut up, Whatret. We’re beyond “can’ts”. We need that information, and you’re going to get it for us. And I’ll tell you something else. He’s already remembering things, and he’s certainly not the docile, spaced-out guy you reckoned he was yesterday when you saw him. He managed to escape the trained assassins who killed the other two and get all the way to London without too much trouble. As well as remembering his real name. So were you lying when you talked to me earlier?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Whatret a little too quickly, debating whether he should come clean about Sean’s description of the dream, and immediately deciding against it. ‘I wouldn’t lie to you.’

  ‘Good. You’re ours now, Whatret. You do what we say. Understand?’

  Mr H’s words confirmed what Whatret had always suspected but never liked to admit to himself. By taking this job, he’d sold his soul, and the chances were he was never going to get it back. He took a deep breath, already sobering up. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I’m on my way.’

  Mr H replaced the phone in his trouser pocket. He was going to have to work out how they were going to kill Whatret once all this was over without raising suspicion. An alcoholic who was scared out of his wits couldn’t be trusted not to shoot his mouth off to someone. It was possible they could do it tonight if he managed to get the information out of Egan. It would be convenient to kill the two of them together and bury them somewhere on the farm where their corpses would never be found. That way they could finally bring an end to this whole sorry saga. And not before time.

  As he walked alongside the barn, Mr H heard Egan cry out in pain as his colleague, Balham, got to work on him. Mr H couldn’t understand why anyone got a kick out of inflicting pain. Violence was sometimes necessary in order to restore equilibrium, but as far as Mr H was concerned, it was always regrettable, and if there was any other way to achieve the same result, then he preferred to take it.

  ‘How’s it going, Sean?’ he asked, going inside and shutting the door behind him. Darkness was falling now and the overhead light was on, illuminating Egan as he sat slumped in the chair, bleeding from the lip and the nose, while Balham stood next to him with a pair of pliers in his hand.

  Egan looked up at him wearily and Mr H noticed a cut running along his right eyebrow, which was oozing blood. ‘I keep telling your friend, I don’t know anything.’

  ‘The bastard isn’t talking,’ said Balham, panting slightly. ‘I was going to start on his front teeth.’ He opened and closed the pliers a couple of times, trying hard not to look too excited. ‘I’d stand well back. It’s going to get a bit messy.’

  Egan looked really scared now, and when he spoke he addressed Mr H. ‘Please. I’ve told you all I know.’

  ‘I don’t think you have, Sean,’ said Mr H calmly, waiting for a couple of seconds to see if he might break as Balham approached him with the pliers.

  Egan moved his head rapidly from side to side letting out desperate moans from behind pursed lips until Balham got behind him and put him in a headlock, lifting the pliers to his mouth.

  ‘All right, leave his teeth in for now,’ said Mr H. ‘We’re going to give him another chance.’

  Balham looked annoyed but knew better than to argue. He released Egan from the headlock and moved away.

  Egan took a deep breath, keeping his mouth tightly shut, and looked at Mr H warily. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m putting myself out for you, Sean, but rest assured, if we think you’re holding back on us, you’re going to lose your teeth. Maybe all of them.’

  ‘I’m not holding back.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ He showed Egan the bottle of mineral water he was carrying.

  Egan nodded eagerly. ‘Yes please. I’m going to do everything I can to cooperate. I promise you.’

  ‘Good. That’s what I like to hear.’

  Mr H had conducted plenty of interrogations in his time, some of which had been carried out with the threat of violence always in the background. Usually, he found that the threat was enough. He also knew that, given time, anyone could be broken down. Sometimes it took days, even weeks, and Mr H suspected that Egan would be harder than most, given that he’d spent more than a decade as an undercover police officer. But out here, on private land, far from prying eyes, they had all the time they needed to break him.

  He crouched down beside Sean and placed the bottle gently to his lips but didn’t let him drink. ‘Are you sure you’ve told me the truth about everything, Sean?’

  Egan nodded and Mr H smiled at him, letting him take a long gulp.

  ‘That’s enough for now,’ he said, removing the bottle and standing back up. ‘What do you say?’

  Egan looked up at him with real gratitude in his eyes. ‘Thanks,’ he whispered.

  Mr H nodded slowly, pleased at the response. Then he turned to Balham. ‘Take a tooth.’

  Nineteen

  Tina parked her car in the shadows of a narrow stretch of woodland that, according to the map on her laptop, was about two hundred metres east of the three buildings that made up Cherry Tree Farm. The tracker she’d given Sean was designed to be accurate to within five metres, and its location appeared to be the westernmost building.

  Tina closed the laptop, slipped it under the passenger seat, and stepped out of the car, shutting the door quietly. A car drove past on the road behind her but it was going fast and its headlights had soon disappeared into the gloom. She looked at her watch. 8.20 p.m. About six hours since she’d dropped Sean off at A and E. A lot could have happened to him in that time.

  Tina had no idea what kind of situation she was walking into, and the thought both unnerved and excited her. She’d come close to dying more than once in the past few years, but those had been days when her life was dark and directionless, when she’d had little to live for. Things had changed now. She was reasonably content with her cottage in the country, and her job as a private detective was bringing in a steady income. She didn’t need to put her neck on the line any more, and it wasn’t just herself she had to worry about either. Her mum had had a cancer scare at the end of the previous year, and her father had taken Tina aside one day and told her in as calm and loving a way as possible that part of the reason for the illness was her constant fear that Tina was going to end up killing herself. ‘You can’t keep doing this, love,’ he’d said. ‘It hurts both of us. I can take the pain. But your mum finds it very, very hard. Please think of her next time you find yourself doing these kinds of dangerous things. Because one day they’re going to get you killed.’

  Tina had always had a decent relationship with her parents. They’d always been good to her, and the self-destructive issues that had dogged her in the past had been the result of her time in the police force rather than any unresolved childhood trauma. ‘It’s OK, Dad,’ she’d told him with a warm smile. ‘Those days are behind me now.’

  But they weren’t. Because somehow trouble had sought Tina out once again, and now here she was creeping through woods in darkness, trying to help an amnesiac fugitive and convicted rapist who appeared to be mixed up with some very dangerous people. She’d thought again about involving the police but, in the end, she had no proof that anything bad had actually happened to Sean. It had seemed a better idea to investigate herself first. But as she came to the edge of the treeline and saw the ramshackle farm buildings directly in front of her – dark, empty and deserted – and
beyond them the imposing-looking barn at the far end with a faint slither of light escaping from inside, she knew that something was very wrong.

  She paused and looked around. She couldn’t see any parked cars or hear any voices. The night was cool and still. Everything was deadly quiet. She reached inside the pockets of her jacket, feeling the reassuring grip of her weapons: an illegal Taser bought in Belgium, a can of pepper spray from a hardware shop in France, and a small lead cosh she’d picked up in an antique shop in Camden, which was for when everything else failed. If she was caught with any of them, she’d face prosecution; caught with all three, she’d almost certainly end up with a long spell in prison. None of that bothered her, though, because in the end she’d always rather be able to defend herself, and worry about everything else afterwards.

  An unwelcome vision of her dad trying to reason with her, the anxiety and disappointment clear in his eyes, crossed her mind, but she forced it away. It was time to move.

  The adrenalin pumped through her and she felt the thrill of illicit excitement as she crept out from the trees and moved quickly but silently round the back of the first building, which looked to be little more than an outhouse. A low fence that might once have been part of a pigsty jutted out of the ground, and she had to step carefully over it before circumnavigating the rear of the second building – a single-storey house with a shallow slate roof that had partially caved in. Tina wondered who owned this place and why it had been left in such a state of disrepair. She made a mental note to check with the Land Registry when she got a chance because it seemed highly likely that it was no random coincidence Sean had been brought to a place as isolated as this one.

  Twenty yards separated her from the barn now. A black Audi A6 was parked next to it, partially obscured by the stringy branches of a weeping willow, and beyond it was a high-wire fence with padlocked gates blocking access from the road.

  Tina took the Taser from her pocket, her finger resting on the trigger, and listened hard. Thanks to the lack of ambient noise, she was sure she could hear muffled voices coming from inside the warehouse. She took a deep breath and stepped out from the cover of the building, creeping quietly across the yard towards the barn doors.

  When she reached the doors, she stopped and put her ear against the wood. She could hear two men talking quietly but couldn’t work out what they were saying. Neither of them was Sean, though, she was sure of that. She was trying to work out what to do next, and not coming up with any obvious ideas, when she heard the unmistakable sound of car tyres on gravel. She looked round the side of the barn and saw headlights approaching the locked gates, followed by the ringing of a phone inside the barn. One of the men answered the phone and his voice got louder as he approached the barn doors.

  Without hesitating, Tina slipped out of sight round the blind side of the barn just as the door opened and the man emerged, no longer talking on the phone.

  Robert Whatret pulled up at the gates to the rendezvous, wishing he could be any place rather than here. As a city man born and bred he wasn’t used to the darkness and silence he was experiencing now. This was a lonely place where the trees rose up like grim sentinels and the night felt like it was enveloping him.

  They could kill him here and no one would ever know. It would be easy. More worryingly, it would also be convenient. Whatret knew he knew too much. Mr H had all but told him so. This left him in a terrible quandary. If he didn’t get the man he still knew as Matt to remember the exact details of what happened on the night of his car accident, then he was no use to the men wanting the information. Yet even if he did get them what they wanted, the net result would still be the same. His usefulness would have run out.

  Whatret tried to slow his breathing, repeating the word ‘calm’ under his breath in that slow, melodious tone he’d always used with his patients in the days when the world had been at his feet and he’d been a man of substance.

  It didn’t work. He wanted to run. Grab his money and head somewhere they couldn’t find him.

  But a figure was already walking confidently towards him through the darkness, his face illuminated by the headlights.

  Whatret swallowed. It was too late.

  Twenty

  It was strange. While I’d been sitting chained and helpless in this seat, as I’d been slapped, threatened and finally held down while one of my back teeth was torn out with a pair of pliers, something had happened. I’d had a vision of a tall, cadaverous man in his fifties with a bald head and the look of an undertaker sitting opposite me in an office somewhere. When the man spoke, his accent was plummy and patrician, but his words had hit me like stones. ‘Always deny, Sean. Never admit to anything. Your legend is your lifeline. Keep to your story, no matter what they put you through. Because the moment you show weakness, you’re dead.’ A long time ago that man had been my boss in the police. I even knew his name – or at least what I’d called him behind his back. Captain Bob. Something bad had happened to him too, although I couldn’t remember what it was.

  But right now all that mattered were those words of advice from long ago, and I’d used them to resist everything my two captors had thrown at me. I was in a lot of pain. The tooth was agony, and I was almost deliriously thirsty, but I could tell that Combover – the man in charge – was beginning to believe that I was telling the truth. Unfortunately, though, that was pretty irrelevant since I had no long-term strategy for getting out of there, and no idea about the location of the bodies they were after.

  It sounded like Dr Bronson had arrived to try to move things along. Combover had just left the room to go and meet him, leaving Blackbeard staring at me sullenly from a few feet away. He didn’t say anything. In fact, he looked quite bored. He’d enjoyed hurting me earlier, there was no doubt about that. He’d worn a tight bully’s smile as he’d beaten me, and later, when he’d shown me the bloody tooth he’d removed with the pliers, holding it in front of me in the palm of his hand, he’d looked genuinely happy, as if he’d been showing me a trophy one of his kids had won. But it seemed that for now his sadism had been sated.

  The hole where the tooth had been so rudely yanked out was still bleeding a little, but less so now. I spat out a mix of blood and saliva then felt round my mouth with my tongue, touching the hole gingerly, before exploring the other teeth, wondering, with less fear than I would have expected, which one they might go for next.

  That was when I felt it. A filling in one of my back teeth that seemed to stick out just a little too much from the cavity. The texture didn’t feel right either. I wondered why I’d never noticed it before. I also wondered what it was, because if it wasn’t a filling, then it was something that had been placed in there artificially.

  Like a tracking device.

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Blackbeard.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, noticing the barn door opening ever so slightly behind him and a female figure slip inside. Even though I was concentrating on looking at Blackbeard rather than her, I knew it was Tina, and I had to work to keep a lid on the burst of hope and excitement that suddenly shot through me. ‘Just checking the damage you did to me. You’d better hope the situation’s never reversed, because if it is, I’ll take you to pieces.’

  He took a step forward, his face contorting into an angry sneer. ‘They’re never going to be reversed. Because you’re not walking out of here.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ I said, looking him right in the eye.

  He raised a hand to hit me but at the last second he must have heard movement behind him because he turned round suddenly.

  But it was too late. I heard what sounded like a crackle of electricity and Blackbeard grunted and fell to the floor, writhing and shaking wildly. And then Tina was standing over me, looking concerned.

  ‘Shit, Sean. You look bad.’

  ‘Quick,’ I snapped. ‘The keys are in his left pocket. It’s a small silver one, does all of them.’

  Tina crouched down, rummaged round and quickly produced a set of
keys.

  ‘That one, that one,’ I said as she looked through them.

  Tina didn’t hesitate. Like me, she knew we hardly had any time, but her hands weren’t shaking as she reached over and undid the wrist restraints. As she repeated the process with the ones securing my ankles, I reached down and grabbed the bloody pliers from the bucket, before turning my attention to the barn door, knowing that if Combover walked through we were finished.

  I heard a car pull up directly outside the barn, which meant that they were going to be coming back in any second.

  ‘Right, go!’ hissed Tina, jumping to her feet.

  There was no time for subtlety now. Nor any point in telling her that Combover had a gun. The only important thing was getting the hell out of there. I was on my feet in a second, stumbling at first from the stiffness in my legs, but quickly overcoming it. With Tina leading the way, we ran out of the doors and sprinted across the yard into the darkness.

  I heard an angry shout not far behind us, followed by Combover’s angry command of ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’

  But there was no way I was stopping now. And nor, it seemed, was Tina as she sprinted towards the cover of the nearest building, with me racing to keep up with her.

  A shot rang out. I wasn’t sure how close it came to me but the bullet ricocheted off the wall in front of me before zinging off into the darkness somewhere.

  ‘Next shot’s in your back, Sean!’ screamed Combover, but there was desperation in his voice now and I was already ducking down as I ran round the back of the empty building and out of his line of fire.

  We kept running. Up ahead, Tina jumped a small fence that popped up out of nowhere. I did the same, but stumbled and fell, hitting something hard. I rolled over, grunting in pain, but was on my feet in a second, feeling a wave of exhilaration at the fact I was suddenly free. Even as I ran I was already swearing to myself that I wouldn’t get caught like this again. From now on I was going to stay free.

  I followed Tina as she ran into a line of woodland that bordered the last of the buildings, risking a quick glance over my shoulder. There was no one coming but I knew they weren’t going to let us go this easily. And I was almost certain that I was still wearing some kind of device they could use to track me. I pulled off my watch and threw it into some brambles. I remember being given it by Jane, which meant there was every chance it could contain the tracker. Even now, with everything else going on, I felt a sting of betrayal at what she’d done to me. For two long months she’d let me believe she was my sister, lying to me about our supposed upbringing, deliberately trying to keep me in a zombie-like state. Heartless bitch.