The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  But that was behind me now, and my past was returning to me far faster than I could ever have anticipated. Every time a new memory popped up I stopped whatever it was I was doing and tried to fit it into place in the still scattered and only partially complete jigsaw that was my past life. Sometimes I was able to; other times the memories were random visions I filed away in my mind, hoping they’d slot in somewhere later. But it was a fantastic feeling knowing that I was finding myself once again after far too long in the wilderness.

  I spent the morning wandering the streets round the hotel and doing some shopping. I bought a new shirt, new jeans and underwear, and threw away all the old stuff I’d been wearing, since most of it had been badly soiled by the events of the past couple of days. I also bought a cheap pre-paid mobile without leaving any details with the guy who sold it to me. That left me with about twenty quid, almost half of which I spent in McDonald’s on two Big Macs, large fries, a hot apple pie and a strawberry milkshake. It was hardly the food of the gods but Christ, it tasted good, and I needed it.

  Afterwards, feeling sated and tired, I headed back to the hotel figuring that a nice nap was in order. I thought about phoning Tina again since I hadn’t heard back from her, but decided it could wait for later. Today, everything could wait. I was free. My belly was full. And I was alive. The world was good.

  The door of the room next to mine was open and I saw the cleaner inside as I passed. I smiled and wished her a good afternoon, and she smiled back, nodding enthusiastically. She was young, early twenties, and pretty, and I felt a stirring somewhere down below. Jesus, I was horny, and there was very little I could do about it. Still, I wasn’t going to let that, or anything else, dampen my mood.

  The cleaner hadn’t done my room yet. It smelled vaguely of sweat and the bed was unmade, just as I’d left it. I headed for the toilet, thinking I was going to need to hang a Do Not Disturb sign on the door so I could get some beauty sleep.

  But the bathroom door opened before I got there and Combover stepped out holding the same revolver he’d had with him yesterday, pointing it at my chest. ‘Hello again, Sean,’ he said calmly as I backed away from him, quickly finding my retreat blocked by the room’s bare wall.

  He was no longer dressed in a suit but wearing a pair of neatly pressed jeans, a pink shirt and a sports jacket, as if he was just off out to a golf club lunch. He looked so unthreatening it would have been difficult to take him seriously if it hadn’t been for the gun and the tense, impatient look in his eyes. Or the fact that he’d told his colleague to pull one of my teeth out with a pair of pliers the night before.

  Behind him Blackbeard, the chief teeth puller, also emerged from the bathroom, wearing the same casually brutal expression. He was also dressed casually – though I didn’t think he’d have been welcome at any golf club lunch.

  I had no idea how they’d found me, but already my mind was working overtime, trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this.

  Combover clearly sensed this. ‘No funny business this time, OK?’ he said, stopping a yard in front of me, the barrel of the gun now only a foot from my face. ‘Otherwise I shoot you dead, in here. We want you alive, but if we have to, we’ll take you dead. And we’ll get away with it too. Understand?’

  ‘I still don’t know the information you’re after.’

  ‘But you will do. We know your memory’s coming back.’

  As he spoke, Blackbeard stopped alongside him and glared at me. ‘You’re not getting away a second time,’ he growled. ‘Try it again and I’ll cripple you.’

  ‘Put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door,’ Combover told him, without turning his gaze from me. ‘We don’t want any interruptions.’

  Blackbeard looked displeased at being given a direct order but reluctantly peeled away.

  ‘Right, Sean, I’m going to go through the drill now. You need to follow it to the letter or you die.’

  He was interrupted by a knocking on the door coming from outside. It had to be the cleaner. Blackbeard still had the Do Not Disturb sign in his hand and, clearly surprised, Combover glanced briefly in the direction of the door as Blackbeard shouted for whoever was knocking to come back later.

  I went for the gun, twisting Combover’s wrist as I shoved his arm away from me. It went off with a loud retort, the bullet hitting the ceiling and releasing a cloud of plaster dust. Combover yelped in pain as I dug my thumb into the fleshy part of his palm where the hand meets the wrist, punching him in the ribs and knocking him off balance. He dropped the gun on the floor and I hit him again with an uppercut that caught him directly beneath the jaw. His head snapped back and he fell on to the unmade bed, rolling over.

  The altercation had lasted barely three seconds, and Blackbeard had taken at least two to react. Now, though, he ran at me across the bed, his face a mask of pure rage, a roar beginning in his throat. In the background I could hear the cleaner shouting something from outside, but I was already scrabbling on the floor for the gun. I grabbed it and jumped back against the wall as Blackbeard did a flying leap towards me. He struck me with full force, grabbing me by the hair with one hand as I gasped for air, but I was already pulling the trigger, and I could hear the gun’s muffled retorts against his torso as I fired three times.

  Immediately his grip on my hair weakened, and for a long couple of seconds the room was completely silent as he stared at me with a look of complete surprise. Then, with a hard shove, I pushed him away and he crumpled to the floor, clutching at the growing bloodstain on his shirt.

  The shock of what I’d just done prevented me from moving for a few seconds. It was hard to believe I’d just shot someone, even if it was a man who’d been torturing me only hours before. I felt utterly numb, but when I looked down at my gun hand, it wasn’t shaking. Outside, the cleaning woman was screaming, and I heard a number of slamming doors. Meanwhile, Combover was trying to get up off the bed and reaching towards the handle on the bathroom door.

  I knew I had to get out, but first I needed answers. I grabbed Combover by the collar of his natty sports jacket and turned him over, pushing the still-smoking gun barrel into his cheek. He winced against the heat, looking scared for the first time.

  ‘Who are you?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me or, so help me God, I’ll blow your head off here and now.’

  Outside in the corridor I heard a male voice shouting something about calling the police, then another door slamming.

  ‘It’s not what you think,’ he stammered.

  ‘I don’t care what it is. Tell me. I’ve just shot your friend. Do you think I won’t do the same to you? I will. You’ve got five seconds to start talking.’ I pushed the barrel in harder, putting all my weight behind it, my finger tensing on the trigger. ‘One. Two.’

  I heard movement behind me then felt my leg being pulled hard. I had to work to keep my balance, and as I swung round, I saw Blackbeard up on his knees. He’d got hold of both my legs now and was trying to pull me over, his features taut with determination.

  For a split second I just looked at him, thinking that he still had a surprising amount of strength for a man who’d just been shot three times. Then he lunged forward and I realized he was trying to bite me in the groin. His teeth clamped on the material of my new jeans, so I placed the barrel of the gun against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet didn’t exit from his head. Or at least there was no big cloud of blood and brains like there often is in the movies. But a thin trickle of red ran down his forehead and his eyes glazed over, and I knew he was dead even before I shoved him out of the way and turned round to face Combover.

  But I was too late. He was already running into the bathroom and, as I took aim and yelled at him not to move, he slammed the door and I heard the lock being pushed across.

  I thought about going in after him. I could kick down the door easily enough and I was certain he’d talk, but there wasn’t time. The shouting in the corridor had stopped but I could still hear the faint echo of door
s slamming and I was pretty sure the whole hotel knew by now that there’d been gunshots in Room 305. And now Blackbeard lay motionless and dead on the floor, and I was the man who’d killed him.

  I reached down and patted his jeans pockets, quickly locating a wallet. I pocketed it without checking the contents and shoved the gun in the back of my jeans, barrel down, covering it with my untucked shirt.

  There was no time to wipe the place down and remove any evidence of my stay. Instead, I pulled open the door, shoved my head out, and looked up and down the corridor. It was empty. No one wanted to be too close to gunfire. But as I ran down the staircase towards the ground floor I saw the cleaner standing in the second-floor stairwell with a male member of staff and a male guest. All three of them were looking up, and when they saw me, the cleaner screamed again. Still none of them moved.

  I didn’t have time to waste pleading my innocence or asking them nicely to make way. The priority was getting to safety, and the gun was out of my jeans and pointing at them before I even had time to think about it.

  ‘Move! Move! Move!’ I yelled.

  And they moved. Fast. Almost falling over themselves to get through the door back on to the second floor.

  I kept going, shoving the gun back in my jeans as I came out into the hotel’s reception area where the previous night I’d checked in with Tina beside me. She’d had to use her credit card as collateral against any damage I might cause – something she’d been reluctant to do, and which in the light of the events of the past few minutes was perfectly justified. She was going to get in a lot of trouble for this, but not nearly as much as me. I’d just killed a man. And it could hardly be classed as manslaughter. I’d shot him four times, the last round a point-blank one to the head. There was no way I was going to be able to explain my way out of that one.

  The same middle-aged woman who’d been at the reception desk when I’d walked past with a friendly hello five minutes earlier was now talking urgently into the phone. The moment she saw me, the words seemed to die in her mouth and she went as white as a sheet.

  I walked across what passed for the hotel foyer, avoiding her eye and trying to look as casual as possible, as if all this commotion had nothing to do with me, even though I was sweating profusely and so pumped up with adrenalin that it was an actual physical effort to stop myself from breaking into a sprint.

  As soon as I was out the front doors and into the bright sunshine of what was rapidly turning into a beautiful early autumn afternoon, I heard the insistent wail of a police siren, not that far away either. I started running across the car park, telling myself to keep calm and think of a way out of this.

  That was when I saw the cheap blue car with white go-faster stripes pulling out of one of the parking spaces front first. The windows were down, letting out some very bad music, and a young guy with slicked black hair was behind the wheel. He was still turning the wheel as I ran in front of the car, blocking his exit.

  His face contorted in anger and he started shouting something at me, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying above the music, and anyway, he stopped the second he saw the gun in my hand.

  ‘Get out!’ I yelled, running round the driver’s side and trying to pull open the door. It was locked so I put the gun against the side of his head and repeated the command.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ he cried, opening the door so fast he almost knocked me over in the process.

  I grabbed him by the collar and literally threw him to the tarmac, realizing with a strange combination of elation and regret that I was a natural in the role of violent gunman. It was almost as if it was impossible to tell where the undercover cop in me stopped and the criminal began.

  Jumping into the driver’s seat, I put my foot down and raced to the car park exit, turning off the blaring music in the process. The siren was louder now, and it sounded as if it had been joined by a second. The traffic was moving at a steady pace, and thankfully there wasn’t too much of it, but I didn’t hang about, pulling out in front of a people carrier, forcing its driver, an irate-looking woman, to do an emergency stop. I turned a sharp right as she blasted on the horn, away from the sirens, and accelerated down the road, overtaking a car ahead that was going too slowly and forcing the one coming towards me to veer out of the way. The whole thing was surreal, like being flung into the middle of a Hollywood action movie, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that a part of me was really enjoying the high of racing down a city street, muscling my way through the traffic, knowing that I had to get away.

  But another part of me was far less excited. As I drove, getting further and further away from the hotel and my pursuers, a voice in my head told me loudly and insistently that I might have been in danger before, but now my situation was far worse. Because I was no longer just the target of a handful of shadowy figures.

  Now I was wanted for murder too.

  Twenty-six

  It was gone two o’clock by the time Tina got back to the office. She’d stopped for coffee and sandwiches en route and eaten them in Hyde Park, allowing herself to calm down after the events of that morning. She’d also done a pretty good job of justifying her actions to herself. After all, Dylan Mackay was a nasty piece of work and she’d extracted important leads from him that he’d never have given up voluntarily. But a vague sense of shock still lingered as she sat down at her desk and thought about what she needed to do now.

  Her first priority was to find out when Lauren and Jen’s phones had gone out of service so she could then pinpoint an exact date they’d disappeared. She also needed their phone records, as well as the phone records for Dylan Mackay’s number. That way she could work out the sequence of events and hopefully find a number for the man Dylan had hired the girls out to. This kind of information was impossible for a private detective to get hold of legally but it was easy for a police officer to access, and Tina had a contact in the Met who could provide her with it, albeit at a cost. His name was Jeff Roubaix, and she’d called him immediately after taking the Lauren Donaldson case, asking him to try to locate Lauren’s phone records. That had been more than a week ago now and she hadn’t heard back from him yet, which wasn’t unusual. The process of finding out the mobile phone carrier a number was registered to, and then getting the carrier to provide the relevant information, sometimes took weeks. And if the number was unregistered, which plenty of them were, then it was even harder and more time-consuming.

  But Tina was tired of waiting. She needed to move things forward, so she lit a cigarette, wandered out on to the street outside her building, and put in a call to Roubaix.

  ‘Give me a moment,’ he said when he picked up at the other end. She could hear office noise around him and then the sound of doors opening and closing. ‘That’s better,’ he continued, sounding like he was now outside. ‘How are you doing?’

  Tina wasn’t one for small talk but she knew Jeff from her long-ago days in Islington CID. He’d joined plainclothes a year after she had and they’d worked together for a while. He’d always been a nice guy, not bad-looking either, but with a predilection for gambling that hadn’t been a problem then but had got worse over time.

  ‘Not bad. Busy.’

  ‘Just like us then. Although at least you’re your own boss. Found that girl yet? Saw the article in the Daily Mail.’

  Jeff’s habit of talking in perfunctory half sentences had always irritated Tina and was actually the main reason she’d never fancied him. There was a kind of slapdash laziness about it that luckily didn’t extend to his professional work. ‘No, not yet. But I need those phone records for that number I gave you urgently.’

  ‘I’m going fast as I can, Tina, but you know what it’s like. Only found out who the carrier was yesterday, and that was quick by usual standards. Going to take longer for records.’

  ‘But you can push it through faster if you try.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s a hassle.’

  ‘I’m paying you, Jeff. That should cover the hassle. I need to fin
d out when and where it was turned off. I also need records on two other numbers urgently.’

  Jeff made an exasperated noise down the phone. ‘I can’t just keep making comms data requests without some decent reason. You know that.’

  She did. But she also knew about his gambling habit. ‘Listen, I’ll pay you double what I agreed to pay you for each number. That means if you get me the information fast – and by fast I mean within the next twenty-four hours – you’ll be getting six times more than you thought. That should give you plenty of incentive to come up with as many good reasons as you need. And it’ll be in cash.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money, Tina,’ he said, his voice barely audible above the outside noise, but loud enough for her to hear the hunger in it.

  ‘My client’s wealthy and he’s dying. He just wants to find his daughter, so he’s not going to quibble about cash.’

  ‘You know, if you’ve got an important lead on a missing person, you need to report it.’

  ‘When I’ve got something concrete, I’ll go straight to the police, but not before. And I promise I won’t involve you, Jeff. I haven’t got your name written down anywhere, and the phone I call you from is unregistered, so there’ll never be a way to connect the two of us.’

  He sighed. ‘OK. I’ll go in as urgent as I can without sounding too many alarm bells. May take longer than twenty-four hours though.’

  ‘The faster you go the more money you get,’ she told him, and having read out the numbers, she ended the call.

  For a couple of minutes she stood in the sunshine, eyes closed, finishing off her cigarette and enjoying the thought that she was beginning to get closer to finding out what had happened to Lauren Donaldson, even though she had a strong feeling that the case wouldn’t have a happy ending. She was also trying to work out what Sean’s involvement in it was. He’d left a couple of messages for her earlier and she needed to call him back. She hoped he didn’t want more money. He was bleeding her dry already and without, as far as she could see, any prospect of paying her back.