The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  Bolt took a deep breath. Hughie didn’t come across like a man who was going to budge very easily. ‘OK, at least tell me the name of the suspect we’re meant to be chasing.’

  Hughie shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t tell you anything more right now.’

  ‘We’re going to find out, so your lack of cooperation is just holding things up and allowing our suspect to escape – which I’m assuming, as this is a matter of national security, is something you don’t want.’

  Hughie said nothing.

  ‘All right, have it your own way. You’re going to be transported to Barnet police station shortly, and we’ll take a full statement there. In the meantime, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder.’ He gave Hughie his rights and started to get out of the car.

  ‘Can you please remove the restraints now that you know who I am?’ asked Hughie.

  ‘No,’ said Bolt, and slammed the door shut behind him.

  That was when he saw Mo hurrying towards him, a puzzled expression on his face. At the same time, the mobile in Bolt’s pocket rang. For the moment he ignored it, wanting to speak to his colleague. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘This whole thing gets stranger, boss,’ said Mo, breathing heavily from the effort of the brisk walk over. ‘The suspect was booked into the hotel under the name Matthew Barron, but it’s probably an alias because he gave a fictitious address. But it was paid for on someone else’s credit card. You’ll never guess who.’

  ‘Go on, surprise me,’ said Bolt, pulling the mobile free from his trouser pocket.

  ‘Tina Boyd.’

  The mere mention of her name brought out all kinds of reactions in Bolt, none of them productive. Frowning, he looked down at the mobile screen, and put the phone to his ear.

  ‘Hello Tina,’ he said. ‘That was good timing. I think you and I may need a little chat.’

  Twenty-nine

  I lied to Tina. I hadn’t got rid of the pistol that I’d used to shoot Blackbeard. I still had it. I wasn’t quite sure why. It wasn’t for safety purposes. I’d already discovered that I could look after myself in a fight. But somehow, deep down, I knew that having it gave me options. There was only one bullet in the chamber but, if all else failed and I was facing arrest and certain imprisonment, it might offer a way out.

  Still, that wasn’t something I wanted to think about.

  More interesting was the fact that there was an iPad on the front seat of the car I’d stolen. The only reason I knew anything about them was because Jane had owned one. She hadn’t liked me looking at it – which in hindsight I could now understand – but I’d persuaded her to let me mess about with it a couple of times, so I knew the basic ins and outs. Like Jane’s, it was locked with a four-digit passcode, but I remembered a crime prevention programme I’d seen on daytime TV the other week where the presenter bemoaned the fact that people used such obvious number combinations to secure their possessions, such as 1111 and 1234. So while I’d been waiting for Tina earlier, I’d tried 1111, and it had opened immediately.

  Now, two hours later, I was parked on a residential back street in Bedford having put what I hoped was enough distance between me and the hotel to finally relax. I needed to get rid of the car. It wasn’t exactly inconspicuous and I knew there’d be a major alert for it out by now, but with barely forty quid to my name (Blackbeard hadn’t been carrying much cash in his wallet), I’d already decided I was going to sleep in it tonight. What happened after that was anyone’s guess. My strategy was not to think too far ahead as, quite frankly, it was too depressing.

  Instead, I decided to see if I could find out more about myself, so I typed in my real name and a whole bunch of results came up. The most recent ones referred to my rape trial and subsequent conviction. I wasn’t strong enough to read about that yet. The memories that had come back had convinced me I was innocent, but it was also clear I wasn’t backward in coming forward either, as my actions with Tina earlier had shown. The pass I’d made at her had come out of nowhere. It had been instinctive. I’d just wanted some human warmth, some physical contact with a woman. But she’d reacted like I was some kind of lunatic, and I felt a wave of embarrassment remembering it.

  So I put it out of my mind.

  Looking further down the list, I saw that the results turned to the undercover operation that had seen me fired from the police. I hadn’t had a chance to read about that before, thanks to Combover and Blackbeard’s intervention in the A and E department.

  The undercover op had happened five years earlier, and it had been completely unofficial. While on long-term leave for stress I’d infiltrated the gang of armed robbers responsible for the murder of my brother back in the nineties, and become involved in the kidnapping of a murder suspect. All three of the gang had ended up dead, while I’d been shot twice while saving the life of a police officer, Tina Boyd. Although I’d shot dead one of the gang, it had been treated as self-defence as he was the one who’d shot me, and he’d also been trying to kill Tina.

  After I’d finished reading, I tried to remember the events. They’d certainly been dramatic enough. For a while nothing came, and I almost gave up, but then a vision of a house on fire flashed across my mind, and I saw myself fighting with a man in the semi-darkness, looking up into his hate-filled eyes, knowing that he was doing everything he could to kill me. For a couple of seconds I could feel my own fear – the knowledge that I was only seconds from a bloody death – before the vision slipped away, back into the recesses of my mind, leaving me tense and shaking in the driver’s seat.

  Something else hit me before I could recover fully. A single jarring memory of my first day in prison. Standing in a room, handing over my possessions to a bored-looking prison officer with tattoos covering both his arms, while he made an inventory of them. Stripping off. Handing over my clothes. Waiting while he and another officer searched me in every orifice. The final thing the one with the tattoos said to me before I was led away in my new uniform to begin my time. ‘It’s going to be hard for you in here.’ There was no sympathy in his voice. No anger either. He was simply stating a fact. At that moment I recalled those words perfectly. Remembered the fear I experienced as he said them. And the anger too, at the injustice of what was happening. As if the whole world had turned on me for no good reason, and all the good things I’d ever done suddenly counted for nothing. And then I was taken through a door and a key turned in the lock behind me – a signal that my life as I knew it was over.

  I waited until the memory had faded before taking a gulp from the bottle of water on the seat beside me. I stared down at the iPad screen, wondering if I should read any more. In the end, I opened up a story from the Mail Online about my trial for rape and, with a thick sense of dread, began reading.

  It was a short piece without photos stating that ‘Disgraced ex-police officer Sean Egan’ had been found guilty of rape and sentenced to five years in prison. There wasn’t really anything in there that Tina hadn’t already told me, except for the fact that I’d apparently been drunk at the time, and the woman I was supposed to have raped hadn’t been. The article stated she’d been taking antibiotics that reacted extremely badly to being mixed with alcohol and, according to her own story, and that of two of her friends she’d been with earlier that evening, she hadn’t been drinking at all on the night she’d met me. I wasn’t sure this made any difference to anything but the tone of the article suggested it did. The victim wasn’t named but the article finished with her saying that I’d ruined her life and that the sentence of five years was laughable. I didn’t read it through a second time and I was relieved that it didn’t dredge up any memories of what had happened.

  I switched off the iPad and threw it in a black wheelie bin outside a house a few yards further down. I would have kept it but they’d said on the same programme where I’d learned about easily deciphered passcodes that iPads had a function that allowed their owner to locate them anywhere in the world, so I guessed it would be a lot easier to find
than the car.

  As I got back into the car and pulled away, it struck me that I’d been involved in some pretty heavy stuff over the years, so it was no real surprise that I’d found myself in the situation I was in now. I thought back to the dream that had started all this off. What the hell had happened that night with the blonde woman and her friend, the one Tina was searching for?

  And where were the bodies?

  Thirty

  Back at home in her living room, a cigarette in one hand, a coffee in the other, Tina felt as if everything was running out of her control.

  As soon as Sean had told her what had happened at the hotel, she knew she had to call the police and tell them what was going on. She’d given him an hour before she made the phone call. She wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t like he deserved it. His actions had risked getting her in a huge amount of trouble and then, to top it all, he’d made a seriously unwanted advance to her, barely any time after killing a man, which didn’t say a huge amount about his empathy for his fellow human beings. But in the end, whether she liked it or not, he’d saved her life five years earlier, and for that reason she’d always owe him.

  When Tina had eventually made the call, it had been to Mike Bolt, her former boss and one-time lover. As the head of one of the Met’s Murder Investigation Teams, Mike had already been given the case of the man Sean had killed, and he’d known about her connection with it when she’d called. They’d talked for a few minutes and she hadn’t held anything back. She’d given him Sean’s name, and a brief rundown of what had happened since he’d come to see her the previous morning.

  ‘We’re going to need to take a statement,’ Mike had said when she finished, not bothering to disguise the exasperation in his voice.

  ‘Don’t arrest me though, Mike. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I don’t deserve the bad publicity.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Tina, but you’re going to have to be straight down the line with me. Try to hide anything and I’ll come down on you hard.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ she’d told him. ‘I promise.’

  He hadn’t said anything for a few seconds, and she’d been just about to fill the silence by asking if they’d ID’d the victim when he finally spoke. ‘Why do you always get yourself involved with the wrong people?’ His tone had reminded Tina of her father. ‘Why don’t you just … calm down?’

  But that was the thing. If she’d known when Sean had walked through her door the trouble he was about to cause her, she’d have kicked him out there and then.

  Or would she have done?

  She put out the cigarette and picked up her laptop. Outside the window, night was beginning to fall. If her office was bugged, then it was possible her house was too. So she’d gone over every inch of both with the most sophisticated bug finder available on the market, although she was realistic enough to know that it was likely their equipment was going to be invisible to hers. Even so, she checked the outside of her laptop for keypad trackers and ran a series of virus checks on the hard drive before opening up her file on Lauren Donaldson.

  She went through what she had so far, putting aside what Sean had told her, since his story was all conjecture. Both girls had gone missing around the same time. They’d been together in the last confirmed sighting Tina had, which was Sheryl’s, and neither had been seen since, which strongly suggested they’d gone missing together. Dylan Mackay had admitted that he’d pimped them out to wealthy men, but had refused to name the last man he’d pimped them out to, even under extreme duress, and in Tina’s opinion his silence was because he was scared of the guy. This meant two things. First, the guy was a nasty piece of work. Second, he had something to do with the girls’ disappearance. So the important thing was to ID him and take it from there.

  However, without Dylan’s cooperation, that was going to be tricky. She plugged in the flash drive she’d used to extract the contents of his phone and browsed through his photos, notes and contacts list, without finding anything useful. He had a lot of photos: some showed him partying; others were of women, many in various stages of undress; and some looked to be of family and friends. There was one of Dylan holding up a boy of about three, both of them grinning at the camera, and it made Tina feel guilty because it showed him as a human being and not some archetypal bad guy.

  In the end, though, none of the photos stood out; nor did any of the notes; and the contacts list was just that, a list, with 353 names on it, any one of whom could have been the person who’d last hired Lauren and Jen from Dylan. And of course it was eminently possible that his name wasn’t on there at all any more, or might never have been. But at one time they must have spoken, and almost certainly on the phone, which meant that Tina’s best chance of identifying him was going to be through Dylan’s phone records, and she was going to have to wait for Jeff Roubaix to get hold of them.

  In the meantime, she needed a last-known address for Lauren and Jen Jones. Sheryl had said they’d lived in a flat in Chalk Farm but a quick search of the Land Registry and the Electoral Register didn’t turn up anything, which was no great surprise. This was one of the problems these days, thought Tina. Because everything was done by email and phone, people didn’t tend to keep each other’s postal addresses in the same way they’d done in the past, making them harder to track down.

  Lighting another cigarette, Tina looked up Sheryl’s number and called her.

  ‘Did you go see Dylan?’ Sheryl asked immediately.

  ‘I did, but don’t worry. I didn’t mention you.’

  ‘Thanks. I appreciate that. Did he help?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘I’m surprised. You must have some serious powers of persuasion.’

  You don’t know the half of it, thought Tina.

  ‘So what did he tell you?’

  ‘He just gave me a few leads to follow up on,’ said Tina carefully. ‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’ She thought about advising Sheryl to keep out of Dylan’s way in case he worked out that she was the one who’d given Tina his name, but decided against it. There was no point worrying her unduly. ‘I’m trying to get an exact address for Lauren and Jen in Chalk Farm,’ she continued. ‘Do you know anyone who might be able to help me?’

  ‘I can’t think of anyone. We were all friends, but not that much, you know. Is there no other way of finding out? I mean, you’re a detective, right?’

  Tina sighed. ‘I’ll find it eventually, it’s just easier if someone can tell me.’

  There was a pause as Sheryl thought. ‘I know Jen was seeing someone just before she went missing. Lauren told me about him. I never met him but I think he lived just down the road from them. Dylan might know him.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘God, what was it?’

  Tina waited again while Sheryl searched her memory banks on the other end of the phone.

  ‘Sean. That was it.’

  Tina felt a stab of excitement. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, totally. It was Sean.’

  ‘Was his last name Egan?’

  ‘She never told me his last name. I think he was a bit older than her. Late thirties maybe, and Lauren said he was good-looking. Look, I’m sorry. It’s not much help, is it?’

  But it was. As far as Tina was concerned there was simply no question that Jen’s boyfriend and Sean weren’t the same person. The age was about right, and Sean was undoubtedly a good-looking guy. It wasn’t concrete evidence that he was connected – not by a long way – but it suddenly made her far more interested in his story, and the events surrounding it.

  One thing was for sure: everything kept coming back to Sean.

  Thirty-one

  I ate dinner in a cavernous pub in Bedford town centre that could probably have fitted five hundred customers comfortably but had barely fifty, making it feel very empty, which suited me just fine. My plan was simple: have a decent meal and then head back to the car, which I’d moved to the other side of town from the spot where I’
d abandoned the iPad, for a sleep. I figured I could think better on a full stomach.

  I had fish, chips and mushy peas and it was surprisingly good. I ate the lot and washed it down with a pint of Foster’s. Then I got profligate and ordered treacle sponge for pudding and another pint, which reminded me that I’d never been very good with money.

  As I drank the second pint, settled in at a corner table a long way from anyone else, I relaxed and let my mind drift. When I’d been living at Jane’s place I’d spent a lot of time on my own, yet the combination of the drugs and the fact that I had no memory from before the car accident had left me unable to think about all but the most basic of functions. The world had been a blank, confusing place. Now, suddenly, it had become exciting and new, and yet, ironically, it looked as if my newfound freedom would be over before I got a chance to fully appreciate it again.

  The sounds of incarceration came back to me. The iron clank of cell doors; the tinkling of keys; the echoing shouts and catcalls; the plaintive cries of the first-timers and the weak at night; the grunts of masturbation … And the smells: disinfectant in the corridors; the stale close-up odour of sweat on the prisoners; bad breath; cheap, mass-produced food.

  In those moments, as I sat drinking my second pint in the comforting warmth of the pub, my conscious self soaking up memories from my subconscious, it was like opening up a book and beginning a story.

  It’s going to be hard for you in here.

  And by God it was.

  They came for me very early on in my stay. I’d helped to put away a lot of very bad people during my time as an undercover cop – gangsters, drug smugglers, armed robbers – and a lot of those people still had power and money, which was a very bad combination. Because of my background they had me on a wing with the so-called vulnerable inmates who needed protection: the paedophiles, the rapists, the terrified first-timers, the ex-cops who’d been caught out by the justice system they were supposed to be upholding. It didn’t help, though.