The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  It was a no-win situation. Say something and risk being viewed as a liability, or keep quiet and definitely be seen as one. What sort of choice was that?

  Dylan stood looking out of his bedroom window at the street below, his thirtieth cigarette of the day in one hand, mobile in the other, knowing that one way or another he was going to have to make the call. He wanted to throw up – the tension coursing through him was that bad. He could die for this, and it was all that bitch Sheryl’s fault. God, he wished he could get his hands round her neck right now and throttle the life out of her. The same with Boyd. At least this call might mean the end for her. She really didn’t know the people she was messing with here. For a couple of seconds an intense, hot rage overtook Dylan Mackay as he recalled the beating he’d received from her, and he pressed the speed dial button on the phone.

  Holding it to his ear, he waited, almost unable to breathe, praying the call wouldn’t be picked up at the other end.

  And then a familiar voice came on the line: ‘Long time no hear. What is it?’

  Dylan swallowed. ‘Someone’s been asking questions.’

  Thirty-four

  It was a sunny morning when I finally woke up. I’d dreamed a lot but couldn’t really remember anything, although as I sat up in the car seat, stiff, cold and tired, I had another flashback to prison, and almost with surprise I realized that I could remember more of my stay there now. Faces appeared in my mind of different screws and inmates, some whose names I remembered, others just passing and anonymous.

  But I was filling in the gaps now. Childhood remained patchy, and I still had this nagging conviction that I had a sister, but adulthood, and particularly my time in the force, was becoming far more vivid and real.

  I was on the mend. However, I was also on the run. I had next to no money and, worse, no plan. I was tempted to call Tina to ask how she was getting on tracking down Dr Bronson but I’d involved her too much already, and if she’d gone to the police, as she’d said she would, then they’d be tracking the mobile number I’d called her from yesterday. In fact they’d be able to track any number I called her from. I’d have to think of another way to contact her.

  In the meantime, I switched on the car radio and searched through the stations until I found one that had the news. There was a big political story about an MP who’d been taking kickbacks from big business; another one about renewed violence in the Middle East; and finally a brief couple of sentences at the end about an incident at a north London hotel the previous day in which a man had been shot dead. The female newsreader said that police were appealing for witnesses, but no mention was made either of me or the identity of the dead man.

  The story gave me just a glimmer of hope. If nothing else, I still had a little time before my face started appearing on TV screens and the hunt for me began in earnest. I knew I had to lose the car but decided to grab some breakfast first.

  I found a roadside café just out of town and ate a fry-up washed down with a couple of cups of coffee. By the time I’d finished I wanted to go back to sleep, but there was no time for that, so I drove back into town and left the car on a back street not far from the main drag. By this time it was just after nine o’clock, so I walked round until I found the bus station, checked the different routes available, and finally jumped on one heading for Cambridge. I wanted to find somewhere isolated where I could lie low for a day or two until I worked out my next move.

  After buying the bus ticket and a bottle of water, I had the sum total of six pounds to my name, so I was going to have to steal to survive. Once upon a time that thought would have bothered me, but not any more. This was about survival. I’d been dealt some bad cards by the world. Kicked out of the police, imprisoned for something I didn’t do, and now hunted, it seemed, by a whole host of people I didn’t know who either wanted to put me back in the slammer or in the ground. I was well and truly on my own. But I’d been in this position before and survived, and I was determined to survive again.

  The bus meandered along a host of B-roads through flat Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire countryside, passing through quaint villages and less quaint towns on its torturous, winding route. About an hour into the trip the bus stopped on a stretch of straight, tree-lined road with a sprinkling of houses backing on to rolling green farmland on either side, and I decided on a whim to get out and walk. There was something truly liberating about being able to stretch my legs on a sunny day, and I had this strange feeling that if I walked for long enough I’d get to where I wanted to be.

  So that’s what I did. Fortified by my high-carb breakfast, and taking advantage of this potentially last burst of freedom, I walked for hours, down forest tracks and across sweeping wheat fields, drinking in the smells and sights of the countryside and working constantly to keep down the fear of incarceration and death that was always there at the back of my mind.

  After a long time, and with my water finished, I was heading down a bumpy single-track road when I came across a footpath that ran past a big wooden barn. The doors to the barn were open and I poked my head inside. It was empty, with hay bales stacked on both sides and a bed of loose hay covering much of the floor space. A wave of weariness suddenly washed over me. There were no other buildings nearby that I could see, and no people either, so I piled up some of the hay in the far corner where I couldn’t be seen easily from the door, lay down on my back, placing the pistol beside me under a light covering of straw, and shut my eyes.

  My last day in prison. That empty feeling of knowing so much time had been wasted, and the fear of what lay ahead. But, maybe thanks to Jack Duckford’s contacts in the underworld, the remainder of my stay after that first incident had been largely uneventful. The same screw who’d signed me in gave me back the bag containing the meagre possessions I’d arrived with, then turned me over to a stern female probation officer called Sian who had wiry hair and the kind of pained smile that made it look like she was constipated. She drove me to the halfway house in the arse end of Balham where I was going to be staying for the next three months, because I didn’t have any family who were prepared to take me in.

  I remember that grim feeling walking into the building. The place stank a lot worse than prison. At least prison was clean. Here, it felt like the BO was encrusted in the grimy, cobweb-strewn walls, along with the deep stench of despair. The guests – the inmates, whatever the hell we were called – looked either listless and doped up or just plain confused. The staff, young and out of their depth for the most part, were run off their feet as they tried to keep everything and everyone under control, and as I walked into the reception and almost tripped over a mop and bucket standing next to an untouched pool of rancid-smelling piss, I knew there was no way I could last it out in there.

  An hour later I used the payphone down the corridor from the room I’d been allocated with three other men, to make a call to Jack. As I stood there with the phone to my ear, trying to ignore the drunken wailing and shouting of someone in one of the rooms, it hit me that right then he was pretty much my only hope, and if he didn’t answer, then I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do.

  But he did answer, and by God I felt relief when I heard his voice.

  ‘It’s Sean,’ I said. ‘I’ve just got out. That job you were talking about when you came to see me. Is it still available?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said without a pause. ‘In fact we need you more now than we did then.’

  ‘Care to tell me about it?’

  ‘Not over the phone. But I promise you this. It’s right up your street.’

  Thirty-five

  Tina didn’t enjoy working from home but there wasn’t any alternative. Mike had told her that the colleague of the man Sean had killed had links to the security services, which would explain how they’d manage to bug her office, and why she’d been unable to find any of the devices with her bug finder. They were probably bugging her house as well, but somehow she felt safer here, and it was a lot easier to tell whether s
he was under surveillance in a sleepy village than in the middle of a city.

  But what she still couldn’t understand was why on earth they were after Sean and how this connected to the disappearance of Lauren Donaldson and Jen Jones. Because she was convinced that the two events were connected. There wasn’t a lot she could do, though, until Jeff Roubaix came back with the details of their phone records and those of Dylan Mackay.

  She finished her fourth coffee of the day and considered an afternoon walk. She liked walking. It gave her time to contemplate the world without interruptions. Maybe it would also give her some ideas.

  But as she got to her feet, she remembered Sean asking her to try to locate the psychotherapist who’d been treating him, Dr Bronson. Sean had been convinced that Bronson had been implanting false memories while he’d been under hypnotherapy, and was responsible for the recurring dream in which Lauren was dead and Jen injured. Tina didn’t entirely trust Sean, but she agreed with him that if she could find Dr Bronson, he might be able to provide some answers.

  She lit a cigarette and sat back down again. The walk could wait. She picked up her laptop, which she was pretty sure hadn’t been bugged since it had been with her the whole time, and typed in the web address for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, or BACP for short, the approved organization for the nation’s counsellors and therapists. A quick search revealed a page listing all those members who’d been struck off over the years. It was possible, of course, that the mysterious Dr Bronson worked for the security services, but Tina doubted it. Whatever was going on, it was definitely illegal. There was no way MI5 would officially sanction removing a vulnerable man from hospital and keeping him drugged in a house in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end. At least she hoped not. Either way, she felt sure that Bronson was a freelancer, and it was unlikely he’d agree to do something so unethical unless he was in trouble and couldn’t make money any other way.

  The list was a long one, and the misdemeanours varied from fraud to serious sexual assault. Concentrating on the previous five years and on men with Caucasian names, Tina came up with seventy-nine of them, which didn’t narrow things down a huge amount. So she decided to focus on those who’d been struck off for the more serious crimes, reasoning that they were the kind of people who could be more easily bought. It wasn’t an ideal search criterion but it did serve to whittle the list down to twenty-four.

  Next it was a case of Googling the individuals and trying to find photos of each of them, and locations. The two men who’d abducted Sean from A and E two days ago had got Bronson to the Herts/Bucks border – to Cherry Tree Farm, where they were holding Sean – in a little over an hour, so he was most likely based somewhere in southern England. Sean had also described Bronson as being a big guy in his fifties with a thick head of dark hair and glasses, so these two things, taken together, were a help. Even so, it was still painstaking and extremely boring work, since photos weren’t generally easy to come by.

  However, an hour later Tina had images for four men in their fifties who to her mind best fitted the bill. Three lived in Greater London, the fourth in Suffolk. She took a deep breath and stretched in her chair, wondering what to do next. She couldn’t just turn up on each man’s doorstep and demand to know if he’d been illegally hypnotizing a man being held against his will. No one was ever going to admit it, and she couldn’t do what she’d done with Dylan and knock the truth out of them either, not when at least three, and possibly all of them, were innocent.

  In the end, she needed Sean’s help to move forward, and right now he could be anywhere. She wondered how she’d react if he called. Would she tell Mike? Possibly, but not definitely.

  She sighed and lit another cigarette while she thought about Sean. He was an enigma to her. A cop who’d been kicked off the force for carrying out an illegal undercover op during which he’d killed at least one man, and potentially others, and who’d ended up convicted of rape; and now he’d killed again, and it looked like he was the boyfriend of one of the missing girls at the time she’d gone missing. And yet she’d known him once as a decent guy who’d tried to bring his brother’s killers to justice and who, more importantly, had saved her life. Did she trust him, or didn’t she?

  Her mobile rang, interrupting her thoughts. She’d changed the SIM card and given the new number to only two people. One was Sean; the other was Jeff Roubaix, and she recognized Jeff’s number now.

  To be on the safe side, Tina walked out into her back garden, notebook in hand, and sat down on the bench she’d put out there the previous summer, before answering the call.

  ‘You owe me a lot of money, Tina,’ said Jeff straight away.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘The first number you gave me, the one you said belonged to a Lauren Donaldson or Marano, was registered to an address in Chalk Farm, and the name was Marano.’

  Tina wrote down the address, knowing that this was almost certainly where Lauren and Jen were living when they disappeared.

  ‘I’ve got the phone records for the past year,’ continued Jeff. ‘I’ll email them to you.’

  ‘When was the phone last used?’

  ‘Hold on, I’ll check.’

  She waited, listening to the clicking of a keyboard at the other end of the line, knowing that Jeff’s next words would almost certainly tell her the day on which Lauren disappeared.

  ‘April the seventh. The last call’s at 18.43.’

  The night before Sean’s car accident.

  ‘Is that a help?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Tina. ‘It is.’ It was also bad news because now it gave total credence to Sean’s story of the dream, the one in which he’d seen a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Lauren lying lifeless on a bed. Someone had switched off Lauren’s phone to prevent it being used to track her down. Tina felt a pang of sadness as she thought of Alan Donaldson, knowing his daughter was almost certainly dead. ‘Can you triangulate the location to where it was last used?’ she asked.

  Jeff made a scoffing sound. ‘Come on, Tina, be serious. That’s way off my remit. You need to go a lot higher than me for that.’

  ‘What about the first of the numbers I gave you yesterday, the one I believe belongs to a Jennifer Jones?’

  ‘At the moment they can’t find a carrier, and I told them to pull out all the stops as well. Which means it’s almost certainly an unregistered pay-as-you-go.’

  ‘Shit. That means it’s going to be hard to track the records, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very. And it’ll need people with a lot more clout and resources than I’ve got to have a chance.’

  ‘OK, thanks.’ Tina was surprised that someone like Jen Jones had a pay-as-you-go. In her experience, the only people not on contracts were kids, technophobes and criminals trying to stay under the radar. ‘And the other one I gave you for Dylan Mackay? Any joy tracking down the records for that?’

  ‘Pulled out all the stops on that one too, just like you asked me to, and it is registered to Dylan Mackay at an address in Kensington. Haven’t got a full year’s records because he hasn’t had the phone that long.’

  ‘How long?’

  Again there was the sound of tapping on the keyboard. ‘Well, that’s interesting,’ Jeff said after a pause. ‘Looks like the contract began on April the eighth.’

  So Dylan had changed phones the day after Lauren disappeared and the same day that Sean had his car accident. But what Tina really needed to find out was who Dylan had been talking to in the days prior to 8 April because that might well tell her who he’d hired Lauren and Jen out to. And who’d killed them.

  ‘Is there any way you can get the records for the phone Dylan owned before April the eighth?’

  Jeff exhaled loudly. ‘I can try, but it means more paperwork, and more hassle, and your bill’s running up high already.’

  ‘Do what you can and I’ll pay you in cash the moment you need it.’

  ‘How about tonight? Can meet up for a drink. Don
’t mind coming to your local.’

  The last thing Tina wanted was for Jeff Roubaix, or any other business contact she had, to be within a few hundred metres of her front door, but she didn’t fancy driving too far either, and she knew she was going to have to pay him now if she wanted any more favours.

  They arranged to meet in her local pub – a place she rarely frequented due to the fact that she could no longer drink alcohol – at eight p.m., before ending the call.

  For a few minutes Tina sat in the sunshine with her eyes closed, mulling over what she’d just learned. She thought about Alan Donaldson and his desperation to be reunited with his missing daughter. It hurt her to know there was going to be no happy ending to this story, but she could still achieve justice for Lauren if she continued on her present course. It would help if she spoke to Mike, because he had the authority to gather the information she needed on the various phones she was trying to track, but she knew he wouldn’t help her. Sean would, though. She was sure of that. He was the key to this whole thing.

  But where the hell was he?

  Thirty-six

  I woke with a start from a completely blank and very deep sleep and almost screamed out loud.

  A figure was staring down at me, partly silhouetted by the barn’s dim light, with a large dog next to it.

  I sat up instinctively and the dog growled, tensing as if readying to pounce.