The Final Minute

by Simon Kernick

  Switching the headlights to full beam, she gunned the engine and drove on to the runway, relieved to see Claire and Milly still running towards her. She accelerated past them, bearing down on the woman in the balaclava, who’d taken up a crouched one-handed firing position a few yards in front of the 4×4. Tina could see she was hurt by the way one arm hung at her side, but she still ducked her head as the woman fired at her. A bullet flew through the middle of the windscreen, missing her by inches, and then the woman was jumping up and darting to one side, clearly hoping to take Tina through the passenger window when she came past and hit the 4×4, which was an inevitability on her current course.

  Tina swung the wheel hard, braking at the same time, chasing down her target. The woman’s gun arm flailed as she tried to get out of the way and a second shot rang out, but this time it didn’t even hit the car and Tina kept driving, clipping the woman’s legs with the edge of the bonnet and sending her flying out of view. She kept spinning the wheel in a screech of tyres until she’d turned round 180 degrees.

  The woman in the balaclava was getting to her feet, unsteadily. She’d lost the gun and was trying to shield her eyes from the glare of Tina’s headlights with her one good arm. She looked disorientated and, as Tina watched, she staggered over to the 4×4. Tina saw the gun lying on the tarmac and she drove forward, putting the car between it and the woman, then jumped out and picked it up.

  The woman had opened the back door of the 4×4 and was leaning inside with her back to Tina.

  ‘Put your hands in the air!’ Tina called out, coming round the front of her car, holding the gun.

  But the woman didn’t seem to be listening. Instead Tina could hear her talking softly to someone inside the 4×4.

  Tina repeated her command. Only three or four yards separated them now. She needed to neutralize the woman but had no idea how she was going to do it. She could hardly shoot her, even though she was sorely tempted, and she had no handcuffs, nor any sign of assistance.

  And then the woman yanked off her balaclava, revealing her long blonde hair, and cried out – a terrible keening sound, like that of an animal in distress. She turned towards Tina, her face twisted in anguish, and for the first time Tina saw the prone body of the Neanderthal in the back of the car, his head hanging over the end of the seat.

  ‘No!’ screamed the woman, her voice echoing across the vast emptiness of the airfield, and, almost as if in answer, a siren wailed, followed by a second, close by, and coming closer.

  Something flashed in the woman’s gloved hand. A blade of some sort. Then she was running at Tina, the anguish transformed in an instant to pure white rage.

  Tina pulled the trigger and fired two shots into her heart, stopping her in her tracks.

  The woman wobbled on her feet, looking momentarily surprised, and it struck Tina for the first time how beautiful she was – a woman who could have had everything yet who’d ended up like this, dying young, violently and alone in a foreign land.

  She fell to the tarmac with a dull, empty thud, leaving Tina the last person standing.

  One Month Later

  Sixty

  Somehow I survived that night.

  The blonde woman shot me three times in the upper body causing extensive internal damage. I suffered a collapsed lung, lost three inches of my small intestine, two of my ribs were shattered, and I no longer have a spleen. But somehow my most important organs were missed, and I’ve been told I’m likely to make a full recovery. I understand that Tina Boyd, who turned up like a slightly tardy version of the Seventh Cavalry, administered emergency first aid until the ambulance crew arrived. She also killed the woman who shot me and saved Claire and Milly, so I guess we’re evens now. In fact, I probably owe her. I’d have liked to thank her personally for what she did but she hasn’t been to see me here at the hospital, where I remain under police guard. And sadly under arrest. As soon as I leave here I’m being transferred to prison to await trial on a number of charges.

  Claire hasn’t visited me either. Nor Milly – about the only good thing, it seems, I’ve ever produced in my life. Claire has let it be known that she wants nothing more to do with me, and doesn’t want me to contact her or Milly, and I guess under the circumstances I can understand her position.

  I was finally well enough to be interviewed by the police a week back. Two men came to talk to me; one was DCI Mike Bolt, the guy Tina had told me about. He was a big presence, the kind of man who could intimidate if he wanted to, but also someone you felt you could trust. The other was his colleague, DS Mo Khan, who looked like he ate too much.

  I asked them a lot of questions, none of which they seemed interested in answering. What they were interested in was finding out what had happened that night at Victor Hanzha’s house. And, like everyone else, they wanted to know the location of the bodies.

  By that point I’d remembered pretty much everything that had happened that night and, if I’m honest, they were memories I’d rather not have accessed. I was in love with Jen Jones, so to have to load her bloodied, still-warm corpse into the back of a car, along with that of an equally young woman, was one of the worst experiences of my life. I came close to being physically sick, and feel nauseous now just thinking about it. That night, I knew I’d been marked for death as well. So when Jack sent me off with Hanzha’s bodyguard – a big Russian guy with an expressionless face – to bury the girls, it was obvious I was going to be joining them in the ground.

  The Russian’s sense of local geography was limited so it was up to me to find a final resting place for the girls. I chose Epping Forest. It was a good forty miles around the M25 from Victor Hanzha’s house and undeniably risky to be driving any distance with two bodies in the car, but I knew that at least we’d have a good chance of making them disappear permanently there. Don’t get me wrong. I felt awful about what we were doing, but genuinely thought I had no other option. I knew the Russian was armed: I’d seen a gun in a shoulder holster underneath his jacket while we were loading the bodies. So I had to go along with it. But all the time I was thinking about how I was going to survive.

  I’d picked up a small cutting knife from the kitchen before I left and it was in my back pocket. I figured that like almost all criminals I’d known, the Russian would be intrinsically lazy, and wouldn’t even think about killing me until I’d helped him dig the grave, so when we finally reached a suitable place deep in the woods and were part way through digging a hole big and deep enough for the bodies, I put down my shovel, wiped my brow with a sigh and, as he told me in broken English to keep going, I whipped out the knife and shoved it in his neck. The whole thing was over in seconds. I got out of the way as the man who’d coldly finished off the girl I’d been in love with staggered round the hole, blood pouring from his neck, before falling into it, dead.

  I spent another hour digging. It would have been much longer but it had rained a lot in recent weeks – I remember that now – and the ground was soft. When I’d finished, I buried all three of them, covered the bodies in the quicklime the Russian had thoughtfully brought with him to aid decomposition, and then filled the hole in with as much earth as possible.

  I performed the whole exercise in a state of shock, but by the time I’d finished I’d realized that as long as I remained in the country, I was a dead man. So I had to get out fast, and for that I needed money. As soon as I got home, I called Jack Duckford, just like he’d said I had. Having thrown a heap of abuse at him for betraying me and demanding a hundred grand for my silence, I told him I’d photographed the girls’ bodies in the house, as well as recording Victor Hanzha talking about the killings on my phone mike, and uploaded the footage to a memory stick, which I’d then placed in a letter along with a map showing where they were buried. I told him I was just about to post the letter to my solicitor with instructions that the letter be opened only in the event of my death. It was all bullshit, of course, but believable enough, and I remember Jack telling me that he’d get me the money.


  After that, things are a bit sketchy. I knew I couldn’t stay in my flat any longer – it was too dangerous – and I remember driving out of town, heading for the south coast where we used to holiday when I was a kid. It must have been four or five a.m. by this time, pitch black and with virtually no traffic on the road, and I have only the vaguest recollection of headlights on full beam in my rear-view mirror, dazzlingly bright as they bore down on me … then nothing until I woke up three months later and looked into the eyes of a woman who claimed to be my sister and who said she was going to look after me.

  So who ran me off the road that night? My guess is that it was Combover and Blackbeard. I now know, thanks to Jack, that Jen Jones – the magnificent blonde I was in love with – was working for them, and was only interested in me to get nearer Alexander Hanzha. At some point she would have bugged my flat, and on that fateful night when I got back home and called Jack, I reckon that Combover and Blackbeard were listening. They heard me say that I had a letter with all this dynamite information on and when I left the flat, they picked up my trail at some point, wanting to intercept the letter, and ended up causing the accident. I’m guessing they checked the car, found no letter but, seeing that I was still alive, pulled me free and called 999, before setting the car on fire and removing all my ID, so that Hanzha’s people wouldn’t be able to find me. Then while I lay in hospital in a coma, they set up the whole thing with my fake sister, so that when I woke up, they could extract the information they needed from me.

  It’s all conjecture of course, but the pieces fit, and it’s the best I’ve got.

  So there I was, back in hospital, talking to DCI Mike Bolt and DS Mo Khan about my memories of that night at Victor Hanzha’s house and, as you can imagine, I had a pretty major dilemma. If I told them the truth and gave them the approximate location of the burial ground, I’d almost certainly face murder charges. So far I’d only been charged with three counts of aggravated vehicle taking and a further count of assault causing ABH on a police officer – the result of the collision at the travellers’ camp. I’d claimed self-defence with the shooting of Blackbeard, and it seemed my story hadn’t been entirely discounted as fiction. With just those charges I might have been able to avoid too long a stretch, especially given the extenuating circumstances. But unlawfully burying three bodies, and with no proof that I hadn’t murdered all of them … that was a different kettle of fish altogether.

  But if I didn’t give them a truthful account of what had happened then Victor Hanzha, the man who’d killed Lauren Donaldson, and as good as killed Jen Jones, would get off scot-free, and the girls would be denied a proper burial, leaving their grieving families in limbo.

  What would you have done?

  I’m a good man. I genuinely believe that.

  But maybe not good enough.

  In the end, I saved myself twenty years in prison by telling them I couldn’t remember anything concrete about that night.

  Sometimes you’ve got to think about number one. Especially when number one’s all you’ve got left.

  Sixty-one

  It was an unseasonably warm October day and the sun was high in the sky as Tina and Mike Bolt stood at the top of the hill that ran up behind her house, admiring the view of the sleepy village below.

  ‘I can’t see why you like it here,’ he said. ‘It’s far too peaceful for you.’

  She laughed. ‘I like peace and quiet as much as anyone else. As long as there’s a bit of excitement mixed in now and again.’

  Mike grunted. ‘A bit of excitement. Is that what you call what happened with Sean Egan?’ He gave her a smile which made her wonder why they’d never worked out. ‘It’s nice of you to invite me up here, but I’m guessing it’s not entirely a social call.’

  ‘It is a social call. I like seeing you. And I’m grateful for what you’ve done on my behalf.’ Mike had done a lot to make sure Tina avoided charges for aiding and abetting a fugitive. ‘But now you mention it, it would be nice to find out what was really going on behind the scenes.’

  ‘It’s all quite murky,’ said Mike. ‘Especially as a lot of powerful people won’t talk to us. Our best bet of confirming what really happened is Carl Hughie. We know he’s one of Crossman’s people, but he’s keeping completely shtum.’

  ‘Didn’t the psychotherapist, Whatret, implicate Hughie as the man paying him to get the information about the bodies from Sean?’

  Mike shook his head. ‘Under questioning, Whatret said he didn’t know what we were talking about. He denied ever meeting Carl Hughie, or Sean Egan for that matter, and he wouldn’t budge.’

  ‘Sean had this recurring dream that Jennifer Jones and Lauren Donaldson were murdered at a house somewhere by someone close to Hanzha,’ said Tina as they walked along the brow of the hill away from the village.

  ‘But did he ever give you any more details than that?’

  ‘No,’ she said reluctantly. ‘He didn’t.’

  ‘Because Sean says he can’t remember anything about the night of his accident. In fact he’s vague on pretty much everything after he left prison, and he’s doing everything he can to avoid incriminating himself.’

  Tina thought of her client, Mr Donaldson. In her final meeting with him three days earlier she’d had to tell him his daughter was almost certainly dead, and that it was unlikely they were ever going to find a body. The police had already told him the same thing, but it hadn’t stopped him breaking down in front of her. She’d tried to comfort him but it had been half hearted because ultimately she knew she’d failed. It might not have been her fault but that didn’t matter. She’d failed.

  She stopped and looked up at Mike with a flash of anger in her eyes. ‘So no one’s going to be brought to justice for killing those girls? And everything’s just going to carry on like before?’

  ‘Well, Hanzha’s already under investigation, and MI5 and the NCA are going to be looking at him a lot more closely now. And all the publicity’s making Crossman look toxic as Home Secretary. There’s talk he’s going to be demoted.’

  ‘But it’s not enough, is it?’

  Mike sighed. ‘It’s all we’re going to get. A lot of the other people we’d like to talk to are dead, like Jack Duckford, and those two American contract killers. Incidentally, Egan might still face charges over the killing of the male contract killer. The same gun from the hotel killing was used, and Egan’s explanation that it was self-defence doesn’t really hold water.’

  ‘You know, I went to see the woman Sean supposedly raped,’ said Tina after a few minutes.

  Mike looked annoyed, just as she knew he would. ‘Jesus. How the hell did you find her?’

  ‘I’m a detective, remember?’

  ‘But it’s illegal, Tina. Why do you keep helping Egan?’

  ‘He saved my life once, Mike. When someone does that, it’s hard to let it go when you see them in trouble. He was a good cop once too. All his problems, from the broken marriage to working for the bad guys, came from that one accusation. I wanted to find out whether it was true or not.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  Tina remembered the meeting. She’d turned up unannounced and Holly Verran, a well-dressed woman in her forties who’d had too much work done to her face, had recognized her from her recent appearances on the news, and let her in without a problem. In fact she’d been all smiles until Tina had told her what her visit was about. Then she’d gone from angry to upset as Tina had confronted her with everything that had happened to Sean and his family since he’d been charged with the rape.

  ‘She still said it was rape,’ said Tina. ‘But I don’t believe her.’

  Holly Verran had come close to admitting the truth, but at the last second had stopped herself, then threatened to have Tina arrested for illegally approaching her and making wild, unfounded accusations, until Tina had told her that if she did that she’d be back, and would be a lot less friendly next time. It was a cheap shot, and Tina didn’t feel good about herself for doing
it, though clearly it had worked because she’d heard nothing since.

  ‘There’s nothing that can be done about that now, Tina,’ said Mike, looking at her with something more than sympathy in his bright blue eyes. She knew he cared for her, and right now, that felt good. ‘You can’t solve the world’s problems on your own. Sometimes you’ve just got to let go.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. She’d tried her best to help Alan Donaldson find his daughter, and Sean Egan to find out who was after him and why, and she could do no more.

  She stopped, took a deep breath, and stared up at the almost cloudless blue sky, her hand tentatively finding Mike’s. It really was a gorgeous day and, for once, it felt as if it might get better.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448136711

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Century 2015

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © Simon Kernick 2015

  Simon Kernick has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by