The Last 10 Seconds

by Simon Kernick

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Wolfe, lifting his hands in a conciliatory gesture. ‘I get the picture, and I’ve sorted stuff now. Mitchell’s pissed off about his boys, but he knows you weren’t to blame.’

  ‘Are his boys OK?’

  He nodded. ‘They’re getting treatment and they won’t talk, so there’s going to be no repercussions, although I don’t think Mitchell’s going to want to deal with us again for a while.’

  His words relieved me, but I didn’t show it. ‘I’m not saying sorry. I did what I had to do.’ I took a drag of the cigarette. It was time to move things along. ‘So, you’ve got the guns. Now, are you going to tell me who we’re supposed to be grabbing and how it’s going to work, so I can decide whether I’m in or not?’

  Wolfe looked over at Haddock, who nodded. He might not have liked me much but apparently that wasn’t going to stop us working together.

  There was a long silence in the room before Wolfe finally spoke again. ‘I can’t tell you who we’re snatching until the last minute. That’s the client’s orders, all right? You’re going to have to trust us on this.’

  In the past, Tyrone Wolfe had always planned his own operations, and the whole idea of a client paying someone like him to carry out a kidnap was pretty much unheard of. Even the term ‘client’ seemed weird coming out of his mouth. But if there was one, then I needed to find out who he was. So I asked him.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, either,’ he answered. ‘He wants to stay anonymous.’

  I sighed. ‘Look, you spend all day giving me the tenth degree, saying you can’t trust me because I might be an undercover cop, then you go and expect me to trust a man I’ve never met, and whose name I don’t even know. I mean, how the hell do I know that he’s not a cop?’

  ‘Because I’ve known him for a long time, and more importantly, he’s got the money. All you’ve got to do is a little bit of crowd control and cover our backs while we snatch the target. Do that, and you’ll be a hundred grand richer. Guaranteed.’

  I frowned, still confused as to exactly what I was getting involved in. ‘So, it’s a hit?’

  Wolfe shook his head. ‘No. We just hold up the guards and retrieve the guy. The client takes it from there.’

  ‘And what’s the client going to do with him?’

  Wolfe shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He hasn’t told me, and I haven’t asked. It’s not my business. And it shouldn’t be yours, either. Are you in?’

  Of course I was in, but I was surprised they were giving me the choice now that they’d told me the details. Then I realized that the reason they were was because, having shot two men, I could hardly go to the police and report them myself. I was going to have to think very carefully about how I got round this.

  In the meantime, I was still playing the part of an unemployed thug in need of some quick cash. Which meant demanding that advance on the hundred grand, because failure to do so would just look suspicious. ‘You said it’s thirty grand up front.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, you get me that and I’m in.’

  For the first time in my presence, Tyrone Wolfe grinned. Even Haddock seemed to relax. And Tommy was beaming from ear to ear. He came over and clapped me hard on the back. ‘You’re part of the crew now, Sean.’

  ‘Welcome aboard,’ said Wolfe. ‘You won’t regret it.’

  And then the man who’d murdered my brother put an arm round my shoulder and pulled me to him. And I had to make myself smile back at him, knowing that finally I had the opportunity for revenge I’d been waiting almost fifteen years for.

  Ten

  My brother John was the kind of guy everyone liked. He had a big grin and an infectious personality. He was always helping people out – friends, family, neighbours, everyone. He used to do the shopping for the old lady who lived down the road, and when she died, just after his sixteenth birthday, she left him five thousand pounds in her will. And do you know what he did? He gave a thousand of it to the local army cadet corps where he was a member so they could buy some new equipment, and another fifteen hundred to my mum and dad to put towards a family holiday for us all. That was John for you. Generous to a fault.

  He was six years older than me and, growing up, I’m not ashamed to say I worshipped him. He’d always take time to play football with me or take me fishing, and knowing he was always there as a protective influence was one of the reasons I was confident enough to take on, and make enemies of, the playground bullies.

  While I always wanted to be a police officer, John’s burning ambition was to join the army, and after his A-levels, that was exactly what he did. I’ll always remember the day of his passing-out parade at Sandhurst to celebrate the end of his officer training. The pride on the faces of my mum and dad as he marched past us; the excitement I felt as a thirteen-year-old boy, waving my Union Jack flag and seeing the Queen for the first time as she inspected the parade; the family photos of the four of us together afterwards, with John pristine in his uniform – photos that would grace the walls and mantelpieces of our home for years afterwards.

  We were all scared when he did his tour of Northern Ireland. At that time, in the tail-end of the 1980s, it was still a very dangerous place for British troops, with bomb attacks a regular occurrence. But he came back unscathed with tales to tell of street riots, tense patrols in the bandit country of South Armagh, and hours of mind-numbing boredom stuck on base waiting for something to happen.

  And then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait and the Gulf War began. John was one of forty-five thousand British troops sent out to help liberate the country, along with half a million others from a wide coalition of countries, and I remember him being excited at the prospect of finally seeing some real action. My mum was worried about him. She didn’t want him to go, but on his last visit home before he went he’d put a big protective arm around her and told her not to worry. He’d then shaken hands with my dad and me, and headed out the door with a final wave goodbye.

  When the ground war broke out at last in February 1991, it was one of the biggest mismatches in history. The Iraqi army was routed and Allied casualties were minimal. Unfortunately, they included members of John’s unit, whose armoured personnel carrier was targeted by mistake by an American A10 war plane. John survived the attack, unlike six of his colleagues, but he suffered serious burns to his face and body, and lost three of the fingers on his left hand. He spent two months in hospital, and when they first removed his bandages, Mum fainted. He was unrecognizable, his face a cruel tangle of scar tissue. Even I flinched, and had to fight back tears.

  At twenty-one, John was invalided out of the army. Extensive plastic surgery and skin grafts helped to improve his appearance, but the mental scars proved harder to heal. He became withdrawn and depressed, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition I don’t think was even recognized at the time. He argued constantly with Mum and Dad, and ended up moving to a small flat in north London where he lived alone, preferring not to venture out so he couldn’t be seen.

  But the thing about John was that he was a fighter, and, though it took a long time and a number of setbacks, including an arrest for drunk and disorderly and assault after a row in a pub when someone made a disparaging comment about his face, he slowly began to come out of his shell and get his life back together. He even got himself a job in a second-hand bookshop, which he was really enjoying. I’d just joined the Met as a trainee based out of Holborn, and had moved down from the family home in Herefordshire, so I often used to visit him. We’d go for drinks together in the pubs near his flat, and I was impressed at how he was turning his life around. He was even talking about running the London Marathon to raise money for an ex-services charity.

  But he never got the chance, because a few weeks later he was dead.

  It happened one lunchtime. John had just finished his morning shift at the bookshop and was walking down the high street to pick up a sandwich when he walked straight into a
n armed robbery. Two masked men armed with shotguns were holding up a cash delivery van outside a NatWest Bank branch. As they forced the two security guards to their knees, and ran to their getaway car, where a driver was waiting with the engine running, John sprang into action and gave chase, rugby-tackling one of them.

  It was a crazy move, but just the kind of one John would make. He was like me in that respect. He never liked to see the bad guys get away with their crimes. And he’d always been recklessly brave, even more so, I suspect, since his injuries, because now he had a point to prove, and this was just the opportunity for the glory he’d always craved, yet had never quite attained.

  Unfortunately, he’d picked on the wrong bad guys. According to one of the dozens of witnesses at the scene, the robber John had rugby-tackled was powerfully built and had managed to throw him off. At this point, the second robber strode over, shouted the words ‘Oi, freak!’, and as John, down on one knee and presenting no threat, raised his hands in surrender, the gunman had shot him once in the head from a distance of no more than five feet, killing him almost instantly. They’d then escaped with their haul intact.

  Forty-six thousand three hundred and twenty pounds – the price of my only brother’s life.

  Oi, freak! I’ll always remember those words. They still sting now. Not only did they murder someone who was a hundred times the man either of them would ever be, but his executioner had even seen fit to mock him for the injuries he’d suffered in the service of his country.

  There was a huge public outcry at the killing. No one likes it when an innocent man’s killed standing up to thugs, especially when that man is a wounded war hero. But unfortunately an outcry on its own is not enough. Although there was huge pressure to find and prosecute the gang, who were believed to be responsible for a further five armed raids over a two-year period, they’d left behind very little evidence for the investigating team to work with.

  That wasn’t to say that the police didn’t know who they were. Three names were quickly in the frame: Tyrone Wolfe, Clarence Haddock and Thomas Allen, career criminals from Hackney with at least twenty convictions between them. They were all arrested and taken to separate police stations for questioning, but none of them gave up a thing, and searches of their homes unearthed no evidence linking them to the crimes. So no charges were brought, and although they were put under surveillance for a while, eventually they fell off the radar.

  It was a different story for my family. First the bomb and John’s injuries, then him being killed, ripped my parents apart. My father never recovered from it. He’d always had a strong exterior, but he was more brittle inside than he’d ever let on, and he was gone within two years. My mother hung on for another seven – I think, because of me – but she was never the same, and in her last years, as she aged and withered and fell apart, we saw each other less and less. She couldn’t stand the idea of me risking my life as a cop, not after what had happened to John, and didn’t see why I couldn’t just get a normal job, as an accountant or a lawyer or something equally boring. She would nag, I’d get sick of it and shout at her, she’d cry, I’d apologize. And our own small domestic tragedy played out the same way again and again like a broken tape, until finally I buried her, five years back now.

  But I never forgot about the men who killed my brother, and throughout my career I kept pushing my various bosses to investigate them. And there were investigations. Wolfe and Haddock later went down for three years apiece for supplying cocaine and heroin, while Tommy Allen did eighteen months for tax evasion, but it wasn’t enough, and when they came out they went back to drug importation, as well as running brothels and people smuggling, except this time they were a lot more careful. I kept pushing. I kept following their progress. I kept looking for chinks in their armour.

  Then, six months ago, while I was on another job, I finally got my breakthrough. An informant of mine told me that he’d heard Tyrone Wolfe bragging that he was the man who’d shot my brother, and I decided then and there that I had to infiltrate his crew. Although they were a tightly knit unit, they did use other people in the commission of their crimes, particularly on the brothel and people-smuggling sides of the business, and I was convinced that if I could just get close enough I could get Wolfe to admit on tape that he’d killed my brother, and then we’d have them all bang to rights.

  But when I went to see Captain Bob in his office at the CO10 HQ in Brixton to get the authorization to go ahead, he turned me down flat.

  Captain Bob’s a bald, cadaverous ex-public schoolboy in his late fifties with a plummy accent who’s been my boss at CO10 for more than ten years. He sits on his arse and supplies the jobs. I go out and do them. He gets paid twice what I do (I sneaked a look at one of his payslips once) and I take all the risks, which seems to encompass perfectly how the world of work works.

  I’ve always been able to tolerate that because generally he’s not been a bad boss and doesn’t interfere too much, but the day when he sat behind his immense tinted-glass desk in his expensive suit and told me there were other bigger and more important targets than Tyrone Wolfe, I blew my top.

  ‘Not to me there aren’t,’ I’d said coldly, leaning over the desk, getting in far too close to him. ‘That bastard killed my brother, and now he’s walking round scot-free, boasting about it, and still making his living from crime. What does he need to do to get you interested? Assassinate the fucking Queen?’

  As unflappable as always, Captain Bob had told me to calm down and sit down. ‘I will pass on your information to the powers-that-be, but it’s precisely because this is so personal to you that I can’t authorize it. Look at you, Sean. It’s almost fifteen years since your brother died, and you’re still full of rage. You’ll never be able to approach the situation objectively and gather evidence without blowing your cover.’

  ‘I will. Just give me the chance.’

  ‘No. I can’t.’ There was a finality to his words, and I knew he wasn’t going to budge.

  ‘Will you use someone else, then? I’ve got evidence that he’s still heavily into the drug trade.’

  ‘How have you got evidence?’ he demanded, looking pissed off.

  ‘How do you think?’ I countered. ‘Because I take an interest.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do, but I’m telling you this, Sean.’ He pointed a long, bony finger at me. ‘I don’t want you spying on Tyrone Wolfe or any of his associates any more. If I hear that you are, I’ll have you up on it. I promise you that. I don’t want your personal life interfering with the job.’

  There was nothing else I could do at the time. But when, three months later, there was still no infiltration job authorized against the Wolfe crew, I knew I was going to have to do it myself, and do it alone.

  And that, unfortunately, is exactly what I did.

  Eleven

  It should have been a good afternoon for Tina Boyd. The arrest and charging of Andrew Kent, not to mention the evidence that had been discovered as a result of the search of his apartment and laptop, was a massive result for the team, and there was an atmosphere of excitement bordering on euphoria in the incident room as the necessary paperwork was completed, and the first stage of the case against him closed off.

  But Tina wasn’t sharing in it. Instead, she felt a heavy, black gloom descending on her as she sat in her shoebox-sized office in the far corner of the incident room, listening to the noise and banter outside the door, feeling like the perpetual outsider she was. It wasn’t that she thought Kent was innocent. She didn’t. She’d felt the odd twinge of doubt during the course of the interviews, but that was more down to what she was now convinced were his Oscar-winning acting abilities. Only once in all her years as a copper had Tina ever seen someone play the part of an innocent man as effectively as Andrew Kent. That was a guy they’d arrested on suspicion of murder during her first stint in Islington CID, after his wife had gone missing following a series of violent arguments, and he’d turned out to be telling the truth.

&n
bsp; Tina, though, had concluded that there was too much evidence against Kent to suggest he was innocent. It was humanly possible, of course, that the hammer and the laptop containing footage of the murders could have been planted, but only by the murderer himself, or someone working with him, and how would he have even known who Kent was? Only the members of the inquiry team knew Kent’s identity, and they’d only discovered it in the past few days. In that time he’d been under almost constant surveillance, making planting evidence both risky and difficult.

  It was too far-fetched a theory to waste time on. And it wasn’t what was making Tina unhappy. What was depressing her was the fact that a seemingly ordinary man like Andrew Kent – someone who’d never been in trouble before, who’d had no known psychiatric illnesses, who looked like he wouldn’t harm a fly – could commit such utterly inhuman and barbaric crimes. Earlier that afternoon she’d called the managers of three of the companies who’d used his services in the past year to tell them that Kent had been arrested and charged with murder, and that officers would be coming round to take statements from them, and all three had expressed total shock. One of them had even commented on what a nice guy Kent was, describing him as friendly, polite, a great worker. None had used the classic ‘serial killer’ soubriquets of ‘quiet’ or ‘withdrawn’. They’d liked him. It had shown in every one of their voices.

  Yet somehow he’d felt the urge to take a ballpeen hammer and smash it into the face of his victims again and again until there was nothing left but pulp, and then rape them as they lay dying.