The Last 10 Seconds

by Simon Kernick

  ‘No, I understand that, sir.’

  ‘Sorry, Tina, I know you do.’ He wiped a hand across his brow. ‘But this has really thrown things off kilter. Has Kent come up with alibis for any of the other murders?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. Just Roisín O’Neill’s.’

  ‘So we’ve got enough evidence to hold him.’

  ‘But we’ve still got the problem of explaining his alibi to a jury. If it really does turn out that he couldn’t have killed Roisín, then our whole case is up the creek. The MO was the same for Roisín as it was for all the others, wasn’t it? I thought it was, but I didn’t join the team until after her murder.’

  MacLeod nodded slowly. ‘It was.’

  He sat back in his seat and tugged hard on the edge of his moustache, as if he was making a concerted effort to pull it off completely. He looked red-faced and unwell, the stress of the case clearly getting to him. It was known that he liked a drink, and Tina wondered if she might end up looking like him one day, burnt out by the job, an early grave beckoning.

  ‘Andrew Kent committed the murder,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t know how he’s worked this alibi, but it’s bullshit, and one way or another we’ll be able to prove it. In the meantime, we’ve got more than enough evidence for the magistrates to remand him in custody tomorrow. So I think the whole team deserves a celebration drink. Including you.’ He made a valiant effort to smile. ‘Are you going to grace us with your presence tonight?’

  His tone suggested he was just ribbing her, but there was also an underlying issue wrapped up in it. Tina rarely socialized with the members of her team. These days, she preferred to finish up at work and head home to the flat where she lived alone, make a bite to eat and then get slowly and steadily pissed alone in front of the TV, unseen by her colleagues, and unbothered by the problems of the outside world. But she was also aware of her responsibilities now that she was a DI and in charge of people, and she knew she was going to have to at least show willing. ‘Sure, I’ll come along for a while.’

  ‘Good. It’ll be nice to see you let your hair down.’

  Tina doubted that. When she hit the bottle, she tended to hit it hard, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. But she didn’t say anything.

  ‘And let’s not spoil it by going on too much about Kent’s alibi in front of the others,’ he continued. ‘It’s just a last-ditch attempt by a man who’s been caught near-enough red-handed to pull the wool over our eyes.’

  She nodded. ‘OK. You’ve convinced me.’

  But the problem was, he hadn’t.

  Fifteen

  One of the nastiest people I ever had to deal with was an up-and-coming Essex-based gangster by the name of Jason Slade. Slade owned a security company that ran the door on nightclubs across Kent and Essex, and controlled all the illegal drugs being sold in them. He also ran a team of thieves who stole and re-badged luxury cars, before exporting them for sale in Russia and the Middle East, which was a hugely lucrative business, estimated at the time by the National Crime Squad to be worth several million in profits per year, making him extremely rich for a twenty-eight-year-old without a qualification to his name.

  Like Tyrone Wolfe, Slade was surveillance aware and very careful in his dealings. He was also a sadist, who took particular pleasure in torturing the people who got on the wrong side of him – something which was worryingly easy to do. There was a story doing the rounds that he’d once gouged out a love rival’s eye with a teaspoon handle, while the girl whose attentions they’d both been vying for (and who hadn’t chosen Slade) was forced to watch. Whether this story was true or not (and I’ve always thought it was), it cemented Slade’s reputation both as a man not to be crossed and as one who was going to be very difficult to bring to justice, since everyone seemed to be so damn scared of him.

  Then one of his gang was stopped in a stolen Porsche 911 Turbo with a kilo of cannabis and a hundred one-gram wraps of coke in a holdall on the back seat. The guy, a good-looking chancer named Tony Boyle, who was still on parole for earlier drugs offences and therefore facing a minimum seven-year stretch for his crimes, decided to cut a deal with the law.

  Now we had a way of getting to Slade. Boyle’s testimony alone wasn’t enough to convict him, so it was decided that Boyle would have to set him up. Apparently, Slade was having difficulty getting a reliable wholesale supply of cocaine for dealing in his clubs and was having to get it from London gangsters at high prices – including, incidentally, one Tyrone Wolfe – so the plan was for Boyle to introduce me and another undercover officer as coke importers who would be able to solve Slade’s problems.

  It took weeks of wrangling, as these things often do, before a meeting was set up in a cheap motel room just off the A127 near Southend. It was a good few years back and recording devices weren’t as advanced as they are today, so as it was just an intro meeting and we weren’t wired up. Our plan was to get Slade interested, arrange a test purchase of the contraband, then take him down red-handed as he handed over the money.

  Slade had agreed to see us without Boyle present, and was alone when we knocked on the motel room door and went inside, fifteen minutes early. He was sitting at a crappy little desk wedged in between the wardrobe and the window. It was 10.15 p.m. and dark outside.

  ‘Thanks for coming, gents,’ he said, getting up and shaking our hands in turn. He wasn’t a big guy, no more than five nine, but he had the wiry build of a featherweight boxer, and he projected an aura of menace that comes naturally to the more serious criminals.

  He offered us a seat on the bed, but we preferred to remain standing.

  The guy I was working with was a veteran copper called Colin (I can never remember his last name), a short, stubby cockney with silver, slicked-back hair and a face that looked like it had been whacked with a spade. ‘I hear you want to buy some high-quality chang,’ he grunted, while I stood next to him, hands crossed in front of me, acting the part of his bodyguard.

  ‘I hear you’ve got some to sell,’ answered Slade cleverly, refusing to be drawn, knowing that if we were undercover police officers then it would be illegal for us to encourage him to commit a crime by offering to sell a product he hadn’t specifically asked for. All annoying semantics, you might think, but we had to be very careful how we operated if we wanted a case to stand up to a judge’s scrutiny.

  And that was the theme of the meeting. In the ten minutes we were in there, Slade was the one asking the questions – about our background, credentials, the size of the product we could deliver – but, at the same time, we couldn’t get him to admit that he actually wanted anything.

  In the end, Colin lost his rag with him. ‘Are you in the fucking market for some gear or not?’ he demanded. ‘Or are we just wasting our time with the hired help?’ His words were designed to provoke an angry reaction, to get Slade to start boasting about his seniority (as criminals will often do when their reputation’s called into question), and I remember thinking that, given Slade’s reputation for violence, Colin was taking a bit of a risk.

  But Slade just smiled. ‘Ask around about me, and you’ll see I’m in a position to do business, big business, but I’m careful who I deal with. Maybe we’ll talk again soon.’ And with that he turned his back, signifying that the meeting was over.

  ‘Do you think he sussed us?’ I asked as we got back to the car.

  ‘No reason why he should,’ grunted Colin, opening the door. ‘Our legend’s good. We’ll get him soon enough. He’s greedy. I could see it in his eyes.’

  The smell hit me as soon as I sat down. Overcooked meat.

  I frowned, exchanging glances with Colin. He’d smelled it too. Then we heard the sizzling. Like bacon frying in a pan. Followed by a desperate, muffled mewing, a sound that instantly reminded me of an injured dog. And it was coming from inside the car.

  We both turned round.

  Tony Boyle was sitting in the back seat, although it took several seconds to work out that it was him, because his face was melting
in front of us as the acid did its work, smoke rising from the dying flesh in thin, stinking coils. Only his head was moving, swinging frantically from side to side, because he was strapped like a mummy from mouth to ankles with brown parcel tape, rendering him helpless as he burned.

  Instinctively, Colin reached out to pull what was left of the masking tape away from Boyle’s mouth, and jumped back as the acid burned his fingers.

  Yelping in pain, Colin called for an ambulance while I used the Swiss army knife I was carrying to cut the tape from Boyle’s body. I kept telling him it would be all right, that help was on its way, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at the damage being wreaked on his face, or stop myself choking at the toxic stench that was filling the car.

  Finally, I managed to cut off all the tape, but when I tried to pull him from his seat so we could get him outside to throw water on the wounds, I found he was stuck fast. It was only when I looked down through the smoke that I saw the reason why.

  The bastards had nailed his feet to the floor.

  The whole meeting had been a set-up. Slade had known we were cops all along, and this was his way of teaching us a lesson. We had nothing on him, either. He hadn’t incriminated himself, and we had not a scrap of evidence to connect him to the attack on Boyle. In fact, like all good gangsters, he had the perfect alibi, having been in the presence of two undercover police officers while the crime went down.

  Although he remained a target of the NCS, intelligence on him began to dry up. Nobody would talk, and it was considered far too dangerous to instigate another undercover op. The net result was that Jason Slade became even more well established on the Essex underworld scene.

  As a police officer, you have to get used to the fact that for every success you have there will always be at least one failure, and usually a fair few more. You learn to move on when you take a hit, not taking it personally, hoping for better luck next time. That was exactly what I did. I was traumatized by what I’d witnessed, but not so much that I couldn’t do my job.

  And then, just under a year later, I read about the tragic case of the father who’d been found dead in his car in Epping Forest, along with his six-year-old daughter. Tony Boyle, whose facial injuries had been so bad that his wife had asked for a divorce, and whose daughter had grown terrified of him, had simply not been able to carry on and had decided to take his only child with him.

  I felt rage then. Real anger, the kind I’d experienced when I heard about the way Wolfe had murdered my brother. At that time, only a few years had passed since John’s death, and the wounds were still raw. Jason Slade reminded me of all the injustices in the world. As far as I was concerned he was directly responsible for the deaths of Boyle and his daughter, yet he was at large and still untouchable.

  But Slade had a weakness. Although he lived with a long-term partner, he also had a mistress whom he visited most Wednesday nights after he’d been out with his cronies. We’d known about her at the time of the undercover op, and had even bugged her flat at one point, but to no avail. It was a stupid move on Slade’s part to keep to such a specific and obvious routine, especially as he travelled there alone, but it served my purposes, because one Wednesday night I waited in the driveway of the mistress’s block of flats to meet Slade when he arrived there.

  I’d been building myself up to it for several weeks, knowing that I was stepping way over the line, but for once letting the rage guide me in my actions.

  Sure enough, at about half past midnight one fine, balmy summer’s evening, Slade’s Jag pulled into the driveway, and as he got out of it, looking more than a little worse for wear, and walked towards the main door, fiddling in his pocket for keys, I launched myself out of the shadows, a balaclava over my head and an image of Tony Boyle’s burning face in my mind.

  At the last second he saw me coming but wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. I had three two-pound coins wedged between my fingers, acting like an improvised but less lethal knuckleduster, and I bunched my fist as tightly as possible and unleashed a flurry of punches to his face, opening up a number of nasty little cuts as I sent him sprawling over the bonnet of the Jag, a feeling of real catharsis flowing through me.

  Before he could recover, I was on him again, dealing blow after blow to his head and body, not giving him a chance to fight back as I beat him to the ground. I knew, like me, he’d been a boxer in his youth, and that he might also be armed, so it was essential I incapacitate him as quickly as possible. He was bleeding badly from his nose and cheek, and even in the darkness I could see his face beginning to swell, which pleased me no end. I wanted to humiliate this bastard and make him pay for some of the suffering he’d inflicted on his victims.

  He landed on his back on the gravel, but as I grabbed him by the collar of his black leather jacket and dragged him to his feet, he threw a whip-like punch that hit me in the side of the head, catching me completely by surprise.

  I let go of his jacket and retreated a couple of steps, shaking my head to clear it, but Slade was clearly nothing like as incapacitated as I’d thought and he was on his feet like a shot, coming at me in a classic protective boxer’s stance before launching a well-aimed three-punch combination that sent me reeling before I could muster a decent defence.

  My nose was bleeding under the balaclava, and I began to panic. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been to go after him like this. Either I should have brought a real weapon, something that would have shifted the balance in my favour, or better still, taken the sensible option and not come at all. Instead, I’d compromised, and now I was going to pay for it.

  I was wobbling precariously, partly stunned, as Slade came in close, grabbing me by the throat with one hand, a look of pure rage on his battered face, and yanking off my balaclava with the other.

  It might have been a year but I could see the spark of recognition in his face, the realization that he knew me from somewhere. Then the surprise as he remembered exactly where.

  Which was when I came to my senses and drove my knee right up into his groin with all the strength I could muster, managing to gather enough to lift him bodily from the ground. He let out a single, tortured gasp, and as I delivered a quick uppercut to his jaw, he went down like a sack of potatoes.

  That was it. Given a chance of escape, all the anger and aggression seeped out of me and I turned and made a run for it, wondering what the hell was going to happen now that I’d made an enemy of the gangster some had taken to calling ‘the acid man’.

  For a while, nothing did happen. I kept my head down, hoping that he’d forget about it, and got on with my work. In those days, like a lot of undercover officers, I only worked part-time for CO10, and I was back on my day job at Camden CID, a good few miles from Jason Slade’s stomping ground, when one day, about two weeks later, my boss, Dougie MacLeod, took me aside and asked me if there was anything I wanted to tell him.

  Dougie was the kind of guy you didn’t try to bullshit. Like all the best coppers, he could smell it from a mile off, and as he sat behind his desk waiting for me to speak, I realized that he knew something. So I told him everything, throwing myself at his mercy, and saying I didn’t know what had come over me.

  When I’d finished, he told me that Jason Slade had found out exactly who I was, as well as where I was based, and had put a contract out on my head. ‘He wants you dead for what you did to him, Sean. It made him look bad and it’s done a lot of damage to his reputation. Damage he’s very keen to repair.’

  I couldn’t help but feel a small amount of satisfaction on hearing that, but unfortunately it was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that he was also willing to pay money to have me killed. There aren’t that many contract killers operating in south-east England, but there are more than enough to take Slade up on his offer.

  ‘How much is the contract for?’ I’d asked.

  He gave me a dirty look, but I could tell that behind it he was amused. ‘Twenty grand. At least double what you’re worth.’

  T
he thing was, he could have lectured me about how stupid I’d been. He could also have recommended me for disciplinary action. He could even have said he’d washed his hands of me and that I was going to have to sort it out myself. It was only a couple of years after my football hooligan infiltration op, which had all gone so badly wrong, so he’d have been justified if he had. But Dougie MacLeod wasn’t like that. He cared for his people and he was pragmatic enough to know how tough it could be being an under-cover operative.

  Instead, he left me to sweat (which I duly did), then a week later he took me aside again and told me that the whole thing had been sorted, and that the contract was now rescinded. He also told me that he’d enrolled me on a course of specialist sessions with a psychiatric counsellor in an effort to sort out my problems, and that if I ever crossed the line again, that would be it. He’d make sure I was drummed out of the force.

  It was years before I found out what had actually happened. Apparently, Dougie had talked to my boss at CO10, Captain Bob, who’d initially wanted to sack me but who’d eventually been persuaded by Dougie to give me a second chance. The two of them had then put the word out among London’s bigger underworld players that if the contract was carried out there’d be serious repercussions from the police, not only against Slade himself, but against all the capital’s organized criminals. It was all bluster, of course, but it must have done the trick because there was never any comeback from Jason Slade or any of his cronies, although the last I heard Slade was still running the Essex drugs scene, and sticking two fingers up at the authorities.

  But the relationship between Dougie and me became strained after the Slade case, and although I worked hard to pay my debt to him by attending all my counselling sessions, and keeping as much on the straight and narrow as possible (and being largely successful at it too), eventually I came to accept that it was never going to be the same again, which was one of the reasons I ended up moving full-time to CO10.