The Last 10 Seconds

by Simon Kernick

  She grabbed the empty plastic cup and threw it towards him. ‘Where the hell did that water come from?’

  ‘From the tap,’ he stammered nervously. ‘I didn’t do a thing to it, honestly.’

  ‘Get it in an evidence bag. It’s going to need to be analysed.’ She dismissed him with an angry wave of the hand and turned back to Kent.

  ‘They don’t want me to talk,’ he said, his voice an angry croak.

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  He swallowed hard, and grabbed her by the hand, his grip surprisingly strong. ‘Get me to a hospital and I’ll tell you everything. I swear it. I’ll tell you everything.’

  Twenty-one

  It was 8.25 p.m., and I was sitting in the back of the people carrier. We were parked up on a backstreet only a few hundred yards from the place where Wolfe and Haddock had picked me up over an hour earlier, except now I was wearing gloves and a boiler suit, and holding one of the Remington shotguns I’d got in the ill-fated gun deal earlier across my knees. The car’s engine was off, the air was muggy and warm, and there was a leaden silence in the car as we waited to go to work, and all the time I was wondering how on earth I’d managed to get myself into the current situation and, more importantly, how I was going to get out of it.

  After I’d got in the car earlier, Wolfe had driven us to a lock-up just up the road in Islington where the guns were stored, along with the change of clothes. We’d changed, and then each of us loaded his own gun. I’d told Wolfe once again that I wasn’t going to pull the trigger for any reason, and once again he’d reiterated that this was a straight ‘snatch’ job and no shots would be fired. ‘But there’s no way we’re walking into a job unloaded,’ he added. ‘That’d just be stupid. Never be unprepared, Sean.’

  Once we were kitted up and back in the people carrier, we’d driven round while Wolfe gave me the lowdown on the job itself.

  The first surprise was that there were five of us involved. As well as the three of us and Tommy, Wolfe’s girlfriend, a Thai girl called Lee he’d been seeing for the past couple of months, and who Tommy said reminded him of a dirty-looking cage fighter, was acting as a spotter. She was currently stationed at a pavement café fifty yards from my old station, Holborn. Within an hour Andrew Kent, our target, was going to be leaving through the front gates in an ambulance with flashing lights, and as soon as he did so she would let us know using the shortwave VHF radio she was carrying.

  It was about a minute’s drive tops to where we were now, and as soon as the ambulance passed, we would pull out and follow it. Tommy was parked in a Bedford van a further hundred metres up the road, also armed with a VHF radio set to the same frequency, and when we gave the signal he would pull out and block the ambulance’s path, forcing it to a halt. We’d then be out of the people carrier, in Wolfe’s words like shit off a greasy stick, with Wolfe taking the front of the ambulance and making the driver open the doors at the back. Then Haddock would pull out our quarry while I provided cover. Tommy would join us in the people carrier, and we’d be out of there in the space of thirty seconds. Any police escort would, Wolfe assured us, be unarmed, since there’d have been no time to organize an ARV to accompany the ambulance, and as such they’d be helpless when confronted with our weapons.

  What frightened me was the level of information these guys had. They just knew too much, which meant that they had to be privy to some kind of inside information. I’d spent more than seven years working out of Holborn nick, and I liked to think that the coppers there were decent, honourable people, not the kind who’d sell information to a scumbag like Tyrone Wolfe, or to his client, whoever that person was. But it seemed someone had. There was no other way they could know that Kent would be travelling in an ambulance, nor the time he’d be leaving. The problem was, including civilian workers and the various uniforms, it could be any one of more than two hundred people.

  I sat back in my seat, conscious that I was sweating. Knowing that if this plan backfired, and shots ended up being fired, then that would be it. My life as I knew it would be over.

  But I could still get out of it, I told myself, if I could get these guys nicked. Maybe not now, but later, when we had Kent in our grasp. That way we could also get to the person behind this, the client, and bring him down with them, thereby wrapping things up perfectly. I doubted if I’d ever get my job back, but it might keep me out of prison.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, breaking the heavy silence in the car, ‘I know you can’t tell me who it is we’re working for, but at least give me an idea what he wants with this guy.’

  Wolfe sighed loudly. It was obvious he was getting tired of my questions. ‘If I tell you, will you shut up afterwards?’

  ‘What you telling him for?’ grunted Haddock. ‘He don’t need to know nothing. He’s just hired help.’

  ‘Because I’m sick of being kept in the dark,’ I snapped.

  Wolfe turned round in his seat, fixing me with his good eye. ‘I told you the bloke’s been charged with the rape and murder of five women, didn’t I? Well, the client’s a relative of one of them, and he wants justice. He doesn’t think the law’ll give it to him. That’s why we’re involved.’

  ‘How does he know that Kent’s going to be leaving Holborn nick in an ambulance in the next hour?’ I asked, thinking it was somewhat ironic that an arch criminal like Tyrone Wolfe was suddenly turning vigilante to make up for the inadequacies of the British legal system.

  ‘I didn’t ask him,’ he replied. ‘Unlike you, I know when to keep my mouth shut.’

  I was pleased. Wolfe’s answer would help us identify his client, because there couldn’t be that many of the victims’ relatives with the influence needed to get information on Kent’s movements. But it also left me with another problem.

  ‘The client’s going to kill him, isn’t he?’

  ‘I thought you said you’d stop asking questions if I told you why he wanted him.’

  ‘But he is. There’s no other reason why he’d want him.’

  Haddock shifted his huge bulk in the front seat, and the car seemed to move a little. ‘What do you care?’ he hissed, in his weirdly effeminate tones. ‘You’re getting paid, and it’s just a nonce who’s going to die.’

  ‘I told you both before, I don’t want to get involved in murder.’

  Wolfe sighed loudly. ‘You’re not getting involved in murder, Sean. The client is. We’re just pulling the guy. Then it’s up to him what he does with him, but he assures me that once he’s finished with Kent, he’ll disappear off the face of the earth and that’ll be that. No one’ll care that much, because this is the Night Creeper we’re talking about, a piece-of-shit sex killer who murders defenceless women in their homes. And the coppers won’t be looking that hard for the people who took him. They’ll just want everyone to forget the fact that they had one of their prisoners snatched from under their noses.’

  I thought Wolfe was being unduly naive, but that was his lookout. Mine was to stop his client getting his hands on Kent. He might be a piece-of-shit sex killer but it was still my job to protect him from the person or persons plotting his murder.

  I was still working out how I was going to do that when Wolfe’s radio crackled into life. It was Lee, his girlfriend.

  ‘Cargo on move,’ she snapped in quick, accented staccato. ‘With you in one minute.’

  I felt a burst of adrenalin surge through me.

  It was on.

  Twenty-two

  Andrew Kent’s face was deathly pale beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics rushed him out of the custody area on a stretcher, with Tina following.

  She hadn’t been able to get anything further out of him about what had happened. He’d vomited twice since she’d first discovered him writhing on the cell floor, and he was clearly still very sick. The cup he’d been drinking from was already on its way to forensics for testing, although the custody sergeant remained adamant no one had interfered with the drink between him pouring it and it reaching Kent’s mo
uth.

  It was possible that it was a suicide attempt. Although suspects are given a full body search when they’re placed in custody, Kent might still have been able to store a potentially poisonous substance in his mouth that was missed in the search. But it was unlikely, particularly given his cryptic comments about people wishing to silence him. It was also possible he was faking it. The paramedics had only given him a cursory checkover before putting him on oxygen and getting him on the stretcher, and were unsure as to what substance he might have ingested, preferring to get him to hospital for tests. But if he was faking it, he was doing a damn good job.

  Either way, Tina knew that Kent was still an extremely dangerous man. She’d experienced a dangerous offender escaping from an ambulance before, so she’d arranged for two uniformed officers to travel in the back with him, and a squad car to travel behind on the route to the hospital, just in case he made a rapid recovery.

  As Kent and the paramedics disappeared out of the station’s front doors, Tina pulled out her mobile and called Grier, giving him a ten-second précis of what had just happened before telling him to get straight down to the reception area. ‘We need to get to the hospital fast. I want to find out exactly what Kent has to say.’

  Less than a minute later, Grier was running alongside her to the station’s car park. ‘I’ll drive,’ she told him, unlocking her battered Ford Focus and jumping in while Grier struggled to fit his gangly legs into the passenger seat. ‘Sorry about the squeeze,’ she added, pulling out of the parking spot before he was fully inside. ‘The last person I had in there was my mother, and she’s five foot two.’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ he asked, finally shutting the door as the Focus turned on to the street, heading in the direction of University College Hospital. ‘He’s not going to speak to us for a while yet.’

  ‘Because I don’t like having him out of my sight. He said he wants to tell me something, and I want to make sure we find out what it is.’

  ‘Have you called MacLeod yet?’

  ‘No.’ She pulled out her mobile and, ignoring the fact that she was breaking the law, speed-dialled his number.

  But before he had a chance to answer, she turned into Doughty Street and immediately slammed on the brakes as she was confronted by a scene of flashing lights and chaos that made her drop the phone involuntarily.

  Twenty-three

  The ambulance came roaring past in a blur of blue lights followed immediately by a marked patrol car. As I pulled on my balaclava with slippery hands and we drove out on to the road behind them, I saw through the gathering darkness Tommy’s white Bedford van reverse out of a turning up ahead and block its path.

  The driver hit the brakes but he was too late to prevent a collision and he lost control in a shriek of tyres before slamming into the back of the van with a loud smash, shunting it sideways but failing to knock it out of the way. Smoke rose from its ruined bonnet.

  Meanwhile, the patrol car’s driver also hit the brakes, but his reactions were better and he came to a halt ten feet behind the ambulance, siren blaring. Before either he or his passenger could get out, though, we came hurtling up behind them in the people carrier.

  This whole op was about speed, surprise and overwhelming force. As a cop with fifteen years on the job, I knew that if you catch people completely off guard, they tend to acquiesce immediately.

  And we hit these guys hard. ‘Ramming speed!’ whooped Wolfe as we careered into the back of the patrol car, knocking it forward several feet.

  For a few seconds, I was caught up in the drama of the whole thing. The adrenalin rush was incredible, the most intense I’d experienced for years, as I threw open the door and leaped out, wielding the shotgun in front of me, finger instinctively placed on the trigger.

  While Wolfe rushed over to the ambulance to intimidate the crew into opening the back doors, Haddock went straight for the patrol car. For a man of his bulk, he moved extremely fast, and as the driver made the stupid mistake of opening his door, Haddock grabbed it with one hand and slammed it against his head, knocking him back inside. A second later he was looming over the front of the car like some kind of avenging demon, legs apart as he pointed his shotgun through the window at the two unarmed officers, bellowing at them not to move or he’d blow them away. Just to emphasize the point, he lowered the barrel with a sudden jerk and shot out the front nearside tyre with a deafening blast that made my heart lurch, and brought me right back to reality.

  I caught a glimpse of the two cops as I passed. The driver, who was holding the injured side of his head with both hands, was unfamiliar, but I recognized his passenger: Ryan James, a cheery forty-something uniform who’d become a copper after fifteen years as a secondary school physics teacher, and who’d once lent me fifty quid when I was short before payday. I’d always liked him, and seeing his face now, pale and terrified, caught my conscience.

  But this was necessary. It had to happen like this. And if he stayed stock-still, he was going to be OK.

  A second blast echoed round the quiet street as Haddock blew out the other front tyre. His whole body seemed to be shaking with excitement as he moved the Remington in a tight arc, revelling in his power. ‘Get your fucking hands in the air! Both of you! I’ll fucking blow your heads off if you try anything! Understand? Under-fucking-stand?’ Then he turned my way. ‘Cover those bastards, and watch me as well,’ he snarled, before charging over to the back of the ambulance where the rear doors were already opening.

  It was no easy task, keeping my eyes on two sets of people at once, but I did what I could. The good thing was, neither of the two cops I was covering looked like they were capable of trying anything, and Ryan James looked like he was going to have a heart attack as he stared at the barrel of my gun, hands thrust rigidly in the air.

  I risked glancing backwards at the ambulance where Haddock had now joined Wolfe. The doors were fully open now and I saw two uniforms – a man and a woman, both young and fresh-faced – in the back, on either side of the gurney, while a female paramedic in green overalls stood over it, her hands out in front of her in a gesture of submission.

  Wolfe leaped in the back and told the paramedic to unstrap her patient.

  ‘You can’t take him,’ I heard her say. ‘Please. He’s sick.’

  ‘Shut up and do what I say! Now!’

  The two uniforms in the back of the ambulance remained frozen in their seats with Haddock moving his gun from one to the other, covering them and hissing murderous threats, his whole demeanour radiating the kind of controlled rage that made crossing him suicidal, and I remember praying that nobody was stupid enough to make a move.

  But the female paramedic wasn’t playing the game. ‘You’re not taking him,’ she shouted, following it with another ‘please’, although she must have known that Wolfe was going to do exactly that.

  With a sudden movement, he grabbed her by her hair and shoved the barrel in her face. ‘Do it!’ he screamed, dragging her back towards the gurney.

  I winced at his violence, feeling my finger tighten on the trigger as I remembered what he’d done to my brother all those years ago, wishing I could do the same to him but knowing that I had to bide my time and hope that this snatch was going to be concluded fast, because with every second that passed we came closer to being rumbled by police reinforcements which right now, with Wolfe and Haddock pumped up on adrenalin and violence, would mean a bloodbath.

  Finally, the paramedic got to work on one of the straps with shaking hands while Wolfe undid the other, all the while pointing his gun in her face.

  And then, as Wolfe shoved her aside and tore the oxygen mask from his face, I finally saw our target for the first time. Andrew Kent, the so-called Night Creeper. The man my former colleagues were sure was responsible for the rape and murder of five young women. He was small and thin, with the grey pallor of the sick, but he was also conscious, and looked just as terrified as the people who’d been protecting him, because he must have known that whatev
er we had planned for him, it was not going to be nice.

  He looked more like a computer geek than a killer, and even though I knew what he was supposed to have done, and that killers never look like killers – they all look just like you and me when they’re vulnerable – I still felt sick as Wolfe dragged him out of the ambulance, with the gun shoved hard into the hollow of his cheek.

  Which was the moment when it all went horribly wrong.

  The male cop lunged forward, jumped out of the back of the ambulance, and grabbed Wolfe’s gun hand, trying to wrestle the weapon from his control. Why he decided to do it was anyone’s guess – maybe it was the need to be hailed as a hero – but one thing that’s drummed into all police officers is never take on a gunman when you’re unarmed, because it can turn a dramatic situation into a disastrous one. As it did now.

  Clearly sensing an opportunity for escape, Kent struggled free of Wolfe’s now tenuous grip and made a bolt for it.

  I was barely ten feet away and moved fast to intercept him, holding my shotgun like a club. There was no way I could let a serial killer escape from custody on top of everything else I was involved in.

  But for a sick man, Kent’s reactions were surprisingly quick, and he leaped at me, launching an improvised karate kick at my stomach. I tried to get out of the way but his foot caught me and I stumbled backwards, colliding with the corner of the cop car’s bonnet.

  I’m no slouch myself, however, and though I was winded, I bounced back off the car and, as he scrambled past me, I slammed the stock of the shotgun into the side of his head. It was a good shot and he went sprawling on to the tarmac in a heap, a deep cut already forming along his hairline. He wasn’t moving either, and for a moment I thought I might have killed him.

  It was then that I saw Wolfe break free of the cop who’d made a grab for him and shove him backwards so that, for the first time, there was distance between them. ‘No!’ I heard myself shout as Haddock swung his shotgun round from where it had been covering the female cop and pointed it directly at her foolish colleague, while Wolfe raised his own gun, holding it two-handed.