The Last 10 Seconds: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  It was all bullshit, of course. My details had simply been made up by Soca and put on all the relevant databases, including the PNC, with flags in place so that if anyone accessed them looking for information, Soca would know. And Hocus might be a kosher criminal who had actually served his time, but he was also now a police informant who’d been drilled to give me a glowing reference.

  Finally, Wolfe stopped at the top of a flight of steps leading down to the stage and turned to face me, his hard, narrow features lit up bizarrely in the pink fluorescent glow of an overhead light. ‘You ever shot someone, Sean?’ he asked, fixing me with his squint.

  I was beginning to feel extremely uncomfortable. The room was quiet and I was boxed in, with railings on one side, a cluster of tables and chairs on the other, and Haddock looming up behind me. But the trick when you’re cornered is to do the same as they do in the animal world: make yourself big, not small. So, straight away I went on the offensive. ‘Hold on here. You’re getting a little bit personal for someone I don’t even know. Now why don’t you help me out here and tell me who the hell you are, and why I should be answering your questions. Because right now you haven’t exactly made it clear.’ At the same time, I turned round and faced down Haddock. ‘And why don’t you give me some space as well, instead of breathing down my neck like something out of the fucking Munsters?’

  To my surprise, he took a step backwards, while Tyrone actually apologized and immediately introduced himself and Haddock. ‘The reason you’re here,’ he explained, ‘is because I’ve got a vacancy in my firm for the right person and Tommy tells me you’re a decent bloke who might fit the bill. So, consider this a job interview.’

  ‘What sort of work do you do?’

  ‘A bit of this,’ he answered, with the beginnings of an unpleasant smile, ‘a bit of that. Not all of it strictly legal.’

  ‘Well, let me tell you something. I’ve been out of nick eight months. No one wants to hire me for legit work. I’ve done some jobs for Tommy but I’ve still got debts up to my eyeballs, and I need something now. Not minimum-wage shit, or flipping burgers in McDonald’s. Real work, that pays real money. You know my background – I know you’ve checked me out, otherwise I wouldn’t be standing here now – so you know I’m not afraid to handle a gun, and you know I’m no hotheaded kid who pulls the trigger and asks questions later. I’m reliable, so if you’ve got something you want to talk about, talk about it now. Otherwise I’m out of here. Your choice. But do me a favour and make it now.’

  I knew that whole spiel back to front. I must have delivered it a thousand times in front of my mirror, probably another twenty out in the field in situations like this one, occasionally substituting the odd word and phrase, but always with the utter conviction of a man at ease with his conscience. To work in undercover as long as I have, you’ve got to be the consummate method actor, a copper’s Robert de Niro, immersing yourself in the part, working with an ever-changing script, which means you’ve got to ad lib on demand and be able to bullshit your way out of every tight corner. Let me tell you something else, too. That spiel never fails. It’s always the one that breaks the ice and gets me in.

  Wolfe and Haddock exchanged glances, Wolfe’s expression questioning, as if he was deferring to his immense colleague.

  Haddock nodded once, and Wolfe turned back my way. ‘I’ve got one day’s work,’ he said quietly. ‘Short notice, definitely in the next few days, but the date’s not finalized yet. The pay’s a straight hundred thousand cash. Interested?’

  Of course I was interested. I hadn’t been expecting much from the initial meeting but already I had Wolfe offering me an armed job. I didn’t show too much enthusiasm, though, because that kind of thing sets people’s alarm bells ringing as well. Instead, I shrugged and said, ‘Depends what it is.’

  ‘It’s a job against an unarmed vehicle in transit.’

  ‘I’d prefer a share of the proceeds.’

  Wolfe shook his head. ‘It’s not that kind of job. The cargo’s human. One man.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. Not yet. But I can tell you that it’s thirty grand up front. Seventy on completion.’

  I acted like I was thinking about it. I wanted to find out more because that way I could finish the job pretty much on the spot, but knew better than to push things at this early stage. ‘I like the sound of thirty grand, but I’ll need to know more before I commit.’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything, but first I want you to do a little job.’

  ‘What kind of job?’

  It was Haddock who answered, leaning down so his mouth was uncomfortably close to my ear, his words delivered in that strangely effeminate voice. ‘The kind that’ll prove to us beyond doubt that you’re not a copper.’

  Four

  It was hot and stuffy in the interview room and DI Tina Boyd was longing for a cigarette. ‘If you’re innocent of all charges, why did you run away from us, violently assaulting two police officers in the process?’ she asked.

  ‘Why do you think?’ demanded Andrew Kent, wearing the same panic-stricken expression he’d been wearing since Tina and her boss, DCI MacLeod, had begun questioning him in the interview room almost two hours earlier. ‘I was on my way home from work and suddenly all these people came out of nowhere screaming and shouting. I panicked and made a run for it.’

  ‘But they clearly identified themselves as police officers,’ Tina persisted.

  ‘I didn’t hear them, OK?’ protested Kent, in tones not far short of hysteria. ‘I just ran, and when they grabbed me, I thought they were trying to mug me or something, so I fought back. I’m sorry I hurt those officers, but it wasn’t my fault.’

  His brief – a young, studious-looking duty solicitor wearing big glasses with the Nike emblem on the frames, and reeking of ambition – put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Andrew,’ he said soothingly. ‘You can answer in your own time.’

  Kent nodded.

  Across the table, he looked even smaller and more harmless than he had done when Tina watched him walking home the previous evening, just before his arrest. His whole demeanour was one of submissive fear, his pale eyes awash with confusion. But Tina had seen the way he’d fought the arresting officers, the cold determination he’d shown, and she wasn’t fooled, although she had to give him full marks for his acting abilities.

  ‘For a terrified civilian, you gave a pretty good account of yourself, Mr Kent,’ she continued. ‘Both officers needed medical treatment, and I had to use CS spray to subdue you.’

  ‘I’m a black belt in karate,’ said Kent with a sigh. ‘I’ve been mugged twice in the past so I wanted to make sure I was able to defend myself when it happened again. I’ve been going to classes for the past six years, and I’m not going to make any apologies for it.’

  ‘It doesn’t make my client guilty of anything either,’ put in his solicitor, whose name was Jacobs.

  Tina ignored him. ‘So you’re still protesting your innocence about these murders?’ she asked Kent.

  ‘Of course I am. I’ve never killed anyone, and I don’t understand why you think—’

  ‘How do you explain your DNA being at the properties of every one of the five victims then?’

  ‘Because I fitted the alarms at all the different properties. I’ve already told you this.’

  ‘Not very good systems then, were they, Mr Kent, if the killer managed to bypass every one of them?’ said DCI MacLeod.

  ‘I thought they were.’

  ‘My client’s not being questioned about his skills as an engineer, now is he?’ Jacobs looked at MacLeod over his half-rimmed glasses with the gravitas of a man twice his age.

  MacLeod wasn’t deterred. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit of a co incidence that every one of our five victims had their brand-new alarms fitted by you? What do you reckon the odds of that are?’

  ‘Look, I’ve fitted thousands of alarms over the years. I’m a hard worker. I can do two or
three clients in one day, so the odds probably aren’t that great.’

  ‘What about the odds of the killer being able to bypass every one of your alarms?’

  Again Kent protested his innocence, and again Jacobs intervened with the same objection – that it wasn’t his client’s work-related capabilities that he’d been arrested for.

  ‘So, how come your DNA was found in four of the victims’ bedrooms if you were only fitting the alarms?’ Tina asked, keen to move the interview on.

  ‘I had to have access to the whole of each property while I was doing the work, because I needed to fit sensors in different rooms.’

  ‘But you didn’t fit sensors in any of the victim’s bedrooms. We checked. Nor did any of your employers think you should have been in them. So what was your DNA doing in there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ answered Kent. ‘Maybe it got carried in there somehow from other places in the house. Is that kind of thing possible?’

  Technically, it was within the realms of possibility, but only just. When Tina pointed this out to him, Kent gave an exaggerated shrug and said he couldn’t understand it.

  ‘Our understanding is that the victims were subjected to violent sexual assaults before being murdered in a brutal fashion. Were any of the DNA samples from the bedrooms that you say match that of my client found on the bodies themselves?’ Jacobs asked, his tone carrying just the right mix of weariness and scepticism.

  Tina and MacLeod exchanged glances. This was their big problem. The killer had cleaned up the bodies scrupulously, using bleach, and so far they’d given up no DNA evidence at all.

  ‘No,’ MacLeod admitted reluctantly, ‘but that doesn’t mean a thing.’

  ‘Well it does, DCI MacLeod, because my client’s already provided a perfectly adequate explanation as to why his DNA might have been in the bedrooms of some of the victims. Now, if you have no further evidence then I’m asking that you release him immediately.’

  Tina fixed Kent with a cold stare. ‘Tell us about the hammer,’ she said baldly.

  Kent’s eyes widened. ‘What hammer? What are you talking about?’

  ‘The hammer we found in your bedroom, Mr Kent. The one covered in blood and brain matter, which we’ve just been told belonged to your last victim, Adrienne Menzies. Your DNA was also on the handle.’

  Kent shook his head. ‘No. No way.’

  ‘Yes. The lab did the tests twice, just to make sure.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know anything about a hammer,’ he stuttered. ‘I really don’t. Jesus, this can’t be happening.’ He looked desperately at Jacobs, who also seemed caught out by this revelation, then back at Tina and MacLeod. ‘I’m innocent, I promise you. Someone must be setting me up.’

  He resembled a frightened child, sitting there barely as tall as Tina and with a skinnier build, seeming to shrink in the chair as the evidence was steadily laid out against him. For the first time, Tina began to doubt that they had the right man. All the evidence seemed to point to him but it was the way he was reacting. He came across like an innocent man. Most of the people she faced didn’t. Most of them were guilty, and tended to limit their answers to a monotonous refrain of ‘no comment’, but Andrew Kent was acting like an ordinary man caught up in a terrifying situation over which he had no control.

  ‘Who do you think set you up?’ demanded MacLeod, his voice laden with scepticism.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know. I honestly don’t. If I was ever going to do something like this, why would I keep the murder weapon in my room? That would be madness . . .’

  The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on his interrogators’ faces.

  Tina was just about to respond when MacLeod tapped her arm and shook his head. ‘OK, you probably need some time with your client, Mr Jacobs, so you can discuss this latest piece of evidence. Interview suspended at eleven forty-six a.m.’ He got to his feet, motioning for Tina to follow him out the door.

  ‘We had him on the rack there. Why did we stop?’ Tina asked when they were out in the corridor.

  ‘There’s been a development. DC Grier just called through on the earpiece. Apparently, there’s something we need to see.’

  ‘Any details?’

  ‘No,’ he said, looking at her seriously, ‘but I don’t like the sound of it.’

  Five

  The incident room on the fourth floor of Holborn station, where CMIT had been carrying out the Night Creeper murder inquiry, was absolutely silent as Tina and MacLeod entered.

  Half a dozen officers, all members of Andrew Kent’s arrest team, were gathered in a loose circle around a widescreen Apple Mac laptop on a desk in the middle of the room. DC Grier stood closest to the desk, his features pale and drawn, his prominent Adam’s apple, still bruised from its encounter with Kent’s hand, visibly pulsating, as if he was trying to keep something down. The expressions on the faces of the other officers present – a grim mixture of nauseated, depressed, tense and stoical – told the same story. Whatever they’d just witnessed had affected every one of them, and the eyes of DC Rodriguez were wet with tears.

  ‘What have we got then?’ asked DCI MacLeod, his soft Edinburgh burr somehow easing the tension in the air. There was a quiet decency about MacLeod that naturally drew people to him, as did his air of calm unflappability, that made you look beyond the beer belly, the thinning grey hair and unfashionable moustache, and see only a natural leader. Once again, Tina was glad she worked for him.

  ‘We’ve found stuff on here,’ sighed Grier, running a hand roughly across his face as if he were trying to remove the memory of whatever it was. ‘Films.’

  ‘What kind?’ asked Tina, feeling a twitch of morbid excitement.

  ‘Footage of the murder of two of the victims. It looks like he filmed it himself.’ Grier paused. ‘It’s extremely graphic.’

  ‘It’s more than that,’ said DS Simon Tilley, normally an exuberant copper with a big personality and a laugh like a bass drum, but who was also the father of two young children. ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’

  MacLeod took a deep breath. A father himself, he clearly had little appetite for the task ahead, but was far too professional to let that stop him. ‘We’d better take a look then.’

  He turned to Tina, his expression suggesting she didn’t have to watch if she didn’t want to. She noticed some of the others looking at her, including Grier and Rodriguez, and had this feeling they were willing her to back out of it.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she told MacLeod bluntly without looking at them. ‘I can take it.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Grier, getting to his feet. ‘Not again. Just press the play button when you’re ready to begin.’

  There were murmurs of agreement from the other officers and they moved away from the desk. Although they remained in the incident room, it seemed to Tina as though they were keeping as far away from the laptop as possible, as if whatever was on it was somehow infectious.

  MacLeod leaned forward and pressed the button on the screen. Then he and Tina stood side by side as the screen lit up to reveal a lengthways shot of a young woman lying on a bed. Tina immediately recognized her as the final victim, Adrienne Menzies, a thirty-three-year-old accountant from Highgate with hair the same dark colour and style as her own, and whose DNA was on the hammer found at Kent’s apartment. She remembered the bed’s expensive yet old-fashioned teak headboard, which she later found out had been handmade by Adrienne’s father. It was always the little details that stayed with you, even amid the horror. And the horror here was unrelenting.

  Adrienne was naked and bound to the bed with black PVC bondage straps of the kind Kent had used in all but one of his murders, and her mouth was gagged with duct tape. The picture quality was very good and Tina could make out the bruises and scratches on her thighs and round her breasts. The camera moved in slow, jerky movements more akin to a homemade film as the person holding it walked carefully round the edge of the bed, filming Adrienne’s vain struggle to free her
self from the bonds that kept her firmly in place. Beneath the gag, her muffled cries of fear grew steadily more desperate and her eyes widened and bulged as if the fear in them was a living thing trying to squeeze its way out.

  The cameraman stopped moving and focused in on her face so that it filled the screen entirely with a pleading expression Tina found hard to bear because she knew exactly what was about to happen to this pretty young woman who, until a few hours before this, had lived a generally happy, ordinary life with family and friends who cared for her. Tina had been at the murder scene. She had stood in that bedroom, looking down at the unrecognizable face in a mask of coagulated blood; the thick splatters on the bed linen and the walls; the long smear only just visible on the teak headboard . . .

  The camera panned out and the screen suddenly went black. Tina’s mouth was dry and she was conscious that she was rubbing her hands together with such force that it was almost painful. She needed a drink. More than she’d needed one in ages. A bottle of good Rioja with a couple of vodka chasers. Anything just to forget about all this.

  The screen lit up again, and this time the camera had been placed in a fixed position about three feet away from Adrienne’s head, and slightly above it – most likely on a bedside table. Tina couldn’t remember if Adrienne had had a bedside table or not. Her head swung from side to side, the moans loud beneath the gag. There was music playing in the background. ‘Beautiful Day’ by U2. Only just audible. Tina would never be able to listen to that song again without being reminded of Adrienne Menzies’ bloody murder.