The Last 10 Seconds: A Novel

by Simon Kernick

  Tina smiled to herself. ‘I think you’re right, Mrs Glover. That’s very perceptive of you.’

  Beatrice Glover chuckled infectiously. ‘I may be old but I’m not senile. Roisín was a lovely girl you know. Always smiling. She could have done so much better than a married man. Those kinds of affairs never end happily, do they?’

  ‘No, they don’t,’ said Tina, remembering the only one she’d had many years before when she was in her early twenties and new to the force. He was a businessman, sixteen years older and, as she’d found out three months in, married with two children. It had been a painful learning experience, and one she’d never repeated. ‘I understand you’ve got access to a computer and the internet, Mrs Glover. Could you do me a favour and look something up on it for me?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Just let me go and turn it on.’

  Tina waited patiently while she got her computer booted up, listening to her say how worried she’d become as a result of the murder, and asking what the world had come to when you could be murdered in your bed.

  ‘Murder’s far rarer than people think, Mrs Glover, and lightning doesn’t usually strike twice, so I’m sure you have nothing to worry about,’ Tina explained, although she was only too aware that lightning had struck far too many times around her.

  ‘All right, Miss Boyd, I’m all booted up and ready. What do you need me to look up?’

  ‘The name “Anthony Gore”. Can you Google it, and add the words “Minister of Home Affairs”? It should come up with some image results. I want you to look at them.’

  Beatrice Glover slowly repeated the words out loud, then Tina heard her click a key at the other end.

  Five seconds passed.

  ‘Can you see a photograph of him yet?’ Tina asked, trying not to sound impatient.

  ‘My goodness. It’s him. That’s the man I saw with Roisín. I thought he looked familiar.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Glover, that’s all I need to know,’ said Tina, and after instructing her not to say anything to anyone about their conversation, she said her goodbyes before the old lady could ask any more questions.

  She took a deep breath and lit her first cigarette of the morning, wincing as the smoke tore down her throat. So Anthony Gore had definitely been Roisín O’Neill’s lover. Of course, as Mike had pointed out, that might be all he was, but Tina wasn’t so sure. She’d Googled Gore herself before phoning Beatrice Glover. A fifty-six-year-old former trial lawyer, married with two adult children, he had a reputation for being combative in the courtroom, and for getting results. He’d become an MP after the 2001 general election and had risen steadily through the government ranks, even though in 2003 he’d become embroiled in controversy when a story appeared in a Sunday tabloid accusing him of having a relationship with a prostitute. Gore had issued a spirited denial and taken legal action against the paper. The prostitute later retracted her story, claiming that all Gore had been guilty of was offering her free legal advice, which was why he was at her flat, and the paper ended up having to pay him A3120,000 in libel damages. Tina noted wryly that he’d made a big point of donating A310,000 to charity but had kept the rest of the cash himself.

  And that was Tina’s problem with Anthony Gore. Maybe she was reading too much between the lines, but there was something about him that left a bad taste in the mouth. In the photographs, there was an arrogance in his bearing, a vague glint of contempt in his eyes, and Tina didn’t like the way the prostitute had changed her story. The new one smacked of bullshit and suggested that she’d been persuaded to do it. Either by Gore himself, or perhaps he had some powerful friends to do it for him. There was no obvious evidence of wrongdoing in any of the basic research she’d done on Gore in the past half an hour, but that might have been because he was careful. Either way, she didn’t like him, or the fact that he’d been around Roisín in the run-up to her murder and was having an affair with her. Also, strangulation tended to point to a crime of passion. It was such a personal method of murder, the kind someone resorts to in moments of pure rage. Or desperation.

  Had Roisín done something to drive Gore to kill her? And had Andrew Kent captured it on film?

  But how had Gore covered it up? As far as Tina knew, he had no connection to the Night Creeper murder inquiry, and she couldn’t imagine a man like Gore – a scholarly lawyer – getting his hands dirty by smashing in his lover’s face with a hammer. Did he have friends who had such contacts? The same friends who’d persuaded the prostitute to change her story? And were they in turn capable of organizing Kent’s breakout from police custody?

  It made sense, and it fitted the facts. But it was also hugely tenuous. And Tina had absolutely no evidence to prove any of it. According to the radio that morning there was no further news on Andrew Kent’s whereabouts, and she hadn’t heard anything from DCI MacLeod. She needed to phone him, so she got to her feet and dialled his number, looking at her watch. It was six thirty, and the sun was shining through the blinds, throwing thin rods of light across her old sofa. He would probably be up. It would have been difficult for him to sleep well, given what had happened the previous night.

  There was no answer. She thought about calling the big boss of Homicide and Serious Crime Command, DCS Frank Mendelson. He ran all the Met’s murder investigation teams and was the man DCI MacLeod reported to. She’d only met him once, when he’d come in to discuss the case a few months earlier. A short, pugnacious and fiercely ambitious man, she remembered him as someone who liked to do things methodically, which meant he’d tell her to write up a report and then, almost certainly, given the lack of obvious evidence and the fact that Anthony Gore was so high profile, nothing would happen. So she decided against it. She also decided against calling Mike, mainly because she was sure that he would tell her to tread carefully, when she knew that treading carefully wouldn’t work. She had to shake things up, and the only way to do that was to confront Gore.

  It was a high-risk strategy. In fact, it was probably madness, given the trouble it could land her in, but somehow, standing alone in her shitty little front room, the thought didn’t bother her. It actually excited her. Risking her job, risking everything, in a dramatic and probably vain effort to get some justice sent her adrenalin surging.

  Ignoring the voice that told her she was being foolish, that this was definitely not the way forward, she strode into the kitchen, pulled a half-full bottle of vodka from the fridge, took a single, hard slug – relishing the burning hit – then picked up the phone and called Dan Grier.

  ‘Wakey wakey,’ she said when he picked up. ‘It’s time to go to work.’

  Forty-five

  DCI Dougie MacLeod lived alone in a spacious corner terrace three or four miles from me in Hendon. His wife, Marion, a small, severe woman who’d always been a bundle of nervous energy, had died suddenly of a heart attack years earlier, and his son, Billy, was off at university somewhere, which made things a lot easier from my point of view, because I didn’t want anyone else to hear what I had to say.

  I hadn’t had much to do with Dougie these past few years, and things had never been the same since I’d assaulted Jason Slade and he’d put a contract on my head, but now that my own family were gone, he was the only person on this planet I trusted completely. He’d always been a man of integrity, prepared to put himself on the line for the people who worked under him, and even though it had been many years since I had, I was still sure I could rely on him to tell me what I needed to do.

  My career was finished, I was beginning to accept that now. Even if I got away with this in the short term, I’d always be looking over my shoulder, wondering when someone was going to find out the truth. More than that, though, I no longer had the stomach for undercover work. I’d come very close to death four times in the past twenty-four hours, and the shock of this was tearing me up inside. I needed a holiday. A long one. Six months, a year, somewhere far away from all the violence of the city. But Ialso done what I’d set out to do all those years ago when I sta
rted out in undercover. I’d brought down Tyrone Wolfe and Clarence Haddock, and I took grim satisfaction from the knowledge that they’d paid the price for what they did all those years ago. Wolfe’s denial that it was he who murdered my brother had caught me out, since it was a reliable source who’d heard him bragging that he was the man who’d pulled the trigger. There were three armed robbers there that day, Wolfe, Haddock and Tommy. But now, at least, they were all dead, even if they had taken the true identity of the shooter to their graves, and my brother and my parents could finally rest in peace.

  I’d used my own car to get to Dougie’s. As I drove past his house, I saw that there were lights on on the ground floor. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Although it was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, I knew he was an early riser, and he was going to have his hands full with the Kent manhunt, so there wouldn’t have been a lot of time to sleep.

  I found a spot fifty yards down the road, parked up, and walked back, feeling nervous about what I was going to have to do.

  Taking a deep breath that made me wince, I rang his doorbell, pleased at least that I no longer looked like something out of a horror film.

  There was no answer, even though his car was in the carport, so I rang again and then rapped hard on the door. It was possible he’d gone out somewhere on foot and would be back soon, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself out here. So after about a minute, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to answer, I took a quick look round to check that no one was around, then clambered over the wooden fence that separated the front of the property from the back garden.

  As I walked quietly round to the conservatory, something caught my eye. A light had gone out upstairs. So someone was here.

  I tried the conservatory door, and it opened. I went inside and was about to call out Dougie’s name when I experienced a sudden uneasy feeling. Maybe it was paranoia after my recent experiences, but my instincts told me to be careful. I crept through the conservatory and into the kitchen, beginning to get worryingly used to sneaking about in places where I didn’t belong, and feeling more and more like some kind of fugitive.

  The kitchen led through to a narrow hallway with the stairs on the left and another room off to the right. Although it was upstairs that the light had gone off, I couldn’t hear any sound coming from up there, which was strange. Again resisting the urge to call out, and wondering what Dougie would say if he caught me sneaking round his house at six in the morning, I crept over to the other door and opened it.

  The sound of the TV drifted out, and as I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, I saw that it was a Sky News report. The room was empty but it smelled of smoke, and there was an overflowing ashtray on the antique coffee table that sat between two traditional leather sofas. That was another thing that was strange. I remembered Dougie smoking when I first joined CID, but I thought he’d given up years earlier.

  I walked further inside the room, my eyes focused on the huge forty-inch TV as a tired-looking reporter spoke to the camera from just outside the scene-of-crime tape in Doughty Street where we’d snatched Kent. Behind him, a few SOCO moved about in their white coveralls, and a uniformed officer stood guard. There didn’t seem to be any frenetic activity.

  The reporter didn’t have much of any importance to say and was just repeating what had happened the previous night. Thankfully, the police officer who’d been shot was stable in hospital, and his injuries were not thought to be life-threatening. The big news from the reporter’s view was the identity of the kidnap victim, and the fact that he’d been charged only hours before with the Night Creeper murders. Police, he said, were keeping an open mind regarding the motive for the snatch, and although he reiterated the usual stuff about a major manhunt being under way, with a number of leads being followed up, the subtext seemed to be that no one knew who’d done it, why, or where he was now. He finished by saying that a police press conference was set for ten a.m. that morning.

  The camera then returned to the studio where an immaculately dressed female newsreader moved on to the next story, which was a fire at an abandoned hotel in Hertfordshire, from which two bodies had so far been recovered. There was a quick shot of the previous night’s rendezvous, which was now little more than a heavily smouldering pile of ash and stone, with a number of fire engines in front of it. Parts of the outbuilding where I’d discovered Haddock’s body were still standing, and I could make out the generator poking above what was left of a stone exterior wall. I assumed that one of the bodies they’d recovered must be his, but I doubted there would have been much left of it. The newsreader was stating that arson was suspected, and quoted Hertfordshire’s chief fire officer as saying it was possible there were more bodies inside. So far, unsurprisingly, no connection had been made between the two stories, but sooner or later DNA or dental work would be used to ID the victims, and then they’d merge into a superstory that would catch the imagination of journalists and police alike as they, like me, hunted for answers. The difference was, at the moment I was several steps ahead of them.

  I froze. The door was opening behind me. And then there was another sound that I knew well enough from my firearms training.

  The metallic click of a gun being cocked.

  Forty-six

  It was seven a.m., and Tina felt a sudden rush of apprehension as she parked the hire car in a resident’s bay across the road from Anthony Gore’s grand four-storey Notting Hill townhouse. All the way there Grier had been asking her if she was sure she was doing the right thing, and suggesting that it would be far better to get authorization before barging in on a government minister and effectively accusing him of murder. To his credit, though, he hadn’t refused to come along. ‘If it all goes wrong, I’ll say I forced you into it,’ she’d said in an attempt to mollify him.

  As they got out of the car now, Grier looked pale. ‘He’s the Minister of Home Affairs, for God’s sake, ma’am,’ he said again, with something close to fear. ‘I don’t like the idea of doing this at all.’

  But it was too late for that, and once again Tina told him she knew what she was doing. ‘Just leave me to do the talking,’ she said, walking up to the front door and rapping hard on the knocker. ‘You’re just going to be back-up. Look stern.’

  He said something she didn’t catch under his breath, but which she was sure wasn’t complimentary, and then she heard footsteps coming from inside.

  ‘Who is it?’ came a voice from behind the door that she recognized from the occasional TV programme she’d seen him on as belonging to Gore himself.

  ‘Police, Mr Gore,’ she answered firmly, holding up her warrant card to the spyhole in the centre of the imposing oak door. Grier did the same.

  There was the sound of locks being turned on the other side, then the door opened on a thick chain and a very irritated-looking Anthony Gore looked out at them. He was wearing a grey silk dressing gown and his collar-length silver hair was a mess. Even so, he looked sleek, well fed and prosperous, as if he’d never had to struggle for anything in life, and Tina’s dislike for him immediately hardened.

  ‘It’s seven on a Saturday morning, this had better be bloody important,’ he said, examining the warrant cards before finally opening up to let them in.

  ‘It is,’ Tina answered, determined not to be intimidated, even though there was a charisma about Gore that hinted at real power. In spite of herself, she could understand why an attractive woman like Roisín, more than twenty-five years younger, could fall for him.

  They followed him as he stalked down the grand hallway to a room at the end. It was a large study, tastefully furnished in mahogany and leather, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases lining two walls and a view out on to a walled garden. Gore took a seat behind an imposing desk so that it looked like he was in charge, and motioned for them to take seats opposite.

  As she sat down, Tina stole a glance at Grier, who seemed to be wilting under Gore’s grim, lawyerly demeanour.

  ‘My name’s DI Tina Boyd
, and this is—’

  ‘I know who you are, Miss Boyd. You have a very high profile for a police officer, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. What is it that I can do for you?’

  ‘We’re investigating the murder of Roisín O’Neill,’ she told him, trying to remain as unfazed as possible.

  ‘I thought someone had been charged with her murder,’ he answered smoothly and without exhibiting any sign of concern. ‘The man who was broken free from police custody last night.’

  ‘New evidence has come to light that suggests he didn’t kill Roisín,’ said Tina, and this time she was sure she caught the first flicker of nerves on his face.

  ‘Really? That’s interesting.’

  There was a short silence. Tina knew she was just going to have to go for it. There was no alternative. ‘You were seeing Roisín O’Neill, I believe, at about the time of her murder.’

  He made a great play of looking shocked by her comment. ‘How dare you accuse me of having an affair with someone I’ve never even met.’

  But this time Tina could tell he was acting. ‘Don’t lie to us, Mr Gore. We have phone records between her mobile and a mobile that was used from this address on a number of occasions in the run-up to the murder, including the previous day. Just because you got rid of the phone after her death and never registered it in your name doesn’t mean we can’t trace it back to you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve come in here and made some unfounded and totally untrue allegations, and I’m not prepared to stand for it. Perhaps all the adulation and high-profile successes have gone to your head, Miss Boyd, but because of your much-publicized trials and tribulations, I’m going to let it go and not take action against you, if you leave here now.’ He turned to Grier. ‘This is your opportunity to save your colleague’s career.’

  ‘She’s my boss, sir,’ Grier answered calmly. He might have looked nervous, but Tina was pleased to see he was holding his own.