The Last 10 Seconds

was no one in the back but I could see the figures of Wolfe and Haddock in the front.

‘Get in,’ called Wolfe, and as I stepped inside I realized my decision had been made for me.

Seventeen

‘What are you thinking of, talking about guns over the phone?’ snarled Wolfe as he pulled away from the kerb. ‘Are you some sort of rank amateur?’

‘I told you we couldn’t trust him,’ grunted Haddock, turning round and giving me a cold glare.

The atmosphere in the car was tense, and both men seemed agitated and jumpy, which told me, if I hadn’t known it already, that the job was imminent.

‘All right, all right, calm down,’ I said, putting up my hands in a defensive gesture. ‘You caught me off guard, that’s all. When you said the job was soon, I didn’t think you meant tonight.’ I made a play of looking at my watch, at the same time flicking the switch to turn on the recorder.

‘We only just found out ourselves,’ said Wolfe.

‘That’s the problem with doing stuff for other people,’ grunted Haddock, who didn’t seem too pleased about the way things were going either.

I got the feeling then that I wasn’t the only person who didn’t know who the client was: Haddock didn’t either. This surprised me. I’d always been under the impression that he and Wolfe were as thick as the thieves they were.

‘I haven’t even told you I’ll do it yet,’ I protested. ‘And where the hell’s Tommy?’

‘Tommy’s nearby. Don’t worry about that.’

But I was worried. Tommy was my only ally in the group, and I wanted him around while this was going down, just in case Wolfe and Haddock decided to get rid of me afterwards.

‘You said you’d do the job if we gave you thirty grand up front,’ continued Wolfe. He turned to Haddock. ‘Clarence, can you do the honours?’

Haddock produced a white jiffy bag and handed it to me, eyeing me carefully as he did so. ‘You got a phone on you?’ he demanded as I took the bag and tore it open to reveal three phonebook-thick wads of used twenties.

‘Yeah.’

‘Give it to me. Now.’

‘Fuck you.’

Haddock’s piggy eyes narrowed to angry slits and I saw that he was clenching his massive fists. But I stood my ground. I needed that damn phone so that I could text Bob and get him to track my location.

‘Do me a favour, Sean, and give him the phone,’ said Wolfe, his tone conciliatory. ‘We’re just going to turn it off and keep it while we do the job. It’s more secure that way. You ought to know that. Mobiles are a copper’s best friend.’

Reluctantly, I pulled the mobile — the only one I was carrying — from my pocket and switched it off before handing it over. ‘I want it back afterwards,’ I told them both angrily, but inside I was growing increasingly nervous because it looked like I was going to have to carry out the job with them, which was against every rule and regulation in the book.

Wolfe was watching me in the rearview mirror. ‘So,’ he said, ‘are you in?’

‘This is a kidnap, right? Not a killing. I’m not killing anyone. Not even for a hundred grand.’

‘That’s right. We spring him from his escort, and deliver him to the client. That’s all.’

‘But what’s the client going to do with him?’ I asked, knowing that if I could get enough information on the recorder, I might get the evidence I needed to convict them later.

‘The less you know about that the better,’ Wolfe answered with an air of finality.

‘At least tell me the name of the person we’re kidnapping.’ Wolfe nodded to himself, seeming to come to a decision. ‘He’s a real piece of shit,’ he answered. ‘The sort who rapes and murders defenceless women.’

And even before he said it, I knew it was going to be the man my former colleagues had arrested only twenty-four hours earlier, the man whose name was known to no one outside the Metropolitan Police.

Andrew Kent.

Eighteen

Tina watched Sean Egan walk off down the street. On a different night she might have been interested in talking to him. The fact that Dougie MacLeod had called him trouble intrigued her, and he was a good-looking guy, who looked like he might be good company. But right now she was preoccupied with the Night Creeper case, and more specifically, with Andrew Kent’s alibi.

Before leaving the station to come to the pub she’d run a check on the General Register Office database and found that Kent’s father had indeed died just before the murder of Roisin O’Neill. She’d then called the vicar of the church in Inverness where his funeral had taken place and they had buried him on the day the coroner claimed Roisin had died. What was more, the vicar remembered meeting Kent before the service when he’d greeted the deceased’s immediate family. When the vicar had asked the reason for Tina’s call, she’d replied that it was in connection with a routine inquiry, and asked that he not mention it to anyone else. She had no desire to give him the full details of the case, even though she knew that Kent’s brief Jacobs would be contacting him to do just that soon enough.

By the time she’d got off the phone, the rest of the team had already gone to the pub, and when she’d walked in fifteen minutes later and seen them clicking glasses in celebration of catching the man who’d been terrorizing London’s young women for the past two years, she hadn’t had the heart to say anything about Kent’s alibi. But she hadn’t had the heart to join in the celebrations either, and had forced herself to drink orange juice rather than a real drink because she needed to think.

All the available evidence suggested Kent was their killer, yet his alibi seemed cast-iron, and he was screaming his innocence from the rooftops. She felt the familiar stirring of excitement at the prospect of working alone to solve a puzzle that no one else seemed interested in.

Now that she’d done her bit and shown her face at the pub, her plan was to go back to the station and look through Roisin O’Neill’s file to see if she could find any clues. Roisin was the fourth victim, murdered only a few months before Tina joined the team. Perhaps the coroner had made a mistake with the timing of the death? That kind of thing occasionally happened, and right now it seemed like the obvious alternative. Or that, at least, was what she was hoping as she stubbed her cigarette underfoot.

She noticed that Sean had disappeared, and thought fleetingly that it was a pity they’d not said goodbye. She wondered if she’d have given him her number if he’d asked for it, and concluded that she probably would have done.

As she turned to walk back to the station, Dan Grier hurried out of the pub door, and she asked him if he was off home.

He nodded. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m heading back to the station. I’ve got some more work to do.’

‘What kind of work?’ he asked as they fell into step. ‘I thought we’d solved the case.’

‘We have,’ she answered, ‘but there are a few ends that need tying up.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘You were on the team when Roisin O’Neill was murdered, weren’t you? Do you remember if anything stood out about her case? That made it different from the others?’

‘I heard talk that Kent’s claiming he’s got an alibi for the O’Neill murder.’ Grier looked at her. ‘Is that right?’

She and MacLeod had agreed to keep Kent’s alibi quiet, but it was always going to get out and she saw no reason not to say anything about it now. ‘It looks like he has, yes. That’s why I wanted to go back and have a look