The Last 10 Seconds

Then I heard a second shot.

I rushed back to the entrance and began ringing the buzzers for the other apartments, desperate to get inside. ‘Help me get this door open,’ I shouted to the taxi driver, who was a big guy about my age. ‘The woman up there’s in trouble.’

He put up his hands. ‘Look, mate, I don’t want to get involved.’

‘I’m a police officer, for Christ’s sake! Sean Egan. You might have seen my name in the paper. The Creeper case. And up there is DI Tina Boyd, being attacked. Now help me get this bloody thing open! Now!’

‘How?’

‘Kick it!’

He looked worried, but to his credit came forward at a steady run and launched a kung fu kick at the door while I continued to press the other buzzers desperately.

The door shook but held. The taxi driver grunted in pain.

A woman came over the intercom. ‘Hello?’

‘This is the police. Let me in.’

‘Show the warrant card to the camera.’

‘I haven’t got time. Let me in.’

‘No.’

The taxi driver did another flying kick and this time the door flew open and I hobbled inside on the crutches. I told him to dial 999 and pressed the button for the lift. It opened immediately, and I got inside and pressed for the fourth floor. The taxi driver made no move to follow me as the doors shut, the phone already to his ear.

I knew what I was doing was insane. I was unarmed, on crutches. I could offer Tina no protection whatsoever, and could easily get myself killed. But I owed her. This was my fault and I didn’t know what the hell I’d do if I was too late and she was already dead.

The lift doors opened and I charged through them. Apartment 4B was opposite me, and straight away I saw that the door was on the latch, but as I shoulder-barged it, with no obvious plan of action whatsoever, it only opened a few inches. The chain was across it. Somewhere further inside I could hear the sound of a struggle.

I cursed, hobbled backwards and charged it again. This time it flew open, and I stumbled inside, only just about keeping my balance, before starting off down the narrow hallway in the direction of the struggle.

Another shot rang out, followed by the loud bang of someone hitting the floor, and I heard Tina let out a short, sharp cry of pain.

I hobbled faster. ‘Police!’ I screamed. ‘Drop your gun, Samuel-Smith! It’s all over!’

As I reached the doorway, I saw him standing above Tina, who lay sprawled out on the floor, her eyes shut, moaning in pain. He was still wearing the same raincoat he’d had on earlier, except now he also had a balaclava covering his bald head, and a gun in his gloved hands.

He turned my way, lifting it up to fire, his eyes frowning behind the mask.

Without hesitating, I threw one of the crutches straight at him, and as he knocked it aside with his gun hand, I threw myself forward, ignoring the searing pain in my leg, and slammed into him.

My momentum and his lack of preparedness drove the two of us across the room and we slammed into the windowframe. I grabbed his gun hand by the wrist so that the weapon was pointing away from us, and with my free hand punched him hard in the face. He fell backwards so that he was half hanging out of the open window, forty feet above the street below. I could see the taxi driver staring up at us, a look of shock on his face, the phone still to his ear as I punched Bob in the face again and again, leaning all my weight into him, ignoring the agonizing pain in my leg, a pure and terrible rage surging through me as I thought of all the treacherous things this man had done: the way he’d protected the men who’d murdered my brother; the way he’d mutilated an innocent woman to protect a discredited politician; the way he’d come here to murder Tina. I wanted to kill him now, to tear him to pieces. To keep punching him until he finally fell sprawling and lifeless on to the concrete like the piece of dirt he was.

The gun fell from his hand and clattered to the ground, but still I couldn’t stop myself, enjoying the hot pain in my knuckles as I kept up my assault.

‘Stop it, Sean. You’ll kill him!’

It was Tina. On her feet now, her nose bleeding, her words slightly slurred, her hands grabbing at my arm.

‘We need him alive. He’s our only link to Wise.’

And in that moment, the anger seemed to flood out of me, and I let go of Captain Bob and stumbled backwards, before falling to the floor under the dead weight of my bad leg.

The last thing I saw before I shut my eyes and lost consciousness was Tina ripping the balaclava off the man who’d been my boss for ten years, revealing a face that was a bloody, defeated mess.

It was over. All of it.

Epilogue

Tina settled into her seat on the plane as it waited for take-off, and relaxed with an orange juice. She’d been off the booze for close to a month now, and wasn’t even missing it any more, although she knew it was far too early to claim success. Alcohol has a way of sneaking back, unnoticed, into a person’s life, but for the moment she was doing a good job of forgetting about it. The cigarettes were a different story. She’d managed to cut down from twenty a day to ten, but that was the extent of it. Still, she figured any normal person had to have some vices.

It was six weeks now since Robin Samuel-Smith’s arrest for attempted murder, and he was currently awaiting trial in the top-security wing of Belmarsh Prison. Tina’s own suspension had been lifted at the same time, it having been decided by the powers-that-be that punishing the police officer who’d done so much to break the whole case wouldn’t sit too well in the court of public opinion.

However, Sean Egan, the man who’d possibly saved her life twice, and who’d also done so much to bring justice to those involved, had resigned his position. She’d only seen him once since that night in her apartment, when they’d met for coffee in a local Starbucks, and he’d told her he was planning on leaving the country for a while and going out to spend some time with cousins of his in New Zealand. He’d tried to get her out for a drink before he left, but somehow she didn’t think it would work. When it came down to it, they were too similar. Both opinionated and impulsive, they’d probably end up killing each other if they ever got together. She’d told him that and he’d laughed and replied that she was probably right.

In the end, Tina had taken a leaf out of Egan’s book and applied for a leave of unpaid absence to recuperate — something which had been agreed to immediately. She imagined that her bosses were secretly pleased at the fact that she was out of their hair for a while.

So here she was, on the way to Central America for a month-long backpacking trip in Costa Rica and Panama. She’d even treated herself to a business-class ticket, and though the cost had been frankly enormous and taken a great chunk out of her savings, she felt that she deserved it.

The stewardess came by with newspapers and she picked a copy of The Times, allowing herself a small smile as she saw the photograph on the front cover. It showed a short, balding man in an unfashionable cream-coloured suit, with flabby cheeks and a pinched, shrew-like face, holding a hand up to shield himself from the flash of a camera. Paul Wise looked like a man under a lot of pressure, but then that was because he was. The government might have survived the scandal that had hit them in the shape of Anthony Gore, taking turns to get on camera and vilify every aspect of his life and career, knowing that he couldn’t fight back, but for Paul Wise, it was a different story. The crimes he’d committed over so many years were finally coming back to haunt him, now that he seemed to have lost all his backers within the establishment. He’d been named as the man behind the Kent conspiracy, and had been named too as the Mr Big behind a number of other serious crimes. Although he’d so far escaped extradition, and was fervently denying everything through his lawyers, as well as threatening legal action against those who’d named him, these threats and denials were being drowned out by the huge tsunami of pressure being aimed at the Northern Cyprus government, and at Turkey, which effectively controlled much of Northern Cyprus’s foreign policy, to deport him back to the UK to face trial.

Wise had become a hunted man, hounded by a press that wasn’t going to let him go, and Tina was confident