Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

‘No, I understand that, sir.’

‘Sorry, Tina, I know you do.’ He wiped a hand across his brow. ‘But this has really thrown things off kilter. Has Kent come up with alibis for any of the other murders?’

She shook her head. ‘No. Just Roisín O’Neill’s.’

‘So we’ve got enough evidence to hold him.’

‘But we’ve still got the problem of explaining his alibi to a jury. If it really does turn out that he couldn’t have killed Roisín, then our whole case is up the creek. The MO was the same for Roisín as it was for all the others, wasn’t it? I thought it was, but I didn’t join the team until after her murder.’

MacLeod nodded slowly. ‘It was.’

He sat back in his seat and tugged hard on the edge of his moustache, as if he was making a concerted effort to pull it off completely. He looked red-faced and unwell, the stress of the case clearly getting to him. It was known that he liked a drink, and Tina wondered if she might end up looking like him one day, burnt out by the job, an early grave beckoning.

‘Andrew Kent committed the murder,’ he said firmly. ‘I don’t know how he’s worked this alibi, but it’s bullshit, and one way or another we’ll be able to prove it. In the meantime, we’ve got more than enough evidence for the magistrates to remand him in custody tomorrow. So I think the whole team deserves a celebration drink. Including you.’ He made a valiant effort to smile. ‘Are you going to grace us with your presence tonight?’

His tone suggested he was just ribbing her, but there was also an underlying issue wrapped up in it. Tina rarely socialized with the members of her team. These days, she preferred to finish up at work and head home to the flat where she lived alone, make a bite to eat and then get slowly and steadily pissed alone in front of the TV, unseen by her colleagues, and unbothered by the problems of the outside world. But she was also aware of her responsibilities now that she was a DI and in charge of people, and she knew she was going to have to at least show willing. ‘Sure, I’ll come along for a while.’

‘Good. It’ll be nice to see you let your hair down.’

Tina doubted that. When she hit the bottle, she tended to hit it hard, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. But she didn’t say anything.

‘And let’s not spoil it by going on too much about Kent’s alibi in front of the others,’ he continued. ‘It’s just a last-ditch attempt by a man who’s been caught near-enough red-handed to pull the wool over our eyes.’

She nodded. ‘OK. You’ve convinced me.’

But the problem was, he hadn’t.

One of the nastiest people I ever had to deal with was an up-and-coming Essex-based gangster by the name of Jason Slade. Slade owned a security company that ran the door on nightclubs across Kent and Essex, and controlled all the illegal drugs being sold in them. He also ran a team of thieves who stole and re-badged luxury cars, before exporting them for sale in Russia and the Middle East, which was a hugely lucrative business, estimated at the time by the National Crime Squad to be worth several million in profits per year, making him extremely rich for a twenty-eight-year-old without a qualification to his name.

Like Tyrone Wolfe, Slade was surveillance aware and very careful in his dealings. He was also a sadist, who took particular pleasure in torturing the people who got on the wrong side of him — something which was worryingly easy to do. There was a story doing the rounds that he’d once gouged out a love rival’s eye with a teaspoon handle, while the girl whose attentions they’d both been vying for (and who hadn’t chosen Slade) was forced to watch. Whether this story was true or not (and I’ve always thought it was), it cemented Slade’s reputation both as a man not to be crossed and as one who was going to be very difficult to bring to justice, since everyone seemed to be so damn scared of him.

Then one of his gang was stopped in a stolen Porsche 911 Turbo with a kilo of cannabis and a hundred one-gram wraps of coke in a holdall on the back seat. The guy, a good-looking chancer named Tony Boyle, who was still on parole for earlier drugs offences and therefore facing a minimum seven-year stretch for his crimes, decided to cut a deal with the law.

Now we had a way of getting to Slade. Boyle’s testimony alone wasn’t enough to convict him, so it was decided that Boyle would have to set him up. Apparently, Slade was having difficulty getting a reliable wholesale supply of cocaine for dealing in his clubs and was having to get it from London gangsters at high prices — including, incidentally, one Tyrone Wolfe — so the plan was for Boyle to introduce me and another undercover officer as coke importers who would be able to solve Slade’s problems.

It took weeks of wrangling, as these things often do, before a meeting was set up in a cheap motel room just off the A127 near Southend. It was a good few years back and recording devices weren’t as advanced as they are today, so as it was just an intro meeting and we weren’t wired up. Our plan was to get Slade interested, arrange a test purchase of the contraband, then take him down red-handed as he handed over the money.

Slade had agreed to see us without Boyle present, and was alone when we knocked on the motel room door and went inside, fifteen minutes early. He was sitting at a crappy little desk wedged in between the wardrobe and the window. It was 10.15 p.m. and dark outside.

‘Thanks for coming, gents,’ he said, getting up and shaking our hands in turn. He wasn’t a big guy, no more than five nine, but he had the wiry build of a featherweight boxer, and he projected an aura of menace that comes naturally to the more serious criminals.

He offered us a seat on the bed, but we preferred to remain standing.

The guy I was working with was a veteran copper called Colin (I can never remember his last name), a short, stubby cockney with silver, slicked-back hair and a face that looked like it had been whacked with a spade. ‘I hear you want to buy some high-quality chang,’ he grunted, while I stood next to him, hands crossed in front of me, acting the part of his bodyguard.

‘I hear you’ve got some to sell,’ answered Slade cleverly, refusing to be drawn, knowing that if we were undercover police officers then it would be illegal for us to encourage him to commit a crime by offering to sell a product he hadn’t specifically asked for. All annoying semantics, you might think, but we had to be very careful how we operated if we wanted a case to stand up to a judge’s scrutiny.

And that was the theme of the meeting. In the ten minutes we were in there, Slade was the one asking the questions — about our background, credentials, the size of the product we could deliver — but, at the same time, we couldn’t get him to admit that he actually wanted anything.

In the end, Colin lost his rag with him. ‘Are you in the fucking market for some gear or not?’ he demanded. ‘Or are we just wasting our time with the hired help?’ His words were designed to provoke an angry reaction, to get Slade to start boasting about his seniority (as criminals will often do when their reputation’s called into question), and I remember thinking that, given Slade’s reputation for violence, Colin was taking a bit of a risk.

But Slade just smiled. ‘Ask around about me, and you’ll see I’m in a position to do business, big business, but I’m careful who I deal with. Maybe we’ll talk again soon.’ And with that he turned his back, signifying that the meeting was over.

‘Do you think he sussed us?’ I asked as we got back to the car.

‘No reason why he should,’ grunted Colin, opening the door. ‘Our legend’s good. We’ll get him soon enough. He’s greedy. I could see it in his eyes.’