Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

‘If there are problems with the case then I’d like to help,’ he answered coolly. ‘I’m in no hurry to get home. Melinda’s not expecting me until late anyway.’

Melinda was Grier’s wife. They’d met at university, and had been together ever since. Tina had never been introduced to her, but she’d noted that whenever Grier spoke about her it was with an obvious fondness in his voice, which was very different to the rest of the married men in the team when they spoke about their wives. It should have made her like him more. Instead it made her jealous.

Tina split the task of trawling through the Roisín O’Neill file into two, Grier concentrating on Roisín’s background while she looked into the mechanics of the murder itself.

The first thing Tina noticed was that Roisín fitted the profile of one of the Night Creeper’s victims perfectly. A successful brand manager for a pharmaceutical company, she was physically attractive and, at twenty-nine, right in his age range. She also lived alone and was apparently single. Most importantly, she’d ordered a new alarm system for her West End apartment three months before her death, and it had been installed by Andrew Kent.

The similarities didn’t end there. As Tina read through the file, she was confronted by a series of graphic photographs from the crime scene itself. Roisín had been found in exactly the same way as the other four victims, lying naked and face up on her bed, her long blonde hair standing out against the sky blue sheets. Her ankles and wrists were tied with rope so that she was spreadeagled, and her face had been smashed to a pulp, rendering it utterly unrecognizable. It looked just like all the other crime scenes, except there was far less blood, and when Tina examined the close-up shots of Roisín’s upper body, she could see extensive bruising on the neck, which hadn’t been present on the other victims.

The pathologist’s report confirmed Grier’s revelation that the cause of death had been manual strangulation, and that the blows to her face had been delivered post-mortem using a blunt object, most likely a hammer. He hadn’t been able to give an accurate estimate as to how long after her death these injuries had occurred, but what he could say, with accuracy, was that, given the state of decomposition of the victim when she was discovered (and he went into a lot of detail on this), Roisín had definitely died at some point between six p.m. and midnight the previous evening — the day of Kent’s father’s funeral. The time of the funeral was two p.m., so it was humanly possible that Kent could have stolen or hired a car, driven back to London — a distance of 456 miles according to the AA website — and committed the murder before driving back to Inverness by breakfast time the following day. But it was also extremely unlikely and, for the moment at least, Tina didn’t think it was worth enquiring about stolen or hired cars in the Inverness area.

Instead, she concentrated on other differences between Roisín’s murder and the others. Two stood out particularly.

The first was the lack of any traces of chloroform at the Roisín crime scene. Part of the Night Creeper’s MO was to use chloroform to subdue his victims after he’d broken into their homes, which allowed him to bind and gag them at leisure, before moving on to the next stage of his assault. Traces of it had been present at the other four murders. Whoever Roisín’s killer had been, and Tina was pretty certain now it wasn’t Andrew Kent, he’d used some other means to overpower Roisín and bind her.

The second was the absence of any physical signs of a violent sexual assault. The Night Creeper liked to be rough with his victims, even though they were unable to offer any physical resistance, and typically he’d inflicted sexual injuries, mainly in the form of lacerations. But not on Roisín. As a consequence, the pathologist was unable to conclude whether, in her case, a sexual assault had even taken place.

What he could say definitively, however, was that Roisín had had sex at some point in the twelve hours prior to her death, because traces of sperm had been recovered from inside her vagina. DNA tests on the sperm had already proved that it was not a match with Kent’s. Nor was it a match for any of the two million other people held on the government’s central DNA database.

Tina sat back in her seat and stretched, looking across at Grier who was hunched over his desk, making studious notes as he read from the open file. The clock on the wall above his head said it was ten past eight. They’d been back at their desks for an hour or so and in that time they’d hardly spoken.

‘Is there anything in the witness statements about Roisín having a boyfriend, Dan?’ she asked him, breaking the silence. ‘Or a lover of some description. I know she was meant to be single, but according to the pathologist’s report she had sex with someone, other than her killer, on the day she died.’

He shook his head. ‘There was no boyfriend — at least not according to her friends and family. And because we were hunting a serial killer by then rather than someone known to her, we didn’t pursue it. Why? Do you think whoever she had sex with had something to do with it?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out who it was. Just so we can eliminate him from the inquiry.’

‘I’m taking it from that that Kent’s alibi’s still looking good.’

‘It’s looking perfect,’ she answered wearily, and she told him what she’d found out.

Grier wiped a hand across his brow. ‘Then we’ve got a problem.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, there’s something I don’t understand, either. I’ve been trawling through all the witness statements, from friends, family, neighbours, everyone who knew her, and it seems she was a nice, ordinary girl with no enemies. In fact, only one thing stands out. I don’t know if you remember, but Roisín lived in an old four-storey house in Pimlico that had been converted into luxury flats.’

‘I didn’t, but go on.’

‘Each floor had its own apartment, and they were linked by a communal staircase, with Roisín’s on the top floor. About a week before her murder, and three months after Kent had fitted the alarm, one of the neighbours ran into someone she didn’t recognize coming down the staircase from the direction of Roisín’s apartment. Her statement said. .’ He paused while he checked his notes. ‘He was, and I quote, “a very suspicious-looking character, a young man with long hair, quite short, who didn’t want to meet my eye”.’

‘Did she challenge him as to who he was?’

‘No, she didn’t say anything. She probably didn’t want a confrontation. She said he left through the front door and that was it. I remember at the time we didn’t take it that seriously.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, mainly because the sighting was a week before the murder, rather than the day it happened. Also, the neighbour was a bit of a busybody, in her seventies, and when we tried to do an e-fit based on her description, it just didn’t work. Every attempt turned out to look nothing like him, according to her. We did go back to Roisín’s friends to ask if she knew someone who fitted the guy’s basic description, but, unsurprisingly, none of them did. Which was why it ended up going to the bottom of the pile.’

Tina had never heard about this sighting, although given the size and scale of the inquiry, and the number of detectives involved, this wasn’t that surprising. ‘So, what makes it stand out now?’ she asked.

‘Because the description might be basic — short, long hair, moles on cheek — but it’s possible that it fits Kent.’

Tina recalled the two very small dark moles an inch apart on Kent’s left cheek. ‘It’s more than possible. It does fit him.’