Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

‘Who?’ she demanded.

‘Get me to a hospital.’

‘Who tried to kill you, Mr Kent?’

He screwed his face into a pained grimace. ‘Jesus, it hurts.’

‘An ambulance is on the way. You’re going to be OK. But you need to tell me what happened.’

‘The water,’ he hissed, looking up at her. ‘It was something in the water.’

The custody sergeant reappeared at the door, looking flustered. ‘The ambulance’ll be here any minute.’

She grabbed the empty plastic cup and threw it towards him. ‘Where the hell did that water come from?’

‘From the tap,’ he stammered nervously. ‘I didn’t do a thing to it, honestly.’

‘Get it in an evidence bag. It’s going to need to be analysed.’ She dismissed him with an angry wave of the hand and turned back to Kent.

‘They don’t want me to talk,’ he said, his voice an angry croak.

‘Who’s “they”?’

He swallowed hard, and grabbed her by the hand, his grip surprisingly strong. ‘Get me to a hospital and I’ll tell you everything. I swear it. I’ll tell you everything .’

It was 8.25 p.m., and I was sitting in the back of the people carrier. We were parked up on a backstreet only a few hundred yards from the place where Wolfe and Haddock had picked me up over an hour earlier, except now I was wearing gloves and a boiler suit, and holding one of the Remington shotguns I’d got in the ill-fated gun deal earlier across my knees. The car’s engine was off, the air was muggy and warm, and there was a leaden silence in the car as we waited to go to work, and all the time I was wondering how on earth I’d managed to get myself into the current situation and, more importantly, how I was going to get out of it.

After I’d got in the car earlier, Wolfe had driven us to a lock-up just up the road in Islington where the guns were stored, along with the change of clothes. We’d changed, and then each of us loaded his own gun. I’d told Wolfe once again that I wasn’t going to pull the trigger for any reason, and once again he’d reiterated that this was a straight ‘snatch’ job and no shots would be fired. ‘But there’s no way we’re walking into a job unloaded,’ he added. ‘That’d just be stupid. Never be unprepared, Sean.’

Once we were kitted up and back in the people carrier, we’d driven round while Wolfe gave me the lowdown on the job itself.

The first surprise was that there were five of us involved. As well as the three of us and Tommy, Wolfe’s girlfriend, a Thai girl called Lee he’d been seeing for the past couple of months, and who Tommy said reminded him of a dirty-looking cage fighter, was acting as a spotter. She was currently stationed at a pavement café fifty yards from my old station, Holborn. Within an hour Andrew Kent, our target, was going to be leaving through the front gates in an ambulance with flashing lights, and as soon as he did so she would let us know using the shortwave VHF radio she was carrying.

It was about a minute’s drive tops to where we were now, and as soon as the ambulance passed, we would pull out and follow it. Tommy was parked in a Bedford van a further hundred metres up the road, also armed with a VHF radio set to the same frequency, and when we gave the signal he would pull out and block the ambulance’s path, forcing it to a halt. We’d then be out of the people carrier, in Wolfe’s words like shit off a greasy stick, with Wolfe taking the front of the ambulance and making the driver open the doors at the back. Then Haddock would pull out our quarry while I provided cover. Tommy would join us in the people carrier, and we’d be out of there in the space of thirty seconds. Any police escort would, Wolfe assured us, be unarmed, since there’d have been no time to organize an ARV to accompany the ambulance, and as such they’d be helpless when confronted with our weapons.

What frightened me was the level of information these guys had. They just knew too much, which meant that they had to be privy to some kind of inside information. I’d spent more than seven years working out of Holborn nick, and I liked to think that the coppers there were decent, honourable people, not the kind who’d sell information to a scumbag like Tyrone Wolfe, or to his client, whoever that person was. But it seemed someone had. There was no other way they could know that Kent would be travelling in an ambulance, nor the time he’d be leaving. The problem was, including civilian workers and the various uniforms, it could be any one of more than two hundred people.

I sat back in my seat, conscious that I was sweating. Knowing that if this plan backfired, and shots ended up being fired, then that would be it. My life as I knew it would be over.

But I could still get out of it, I told myself, if I could get these guys nicked. Maybe not now, but later, when we had Kent in our grasp. That way we could also get to the person behind this, the client, and bring him down with them, thereby wrapping things up perfectly. I doubted if I’d ever get my job back, but it might keep me out of prison.

‘Listen,’ I said, breaking the heavy silence in the car, ‘I know you can’t tell me who it is we’re working for, but at least give me an idea what he wants with this guy.’

Wolfe sighed loudly. It was obvious he was getting tired of my questions. ‘If I tell you, will you shut up afterwards?’

‘What you telling him for?’ grunted Haddock. ‘He don’t need to know nothing. He’s just hired help.’

‘Because I’m sick of being kept in the dark,’ I snapped.

Wolfe turned round in his seat, fixing me with his good eye. ‘I told you the bloke’s been charged with the rape and murder of five women, didn’t I? Well, the client’s a relative of one of them, and he wants justice. He doesn’t think the law’ll give it to him. That’s why we’re involved.’

‘How does he know that Kent’s going to be leaving Holborn nick in an ambulance in the next hour?’ I asked, thinking it was somewhat ironic that an arch criminal like Tyrone Wolfe was suddenly turning vigilante to make up for the inadequacies of the British legal system.

‘I didn’t ask him,’ he replied. ‘Unlike you, I know when to keep my mouth shut.’

I was pleased. Wolfe’s answer would help us identify his client, because there couldn’t be that many of the victims’ relatives with the influence needed to get information on Kent’s movements. But it also left me with another problem.

‘The client’s going to kill him, isn’t he?’

‘I thought you said you’d stop asking questions if I told you why he wanted him.’

‘But he is. There’s no other reason why he’d want him.’

Haddock shifted his huge bulk in the front seat, and the car seemed to move a little. ‘What do you care?’ he hissed, in his weirdly effeminate tones. ‘You’re getting paid, and it’s just a nonce who’s going to die.’

‘I told you both before, I don’t want to get involved in murder.’

Wolfe sighed loudly. ‘You’re not getting involved in murder, Sean. The client is. We’re just pulling the guy. Then it’s up to him what he does with him, but he assures me that once he’s finished with Kent, he’ll disappear off the face of the earth and that’ll be that. No one’ll care that much, because this is the Night Creeper we’re talking about, a piece-of-shit sex killer who murders defenceless women in their homes. And the coppers won’t be looking that hard for the people who took him. They’ll just want everyone to forget the fact that they had one of their prisoners snatched from under their noses.’

I thought Wolfe was being unduly naive, but that was his lookout. Mine was to stop his client getting his hands on Kent. He might be a piece-of-shit sex killer but it was still my job to protect him from the person or persons plotting his murder.