Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

‘Because,’ he answered, ‘I’m not like that. I can’t kill someone in cold blood. Whoever it is.’

‘But you killed my brother.’

A look of surprise flickered across his face. ‘What?’

‘Highgate High Street. Thursday the second of November 1995. A man tried to stop you robbing a security van. His name was John Egan. He had facial scarring because he’d been injured in the Gulf War. You called him a freak just before you shot him. Remember?’ I leaned in closer, staring right into his eyes. ‘He was my brother.’

‘That guy?’ He looked confused. ‘Your brother?’

‘That’s right. My brother. And I’m no lowlife thief and killer like you. I’m an undercover copper. Got that? I infiltrated your crew so I could bring you down. And now I have. You’re all finished.’

‘Oh Jesus, you don’t understand. .’ He shook his head slowly from side to side.

I leaned in even closer, my face only inches from his. Wanting to hear his excuses. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘But I heard it from a reliable source that you were bragging about it.’

‘That’s all it was,’ he whispered. ‘Bragging.’ He made a huge effort to look me right in the eye. ‘I never killed your brother, Sean.’

And then, as I stood back up, reeling from this piece of news, I smelled it. Coming from downstairs.

Petrol.

The next second there was a loud roar, and the corridor was suddenly completely lit up. I turned round as a wave of heat rushed over me and saw flames leaping up the staircase.

Who the hell had set the fire? Everyone I’d come here with was dead. But I didn’t have time to worry about that because the first of the cloying black smoke was billowing down towards me.

‘Who killed my brother?’ I yelled down at Wolfe, grabbing him by the collar of his boiler suit, desperate to know.

But his eyes had closed and he went limp in my grasp, and even as I shook him with an angry frustration, the smoke wafted thickly about me and I started to choke.

I turned and ran for the window at the end of the corridor. It was older than the one I’d tried getting out of earlier, and though double-glazed, the glass was thin, with a crack running diagonally up one side, and its frame looked loose and unwieldy. But there was also no sign of a handle to open it.

The smoke was really getting thick now, and, though exhausted, adrenalin born of total desperation was coursing through me. I slammed into it hard. The frame rattled, but didn’t budge. I did it again. Four times in all. But nothing was happening, except that my ribs were screaming and I was having trouble breathing. Forcing myself to keep calm, I took five steps back and charged it shoulder-first. This time I heard it splinter and loosen. Coughing, and with the roar of the flames getting louder in my ears, I took another five steps back, wincing as the heat began to burn my back. Then, shutting my eyes in an effort to stop them stinging so much, I charged the window again, only this time I actually dived into it.

The whole thing, glass and frame, toppled down to the ground, and I only just stopped myself from going down with it. Desperately, I breathed in the fresher air as the smoke billowed all around me, then swung myself out of the gap I’d created so that I was hanging by my fingertips. The drop to ground level was probably ten feet but I had to get out of this place as fast as possible, so I swung out my legs, let go and landed hard, jarring my ankles and rolling across broken glass.

I was almost opposite the outbuilding where I’d discovered Haddock’s body. Ten yards beyond it was the first of the trees, and relative safety.

Ignoring the pain in my ankles — Jesus, everywhere — I started running for it. But as I did so, I heard the heavy click of a shotgun being cocked only yards behind me. I turned, caught the faintest glimpse of a man in a boiler suit like the ones we’d all been wearing, and a balaclava. He was aiming the shotgun at me.

I zigzagged, keeping low, and as the shotgun blasted into life I dived behind the outbuilding wall, temporarily out of sight, before scrambling back to my feet again and running for my life.

I hit the trees at a pace I didn’t think I was capable of at the best of times, let alone after everything that had happened to me, and tore through the undergrowth. There was another blast from the shotgun, which passed quite close, but I kept on going, through bushes and foliage, leaping over dips, covering as much ground as I possibly could before finally stumbling and falling to the ground.

I couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit behind me so I slid under a holly bush and stayed where I was, my breathing coming in low pants that I found hard to keep quiet. The whole forest was lit up by the flames coming from the building as they danced high into the night sky, and I looked around cautiously, trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible.

Two minutes passed. My breathing became more regular and gradually I started to think that maybe the worst was over.

Then I heard the sound of a twig breaking close by.

I froze. From my position lying in the dirt, I saw a pair of boots moving slowly and purposefully through the undergrowth straight towards me. Five yards, four yards, three. I had no energy left. None at all. I’d been through hell these past few hours, and every part of me burned and ached. I still had enough of my wits about me to stay silent and hope, but if it came to it, and I ended up looking down the barrel of the shotgun, I’d take what was coming to me.

The boots stopped a yard away from my face. Could my pursuer see me? My body tensed, waiting for that final shot that would end every experience and every emotion I’d ever felt.

But it never came. A siren wailed in the distance, followed moments later by another, and the man who was hunting me turned and walked away.

I lay there for a long time, listening to the sirens getting closer, and, although I was almost too exhausted to think straight, two questions kept running through my head. The first was, why had the man with the shotgun tried to kill me, and then taken a risk by trying to hunt me down in the forest? I could only assume he was the client we were working for, yet he must have known that I couldn’t ID him.

But it was the second question that was really bothering me. If Tyrone Wolfe hadn’t killed my brother, then who the hell had?

Despite the hour, Tina was wide awake. She had a theory. It was basic, and far from watertight, but it fitted the facts.

She finished her glass of wine, drank some water to clear her head, and logged on to the CMIT database where the details from the Night Creeper inquiry were kept electronically. Working as fast as was possible when you’d done a sixteen-hour day and just polished off most of a bottle of wine, she found the witness statements pertaining to the Roisín O’Neill case and began skim-reading them. As with any major inquiry, the police were obliged to take detailed statements from as many people as possible to minimize the chances of missing something. In this case, though, because they already suspected Roisín’s death to be the work of a serial killer who had no prior connection with his victim, and whose motive was clearly established, the background questioning of friends and family was less detailed. Instead, more effort had been aimed at Roisín’s neighbours and anyone who’d been in the area around the time of her death. It was these individuals Tina concentrated on now.

Even so, this involved sixty-three different people, and it was twenty minutes before she found what she was looking for. It was a single sentence from a woman who lived in one of the flats overlooking Roisín’s apartment block, a throwaway comment that at the time would never have aroused any interest but which now added another, albeit tenuous, layer of support to Tina’s theory.