Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

Five minutes later she found something else. Another comment, this time from Beatrice Glover, the woman who lived in the flat below, whom Dan Grier had spoken to earlier about her separate sighting of Andrew Kent on the staircase. Again it was insignificant when put against the background of a major serial killer inquiry, and something that would never have been linked to the statement made by the woman across the road, but now it made Tina’s heart race.

She was on the right track.

Next, she hunted down Roisín’s mobile phone records. It was standard practice in any murder inquiry to check the phone records of the victim, although as far as she remembered, in Roisín’s case they’d been used primarily to give a more accurate time of death. That was the beauty of the plan hatched by whoever had killed her: he’d known that her murder would be lumped in with the others committed by the Night Creeper, so all the police resources would be pushed at trying to locate, identify and gather evidence against the Night Creeper himself. None of the people involved in the inquiry at the time had assumed for one moment that Roisín wasn’t his fourth victim, because it seemed inconceivable.

Roisín’s phone records had been scanned on to an electronic file after being thoroughly checked by the investigating officers, so there were handwritten notes next to the phone numbers listed, identifying to whom the numbers belonged. This made Tina’s task a lot easier. Roisín had clearly been a popular girl. The numbers of calls she made and received averaged some thirty a day. Most of them were to friends and family members. She was in regular contact with her father and Derval. There were work calls in there as well.

But one particular number stood out. A mobile from which she’d received eight calls in the four weeks before her death, and made a total of sixteen calls to, eleven of which had gone to voicemail. Someone she was obviously very interested in talking to but who wasn’t always interested in talking to her. Their calls were sometimes brief, but other times they were a lot longer. One she’d received had lasted for ninety-seven minutes. But what really interested Tina was the handwritten word next to the number, made by whichever officer had checked the records.

Dead .

She tried the number again now and was given the automatic message that it was out of service. No one had followed this up at the time, but again, there’d been no reason to. Roisín was the victim of the Night Creeper. End of story.

But she hadn’t been. Someone else had killed her.

Tina sat back on the sofa and lit a cigarette, wondering to whom that number belonged, and how she was going to find out.

Her own mobile rang. She picked it up and frowned. It was a blocked call.

‘Miss Boyd?’ came an uncertain-sounding voice as Tina picked up.

She recognized it instantly. It was the guy from the security company whose cameras covered Kevin O’Neill’s road. ‘Hello, Jim. Thanks for getting back to me.’

‘I haven’t woken you up, have I? You did say call back whatever the time.’

‘Don’t worry, I’m still working.’

‘God, at this time? You must be keen.’

Keen or obsessed, she wasn’t sure which. ‘What have you got for me?’ she asked, trying not to sound impatient but wanting to get him off the phone nevertheless, now that she had a new lead to follow up.

‘You asked me to check through the Mayflower Lane footage from Thursday night, and give you a list of all the non-residents’ cars that went in and out. I’ve got it.’

‘Is it long?’

‘No. Just three cars.’

She took down the numbers and the times they’d passed by the camera, and thanked him for his efforts.

‘It must be pretty important if you’re still working on it at this time,’ he said.

‘I promise I’ll let you know what it is the minute I can,’ she told him, and hung up.

Tina didn’t have particularly high hopes that Jim’s information would provide another lead, but since there were only three cars on the list, she logged on to the PNC and ran a check to see if any of them were stolen, hitting gold with the very first one, a silver Honda Accord sedan. The plates were false and had been removed from a silver Honda Accord coupé in Islington four days earlier.

She sat back and rubbed her eyes. It was the killer’s car. It had to be.

She finished the cigarette and stubbed it in an ashtray that was close to overflowing, resisting the urge to have another drink. She was getting somewhere now, narrowing things down, getting closer to the truth. But she also needed help.

She looked at her watch. It was 1.30 a.m. She knew who she had to call.

Mike Bolt had been Tina Boyd’s boss at Soca, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, for more than a year, but that was only telling a small part of the story. He’d recruited her when Tina was at a low ebb, and had done a lot to get her back on her feet. During that time, a close friendship had developed between them, which had almost ended in a love affair, and was the main reason why she’d left Soca and returned to the Met. But the feelings she’d had for him, and which she knew he’d had for her, had never gone away, and they were solidified a year later when he risked his own life to save hers after she’d been kidnapped by a psychotic thug in a case that had thrown them both into the limelight.

It was that incident that had left Tina with the gunshot injury to the foot. She’d also managed to kill the thug in question, and for weeks afterwards she’d retreated into her shell while on sick leave, ignoring all offers of help, including those from Mike Bolt. It was only after she’d returned to work and made the transfer to CMIT that she’d felt confident enough to contact him again. She’d spent a long time musing over whether she should finally make her feelings known, before finally deciding that she should, and after plucking up the courage and pushing down her doubts, she’d made the call.

He’d sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her and they’d talked for a good five minutes before he dropped the bombshell. He had a new girlfriend. Her name was Claire and it was going well. He hadn’t elaborated — he’d always been careful not to hurt other people’s feelings — but she’d known the truth. He was happy with someone else.

They’d kept talking for another ten minutes, during which time she did a solid job of keeping the sinking feeling she had in her gut out of her voice. As the conversation wound up, he said that they would have to catch up over a drink some time, but his tone was vague and noncommittal, and she knew he didn’t mean it.

When she got off the phone that time, she’d cried her eyes out, before getting hideously drunk in the poky little lounge where she sat now, rueing her self-destructiveness and all the opportunities she’d deliberately missed over the years.

And now she had to call him at 1.30 on a Saturday morning, having drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Rioja. It wasn’t a thought she relished, but it needed to be done. Mike Bolt was one of the best detectives she’d ever worked with. More importantly, he was a high-flyer with excellent contacts within both Soca and the Met.

‘God knows what his girlfriend’s going to think,’ she said aloud as she dialled his number. But she knew he, at least, would understand.

He answered on the fourth ring, sounding tired. ‘Tina?’

So he hadn’t removed her number from his phone. ‘Hi, Mike. Sorry to bother you at this time of night, but I need your help urgently,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t slurring her words. As far as she knew, he didn’t know anything about her drinking.

He yawned. ‘That’s OK. I was only half asleep anyway, and Claire’s away. What’s the problem?’