Simon Kernick - The Last 10 Seconds

‘Why do you think?’ demanded Andrew Kent, wearing the same panic-stricken expression he’d been wearing since Tina and her boss, DCI MacLeod, had begun questioning him in the interview room almost two hours earlier. ‘I was on my way home from work and suddenly all these people came out of nowhere screaming and shouting. I panicked and made a run for it.’

‘But they clearly identified themselves as police officers,’ Tina persisted.

‘I didn’t hear them, OK?’ protested Kent, in tones not far short of hysteria. ‘I just ran, and when they grabbed me, I thought they were trying to mug me or something, so I fought back. I’m sorry I hurt those officers, but it wasn’t my fault.’

His brief — a young, studious-looking duty solicitor wearing big glasses with the Nike emblem on the frames, and reeking of ambition — put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Andrew,’ he said soothingly. ‘You can answer in your own time.’

Kent nodded.

Across the table, he looked even smaller and more harmless than he had done when Tina watched him walking home the previous evening, just before his arrest. His whole demeanour was one of submissive fear, his pale eyes awash with confusion. But Tina had seen the way he’d fought the arresting officers, the cold determination he’d shown, and she wasn’t fooled, although she had to give him full marks for his acting abilities.

‘For a terrified civilian, you gave a pretty good account of yourself, Mr Kent,’ she continued. ‘Both officers needed medical treatment, and I had to use CS spray to subdue you.’

‘I’m a black belt in karate,’ said Kent with a sigh. ‘I’ve been mugged twice in the past so I wanted to make sure I was able to defend myself when it happened again. I’ve been going to classes for the past six years, and I’m not going to make any apologies for it.’

‘It doesn’t make my client guilty of anything either,’ put in his solicitor, whose name was Jacobs.

Tina ignored him. ‘So you’re still protesting your innocence about these murders?’ she asked Kent.

‘Of course I am. I’ve never killed anyone, and I don’t understand why you think—’

‘How do you explain your DNA being at the properties of every one of the five victims then?’

‘Because I fitted the alarms at all the different properties. I’ve already told you this.’

‘Not very good systems then, were they, Mr Kent, if the killer managed to bypass every one of them?’ said DCI MacLeod.

‘I thought they were.’

‘My client’s not being questioned about his skills as an engineer, now is he?’ Jacobs looked at MacLeod over his half-rimmed glasses with the gravitas of a man twice his age.

MacLeod wasn’t deterred. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that every one of our five victims had their brand-new alarms fitted by you? What do you reckon the odds of that are?’

‘Look, I’ve fitted thousands of alarms over the years. I’m a hard worker. I can do two or three clients in one day, so the odds probably aren’t that great.’

‘What about the odds of the killer being able to bypass every one of your alarms?’

Again Kent protested his innocence, and again Jacobs intervened with the same objection — that it wasn’t his client’s work-related capabilities that he’d been arrested for.

‘So, how come your DNA was found in four of the victims’ bedrooms if you were only fitting the alarms?’ Tina asked, keen to move the interview on.

‘I had to have access to the whole of each property while I was doing the work, because I needed to fit sensors in different rooms.’

‘But you didn’t fit sensors in any of the victim’s bedrooms. We checked. Nor did any of your employers think you should have been in them. So what was your DNA doing in there?’

‘I don’t know,’ answered Kent. ‘Maybe it got carried in there somehow from other places in the house. Is that kind of thing possible?’

Technically, it was within the realms of possibility, but only just. When Tina pointed this out to him, Kent gave an exaggerated shrug and said he couldn’t understand it.

‘Our understanding is that the victims were subjected to violent sexual assaults before being murdered in a brutal fashion. Were any of the DNA samples from the bedrooms that you say match that of my client found on the bodies themselves?’ Jacobs asked, his tone carrying just the right mix of weariness and scepticism.

Tina and MacLeod exchanged glances. This was their big problem. The killer had cleaned up the bodies scrupulously, using bleach, and so far they’d given up no DNA evidence at all.

‘No,’ MacLeod admitted reluctantly, ‘but that doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘Well it does, DCI MacLeod, because my client’s already provided a perfectly adequate explanation as to why his DNA might have been in the bedrooms of some of the victims. Now, if you have no further evidence then I’m asking that you release him immediately.’

Tina fixed Kent with a cold stare. ‘Tell us about the hammer,’ she said baldly.

Kent’s eyes widened. ‘What hammer? What are you talking about?’

‘The hammer we found in your bedroom, Mr Kent. The one covered in blood and brain matter, which we’ve just been told belonged to your last victim, Adrienne Menzies. Your DNA was also on the handle.’

Kent shook his head. ‘No. No way.’

‘Yes. The lab did the tests twice, just to make sure.’

‘I. . I don’t know anything about a hammer,’ he stuttered. ‘I really don’t. Jesus, this can’t be happening.’ He looked desperately at Jacobs, who also seemed caught out by this revelation, then back at Tina and MacLeod. ‘I’m innocent, I promise you. Someone must be setting me up.’

He resembled a frightened child, sitting there barely as tall as Tina and with a skinnier build, seeming to shrink in the chair as the evidence was steadily laid out against him. For the first time, Tina began to doubt that they had the right man. All the evidence seemed to point to him but it was the way he was reacting. He came across like an innocent man. Most of the people she faced didn’t. Most of them were guilty, and tended to limit their answers to a monotonous refrain of ‘no comment’, but Andrew Kent was acting like an ordinary man caught up in a terrifying situation over which he had no control.

‘Who do you think set you up?’ demanded MacLeod, his voice laden with scepticism.

‘I told you, I don’t know. I honestly don’t. If I was ever going to do something like this, why would I keep the murder weapon in my room? That would be madness. .’

The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on his interrogators’ faces.

Tina was just about to respond when MacLeod tapped her arm and shook his head. ‘OK, you probably need some time with your client, Mr Jacobs, so you can discuss this latest piece of evidence. Interview suspended at eleven forty-six a.m.’ He got to his feet, motioning for Tina to follow him out the door.

‘We had him on the rack there. Why did we stop?’ Tina asked when they were out in the corridor.

‘There’s been a development. DC Grier just called through on the earpiece. Apparently, there’s something we need to see.’

‘Any details?’

‘No,’ he said, looking at her seriously, ‘but I don’t like the sound of it.’

The incident room on the fourth floor of Holborn station, where CMIT had been carrying out the Night Creeper murder inquiry, was absolutely silent as Tina and MacLeod entered.

Half a dozen officers, all members of Andrew Kent’s arrest team, were gathered in a loose circle around a widescreen Apple Mac laptop on a desk in the middle of the room. DC Grier stood closest to the desk, his features pale and drawn, his prominent Adam’s apple, still bruised from its encounter with Kent’s hand, visibly pulsating, as if he was trying to keep something down. The expressions on the faces of the other officers present — a grim mixture of nauseated, depressed, tense and stoical — told the same story. Whatever they’d just witnessed had affected every one of them, and the eyes of DC Rodriguez were wet with tears.