The Last 10 Seconds

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean he must have put hidden cameras in the apartments when he was fitting the alarms because it shows the victims going about their daily lives. It’s clear he’s edited it down a lot because it’s mainly of an intimate nature. Them getting changed, walking round naked. In one case having sex. That sort of thing. I suppose it made it more fun for him. Stalking them like that but without running any risk of getting caught.’

‘And is there footage like this of all of the victims?’

‘Three that we’ve found so far.’

MacLeod ran a hand across his brow. ‘Good God.’

‘Is there any way it could have been planted on his laptop?’ Tina asked.

Grier looked at her like she was mad, and she remembered immediately why she didn’t like him. ‘No way. There’s so much of it for a start, and the dates the footage was first added to the system tie in with the dates of the murders. This stuff’s been put on there over a long period of time. It’s authentic, and it belongs to that computer.’

‘Were the files well hidden?’

‘They were in a folder within a folder within a folder, squirrelled away among a lot of other files in the My Documents section, all with bland, irrelevant names. It was quite a trawl to locate them.’

‘They weren’t that well hidden though, were they? They didn’t have password protection or an encryption system like some of the paedophile networks put on their PCs to stop us accessing the hard drive?’

Grier looked defensive. ‘Are you suggesting they were easy to find, ma’am?’ he asked her.

‘I don’t think Tina’s saying that at all, Dan,’ put in MacLeod hastily.

‘No, I’m not. I’m just checking the facts. That’s all, Dan. OK?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, it’s just I’ve been here with that laptop for most of the last twelve hours trawling through reams of crap until I finally found them.’

‘We’ve all had a bit of a traumatic few minutes,’ said DCI MacLeod, ‘so let’s just concentrate on the most important task, which is keeping the evidence safe and secure. Download all the relevant files to a memory stick, Dan, then get the laptop bagged up and sent over to the lab. I want it tested for Kent’s DNA, fingerprints, the lot. I don’t want him trying to deny it belongs to him.’

Grier looked surprised. ‘He won’t do that, will he, sir?’

‘He’s denied everything so far. We need to keep building up the case until it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference how good an actor he is, because the jury’ll have no choice but to find him guilty.’

When Grier had gone with the laptop, MacLeod turned to Tina. ‘All right, are you ready to finish this bastard off ?’

She nodded firmly. ‘Never readier.’

‘Let’s see how he responds to the fact that we’ve found all his home videos.’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You had a big part in bringing him in, Tina. When we’re ready, do you want to be the one who charges him?’

But had it all been too easy? Andrew Kent had been delivered to them on a plate with the murder weapon in his bedroom and his laptop full of hugely incriminating video evidence. But even as this nagged at her, Tina pushed it aside, knowing that she was just ignoring the obvious explanation, which was that Kent was like all the other cold-blooded killers who’d begun to believe the hype of their invincibility and had become too complacent.

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I want to watch him squirm.’

Six

The job Tyrone Wolfe wanted me to carry out was to buy some guns from an underworld dealer based in Canning Town. Although he’d told Tommy to drive me to the destination, he’d made it clear that I was to go in and make the purchase alone. His rationale was simple: if I bought the guns, I was committing a serious crime and therefore couldn’t be a copper. But the rationale was flawed, because by sending me on my way with Tommy driving they’d put me in a position where I had no choice but to commit it, since failure to do so would have blown my cover. I wasn’t sure whether my handler at CO10 would see it quite like that, of course. DI Robin Samuel-Smith, or Captain Bob as he was universally known behind his back, liked to play things by the book. But I’d worry about that one later.

Wolfe had given me an envelope containing five grand in cash – payment for two automatic shotguns and a handgun – handed me back the rest of my possessions, including my recording watch, and told me that I was expected at the dealer’s place half an hour ago, and that he’d see me with the goods later.