The Last 10 Seconds

And then, just under a year later, I read about the tragic case of the father who’d been found dead in his car in Epping Forest, along with his six-year-old daughter. Tony Boyle, whose facial injuries had been so bad that his wife had asked for a divorce, and whose daughter had grown terrified of him, had simply not been able to carry on and had decided to take his only child with him.

I felt rage then. Real anger, the kind I’d experienced when I heard about the way Wolfe had murdered my brother. At that time, only a few years had passed since John’s death, and the wounds were still raw. Jason Slade reminded me of all the injustices in the world. As far as I was concerned he was directly responsible for the deaths of Boyle and his daughter, yet he was at large and still untouchable.

But Slade had a weakness. Although he lived with a long-term partner, he also had a mistress whom he visited most Wednesday nights after he’d been out with his cronies. We’d known about her at the time of the undercover op, and had even bugged her flat at one point, but to no avail. It was a stupid move on Slade’s part to keep to such a specific and obvious routine, especially as he travelled there alone, but it served my purposes, because one Wednesday night I waited in the driveway of the mistress’s block of flats to meet Slade when he arrived there.

I’d been building myself up to it for several weeks, knowing that I was stepping way over the line, but for once letting the rage guide me in my actions.

Sure enough, at about half past midnight one fine, balmy summer’s evening, Slade’s Jag pulled into the driveway, and as he got out of it, looking more than a little worse for wear, and walked towards the main door, fiddling in his pocket for keys, I launched myself out of the shadows, a balaclava over my head and an image of Tony Boyle’s burning face in my mind.

At the last second he saw me coming but wasn’t fast enough to get out of the way. I had three two-pound coins wedged between my fingers, acting like an improvised but less lethal knuckleduster, and I bunched my fist as tightly as possible and unleashed a flurry of punches to his face, opening up a number of nasty little cuts as I sent him sprawling over the bonnet of the Jag, a feeling of real catharsis flowing through me.

Before he could recover, I was on him again, dealing blow after blow to his head and body, not giving him a chance to fight back as I beat him to the ground. I knew, like me, he’d been a boxer in his youth, and that he might also be armed, so it was essential I incapacitate him as quickly as possible. He was bleeding badly from his nose and cheek, and even in the darkness I could see his face beginning to swell, which pleased me no end. I wanted to humiliate this bastard and make him pay for some of the suffering he’d inflicted on his victims.

He landed on his back on the gravel, but as I grabbed him by the collar of his black leather jacket and dragged him to his feet, he threw a whip-like punch that hit me in the side of the head, catching me completely by surprise.

I let go of his jacket and retreated a couple of steps, shaking my head to clear it, but Slade was clearly nothing like as incapacitated as I’d thought and he was on his feet like a shot, coming at me in a classic protective boxer’s stance before launching a well-aimed three-punch combination that sent me reeling before I could muster a decent defence.

My nose was bleeding under the balaclava, and I began to panic. I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been to go after him like this. Either I should have brought a real weapon, something that would have shifted the balance in my favour, or better still, taken the sensible option and not come at all. Instead, I’d compromised, and now I was going to pay for it.

I was wobbling precariously, partly stunned, as Slade came in close, grabbing me by the throat with one hand, a look of pure rage on his battered face, and yanking off my balaclava with the other.

It might have been a year but I could see the spark of recognition in his face, the realization that he knew me from somewhere. Then the surprise as he remembered exactly where.

Which was when I came to my senses and drove my knee right up into his groin with all the strength I could muster, managing to gather enough to lift him bodily from the ground. He let out a single, tortured gasp, and as I delivered a quick uppercut to his jaw, he went down like a sack of potatoes.

That was it. Given a chance of escape, all the anger and aggression seeped out of me and I turned and made a run for it, wondering what the hell was going to happen now that I’d made an enemy of the gangster some had taken to calling ‘the acid man’.