The Last 10 Seconds

Wolfe sighed loudly. It was obvious he was getting tired of my questions. ‘If I tell you, will you shut up afterwards?’

‘What you telling him for?’ grunted Haddock. ‘He don’t need to know nothing. He’s just hired help.’

‘Because I’m sick of being kept in the dark,’ I snapped.

Wolfe turned round in his seat, fixing me with his good eye. ‘I told you the bloke’s been charged with the rape and murder of five women, didn’t I? Well, the client’s a relative of one of them, and he wants justice. He doesn’t think the law’ll give it to him. That’s why we’re involved.’

‘How does he know that Kent’s going to be leaving Holborn nick in an ambulance in the next hour?’ I asked, thinking it was somewhat ironic that an arch criminal like Tyrone Wolfe was suddenly turning vigilante to make up for the inadequacies of the British legal system.

‘I didn’t ask him,’ he replied. ‘Unlike you, I know when to keep my mouth shut.’

I was pleased. Wolfe’s answer would help us identify his client, because there couldn’t be that many of the victims’ relatives with the influence needed to get information on Kent’s movements. But it also left me with another problem.

‘The client’s going to kill him, isn’t he?’

‘I thought you said you’d stop asking questions if I told you why he wanted him.’

‘But he is. There’s no other reason why he’d want him.’

Haddock shifted his huge bulk in the front seat, and the car seemed to move a little. ‘What do you care?’ he hissed, in his weirdly effeminate tones. ‘You’re getting paid, and it’s just a nonce who’s going to die.’

‘I told you both before, I don’t want to get involved in murder.’

Wolfe sighed loudly. ‘You’re not getting involved in murder, Sean. The client is. We’re just pulling the guy. Then it’s up to him what he does with him, but he assures me that once he’s finished with Kent, he’ll disappear off the face of the earth and that’ll be that. No one’ll care that much, because this is the Night Creeper we’re talking about, a piece-of-shit sex killer who murders defenceless women in their homes. And the coppers won’t be looking that hard for the people who took him. They’ll just want everyone to forget the fact that they had one of their prisoners snatched from under their noses.’

I thought Wolfe was being unduly naive, but that was his lookout. Mine was to stop his client getting his hands on Kent. He might be a piece-of-shit sex killer but it was still my job to protect him from the person or persons plotting his murder.

I was still working out how I was going to do that when Wolfe’s radio crackled into life. It was Lee, his girlfriend.

‘Cargo on move,’ she snapped in quick, accented staccato. ‘With you in one minute.’

I felt a burst of adrenalin surge through me.

It was on.

Twenty-two

Andrew Kent’s face was deathly pale beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics rushed him out of the custody area on a stretcher, with Tina following.

She hadn’t been able to get anything further out of him about what had happened. He’d vomited twice since she’d first discovered him writhing on the cell floor, and he was clearly still very sick. The cup he’d been drinking from was already on its way to forensics for testing, although the custody sergeant remained adamant no one had interfered with the drink between him pouring it and it reaching Kent’s mouth.

It was possible that it was a suicide attempt. Although suspects are given a full body search when they’re placed in custody, Kent might still have been able to store a potentially poisonous substance in his mouth that was missed in the search. But it was unlikely, particularly given his cryptic comments about people wishing to silence him. It was also possible he was faking it. The paramedics had only given him a cursory checkover before putting him on oxygen and getting him on the stretcher, and were unsure as to what substance he might have ingested, preferring to get him to hospital for tests. But if he was faking it, he was doing a damn good job.

Either way, Tina knew that Kent was still an extremely dangerous man. She’d experienced a dangerous offender escaping from an ambulance before, so she’d arranged for two uniformed officers to travel in the back with him, and a squad car to travel behind on the route to the hospital, just in case he made a rapid recovery.

As Kent and the paramedics disappeared out of the station’s front doors, Tina pulled out her mobile and called Grier, giving him a ten-second précis of what had just happened before telling him to get straight down to the reception area. ‘We need to get to the hospital fast. I want to find out exactly what Kent has to say.’