The Last 10 Seconds

Ignoring the pain in my ankles – Jesus, everywhere – I started running for it. But as I did so, I heard the heavy click of a shotgun being cocked only yards behind me. I turned, caught the faintest glimpse of a man in a boiler suit like the ones we’d all been wearing, and a balaclava. He was aiming the shotgun at me.

I zigzagged, keeping low, and as the shotgun blasted into life I dived behind the outbuilding wall, temporarily out of sight, before scrambling back to my feet again and running for my life.

I hit the trees at a pace I didn’t think I was capable of at the best of times, let alone after everything that had happened to me, and tore through the undergrowth. There was another blast from the shotgun, which passed quite close, but I kept on going, through bushes and foliage, leaping over dips, covering as much ground as I possibly could before finally stumbling and falling to the ground.

I couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit behind me so I slid under a holly bush and stayed where I was, my breathing coming in low pants that I found hard to keep quiet. The whole forest was lit up by the flames coming from the building as they danced high into the night sky, and I looked around cautiously, trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible.

Two minutes passed. My breathing became more regular and gradually I started to think that maybe the worst was over.

Then I heard the sound of a twig breaking close by.

I froze. From my position lying in the dirt, I saw a pair of boots moving slowly and purposefully through the undergrowth straight towards me. Five yards, four yards, three. I had no energy left. None at all. I’d been through hell these past few hours, and every part of me burned and ached. I still had enough of my wits about me to stay silent and hope, but if it came to it, and I ended up looking down the barrel of the shotgun, I’d take what was coming to me.

The boots stopped a yard away from my face. Could my pursuer see me? My body tensed, waiting for that final shot that would end every experience and every emotion I’d ever felt.

But it never came. A siren wailed in the distance, followed moments later by another, and the man who was hunting me turned and walked away.

I lay there for a long time, listening to the sirens getting closer, and, although I was almost too exhausted to think straight, two questions kept running through my head. The first was, why had the man with the shotgun tried to kill me, and then taken a risk by trying to hunt me down in the forest? I could only assume he was the client we were working for, yet he must have known that I couldn’t ID him.

But it was the second question that was really bothering me. If Tyrone Wolfe hadn’t killed my brother, then who the hell had?

Thirty-nine

Despite the hour, Tina was wide awake. She had a theory. It was basic, and far from watertight, but it fitted the facts.

She finished her glass of wine, drank some water to clear her head, and logged on to the CMIT database where the details from the Night Creeper inquiry were kept electronically. Working as fast as was possible when you’d done a sixteen-hour day and just polished off most of a bottle of wine, she found the witness statements pertaining to the Roisín O’Neill case and began skim-reading them. As with any major inquiry, the police were obliged to take detailed statements from as many people as possible to minimize the chances of missing something. In this case, though, because they already suspected Roisín’s death to be the work of a serial killer who had no prior connection with his victim, and whose motive was clearly established, the background questioning of friends and family was less detailed. Instead, more effort had been aimed at Roisín’s neighbours and anyone who’d been in the area around the time of her death. It was these individuals Tina concentrated on now.

Even so, this involved sixty-three different people, and it was twenty minutes before she found what she was looking for. It was a single sentence from a woman who lived in one of the flats overlooking Roisín’s apartment block, a throwaway comment that at the time would never have aroused any interest but which now added another, albeit tenuous, layer of support to Tina’s theory.

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.