The Last 10 Seconds

It was that incident that had left Tina with the gunshot injury to the foot. She’d also managed to kill the thug in question, and for weeks afterwards she’d retreated into her shell while on sick leave, ignoring all offers of help, including those from Mike Bolt. It was only after she’d returned to work and made the transfer to CMIT that she’d felt confident enough to contact him again. She’d spent a long time musing over whether she should finally make her feelings known, before finally deciding that she should, and after plucking up the courage and pushing down her doubts, she’d made the call.

He’d sounded genuinely pleased to hear from her and they’d talked for a good five minutes before he dropped the bombshell. He had a new girlfriend. Her name was Claire and it was going well. He hadn’t elaborated – he’d always been careful not to hurt other people’s feelings – but she’d known the truth. He was happy with someone else.

They’d kept talking for another ten minutes, during which time she did a solid job of keeping the sinking feeling she had in her gut out of her voice. As the conversation wound up, he said that they would have to catch up over a drink some time, but his tone was vague and noncommittal, and she knew he didn’t mean it.

When she got off the phone that time, she’d cried her eyes out, before getting hideously drunk in the poky little lounge where she sat now, rueing her self-destructiveness and all the opportunities she’d deliberately missed over the years.

And now she had to call him at 1.30 on a Saturday morning, having drunk three-quarters of a bottle of Rioja. It wasn’t a thought she relished, but it needed to be done. Mike Bolt was one of the best detectives she’d ever worked with. More importantly, he was a high-flyer with excellent contacts within both Soca and the Met.

‘God knows what his girlfriend’s going to think,’ she said aloud as she dialled his number. But she knew he, at least, would understand.

He answered on the fourth ring, sounding tired. ‘Tina?’

So he hadn’t removed her number from his phone. ‘Hi, Mike. Sorry to bother you at this time of night, but I need your help urgently,’ she said, hoping she wasn’t slurring her words. As far as she knew, he didn’t know anything about her drinking.

He yawned. ‘That’s OK. I was only half asleep anyway, and Claire’s away. What’s the problem?’

‘Have you been watching the news tonight?’

‘Are you talking about the Night Creeper snatch from outside my old nick? They’ve got wall-to-wall coverage on every news channel going. That’s your case, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I thought it was. I was actually going to phone you about it tomorrow. I thought you’d be too busy tonight. Any news on how the hunt for him’s going?’

‘Nothing yet,’ she answered, realizing that she should be talking to Dougie MacLeod about this. Yet she felt more comfortable talking it through with Mike, whom she knew would be more receptive to her theories. In spite of herself, she was also glad that he’d been thinking about phoning her to discuss the case. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

‘Kent and his abductors could be anywhere by now. But they’re incredible circumstances. What’s the story behind it?’

She told him everything that had happened since Kent’s arrest, starting with the initial interviews and his passionate denials; and then the huge reams of evidence against him, his iron-clad alibi for Roisín O’Neill’s murder, the attempted poisoning in the cell, the highly professional snatch and, finally, Roisín’s father’s suspicious death. ‘I’ve got a car with false plates that was spotted driving into Kevin O’Neill’s cul-de-sac on the night he died that doesn’t belong to anyone living there. I need a check on the ANPR to see where it is now.’

‘Can’t you get your boss to authorize that?’

‘Right now, no one’s interested in looking for weaknesses in our case against Kent. They’re just interested in finding him.’

‘Which I can understand.’

‘So can I, but there are plenty of other people out there looking for him. I need to find out why it happened. And in my opinion, the key’s Roisín.’

‘But how? You said yourself, there’s a huge amount of evidence against Andrew Kent.’

‘There is, and I’m sure he killed the other four women. But he didn’t kill Roisín. He couldn’t have done.’

She heard Mike yawning down the end of the line again. ‘Blimey, Tina, this is quite hard to get my head round at half one in the morning. Let me get up. I need a drink of water.’

She waited a couple of minutes, lighting her last cigarette of the night while she listened to him moving about in his flat.

‘OK,’ he said at last. ‘It’s clear you’ve got a theory. What is it?’