The Last 10 Seconds

DCI Dougie MacLeod lived alone in a spacious corner terrace three or four miles from me in Hendon. His wife, Marion, a small, severe woman who’d always been a bundle of nervous energy, had died suddenly of a heart attack years earlier, and his son, Billy, was off at university somewhere, which made things a lot easier from my point of view, because I didn’t want anyone else to hear what I had to say.

I hadn’t had much to do with Dougie these past few years, and things had never been the same since I’d assaulted Jason Slade and he’d put a contract on my head, but now that my own family were gone, he was the only person on this planet I trusted completely. He’d always been a man of integrity, prepared to put himself on the line for the people who worked under him, and even though it had been many years since I had, I was still sure I could rely on him to tell me what I needed to do.

My career was finished, I was beginning to accept that now. Even if I got away with this in the short term, I’d always be looking over my shoulder, wondering when someone was going to find out the truth. More than that, though, I no longer had the stomach for undercover work. I’d come very close to death four times in the past twenty-four hours, and the shock of this was tearing me up inside. I needed a holiday. A long one. Six months, a year, somewhere far away from all the violence of the city. But I’d also done what I’d set out to do all those years ago when I started out in undercover. I’d brought down Tyrone Wolfe and Clarence Haddock, and I took grim satisfaction from the knowledge that they’d paid the price for what they did all those years ago. Wolfe’s denial that it was he who murdered my brother had caught me out, since it was a reliable source who’d heard him bragging that he was the man who’d pulled the trigger. There were three armed robbers there that day, Wolfe, Haddock and Tommy. But now, at least, they were all dead, even if they had taken the true identity of the shooter to their graves, and my brother and my parents could finally rest in peace.

I’d used my own car to get to Dougie’s. As I drove past his house, I saw that there were lights on on the ground floor. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Although it was seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, I knew he was an early riser, and he was going to have his hands full with the Kent manhunt, so there wouldn’t have been a lot of time to sleep.

I found a spot fifty yards down the road, parked up, and walked back, feeling nervous about what I was going to have to do.

Taking a deep breath that made me wince, I rang his doorbell, pleased at least that I no longer looked like something out of a horror film.

There was no answer, even though his car was in the carport, so I rang again and then rapped hard on the door. It was possible he’d gone out somewhere on foot and would be back soon, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself out here. So after about a minute, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to answer, I took a quick look round to check that no one was around, then clambered over the wooden fence that separated the front of the property from the back garden.

As I walked quietly round to the conservatory, something caught my eye. A light had gone out upstairs. So someone was here.

I tried the conservatory door, and it opened. I went inside and was about to call out Dougie’s name when I experienced a sudden uneasy feeling. Maybe it was paranoia after my recent experiences, but my instincts told me to be careful. I crept through the conservatory and into the kitchen, beginning to get worryingly used to sneaking about in places where I didn’t belong, and feeling more and more like some kind of fugitive.

The kitchen led through to a narrow hallway with the stairs on the left and another room off to the right. Although it was upstairs that the light had gone off, I couldn’t hear any sound coming from up there, which was strange. Again resisting the urge to call out, and wondering what Dougie would say if he caught me sneaking round his house at six in the morning, I crept over to the other door and opened it.

The sound of the TV drifted out, and as I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, I saw that it was a Sky News report. The room was empty but it smelled of smoke, and there was an overflowing ashtray on the antique coffee table that sat between two traditional leather sofas. That was another thing that was strange. I remembered Dougie smoking when I first joined CID, but I thought he’d given up years earlier.

I walked further inside the room, my eyes focused on the huge forty-inch TV as a tired-looking reporter spoke to the camera from just outside the scene-of-crime tape in Doughty Street where we’d snatched Kent. Behind him, a few SOCO moved about in their white coveralls, and a uniformed officer stood guard. There didn’t seem to be any frenetic activity.