The Final Minute (22 page)

When Tina had eventually made the call, it had been to Mike Bolt, her former boss and one-time lover. As the head of one of the Met’s Murder Investigation Teams, Mike had already been given the case of the man Sean had killed, and he’d known about her connection with it when she’d called. They’d talked for a few minutes and she hadn’t held anything back. She’d given him Sean’s name, and a brief rundown of what had happened since he’d come to see her the previous morning.

‘We’re going to need to take a statement,’ Mike had said when she finished, not bothering to disguise the exasperation in his voice.

‘Don’t arrest me though, Mike. I haven’t done anything wrong, and I don’t deserve the bad publicity.’

‘I’ll do what I can, Tina, but you’re going to have to be straight down the line with me. Try to hide anything and I’ll come down on you hard.’

‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’ she’d told him. ‘I promise.’

He hadn’t said anything for a few seconds, and she’d been just about to fill the silence by asking if they’d ID’d the victim when he finally spoke. ‘Why do you always get yourself involved with the wrong people?’ His tone had reminded Tina of her father. ‘Why don’t you just … calm down?’

But that was the thing. If she’d known when Sean had walked through her door the trouble he was about to cause her, she’d have kicked him out there and then.

Or would she have done?

She put out the cigarette and picked up her laptop. Outside the window, night was beginning to fall. If her office was bugged, then it was possible her house was too. So she’d gone over every inch of both with the most sophisticated bug finder available on the market, although she was realistic enough to know that it was likely their equipment was going to be invisible to hers. Even so, she checked the outside of her laptop for keypad trackers and ran a series of virus checks on the hard drive before opening up her file on Lauren Donaldson.

She went through what she had so far, putting aside what Sean had told her, since his story was all conjecture. Both girls had gone missing around the same time. They’d been together in the last confirmed sighting Tina had, which was Sheryl’s, and neither had been seen since, which strongly suggested they’d gone missing together. Dylan Mackay had admitted that he’d pimped them out to wealthy men, but had refused to name the last man he’d pimped them out to, even under extreme duress, and in Tina’s opinion his silence was because he was scared of the guy. This meant two things. First, the guy was a nasty piece of work. Second, he had something to do with the girls’ disappearance. So the important thing was to ID him and take it from there.

However, without Dylan’s cooperation, that was going to be tricky. She plugged in the flash drive she’d used to extract the contents of his phone and browsed through his photos, notes and contacts list, without finding anything useful. He had a lot of photos: some showed him partying; others were of women, many in various stages of undress; and some looked to be of family and friends. There was one of Dylan holding up a boy of about three, both of them grinning at the camera, and it made Tina feel guilty because it showed him as a human being and not some archetypal bad guy.

In the end, though, none of the photos stood out; nor did any of the notes; and the contacts list was just that, a list, with 353 names on it, any one of whom could have been the person who’d last hired Lauren and Jen from Dylan. And of course it was eminently possible that his name wasn’t on there at all any more, or might never have been. But at one time they must have spoken, and almost certainly on the phone, which meant that Tina’s best chance of identifying him was going to be through Dylan’s phone records, and she was going to have to wait for Jeff Roubaix to get hold of them.

In the meantime, she needed a last-known address for Lauren and Jen Jones. Sheryl had said they’d lived in a flat in Chalk Farm but a quick search of the Land Registry and the Electoral Register didn’t turn up anything, which was no great surprise. This was one of the problems these days, thought Tina. Because everything was done by email and phone, people didn’t tend to keep each other’s postal addresses in the same way they’d done in the past, making them harder to track down.

Lighting another cigarette, Tina looked up Sheryl’s number and called her.

‘Did you go see Dylan?’ Sheryl asked immediately.

‘I did, but don’t worry. I didn’t mention you.’

‘Thanks. I appreciate that. Did he help?’

‘A little.’

‘I’m surprised. You must have some serious powers of persuasion.’

You don’t know the half of it, thought Tina.

‘So what did he tell you?’

‘He just gave me a few leads to follow up on,’ said Tina carefully. ‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’ She thought about advising Sheryl to keep out of Dylan’s way in case he worked out that she was the one who’d given Tina his name, but decided against it. There was no point worrying her unduly. ‘I’m trying to get an exact address for Lauren and Jen in Chalk Farm,’ she continued. ‘Do you know anyone who might be able to help me?’

‘I can’t think of anyone. We were all friends, but not that much, you know. Is there no other way of finding out? I mean, you’re a detective, right?’

Tina sighed. ‘I’ll find it eventually, it’s just easier if someone can tell me.’

There was a pause as Sheryl thought. ‘I know Jen was seeing someone just before she went missing. Lauren told me about him. I never met him but I think he lived just down the road from them. Dylan might know him.’

‘Do you have a name?’

‘God, what was it?’

Tina waited again while Sheryl searched her memory banks on the other end of the phone.

‘Sean. That was it.’

Tina felt a stab of excitement. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, totally. It was Sean.’

‘Was his last name Egan?’

‘She never told me his last name. I think he was a bit older than her. Late thirties maybe, and Lauren said he was good-looking. Look, I’m sorry. It’s not much help, is it?’

But it was. As far as Tina was concerned there was simply no question that Jen’s boyfriend and Sean weren’t the same person. The age was about right, and Sean was undoubtedly a good-looking guy. It wasn’t concrete evidence that he was connected – not by a long way – but it suddenly made her far more interested in his story, and the events surrounding it.

One thing was for sure: everything kept coming back to Sean.

Thirty-one

I ate dinner in a cavernous pub in Bedford town centre that could probably have fitted five hundred customers comfortably but had barely fifty, making it feel very empty, which suited me just fine. My plan was simple: have a decent meal and then head back to the car, which I’d moved to the other side of town from the spot where I’d abandoned the iPad, for a sleep. I figured I could think better on a full stomach.

I had fish, chips and mushy peas and it was surprisingly good. I ate the lot and washed it down with a pint of Foster’s. Then I got profligate and ordered treacle sponge for pudding and another pint, which reminded me that I’d never been very good with money.

As I drank the second pint, settled in at a corner table a long way from anyone else, I relaxed and let my mind drift. When I’d been living at Jane’s place I’d spent a lot of time on my own, yet the combination of the drugs and the fact that I had no memory from before the car accident had left me unable to think about all but the most basic of functions. The world had been a blank, confusing place. Now, suddenly, it had become exciting and new, and yet, ironically, it looked as if my newfound freedom would be over before I got a chance to fully appreciate it again.

The sounds of incarceration came back to me. The iron clank of cell doors; the tinkling of keys; the echoing shouts and catcalls; the plaintive cries of the first-timers and the weak at night; the grunts of masturbation … And the smells: disinfectant in the corridors; the stale close-up odour of sweat on the prisoners; bad breath; cheap, mass-produced food.

In those moments, as I sat drinking my second pint in the comforting warmth of the pub, my conscious self soaking up memories from my subconscious, it was like opening up a book and beginning a story.

It’s going to be hard for you in here.

And by God it was.

They came for me very early on in my stay. I’d helped to put away a lot of very bad people during my time as an undercover cop – gangsters, drug smugglers, armed robbers – and a lot of those people still had power and money, which was a very bad combination. Because of my background they had me on a wing with the so-called vulnerable inmates who needed protection: the paedophiles, the rapists, the terrified first-timers, the ex-cops who’d been caught out by the justice system they were supposed to be upholding. It didn’t help, though.

When I first arrived, I had my own cell, and one morning I was standing at the sink cleaning my teeth when two of the wing’s screws came in. The most senior of the two was called Mr Crawley and he’d been the one who’d given me what they called a ‘welcome briefing’ when I’d first arrived. He was a big, cheery Yorkshireman with a crumpled, ruddy face that looked like it had been moulded out of playdough by a two-year-old and an air of real warmth about him – the kind of guy you’d end up talking to in a pub.

‘Right, Sean,’ he said, giving me a rueful smile. ‘The governor needs to see you. We’re on Amber Status at the moment so we’re going to need to put the cuffs on, I’m afraid.’

‘Any idea what it’s about?’ I asked, putting down the toothbrush. I was hoping that somehow it might be good news, like a quashed conviction.

‘No idea,’ he said, as the other one, whose name I couldn’t recall, closed the cell door. ‘You know what the bosses are like. They never talk to us plebs. You must have had that back in the police.’

We continued to chat amiably while he turned me round to face the wall and applied the cuffs, which was when I noticed that the other screw was filling up the sink with hot water, using his finger to gauge the heat. I said something light-hearted about the governor being a bit OCD if he needed me to wash twice before he saw me, but my instincts immediately told me that something was wrong.

And they were right to, because the next second Mr Crawley grabbed me from behind and swung me round, and he and the other screw forced my head into the sink, holding it underwater. The water was painfully hot, but not hot enough to scald. I struggled like a madman but Crawley was a lot stronger than I’d imagined, and anyway, there were two of them, so it was futile. I couldn’t even cry out.

Because of the angle they were holding my head at, I could actually see them holding my head under and I looked up, desperately hoping they’d catch the panic in my eyes and have second thoughts about what they were doing. It was then that I saw the one whose name I couldn’t remember had a phone in front of his face, and was actually filming what was happening.

Panic spread through me like a virus as the need to breathe grew stronger and stronger. My lungs felt like they were going to burst and yet still they held me under. I remember thinking I was going to drown. I struggled even harder, trying to lash out, but they had me pinned.

And then, just as suddenly as it had been shoved in, my head was yanked out of the hot water by my hair.

‘Jason sends his love,’ hissed Crawley in my ear as I gasped for breath.

I knew exactly who he was talking about: Jason Slade, a sadistic drug dealer who was one of the nastiest thugs I ever had to deal with. The irony of it was that I’d never even put Slade away. We’d tried to catch him out in an undercover op years before but he hadn’t taken the bait and, because he was such a piece of shit, and because I knew he was guilty of some really heinous crimes, I’d let my anger get the better of me and had attacked him outside his home one night with a pair of makeshift knuckledusters. He hadn’t managed to get his revenge at the time, but the nastiest criminals have long memories, as I was finding out to my cost.

Crawley gave me maybe ten seconds to get some breath back then he dunked me again, keeping me under even longer this time. He repeated the process twice more, and on the final time I actually took in a lungful of water. For a couple of seconds I genuinely thought I was going to die before Crawley pulled me out and shoved a hand towel over my face to muffle my choking.

‘Now I wouldn’t have done that if you weren’t a rapist,’ he said in an almost regretful tone, ‘but the fact is you are. So, just like the rest of them in here, you deserve what you get. Now, I can see you’re a sensible man, so the best bet’s not to say anything to anyone.’ He sighed and gave me one of his rueful smiles. ‘Because if you do, it’ll be bad. Very bad.’

But it was going to be bad – very bad – anyway. I was sure of that. Jason Slade was nowhere near the most powerful man I’d crossed. There were others who’d pay good money to see me dead, and if Slade could get to me, they could too. After that incident, I could remember thinking that I was never going to make it out of there alive. That I was going to die in that hellhole.

And then something happened.

When I was a young undercover officer, there’d been a guy about ten years older than me who’d acted as my mentor. His name was Jack Duckford, and he was a good-looking London boy with a nice line in patter. We’d worked together on a number of assignments and had stayed friends on and off for some time afterwards. He’d moved away from undercover, joining the National Crime Squad and specializing in hunting down organized crime gangs, and one day, about a month into my time in prison – maybe a bit more – he came in to visit.

I could remember being shocked to see him. We hadn’t talked in at least three years and most of my friends and former work colleagues were avoiding me like the plague, so I was happy that someone from my past had finally turned up to see me.

We didn’t make much small talk. When he asked me how I was getting on I told him the truth. ‘It’s bad, Jack. I don’t think I can do five years of this.’ I explained what had happened with Crawley and the other screw, keeping my voice down because you never knew who was listening. ‘Is there anything you can do to help?’