The Final Minute (32 page)

‘Come on, Jack, don’t treat me like an idiot. I’m not going to tell you that.’

‘What do you want?’ There was an edge to his voice now, as if he expected me to be the bearer of bad news.

‘I need your help. I was in a car accident a few months back and I lost my memory. I’ve got a lot of it back now but I need to know about the work I was doing for you when I left prison.’

There was a heavy silence down the other end of the phone for a good five seconds.

I broke it. ‘I know you came to visit me in prison offering me work. And I know I was working for you when I left. I just don’t remember what I was doing. So please, for old times’ sake, help me out here. I’ll remember what it was eventually, so even if you don’t tell me, it’s all going to come out in the wash.’

‘I’m going to have to transfer you through to another number,’ he whispered. ‘I can’t talk in here. Give me twenty seconds.’

‘Twenty seconds. No more.’

I counted in my head as I waited, wondering if I was making a mistake. By the time I got to nineteen, he came back on the line. It sounded like he was in a corridor somewhere.

‘We need to meet,’ he said quickly. ‘You were doing undercover work, infiltrating a group of very dangerous people. I’m going to have to give you a thorough debriefing, then I’m going to go with you when you hand yourself in. Because you’re going to have to give up, Sean, you know that.’

The automatic doors at the end of the carriage hissed open and a ticket inspector walked in. There was only the sleeping man in the suit between us, and I was in the last carriage, which meant there was no way I could avoid him.

‘Give me the names of the people in this group,’ I hissed into the phone. ‘Now.’

‘We need to meet,’ he said firmly. ‘I’ll tell you then.’

The train slowed. We were approaching a station. The ticket inspector woke the sleeping man and asked to check his ticket.

‘Please, Jack,’ I said. ‘Names.’

‘It’s big, Sean. Really big.’ He sighed. ‘The person we really wanted you to find out about was the Home Secretary.’

That shocked me. I’d expected the name of some big-time criminal. The Home Secretary was one of the few politicians I could actually put a name to: I’d seen him on TV at Jane’s a couple of times. Garth Crossman was a charismatic, silver-haired guy who sounded like he actually understood the problems of the voters. Jesus, what had I been doing investigating him?

I looked up. The ticket inspector was approaching me now, a dour expression on his face, as if some sixth sense had already told him I didn’t have a ticket.

Jack was still telling me I needed to meet him as soon as possible.

‘I’m going to have to call you back,’ I said, and ended the call, switching off the phone as the inspector stopped in front of me.

‘Tickets, please,’ he said, looking down at me. He was a tall, thin guy in his mid-fifties who looked like he’d make a good undertaker.

Beyond him, I could see that the guy in the suit had already closed his eyes again. The brakes squealed as the train continued to slow, and the announcer said that we were approaching Stevenage. ‘Sorry, it’s in here,’ I said, getting to my feet and acting like I was going to reach into my back pocket. I still wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do until I suddenly grabbed him, swung him round and applied a chokehold, rapidly upping the pressure so he couldn’t cry out, while all the time staring at the sleeping passenger, hoping he didn’t hear what was going on.

Outside the window the station’s platform appeared. The inspector made a choking noise, then went limp in my arms. Moving quickly, I dragged him the few feet to the carriage toilet and manoeuvred us both inside, shutting the door behind me. He was moaning quietly but still pretty much out, so I propped him up on the toilet seat and relieved him of his peaked cap, jacket and ID, before hastily donning them. The train had stopped now and I heard people coming on board, so I squeezed out of the door, dressed in my new outfit, and, pushing the cap down so it covered my features as much as possible, walked down the carriage.

A noisy group of students were streaming on board but they moved out of my way as I made for the doors before they closed, careful not to hurry, even though I knew the inspector was going to wake up any second and raise the alarm. The students must have woken up the guy in the suit, because he glanced up at me as I passed, looked vaguely surprised at the fact that my face appeared to have changed, but not surprised enough to do anything about it, then shut his eyes again.

Two minutes later I was on a different train, heading non-stop into London.

For now, it seemed, my luck was holding.

Forty-nine

Mike Bolt was sitting in his office in the incident room at Barnet police station when Mo Khan walked in, a sheaf of papers in his hand. It had just turned five p.m. and Bolt was beginning to think about finishing up for the day. The forty-eight hours since they’d been called to the murder at the Sunny View Hotel had been both frenetic and frustrating, and he hadn’t got to bed until three a.m. that morning. He needed a rest.

Mo sat down and put the papers on the desk. ‘I’ve got some interesting information about our two MI5 men, Mr Hughie and the late Mr Balham. We’ve been through both their bank accounts and everything’s in order. All they’ve been receiving is their government salaries. However, they both live in decent-sized houses and own nice cars.’

‘So how have they financed them?’

‘Well, Hughie’s single, but his brother pays his mortgage, and his car payments. He also books and pays for a couple of Hughie’s long-haul holidays. Whereas Mrs Balham’s the big earner in the Balham household. And it turns out that Hughie’s brother and Mrs Balham are consultants for the same company. Secure Solutions.’

Bolt sat up in his chair, no longer tired. ‘The same company that was paying the two people babysitting Sean Egan in Wales, and who are both now dead. A company that’s linked directly to the Home Secretary, Garth Crossman, the man who’s currently trying to stop our investigation into Balham’s murder. You know, this is a very strange case. Because for the life of me I cannot understand why Crossman or any of his people are interested in an ex-con like Sean Egan. And no one in MI5 seems to want to enlighten us either.’ He looked at Mo. ‘Any ideas?’

‘Nothing springs out, boss, I’ve got to admit.’

Bolt shook his head and let out a long breath. He needed to leave and grab himself a drink in his local back in Clerkenwell. ‘Have we got the records back for Dylan Mackay’s phone yet? Tina’s convinced his murder’s linked to what’s been happening with Egan.’

Mo grunted. ‘I’m not so sure of that.’ He’d never been a fan of Tina Boyd and made little secret of his disdain for Bolt’s more sympathetic attitude towards her. ‘But I’ve got the records here.’ He sorted through the bundle of papers he’d brought in with him, and slid the relevant ones across the desk. ‘I checked through the calls he made and received on his old phone, the one he stopped using the day of Egan’s car accident.’

‘Anything stand out?’

‘I’ll be honest, boss, not really. I think a team from Area West are going to be taking the Mackay case as well, so it’ll be out of our hands soon.’

‘Fair enough. Thanks for getting it sorted for me anyway.’

When Mo had gone back to the incident room, Bolt had a brief scan of the records. Mackay had used the SIM card for his previous phone for more than four years before he’d stopped using it, at 1.11 a.m. on the morning of 8 April. A few hours later, an anonymous man carrying no ID, who Tina claimed was Sean Egan, had hit a tree in his car and ended up in a coma. Mo might not have been convinced of any connection but Bolt thought it was too much of a coincidence to have been an accident, and he trusted Tina’s judgement. Whatever her faults – and Bolt would be the first to admit she had a fair few – she’d always been a good detective.

The last call Dylan Mackay had received had lasted four minutes and seventeen seconds, and had come from a mobile number. Bolt looked back over the fifty or so calls Mackay had made or received during the five days running up to when the phone was switched off for the last time, looking for that same number, and saw that it appeared twice more: Mackay had received a call from it on 6 April lasting five minutes and twenty-eight seconds and had then made a call on 7 April lasting seven minutes and thirty-one seconds. The fact that it was the last number Dylan had received a call from before changing his phone and SIM card for the first time in four years told Bolt that it was worth finding out who it belonged to.

Tracking the ownership of mobile numbers could take weeks if standard procedures were followed, but in emergencies that time could be reduced to hours, sometimes even minutes. There was no way this was an emergency, but neither was it a regular case. Four people had been murdered in the previous forty-eight hours in wildly different circumstances; Bolt couldn’t afford to wait for weeks for an answer. He had a feeling that Sean Egan would be in prison, or possibly even dead, by then and the whole inquiry would grind to a very convenient halt.

He called the liaison officer at Homicide and Serious Crime Command whose job it was to deal with the UK’s mobile phone carriers, and gave him the number and a rapid-fire spiel of why he needed the name of the registered owner right now, and how it could tie up several separate murder inquiries, then sat back in his seat, figuring that it was going to be a while before he had that pint.

But the liaison officer was fast. Just forty minutes later he phoned Bolt back and told him that the number was registered to a publicly listed company. Thanking him, Bolt wrote down the number and Googled the company.

It took him less than two minutes to establish a connection between the company and the Sean Egan murder inquiry, and maybe another ten before he finally began to work out what had really been going on.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered to himself. No wonder Sean Egan was such a hunted man.

Fifty

St Mary Magdalene parish church was an old stone building set on a quiet back street a hundred metres away from the busy hubbub of the Euston Road, and almost in the shadows of the gleaming office blocks of the brand-new Regents Place development. In her younger years, when she’d been living in and around Camden, Tina had enjoyed going for long walks and exploring the city, which is how she’d come to find this place. It was a peaceful spot with a pretty little sheltered garden that could be reached down a short flight of stone steps.

The sun was shining and children played in the small park opposite as Tina walked up to the front entrance. Churches in London tended to be locked, even in the day, in order to keep out thieves and the homeless, which seemed to Tina to be a sad indictment of modern society, but the door to St Mary Magdalene opened when she tried it. She was almost certain she hadn’t been followed there, but she took a last look round anyway just to make sure before slipping inside and taking a seat at the end of one of the rows of pews.

The church was empty and quiet, and Tina immediately felt at peace. It was hard to believe that barely two minutes ago she’d been fighting her way through the armies of commuters swarming along the Euston Road, and it made her wonder why more people didn’t take sanctuary in places like these, where they could escape from the modern world, even if it was for a few minutes, and just … contemplate.

Tina closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing, taking herself back to childhood. Neither of her parents had been religious, but she remembered going to church with her maternal grandma when she’d been a little girl, and her grandma telling her that if she was good, then God would look after her. The vicar at the church had been a kindly old man and Tina had always felt very welcome. It had seemed like a place of pure goodness, and maybe to her it still was.

Her grandma had been a loving, stable influence in Tina’s life but she’d been gone for close to twenty years now, having passed away when Tina was in her second year of university. Sitting there in the musty cool, she could picture her grandma perfectly, and the image calmed her.

‘Penny for your thoughts,’ said Sean Egan as he shuffled along the pew towards her. He was dressed in an ill-fitting grey suit jacket and a peaked cap, with a photo ID tag hanging from a lanyard around his neck.

‘What
are
you wearing?’ she asked as he sat down beside her.

‘It’s a long story,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘And a good disguise. No one looks at you twice when you’re dressed like this.’

Tina raised her eyebrows but didn’t ask where he’d got the outfit from. Right now, she didn’t want to know. ‘OK Sean, I spent a long time searching through the list of struck-off therapists looking for candidates for your Dr Bronson, and I’ve narrowed it down to four people. I wasn’t operating from an exhaustive list, though, so he might not be one of them. For all we know he may not even be struck off, but it’s the best I can do. And it’s the last thing I’m doing too. We’re quits after this. I’m not risking my neck for you any more.’

‘I understand.’ He pulled the kind of face men pull when they want a woman to sympathize with them, but it didn’t look real. Sean was a manipulator. Tina had come to realize that.

She produced four folded A4 sheets from inside her jacket and handed them to him.

He glanced at the first photo and shook his head, placing it at the bottom of the pile.

As she watched him, Tina realized that she really wanted Bronson’s face to be in there because, with him, another piece of the puzzle fell into place, and she came that bit closer to finding out what had happened to Lauren Donaldson. She was certain the news wasn’t going to be good, but she needed to give Lauren’s father closure.

‘That’s him,’ said Sean, pointing at a black and white photo showing an upper body shot of a middle-aged man in a suit, with dark hair and glasses. ‘One hundred per cent. That’s Bronson.’

Tina had numbered each of the photos. Bronson was number 3. She consulted her notebook. ‘His real name’s Robert Whatret, and he was a well-qualified and highly regarded psychotherapist until he was struck off and imprisoned for sexually assaulting his patients.’