The Last 10 Seconds (11 page)

Eighteen

Tina watched Sean Egan walk off down the street. On a different night she might have been interested in talking to him. The fact that Dougie MacLeod had called him trouble intrigued her, and he was a good-looking guy, who looked like he might be good company. But right now she was preoccupied with the Night Creeper case, and more specifically, with Andrew Kent’s alibi.

Before leaving the station to come to the pub she’d run a check on the General Register Office database and found that Kent’s father had indeed died just before the murder of Roisín O’Neill. She’d then called the vicar of the church in Inverness where his funeral had taken place and they had buried him on the day the coroner claimed Roisín had died. What was more, the vicar remembered meeting Kent before the service when he’d greeted the deceased’s immediate family. When the vicar had asked the reason for Tina’s call, she’d replied that it was in connection with a routine inquiry, and asked that he not mention it to anyone else. She had no desire to give him the full details of the case, even though she knew that Kent’s brief Jacobs would be contacting him to do just that soon enough.

By the time she’d got off the phone, the rest of the team had already gone to the pub, and when she’d walked in fifteen minutes later and seen them clicking glasses in celebration of catching the man who’d been terrorizing London’s young women for the past two years, she hadn’t had the heart to say anything about Kent’s alibi. But she hadn’t had the heart to join in the celebrations either, and had forced herself to drink orange juice rather than a real drink because she needed to think.

All the available evidence suggested Kent was their killer, yet his alibi seemed cast-iron, and he was screaming his innocence from the rooftops. She felt the familiar stirring of excitement at the prospect of working alone to solve a puzzle that no one else seemed interested in.

Now that she’d done her bit and shown her face at the pub, her plan was to go back to the station and look through Roisín O’Neill’s file to see if she could find any clues. Roisín was the fourth victim, murdered only a few months before Tina joined the team. Perhaps the coroner had made a mistake with the timing of the death? That kind of thing occasionally happened, and right now it seemed like the obvious alternative. Or that, at least, was what she was hoping as she stubbed her cigarette underfoot.

She noticed that Sean had disappeared, and thought fleetingly that it was a pity they’d not said goodbye. She wondered if she’d have given him her number if he’d asked for it, and concluded that she probably would have done.

As she turned to walk back to the station, Dan Grier hurried out of the pub door, and she asked him if he was off home.

He nodded. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m heading back to the station. I’ve got some more work to do.’

‘What kind of work?’ he asked as they fell into step. ‘I thought we’d solved the case.’

‘We have,’ she answered, ‘but there are a few ends that need tying up.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘You were on the team when Roisín O’Neill was murdered, weren’t you? Do you remember if anything stood out about her case? That made it different from the others?’

‘I heard talk that Kent’s claiming he’s got an alibi for the O’Neill murder.’ Grier looked at her. ‘Is that right?’

She and MacLeod had agreed to keep Kent’s alibi quiet, but it was always going to get out and she saw no reason not to say anything about it now. ‘It looks like he has, yes. That’s why I wanted to go back and have a look at the file. Roisín’s murder was before my time so I need to read up on it.’

Grier was silent for a few seconds. ‘There was no footage on Kent’s laptop relating to it. And it was the only one for which there wasn’t, which I suppose in the light of his alibi seems a bit strange.’

‘This whole thing seems bloody strange. Try to think, Dan – was the MO exactly the same as the others?’

‘Jesus.’

She put a hand on his arm. ‘What?’

‘The MO was the same, but . . .’ He screwed up his face in concentration. ‘But not exactly. There were minor differences.’

‘What kind of differences?’

‘The hammer blows. Roisín had her face pummelled in like the others, but if I remember rightly, the actual cause of death was strangulation. He laid into her with the hammer, like he did with all the others, but the difference was he did it after she was already dead.’

They stood in the middle of the pavement stock-still as the full ramifications of what Grier was saying washed over them both.

‘His alibi’s watertight,’ said Tina at last.

‘But if he didn’t kill Roisín O’Neill, then who did? And what about the other four girls? Did he kill them, or didn’t he?’

Tina sighed. ‘I don’t know. But that’s exactly what we need to find out.’

Nineteen

‘You don’t have to help me, Dan,’ Tina told him as they headed back up to the incident room. ‘I know you’ve put in the hours, and I don’t mind doing this myself.’ In truth, she preferred the idea of working alone, especially in an empty office. It meant she could sneak a quick drink if she needed one without arousing suspicion.

‘If there are problems with the case then I’d like to help,’ he answered coolly. ‘I’m in no hurry to get home. Melinda’s not expecting me until late anyway.’

Melinda was Grier’s wife. They’d met at university, and had been together ever since. Tina had never been introduced to her, but she’d noted that whenever Grier spoke about her it was with an obvious fondness in his voice, which was very different to the rest of the married men in the team when they spoke about their wives. It should have made her like him more. Instead it made her jealous.

Tina split the task of trawling through the Roisín O’Neill file into two, Grier concentrating on Roisín’s background while she looked into the mechanics of the murder itself.

The first thing Tina noticed was that Roisín fitted the profile of one of the Night Creeper’s victims perfectly. A successful brand manager for a pharmaceutical company, she was physically attractive and, at twenty-nine, right in his age range. She also lived alone and was apparently single. Most importantly, she’d ordered a new alarm system for her West End apartment three months before her death, and it had been installed by Andrew Kent.

The similarities didn’t end there. As Tina read through the file, she was confronted by a series of graphic photographs from the crime scene itself. Roisín had been found in exactly the same way as the other four victims, lying naked and face up on her bed, her long blonde hair standing out against the sky blue sheets. Her ankles and wrists were tied with rope so that she was spreadeagled, and her face had been smashed to a pulp, rendering it utterly unrecognizable. It looked just like all the other crime scenes, except there was far less blood, and when Tina examined the close-up shots of Roisín’s upper body, she could see extensive bruising on the neck, which hadn’t been present on the other victims.

The pathologist’s report confirmed Grier’s revelation that the cause of death had been manual strangulation, and that the blows to her face had been delivered post-mortem using a blunt object, most likely a hammer. He hadn’t been able to give an accurate estimate as to how long after her death these injuries had occurred, but what he could say, with accuracy, was that, given the state of decomposition of the victim when she was discovered (and he went into a lot of detail on this), Roisín had definitely died at some point between six p.m. and midnight the previous evening – the day of Kent’s father’s funeral. The time of the funeral was two p.m., so it was humanly possible that Kent could have stolen or hired a car, driven back to London – a distance of 456 miles according to the AA website – and committed the murder before driving back to Inverness by breakfast time the following day. But it was also extremely unlikely and, for the moment at least, Tina didn’t think it was worth enquiring about stolen or hired cars in the Inverness area.

Instead, she concentrated on other differences between Roisín’s murder and the others. Two stood out particularly.

The first was the lack of any traces of chloroform at the Roisín crime scene. Part of the Night Creeper’s MO was to use chloroform to subdue his victims after he’d broken into their homes, which allowed him to bind and gag them at leisure, before moving on to the next stage of his assault. Traces of it had been present at the other four murders. Whoever Roisín’s killer had been, and Tina was pretty certain now it wasn’t Andrew Kent, he’d used some other means to overpower Roisín and bind her.

The second was the absence of any physical signs of a violent sexual assault. The Night Creeper liked to be rough with his victims, even though they were unable to offer any physical resistance, and typically he’d inflicted sexual injuries, mainly in the form of lacerations. But not on Roisín. As a consequence, the pathologist was unable to conclude whether, in her case, a sexual assault had even taken place.

What he could say definitively, however, was that Roisín had had sex at some point in the twelve hours prior to her death, because traces of sperm had been recovered from inside her vagina. DNA tests on the sperm had already proved that it was not a match with Kent’s. Nor was it a match for any of the two million other people held on the government’s central DNA database.

Tina sat back in her seat and stretched, looking across at Grier who was hunched over his desk, making studious notes as he read from the open file. The clock on the wall above his head said it was ten past eight. They’d been back at their desks for an hour or so and in that time they’d hardly spoken.

‘Is there anything in the witness statements about Roisín having a boyfriend, Dan?’ she asked him, breaking the silence. ‘Or a lover of some description. I know she was meant to be single, but according to the pathologist’s report she had sex with someone, other than her killer, on the day she died.’

He shook his head. ‘There was no boyfriend – at least not according to her friends and family. And because we were hunting a serial killer by then rather than someone known to her, we didn’t pursue it. Why? Do you think whoever she had sex with had something to do with it?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d like to find out who it was. Just so we can eliminate him from the inquiry.’

‘I’m taking it from that that Kent’s alibi’s still looking good.’

‘It’s looking perfect,’ she answered wearily, and she told him what she’d found out.

Grier wiped a hand across his brow. ‘Then we’ve got a problem.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, there’s something I don’t understand, either. I’ve been trawling through all the witness statements, from friends, family, neighbours, everyone who knew her, and it seems she was a nice, ordinary girl with no enemies. In fact, only one thing stands out. I don’t know if you remember, but Roisín lived in an old four-storey house in Pimlico that had been converted into luxury flats.’

‘I didn’t, but go on.’

‘Each floor had its own apartment, and they were linked by a communal staircase, with Roisín’s on the top floor. About a week before her murder, and three months after Kent had fitted the alarm, one of the neighbours ran into someone she didn’t recognize coming down the staircase from the direction of Roisín’s apartment. Her statement said . . .’ He paused while he checked his notes. ‘He was, and I quote, “a very suspicious-looking character, a young man with long hair, quite short, who didn’t want to meet my eye”.’

‘Did she challenge him as to who he was?’

‘No, she didn’t say anything. She probably didn’t want a confrontation. She said he left through the front door and that was it. I remember at the time we didn’t take it that seriously.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, mainly because the sighting was a week before the murder, rather than the day it happened. Also, the neighbour was a bit of a busybody, in her seventies, and when we tried to do an e-fit based on her description, it just didn’t work. Every attempt turned out to look nothing like him, according to her. We did go back to Roisín’s friends to ask if she knew someone who fitted the guy’s basic description, but, unsurprisingly, none of them did. Which was why it ended up going to the bottom of the pile.’

Tina had never heard about this sighting, although given the size and scale of the inquiry, and the number of detectives involved, this wasn’t that surprising. ‘So, what makes it stand out now?’ she asked.

‘Because the description might be basic – short, long hair, moles on cheek – but it’s possible that it fits Kent.’

Tina recalled the two very small dark moles an inch apart on Kent’s left cheek. ‘It’s more than possible. It does fit him.’

‘Listen, ma’am, it wasn’t my fault,’ said Grier defensively. ‘How was anyone to know at the time that he could have been our killer?’

‘Have you got a number for this witness?’ she asked, not wanting to get into a debate about past mistakes. When he nodded, she told him to call her straight away. ‘Arrange to get a photo of Kent across to her, see if she recognizes it.’

Two minutes later, Grier was on the phone to seventy-six-year-old Beatrice Glover, reminding her of the case and asking if he could come round with a photo to show her. ‘Oh, you’ve got email,’ she heard him say, unable to hide the surprise in his voice. Ageist sod, thought Tina, and typical of an arrogant young guy like Grier to make rash and thoughtless generalizations. She wondered if that’s why he’d been so dismissive of her testimony in the first place.

She waited as he emailed Beatrice Glover the mugshot that had been taken of Kent after his arrest the previous night. Grier stayed on the line while she opened up the file to view it.

When he came off the phone, he looked utterly confused. ‘She’s not a hundred per cent sure – she says it’s been a long time – but she’s pretty confident the man in the photo is the man she saw on the staircase the week before Roisín’s murder.’ He sighed. ‘But if Kent didn’t kill her then what on earth was he doing hanging round her place when he had no reason to?’

Tina had been thinking about that for the last five minutes, and there was only one conclusion she kept coming up with. ‘I really hope it isn’t the case,’ she said quietly, ‘but it’s possible that Andrew Kent wasn’t working alone.’