The Last 10 Seconds Page 0,2

the door in a single sudden movement, hoping she’d timed it right.

She had. Unable to stop himself, Kent sprinted into it just as it reached the limits of its hinges, the force of the collision sending him somersaulting over the top.

The adrenalin surged through Tina as she exploded out of the car, a pent-up ball of excitement and rage, half stumbling on her bad leg but righting herself through sheer force of will, a can of CS spray her only weapon.

Kent was clearly winded, but he was already rolling over on to his back, putting one hand down for support so he could jump back up, his eyes widening as he saw Tina bear down on him.

The laws governing arrests in the UK are some of the strictest in the world. Only the minimum force required to control a suspect should be used. But Tina had always treated the rules with flexibility, and she leaped on to Kent’s stomach, knees first, putting all her weight into it, ignoring his gasp of pain as she positioned herself astride his chest and gave his open mouth and eyes a liberal shot of CS spray, leaning back so she wasn’t affected herself.

He coughed, spluttered, and struggled under her, still showing reserves of fight she hadn’t expected, and almost knocked her off, so she punched him in the face with all her strength. Once, twice, three times, feeling a terrifying exhilaration as her fist connected with the soft flesh of his cheek, the blows strong and angry enough to knock his head on the concrete each time they landed.

‘Andrew Michael Kent,’ she snarled as he fought for breath, the resistance seeping out of him now as her colleagues began arriving in numbers, several of them pinning his limbs to the ground, ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘I’m innocent!’ he howled, before breaking into a fit of coughing.

‘You and every other one I’ve ever nicked,’ Tina grunted, getting to her feet and leaving her colleagues to finish off the arrest, unnerved but not surprised by how much she’d enjoyed hurting him.

Two

The media had dubbed him the Night Creeper. For a period of twenty-three months, he’d terrorized London, raping and murdering a total of five women in their own homes. The victims were, it seemed, all picked at random, but they also fitted a broad profile. They were white, single, successful in their careers, and physically attractive. The youngest was aged just twenty-five, the oldest thirty-seven, and what had particularly focused media attention was that there was never any sign of forced entry to the victim’s homes, even though all the properties were considered secure, and fitted with new alarm systems. This gave an almost mystical power to the Night Creeper – a man who could break in anywhere at will, making no sound, and leaving no trace – and it had increased the fear among attractive and single London career women, and their families, no end.

When Tina had joined CMIT four months earlier, successfully applying for a vacant DI’s position, the pressure on the police for an arrest had been intense. But leads had been scarce. The killer was forensically aware, leaving behind little in the way of clues, and no witnesses had ever reported seeing him.

In the end, it was that old classic ‘good old-fashioned police-work’ that finally led to the arrest, and the person who’d spotted the clue was Tina herself.

While interviewing a close friend of the last victim, Adrienne Menzies, Tina had discovered that the alarm system in Adrienne’s apartment had only been installed a few weeks earlier and that the man who’d installed it had, in the words of the friend, ‘given Adrienne the shivers’. Because of the length of time between the installation and the murder, and the vagueness of the friend’s words, Tina hadn’t initially been optimistic of a link, and the colleague who was with her at the interview, young, up-and-coming DC Dan Grier, had discounted it immediately. But when Tina thought about it more, it had struck her that one foolproof way of getting through alarms on buildings and residences was if you’d fitted them yourself, so she’d contacted the companies who’d installed the alarms at the other properties and asked them to supply the name of the engineer