The Last 10 Seconds Read Online Free PDF Page B

Apparently, there’s something we need to see.’
    ‘Any details?’
    ‘No,’ he said, looking at her seriously, ‘but I don’t like the sound of it.’

Five
    The incident room on the fourth floor of Holborn station, where CMIT had been carrying out the Night Creeper murder inquiry, was absolutely silent as Tina and MacLeod entered.
    Half a dozen officers, all members of Andrew Kent’s arrest team, were gathered in a loose circle around a widescreen Apple Mac laptop on a desk in the middle of the room. DC Grier stood closest to the desk, his features pale and drawn, his prominent Adam’s apple, still bruised from its encounter with Kent’s hand, visibly pulsating, as if he was trying to keep something down. The expressions on the faces of the other officers present – a grim mixture of nauseated, depressed, tense and stoical – told the same story. Whatever they’d just witnessed had affected every one of them, and the eyes of DC Rodriguez were wet with tears.
    ‘What have we got then?’ asked DCI MacLeod, his soft Edinburgh burr somehow easing the tension in the air. There was a quiet decency about MacLeod that naturally drew people to him, as did his air of calm unflappability, that made you look beyond the beer belly, the thinning grey hair and unfashionable moustache, and see only a natural leader. Once again, Tina was glad she worked for him.
    ‘We’ve found stuff on here,’ sighed Grier, running a hand roughly across his face as if he were trying to remove the memory of whatever it was. ‘Films.’
    ‘What kind?’ asked Tina, feeling a twitch of morbid excitement.
    ‘Footage of the murder of two of the victims. It looks like he filmed it himself.’ Grier paused. ‘It’s extremely graphic.’
    ‘It’s more than that,’ said DS Simon Tilley, normally an exuberant copper with a big personality and a laugh like a bass drum, but who was also the father of two young children. ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.’
    MacLeod took a deep breath. A father himself, he clearly had little appetite for the task ahead, but was far too professional to let that stop him. ‘We’d better take a look then.’
    He turned to Tina, his expression suggesting she didn’t have to watch if she didn’t want to. She noticed some of the others looking at her, including Grier and Rodriguez, and had this feeling they were willing her to back out of it.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ she told MacLeod bluntly without looking at them. ‘I can take it.’
    ‘I can’t,’ said Grier, getting to his feet. ‘Not again. Just press the play button when you’re ready to begin.’
    There were murmurs of agreement from the other officers and they moved away from the desk. Although they remained in the incident room, it seemed to Tina as though they were keeping as far away from the laptop as possible, as if whatever was on it was somehow infectious.
    MacLeod leaned forward and pressed the button on the screen. Then he and Tina stood side by side as the screen lit up to reveal a lengthways shot of a young woman lying on a bed. Tina immediately recognized her as the final victim, Adrienne Menzies, a thirty-three-year-old accountant from Highgate with hair the same dark colour and style as her own, and whose DNA was on the hammer found at Kent’s apartment. She remembered the bed’s expensive yet old-fashioned teak headboard, which she later found out had been handmade by Adrienne’s father. It was always the little details that stayed with you, even amid the horror. And the horror here was unrelenting.
    Adrienne was naked and bound to the bed with black PVC bondage straps of the kind Kent had used in all but one of his murders, and her mouth was gagged with duct tape. The picture quality was very good and Tina could make out the bruises and scratches on her thighs and round her breasts. The camera moved in slow, jerky movements more akin to a homemade film as the person holding it walked carefully round the edge of the bed,