The Last 10 Seconds Read Free Page B

back as I can remember, I had this burning desire for justice. At school I confronted bullies if I saw them picking on smaller kids. If they didn’t back down, I’d fight them. In the early days I lost more times than I won, so I took up boxing, and the ratio quickly changed. My dad always said I should join the army, which is what my brother John ended up doing. He said I was too aggressive for the police, and maybe I was, because my first three years in uniform were an exercise in boredom and gradual disillusionment. I could never quite get over the fact that the public could abuse and assault me at will, with little fear of prosecution, whereas I couldn’t do the same back to them. So I decided to become a detective, only to find that life in CID is ninety per cent paperwork, nine per cent detective work, and one per cent excitement, and that’s if you’re lucky. Not exactly Dirty Harry.
    My boss at the time, and the man who, with the possible exception of my dad, I’ve always respected most in the world, saw my frustration, and told me that maybe I should try undercover work.
    DCI Dougie MacLeod – he taught me one hell of a lot, including the art of patience, which was something I thought I’d never pick up. Right up until yesterday, I always thought his greatest service to me was that particular suggestion, because for the past nine years of my life I’ve been working with CO10, Scotland Yard’s elite (their word, not mine) undercover unit. Working undercover, I’ve finally found the excitement I was looking for, and I’ve also put away some extremely nasty characters, many of whom still want me dead. And as I stood in the windowless back room of a grimy Soho nightclub that morning, I had the feeling that there weren’t many much nastier than the two men sitting across the table opposite me.
    ‘I hear you’re looking for work,’ said the one on the right. He was in his mid-forties, with closely cropped silver hair, a noticeable squint in one eye, and features that were long, sharp and unforgiving, as if they’d been hand-carved from hardwood, and dominated by a nose skewed by a long-ago breakage and missing a lump at the bridge. He was wearing a faded Lonsdale T-shirt that showed off wiry, muscular arms peppered with faded tattoos, and his good eye homed in on me now, hunting for weaknesses. His name was Tyrone Wolfe, and he was suspected of involvement in at least five murders.
    The man sitting next to him was called Clarence Haddock. It was, speaking frankly, a ridiculous name, and one that simply didn’t do justice to the huge, terrifying-looking thug with the beard and dreadlocks who for the past five years had been Tyrone Wolfe’s closest associate. More than a dozen gold labret studs peppered his face, including one that went horizontally straight through his fat, splayed nose, giving him the appearance of an angry bull preparing to charge. He sat with his trunk-like forearms on the table, glaring up at me in silence, the barely suppressed rage he’d become legendary for seeming to emanate from him in short, brutal waves. It was said that Clarence Haddock had once cut a man’s throat with such force that he’d decapitated him with a single pull of the knife, and looking at him now I could picture him feeding on the still-twitching corpse afterwards. I knew all about him, of course, but even so, standing a few feet away from him in a claustrophobic room reminded me of the first time I’d seen a great white shark in real life while on a cage-diving trip off Gansbaii in South Africa. A mixture of primeval fear and sheer awe.
    I held both their gazes, ignoring the drop of sweat running down my temple. ‘Yeah, I could be. What have you got?’
    Wolfe turned to the third man in the room, a big middle-aged guy with long, greying blond hair and a face with more lines than the Bible, who was leaning against the wall. This was Tommy Allen, another of Wolfe’s close associates, and the man I’d spent