‘The hammer looked like the one we found at Kent’s place, didn’t it?’ she said at last.
‘Impossible to tell for sure, and that’s exactly what a defence lawyer would say in court. There must be plenty of hammers like that one in existence.’
‘It’ll be a lot harder for him to argue about the fact that Adrienne’s DNA was on it, and that there’s a video of the murder on his laptop.’ She shook her head, annoyed with herself for doubting even for a moment that Kent was the Night Creeper. He was just one of the better actors she’d come across in the interview room, and she should have remembered that that was exactly what true psychopaths were. Consummate actors who liked nothing more than pulling the wool over the eyes of those around them.
MacLeod gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch that, Tina. I hope it doesn’t bring back any memories.’
She guessed he was referring to when she’d been kidnapped and shot the previous year, but if so, he was wrong, because the memories had never gone away, and as far as Tina was concerned they were her business and no one else’s. ‘I’m sorry you had to watch it too, sir,’ she told him. ‘And don’t worry, it didn’t.’
‘Good,’ he said simply, then turned to face DC Grier, who was approaching the two of them almost gingerly. He still looked pale, and Tina felt a renewed respect for him. At least he wasn’t trying to be all macho about it, pretending that it hadn’t affected him.
‘There’s another film on there along the same lines,’ he said. ‘It captures Diane Woodward’s murder.’ Diane was the third victim, and at thirty-seven, the oldest. She’d died ten months earlier in very similar circumstances.
‘Any clues as to the identity of the perpetrator on that one?’ asked MacLeod.
Grier shook his head. ‘It was all handheld stuff similar to the one you’ve just seen. There’s also a lot of further footage of the victims taken while they were still alive, but before he broke in to kill them.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean he must have put hidden cameras in the apartments when he was fitting the alarms because it shows the victims going about their daily lives. It’s clear he’s edited it down a lot because it’s mainly of an intimate nature. Them getting changed, walking round naked. In one case having sex. That sort of thing. I suppose it made it more fun for him. Stalking them like that but without running any risk of getting caught.’
‘And is there footage like this of all of the victims?’
‘Three that we’ve found so far.’
MacLeod ran a hand across his brow. ‘Good God.’
‘Is there any way it could have been planted on his laptop?’ Tina asked.
Grier looked at her like she was mad, and she remembered immediately why she didn’t like him. ‘No way. There’s so much of it for a start, and the dates the footage was first added to the system tie in with the dates of the murders. This stuff’s been put on there over a long period of time. It’s authentic, and it belongs to that computer.’
‘Were the files well hidden?’
‘They were in a folder within a folder within a folder, squirrelled away among a lot of other files in the My Documents section, all with bland, irrelevant names. It was quite a trawl to locate them.’
‘They weren’t that well hidden though, were they? They didn’t have password protection or an encryption system like some of the paedophile networks put on their PCs to stop us accessing the hard drive?’
Grier looked defensive. ‘Are you suggesting they were easy to find, ma’am?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t think Tina’s saying that at all, Dan,’ put in MacLeod hastily.
‘No, I’m not. I’m just checking the facts. That’s all, Dan. OK?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound disrespectful, it’s just I’ve been here with that laptop for most of the last twelve hours trawling through reams of crap until I finally found them.’
‘We’ve all had a bit of a traumatic few minutes,’ said DCI MacLeod, ‘so let’s just concentrate on the most important task, which is keeping the evidence safe and secure. Download all the relevant files to a memory stick, Dan, then get the laptop bagged up and sent over to the lab. I want it tested for Kent’s DNA, fingerprints, the lot. I don’t want him trying to deny it belongs to him.’
Grier looked surprised. ‘He won’t do that, will he, sir?’
‘He’s denied everything so far. We need to keep building up the case until it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference how good an actor he is, because the jury’ll have no choice but to find him guilty.’
When Grier had gone with the laptop, MacLeod turned to Tina. ‘All right, are you ready to finish this bastard off?’
She nodded firmly. ‘Never readier.’
‘Let’s see how he responds to the fact that we’ve found all his home videos.’ He put a hand on her arm. ‘You had a big part in bringing him in, Tina. When we’re ready, do you want to be the one who charges him?’
But had it all been too easy? Andrew Kent had been delivered to them on a plate with the murder weapon in his bedroom and his laptop full of hugely incriminating video evidence. But even as this nagged at her, Tina pushed it aside, knowing that she was just ignoring the obvious explanation, which was that Kent was like all the other cold-blooded killers who’d begun to believe the hype of their invincibility and had become too complacent.
‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘I want to watch him squirm.’
Six
The job Tyrone Wolfe wanted me to carry out was to buy some guns from an underworld dealer based in Canning Town. Although he’d told Tommy to drive me to the destination, he’d made it clear that I was to go in and make the purchase alone. His rationale was simple: if I bought the guns, I was committing a serious crime and therefore couldn’t be a copper. But the rationale was flawed, because by sending me on my way with Tommy driving they’d put me in a position where I had no choice but to commit it, since failure to do so would have blown my cover. I wasn’t sure whether my handler at CO10 would see it quite like that, of course. DI Robin Samuel-Smith, or Captain Bob as he was universally known behind his back, liked to play things by the book. But I’d worry about that one later.
Wolfe had given me an envelope containing five grand in cash — payment for two automatic shotguns and a handgun — handed me back the rest of my possessions, including my recording watch, and told me that I was expected at the dealer’s place half an hour ago, and that he’d see me with the goods later.
We were now in Tommy’s car en route. In the back seat, sitting up with his tongue lolling out, was Tommy’s dog, Tommy Junior, an unhealthy-looking mongrel with a mangled ear who always smelled of old raincoats. The story went that Tommy had rescued him from a gang of teenage thugs who’d tied his front and back paws together and were about to dump him in the murky waters of Regent’s Canal. Tommy had thrown in one of the thugs instead, and when a second pulled a knife on him, he’d produced an extendable baton and broken his nose with it before sending him in with his mate. The others had done the sensible thing and fled.
Tommy Junior loved his master and, perhaps unsurprisingly, distrusted everyone else. He seemed to have taken a particular dislike to me because in the last three months I’d become something of a regular in the front seat, which was the one he liked to occupy.