Famous Last Words

Chapter 5

5

Niall

One of the many things Niall didn’t count on when he became a hostage negotiator is that hostage situations hardly ever happen. And so, ghoulish as this may be, most of his days are spent waiting for one, like a footballer on the bench. Or, worse, he’s called to one that resolves while he’s on the way. Niall does more U-turns at motorway roundabouts than he does negotiating.

He is at this precise moment on light duties in the police back office of the Met – he’s a detective on the side, though a pretty unwilling one since his hostage training. If he’s lucky, he might get a negotiation with a petty criminal who has stolen a bottle of vodka and decided to hold up Tesco Express with a water pistol instead of coming out.

He sifts through the application forms he has for a vacancy in his department, but he can’t settle to it today, keeps putting the forms down and buying things on Amazon Prime (a home beer-making kit, a spinning shelf that goes in the fridge that he can put his chutneys on).

It is not especially coincidental to Niall, then, when the call does come, because he’s always waiting for it. Vivienne tells him he even answers these calls in his sleep. ‘“What’s the situation?” you say. Some wives would hope you would call their name in your dreams.’

‘DCI Thompson,’ he says into the phone as he answers now – fully awake, or so he hopes.

‘White male holding up a warehouse in Bermondsey,’ the call handler says.

He holds the phone between his ear and shoulder and drops the forms, interested. They scatter, drifting off the desk this way and that like feathers, but Niall is much beyond caring what becomes of them. He opens and takes a sip of his Coke – the first gulp of the day is always the best; everyone has their vices – fizzy metal liquid bubbling on his tongue, tilts his head, and says, ‘What exactly do you mean by “holding up”?’ He stares at the can. He wrote his name on it with a Sharpie, so that nobody would steal it from the work fridge, pathetic as that is.

‘He has taken three hostages. Sadly, the media already has it – a security guard being paid to watch the CCTV remotely called 999, which was good, but he also leaked the footage on Facebook.’

Niall feels a frisson rush up his body. This is not a domestic. And it’s not a shoplifter, either. A livestreamed siege.

‘He’s put bags on their heads.’ Her voice is deadpan. It’s Sheridan, Niall realizes. She took a call for him five years ago, about a man set to jump on to the M4, and she’d said flatly, then, ‘There’s probably nothing anyone can do now, but he’s still there …’ She’s bored with the job, and understandably so, but Niall finds it embarrassing when the police do not care enough. He went to the M4, as it goes. Talked him down.

‘I have that CCTV for you. Hang on …’ Sheridan says.

‘Just WhatsApp it to me.’

‘I’m supposed to email it, one sec …’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘We need to get down there. Where in Bermondsey?’

‘Behind Shad Thames.’

Niall knows it well. Iron bridges in an alleyway that connect apartments above like a Kerplunk! game.

‘Perpetrator is called Luke Deschamps.’

Niall hears his email beep in his ear. He opens it on his laptop and clicks the link, the phone on speaker.

‘I’ll be there,’ he says, watching the video load, standing back from his desk, hands on his hips.

He squints, trying to work out how the perpetrator has power over the individuals in their hoods, and then he sees it: the handgun tucked into his dark sleeve. A Beretta, a pistol.

Bermondsey High Street looks shabby and tired even in the bright sunlight when Niall arrives. He and Vivienne moved last year to the Barbican, at his insistence to be near work, and now everywhere looks somehow unclean compared to the sanitized holiday-complex feel of his home, a penthouse in a building called Ben Jonson House that looks like something from Battlestar Galactica . Viv works for the RSPCA and – from time to time – brings home animals she can’t rehouse that look kind of out of place in the clean-lined apartment. Niall often approaches the front door with real trepidation, worse than he feels at work, unable to forget the time there was a surprise kestrel in the shower.

He grabs his phone and sends her a text now. Got called on to a job. No idea how long I’ll be , he writes. A job or a job job? she replies immediately. A job job – proper one! He smiles down at the phone. She once told him she finds it impossibly sexy when he’s on a hostage situation, which Niall has never forgotten.

But, today, Viv doesn’t reply exactly as he expects. Right x , she replies, and that’s all.

She will be pissed off with him, Niall thinks with a sigh. They’re tussling at the moment, locking horns over work. He got halfway round the North Circular one Friday a few weeks ago to a job that got called off before he got there, but it had made him so late back they had to cancel their weekend away in the Lake District.

But work’s work. Policing is antisocial. Everybody knows it.

He ventures down the High Street with a bounce in his step, walking past proper London – corner shops with loose and hot fruit and veg outside, neon Tube signs and graffiti and fire escapes Rapunzelling down the back of buildings.

It’s obvious where the siege is taking place, two streets back, on a road comprising mostly industrial units but some clusters of houses, too.

‘What’s going on?’ Niall says, hurrying up to James Maidstone, the lead CID detective in charge, known in hostage situations as the silver commander. The gold commander sits in some office somewhere, authorizing things from afar. Niall is the lowly hostage negotiator: here just to communicate.

What most people don’t know – and what Niall learnt from his training, at a kind of shabby boot camp in Surrey – is that it’s not actually about talking. In major terrorism jobs you have two negotiators in: one to talk, and one to merely listen. They’re even called that: ‘the listener’. And theirs is the most important job in the room.

Sadly, budget cuts and a lowly three hostages taken means Niall is both today. He takes a sip of the Coke he brought with him. ‘What’s the situation?’ he asks.

Maidstone turns to Niall. He’s everything Niall is not: a graduate-entry police officer who’s risen quickly through the ranks. He knows things out of textbooks, and looks like it, too: wears shoes he shines and a watch he bought in Dubai. Niall, in battered old trainers, feels as old as time itself.

Maidstone takes a vape out of his front pocket and puffs on it. Niall, who quit smoking twenty years ago, still finds he could reach over and inhale the nicotine clouds from it, right there while it rests between Maidstone’s fingers.

‘Hostage-taker is Deschamps. Thirty-eight. No criminal history at all. A writer. Married to Camilla, who is also his literary agent. They have a nine-month-old, Polly. Not much more information at this time,’ he says. At this time is his verbal tic.

‘Right. I need information and fast,’ Niall says. ‘What’s the deal with the security guard?’

‘No suspicion. Wants Facebook infamy, I think.’

‘Do you think he’s involved?’

Maidstone makes a face, then pockets his vape. His black suit shines a kind of burnished hot brown in the bright sun, like a black cat. ‘I don’t think so. He’s got loads of followers on there. Alt-right stuff. Put the footage on his feed after calling it in. No connection to Deschamps that I can see.’

‘Fucking idiot,’ Niall says. Maidstone’s eyes flicker slightly. ‘And the hostage-taker? Any history of domestics?’

‘No.’

‘Any contact?’

‘Nothing at this time.’

‘So he hasn’t levied a threat?’

‘No.’

‘So no idea what he wants?’ Niall presses. He checks a clock. Time is already running out. ‘What I need is eyes on him, so I can see his body language, and a line to him, so we can talk. Find out what his agenda is – and what he’s feeling.’

‘OK. Understood. We have CCTV. Let me see what else I can get you. His mobile’s now off, but there’s a landline. I’m getting it set up. I want you communicating within the hour.’ He begins typing – Maidstone gets stuff done, to his credit, and Niall knows he will be getting what he wants soonest.

Viv always says she likes to think his job involves guns and stakeouts and ransoms. She sometimes says things like ‘And why didn’t you blow his brains out?’ or ‘What was the sniper doing?’ The reality is of course different: it is simply that every person, every single human on earth, desperately wants something , and it is Niall’s only job to work out what. He plays along when she asks him, though. It’s one of their games. As he thinks of her, he realizes that he forgot to take the bin out this morning – she will be annoyed at him. It’s her most hated task, and he left her to do it. The problem with being a hostage negotiator is that everyone thinks you’re doing something for some smart, Machiavellian reason. But, sometimes, you just forget the bins.

Maidstone leads Niall across the sunlit street to a van that houses a few laptops. ‘We have eyes on live CCTV, look.’

He grabs for a laptop and hands it to Niall, who watches in silence. It’s grainy, hard to make out. A warehouse background of empty shelving racks, only two and a half hostages visible in the frame. They’re seated on wooden chairs perhaps grabbed hastily: their angles are skewed. Deschamps is off-screen.

The most significant thing, to Niall, is the silence and the stillness of it: this can only mean one thing – the hostages are terrified.

He brings the laptop closer to his ear and listens carefully: the sound of shoes on cement. Those footsteps are fast and urgent, the movements of an agitated man, which is not good news.

‘Let me see the moment of entry,’ he says.

‘We have nothing from the street. Inside, we see one hostage is already there. Then we have Deschamps arriving inside, but only into the main frame. Interior camera doesn’t reach the door. And we don’t see how he gets his other two hostages in there.’

Maidstone finds the footage and starts it on the laptop in front of him.

A woman enters the frame. She walks purposefully on-, then off-screen. There’s nothing more for almost thirty minutes.

Half an hour later, Luke Deschamps appears. A small movement at the top of the screen, near the table, and then he walks forwards purposefully, holding the gun out in front of him with straight arms. He shouts, to people off-screen, ‘On the chairs, now, or I shoot!’ Gun in hand, directing their actions. He leaves the screen, then drags three chairs into view. He directs each hostage on to a chair, using the gun, then ties them up deftly, with quick hand movements. All three hostages sit rigidly. Deschamps looks directly up at the camera.

Niall pauses it, rewinds, but he can’t make out that small movement right at the start. He watches again.

Niall makes a note to run the footage of the hostages through the DVLA database, even though he knows he won’t get hits for people with covered faces.

He plays it again, fourth time.

Deschamps is silent as he arrives, and something about it makes Niall shiver. Deschamps does nothing. Merely tracks his targets with the aim of the gun. And then, and only then, does he shout. He likely shepherded them in with the gun unseen, though it’s surprising he wasn’t issuing verbal directions as he did so.

‘OK. Leave it with me,’ he says to Maidstone.

More and more police are arriving. A couple of uniformed officers are scouting out the area. They will be responsible for assembling the inner and outer cordons. The first steps are to evacuate the few houses and industrial units in the immediate vicinity, telling people in the wider area to get to the back of buildings, far away from possible gunshots.

An officer at a laptop in another van raises a hand. ‘ID on one of the hostages,’ he shouts, getting out of the van. Maidstone whips his head around, while Niall listens. The officer comes over quickly to Maidstone. ‘Isabella Louis. Forty-two. Her husband, George Louis, has phoned her in.’

‘George Louis?’ Maidstone says immediately – sharp as a tack: George Louis is in the police.

‘Exactly. He’s on his way here. He worked uniform in Hammersmith before joining the GDPR team. His family owns the warehouse. He couldn’t get hold of her this morning. He’s pretty sure she was headed there to do some job between tenants. Plus, he’s recognized her clothes.’

Niall nods slowly. Who takes a copper’s wife hostage? Somebody with bollocks, that’s who. Not a family man with no criminal history.

‘Has George any known connection to Deschamps?’ Niall says. ‘Can we speak to him?’

The officer is standing with the laptop held in one hand, the other typing. ‘No connection on the force systems. And Deschamps isn’t connected to the warehouse in any obvious way. George doesn’t know him.’

‘Get off the systems and on to Facebook,’ Niall says, his detective instincts bubbling to the surface. ‘Get on Isabella’s social media. We need to know if he took her for a reason. I’m guessing George never arrested him? Not for anything, even speeding?’

‘No.’

‘Got it. We need ID on the others.’

Maidstone nods. ‘We’ve got nothing at this time,’ he says. ‘Look, we need to establish a dialogue.’

‘We need an RVP,’ Niall says, gesturing to the copper standing holding a laptop, squinting at its screen in the sun. The rendezvous point: the place they will gather, assess intelligence, be briefed, and, more importantly, think and strategize. ‘We can’t stand out here. We need to discuss tactics before dialogue. Let’s set one up.’ He points up the road, five hundred yards away – too far for the CCTV to be useful to get a look at the warehouse and Deschamps’s arrival – to the pub.

‘A Wetherspoon’s?’ Maidstone says.

‘It’s better than nothing.’

Niall and Maidstone walk up the street together and across the pub’s car park, past an A-frame board that says ‘TODAY – two for one puddings’.

They walk through the double doors, sunlight to gloom, and Niall is immediately relieved that it isn’t busy. Wednesday morning, and the heat has driven down footfall. An old man with shaking hands sits at one of the tables with a pint, a betting slip and a newspaper full of tips. A family of five – tourists, maybe – are nearby with lemonades. Not much else. Fruit machines. Flyers for food offers.

They approach the bar together. Immediately, Niall’s eyes flick to the taps. And it isn’t Pepsi on draught – it’s Coke. How completely excellent.

‘I’ll set my stuff up there,’ Niall says, indicating a rickety nearby table. ‘You talk to the manager and get everyone out,’ he adds. No one can stay, not even the staff. And Niall finds that most people, when faced with it, don’t need the risks spelling out to them.

‘I’m aware of the next steps,’ Maidstone says frostily.

Niall slides his laptop and a designated mobile out of his bag. Nothing more. Some hostage negotiators want the gold commander on the phone at all times, endless discussions, a whole room full of people listening, but Niall doesn’t. Just him, the kidnapper, the phone line stretching thin between them. An earpiece he’s forced to wear so he can take instructions. He has to record the call for compliance, but rather wishes he didn’t: experienced hostage-takers recognize the second’s delay it causes, though he doesn’t get the impression Deschamps is one of these. No criminal history. Family man. Normal job. Though their baby is young … he begins to ponder postnatal depression in men leading to some sort of psychotic break, just as the patrons begin to leave, shooting curious glances Niall’s way.

And George Louis’s wife. It’s very strange. Niall had assumed Isabella was an accidental hostage, already in the warehouse when Deschamps burst in. But you can never ignore a coincidence in policing, and George Louis is a big-personality copper: aggressive, forthright, and smart, too. He could easily have pissed somebody off.

Niall nips behind the bar and pulls himself a Coke, thinking how much he can rack up on the tab they will have to settle later. Anyway. The matter at hand: usually, by now, a demand has been made. Or a hostage killed.

He keeps the laptop with the CCTV on open, watching it, wanting Deschamps to come into view. You can learn a lot about someone’s emotional state if only you can see them.

Officers begin to trickle into the pub. Police in riot gear, bulletproof shields, holding MP5s and Glocks, then uniformed coppers and yet more detectives taken off missing persons cases and garden-variety burglaries.

Maidstone arrives, and begins his address: ‘Deschamps is thirty-eight, a writer, a husband, and father of one with no previous. We have no CCTV of him outside the warehouse from this morning, or on the streets: it’s an industrial area with limited cameras. The closest is the pub, and neither Luke nor any of the hostages walked by there. All we have is that initial footage, and this.’

‘You’ve combed every CCTV?’ Niall interrupts.

‘We’re on it. The CCTV from inside the warehouse suggests Isabella was already there. She behaves like she’s alone, and she and George own the building. She waits for half an hour. Then Deschamps arrives. Either the men were already there when Isabella arrived, or more likely Deschamps brought them in, just cut off from the CCTV, given he then tied them up.’

Niall raises his eyebrows. He is thinking, forming a plan. Deschamps is a known family man: maybe they should get the wife down here. Use her to engage him.

Maidstone continues: ‘Isabella is a forty-two-year-old woman who is local to Bermondsey and owns the warehouse with her husband, derelict as it is. Has no previous and no known connection to Deschamps. Neither does her husband, but he is a Met copper: George Louis. We don’t know how Deschamps captured the other two hostages, nor who they are. We have CCTV on him right now and can see his hostages are bound to chairs, with hoods on their heads. Deschamps is off-screen for now, but is not shouting or making direct threats.’ He takes a breath. ‘He is armed, a Beretta pistol, not automatic, but nevertheless dangerous.

‘Outer cordon, keep the public out. Inner cordon, aim to control Deschamps should he emerge.’ He pauses. ‘At this time … shoot to kill is not authorized, unless – and until – something changes.’

Niall has his eyes on the laptop. The only sound is Deschamps’s footsteps.

‘The layout of the warehouse is online,’ Maidstone continues. ‘There’s one door at the front. There is what is deemed a fire escape at the back of the warehouse, up a flight of stairs. It leads only up to the roof – from which there is no external way down, so it is a fire escape in name only. We have a drone up there now.’

Weapons click as the officers shift, some perching against tables, some standing among the chalkboard specials menus and the fridges full of alcohol. One of the CID gets out a J2O and uncaps it noisily with a hiss.

And that’s when it happens: Deschamps steps back into view on the CCTV, blue eyes right up close to the camera. What is he doing?

The room falls silent. Maidstone comes over to watch Niall’s laptop.

All around the pub, laptops display the CCTV, fifty Deschampses, fifty pairs of blue eyes. He reaches one hand up, concentration etched on his features. He’s holding something. Is it the gun? No, it’s some sort of material …

And Niall knows what’s going to happen before it does. Deschamps’s brow is wrinkled, his eyes wired. And then in one swift motion he covers the CCTV with the material, and the screen goes black. All they have now is sound, the rush of the static.

Next to Niall, Maidstone swallows, loosens his shirt. ‘Right,’ he addresses the room. ‘We have a problem.’ And then, as if Deschamps heard Maidstone, the sound goes off too. He’s switched off the camera. Turned it off at the mains.