Chapter 9
9
Niall
With every minute that passes, Deschamps could shoot. But Niall doesn’t think that he’s going to.
‘It’s odd we have no ID on the other hostages yet,’ Niall says as Maidstone’s shoes kick up the dust by the side of the road into brown clouds. The warehouse stands in the distance, and Niall begins to sweat. The unknown hostages are troubling him. Usually, they would have been identified by now, reported missing by their families and recognized on the news by their clothes. ‘It’s making me wonder. If all is not as it seems.’
‘Faces are covered, aren’t they?’
‘There are all sorts of tells even with covered faces,’ Niall remarks. ‘If they’re missing, the relatives see the news and recognize what they’re wearing. Don’t you think it’s strange?’ he presses. ‘No one missing them yet. No one phoned it in.’
Maidstone pauses. ‘It is weird,’ he says. Even he can’t deny it. ‘The force intelligence bureau are on it.’ He looks at Niall. ‘What’s your first approach going to be?’
‘I’m thinking,’ Niall says.
‘Well, think faster. He could take a shot right now.’
‘He hasn’t,’ Niall says.
Luckily, DS Steven Lambert interrupts them: Niall wants time, is all. He wants to work out what is really happening, and why.
‘How’s it looking?’ Lambert says, arriving from the bar with what looks to Niall like a half of cider but which he hopes isn’t. ‘We’ve visited the wife. Seems very shocked. Nothing suspicious in her behaviour so far.’
Niall nods. Lambert is a good judge of character but not at when to act. The cordon could be divided into the strategists and what the negotiators would call the knuckle-draggers, and Lambert is most definitely the latter. He likes Metallica, horror movies and extracting information from people, which he is excellent at. Once, when Lambert was still in uniform and part of an inner cordon, Niall heard him say over the wiring equipment, ‘We should just kick the fucking door down now and then we could all go home.’
‘Do you have any idea why no one has claimed the hostages yet?’ Niall asks.
‘No. It’s odd, isn’t it? In this day and age … with it on the news, too. I’d expect people to ring up the second they can’t get hold of someone who matches their descriptions.’
‘I know. And their clothes are obvious.’ He pauses. ‘What’s Camilla like?’
Lambert turns his mouth down. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Scared. Bewildered. Whole body was shivering.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘Smart.’
‘Do you think she’s covering for him?’
‘No.’ Lambert places his drink on Niall’s table, then puts his hands on his hips, which somehow makes his forearms and biceps look even larger. ‘But I think that she would .’
‘Why?’
‘Loves him,’ Lambert – terminally single, on all the dating apps – says softly. ‘It’s kind of sad, actually.’
‘It is.’
A woman faces to camera in a TikTok video, holding a handheld mic. She has dark hair and blue eyeshadow.
‘So, there’s this siege happening in Bermondsey, right. A guy has taken three hostages in a warehouse. However, the news outlets say nobody knows the identity of the hostages. And I’m just thinking – isn’t that really creepy??! Here’s the footage – do you know them?’
Niall clicks off the video, sighing. The armchair detectives will soon be out in full force.
The silent drills have finally reached the other side of the thick old warehouse walls, and Niall’s been summoned to the scene now to observe it. He’s been stripped of his radio, his mobile phone, anything that will make any noise.
‘You’re not going to like it,’ Maidstone says grimly to him, shiny shoes bouncing the sunlight around as they walk, and he’s right.
The warehouse stands square and sunlit, the inner cordon static around it: a hundred or so armed officers making zero noise or movements, like Niall has walked into a military painting. The police are in riot gear: helmets and shields, MP5s held cross-body.
Maidstone leads Niall across the car park, down a ramp bordered by a small orange brick wall, and to the side of the warehouse that sits in shadow – the sunny side would let too much light in and give them away.
Two officers stand sentry by a tiny hole about a foot off the ground – down low is less noticeable – and they nod to Niall as he arrives.
A recording device is attached to the wall, gazing in through the hole with its electronic eye, and this will be being broadcast in the RVP for people to see, but Niall wants to see it in real time, in the flesh. There’s enough room for him to peer in alongside it.
He crouches down. If he so much as sneezes, he will give the game away. Immediately, his knees begin to ache, but he ignores them. They don’t have much time. He needs to look, then think, then act.
The hole is less than a centimetre wide, the wall thick, and, at first, Niall can’t make anything out, the view small and imperfect, the inside of the warehouse dim.
But then he sees him, in the fish-eye of the foot-deep cylindrical hole: Deschamps. He is in miniature: at the centre of a dollhouse tableau of a horror scene. He is standing in front of his hostages, pacing. Seven steps one way, seven back.
But it’s the gun. It’s the gun that does it: his arms are as straight as they were on the CCTV, ready to deal with relay, but the barrel is directly and intentionally trained on the head of each hostage in turn. The woman then the man then the man. The man then the man then the woman.
Niall’s heart descends downwards from his chest to his feet. This looks like a person who wants to shoot: he can’t deny it. Maidstone will be all over this. This changes everything.
His body language is taut, ready to act, but not especially agitated. No. His shoulders are up, his footsteps quick, now, but he looks … what? Niall gets occasional glimpses at Deschamps’s features, and he looks … well, scared. That’s it. He has got scared body language. Furtive and somehow quite meek. Niall assesses the gun. It’s aimed but not cocked. But Deschamps’s finger is on the trigger.
Niall eventually moves away, and one of the other officers takes his place. Niall touches his shoulder as he leaves. Standing sentry is no easy job.
‘I see what you mean,’ he says in greeting to Maidstone.
‘Right,’ Maidstone replies. ‘We’ve got to go in there. He’s practically taking aim. Agree?’
Niall hesitates. He is . But he’s scared. And scared people want a way out. ‘I would like to have a go at contact,’ he says. He waves his phone containing the email from the coppers searching Camilla Deschamps’s house. ‘I’ve got some intel, and I’ve got an idea.’
‘Are you joking?’ Maidstone says coldly. ‘We said … if the gun’s pointing at them, we go in.’ He has sweat patches beginning to form at his armpits and the small of his back.
‘No, you said that. Body language is made up of more than just a weapon.’
‘I disagree.’
‘I think one attempt at contact is reasonable,’ Niall says, and he can’t explain it, but he just doesn’t think Deschamps will go through with it. Something about his glossy profile on his wife’s agency’s website, his books, co-working space – now searched – containing nothing of any note at all, his GP records showing zero concerns.
Despite everything. Despite the captured civilians, the purchased gun, Niall just can’t see it. Fear isn’t often compatible with malice. Some deep instinct somewhere tells him to wait.
‘What’s your idea?’ Maidstone asks.
Niall pauses. ‘He likes coffee.’
Niall undertook his hostage negotiation course in 2010 in a draughty country manor in Surrey. He was taught – and later mentored – by a DI called Larry who collected old Apple Mac computers. Every weekend he went to some fair or other and bought another, kept them in his loft. It was Larry who taught Niall his cardinal rule: that everybody wants something. Niall – who’d had a harsh Catholic upbringing full of guilt – was pleasantly surprised by the humanity in negotiating, and in Larry.
The first day was lectures that Niall found so dry he slow-blinked his way through them, texting Viv under the desk to stay awake. The final three days were role plays: armed fugitives, terrorists, everything. This, Niall needed no distracting from. This was what he was there for.
He sat outside a stately room that an actor playing an armed perpetrator had locked himself inside, and tried to get him to talk with methods he’d only just learnt. Open questions, slow and steady, build rapport. What do you like to do in your spare time? You’re having some intense feelings now, but they will pass. Me? I can’t wait to get home to my girlfriend and watch Seinfeld with her: we’re rubbish at modern TV, we are still in the nineties. Niall always told the truth in these negotiations: he and Viv really do like old telly. Or, rather, they did: when did they last watch reruns together?
They learnt about pacing and leading, about priming the suspect to start to agree with you.
They did theory in the mornings, practicals in the afternoons and into the evenings. Eleven o’clock finishes, sometimes midnight, after which they were encouraged to drink at the bar together, hitting the dorm rooms at three, up again for eight. Niall had at first assumed this was a bonding exercise, but later realized that the instructors’ aims were to tire them out. The practical assignments got harder the more exhausted they got, and that’s when they transformed: into people who could think fast, people who could hold their emotions at any cost. The only way to learn it was to do it.
On the final day of the course, Niall had walked with Larry to the car park across pale gravel that crunched underfoot and through high autumn winds that rattled leaves. Like every immersive experience, at the end of the week Niall had felt changed.
‘What would be your only tip – if you had to give just one?’ Niall had asked him.
Larry had paused for a minute or two as they reached his car – as old as his Apple Mac computers, a 1980s racing-green Mini – then replied: ‘Above all else, reciprocity: never give up something without getting something in return.’
Niall had thought about that a lot in the weeks that followed. But the more experienced he’s become, the more he’s realized that the rules are just that: rules. And, sometimes, they’re there to be broken.
And so Niall is going to offer Deschamps some coffee, and ask for nothing in return just yet. He’s offering it only because he wants Deschamps to know Niall is willing to give, not just take, somebody who wants to listen to him, and to what he likes. His wife says he likes coffee. It’s their thing.
‘Coffee can be the very beginning of a dialogue,’ Niall says now to Maidstone. They hurry down the street. ‘Coffee as an invitation – to open up.’
‘We are running out of time very quickly here.’
Maidstone is the sort of copper who finds doing nothing too anxiety-provoking, would rather take a different kind of risk. He favours action. Niall favours patience, especially with a man who looks too frightened to shoot.
The job of a hostage negotiator, in many ways, is to simply run down the clock. Let the kidnapper become tired, jaded, know that it isn’t going anywhere.
Maidstone flicks his gaze to Niall. ‘You can deliver the coffee,’ he says. ‘It’s an offer of coffee, left by the door. That’s all. You tell him just that. You’ve got half an hour.’
Niall directs an assistant to go and get the coffees. Starbucks, four lattes, four cinnamon swirls. Uncontroversial. Isabella’s husband calls in, speaks to Maidstone, says he’s heard nothing from Isabella. Says she would have texted if at all possible. Niall closes his eyes for a few moments to think about the hostages. Their fear. Their beating hearts inside that building, relying on Niall to save them.
He heads to stand outside while he waits for the coffees, wishing they’d be faster, and skim-reads a report he’s been CC’d in on with information Camilla has given, wondering when Maidstone will pull the plug and stop his plans.
Hmm. Interesting: Deschamps has wiped tech and failed to report a crime. See? This is why you wait. You find stuff out with the time that you buy. And all of this points to a man who is hiding something.
He continues scanning the report. No access to recent internet searches as yet … Suspect is not on Prevent list or known to have terrorist associations … combing his current contacts now … no list of recent iPhone locations visited since April …
Niall stops reading at that and dials the telecoms team who – in situations like this – answer immediately: one of the many reasons Niall likes the dynamism of an unfolding real-time situation.
‘Why are Deschamps’s locations post-April not available?’ he says.
‘I know – we’re on it,’ the analyst says. ‘It’s top of my list.’ It’s Claire. He likes her, mum to three, therefore a brilliant multi-tasker, doesn’t miss a trick. ‘He stopped his phone from location tracking on the twenty-first of April this year. Could just be an iOS update thing.’
‘I doubt that,’ Niall says flatly. In his experience, coincidences do not really exist in policing, not as much as people seem to think, anyway. ‘Twenty-first of April. What time?’
‘Just before midnight,’ Claire says. ‘Which coincides with an iPhone update while it was charging.’
‘Or somebody out doing something at close to midnight that they didn’t want anybody to know about,’ Niall replies, wandering into the cool shade of the pub again as he rings off.
Where the fuck are the coffees? Niall grabs a laptop in frustration, begins the research into Deschamps’s locations as the clock ticks ever down.
The investigation management system has an old-style display, green text on black, and he’s searching for any crime committed on the twenty-first of April this year. It’s plausible that something happened involving Deschamps that led him to where he is now: so what was it?
He narrows the search to Putney and Bermondsey, the two places Deschamps is most likely to have been on that day. There’s a red spot for every single crime reported, most of them petty. Muggings, burglaries, assaults, batteries: this is London. Niall scrolls and scrolls, hoping that something will jump out at him, scanning for murders, anything very serious, but there isn’t one.
He flicks his gaze out of the window to the warehouse. Anything could be happening in there …
Concentrate. He goes to the automatic number plate recognition database. Somebody in the intelligence bureau will be doing this, but Niall can’t resist performing his own search for faster answers.
He types in Deschamps’s registration, which pulls up a hundred hits, and Niall scrolls to the twenty-first of April.
Six hits.
22:00: Putney High Street
22:20: an A road in Clapham
22:40: Camberwell
23:05: Whitechapel
23:10: Poplar
23:30: East Ham
Odd place to drive, through central London – unusual for a native – and so late at night. He can access pictures from each hit, but they’re as crappy as ever, near useless, taken from gantries or poles by the side of the road, dark and grainy. You can barely make out it’s a white male, certainly nothing else.
He flicks to the twenty-second of April, but there’s nothing, nor the twenty-third. Nothing comes back on until early May, two weeks later. Now it’s the twenty-first of June.
So Deschamps goes out that night but, according to the database, he doesn’t come home again.
Maidstone arrives at Niall’s table, interrupting him. ‘Where are your coffees? You’re almost fifteen minutes into your allotted thirty.’
‘Coming,’ Niall says tightly.
‘Growing the beans yourself? We have guns to heads here, Niall.’
Niall ignores him. Maidstone is holding a piece of paper: reports of missing persons from this morning in London – sixty of them, with descriptions.
‘No matches to our unknown hostages. These guys are both in jeans and white trainers, middle-aged, we think. No one’s phoned that in at this time,’ Maidstone says.
‘Lambert was just saying it’s weird.’
‘It is.’
Niall points to his screen. ‘Look at this: Deschamps goes out one night, gets pinged all over the place by ANPR, but then doesn’t come home again according to the cameras – and turns off his iPhone location data just before midnight.’
‘Hang on,’ Maidstone says. ‘Let me get the report on the state of the car.’ He types away on his phone. ‘See if it’s got any evidence on it … Finally – your order is arriving,’ he says, gesturing briefly towards the assistant at the door holding a drinks tray and a brown paper bag. ‘Get moving. Twelve minutes.’
‘James.’
‘What?’
‘If he comes to the door to get these, I need an assurance from you that you will do absolutely nothing. And I really mean nothing.’
Maidstone shifts on his feet. ‘That depends what he does.’
‘I need to be able to give him a cast-iron guarantee that you will do nothing if he gets those coffees. If one of your snipers aims the rapport will be lost.’
‘Provided he doesn’t aim at us, we won’t shoot.’
‘He may well aim. But I just don’t think he’ll shoot.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Where are the snipers situated?’
He sighs. ‘One on the door and one on the roof. Do not so much as glance at them or you will get me sacked and sued.’
‘I’m not an idiot.’
‘I’m thinking of the inevitable public inquiry here.’
‘I need to be able to promise him that we won’t harm him. That’s my first move always. This coffee needs to be a true offer. Not bait.’ Niall pauses. ‘He will think it’s bait, anyway. I want to prove him wrong as my opening effort.’
‘Fine,’ Maidstone says.
‘Look at this. Officers have checked the car and the ANPR system for the twenty-first of April. Reg plates got covered in mud, it seems. Stopped pinging the ANPR on the way home. You can see where the mud has crusted off when he starts pinging them again in May.
‘At the same time he turned off his location data.’ Niall’s tone slides to frustrated. Yes , they need to do the coffees, but they also need to crack the mystery.
‘Right,’ Maidstone says, finally levelling with him. He holds Niall’s gaze. ‘Pretty suspicious.’
‘It was dry that day,’ Niall says. It had been dry all spring. ‘No mud spray.’
‘Hmm.’
Niall picks up the coffees and begins to get moving. He suddenly has an urge to text Viv. She’ll be thinking he’s staking Deschamps out, wearing riot gear and holding a machine gun. Instead, he’s serving coffee.
Niall is ready for contact, holding the coffees and wearing a bulletproof vest.
He is interrupted by Maidstone, talking into his radio. ‘Engage protocol: negotiator to approach the building in two minutes for first contact.’
Niall is wired up. His bulletproof vest is heavy, sticking the sweat to his back.
The coffees are steady in their tray in his hands, probably cold now, but that’s policing for you: everything takes longer than you’d think. It tires Niall out, sometimes. Like you have all these instincts and ideas about what to do for the best, and they’re culled and culled by red tape and processes .
He stares at the warehouse, his gaze narrowing to focus on the black wooden door.
Amazing where the fear goes, when it comes to it: it just disappears. If you do something often enough and don’t die, then you somehow think you never will, like when you first learn to drive a car and think about crashing all the time, but within a year are steering with your knees and eating burgers.
The riot squad is ready. The inner cordon is a tidal wave of officers, all waiting, their bodies still, shields up. The road is full of people, but it’s utterly silent as Niall walks. Officersw part for him like the Red Sea.
The walk takes him one minute. In his ear, Maidstone gives him the all-clear, and Niall stops at the door.
He pauses there, just listening.
He leans closer, clears his throat. ‘Luke Deschamps?’ he says, one ear to the wood. ‘My name’s Niall.’
Nothing. He waits five seconds. ‘I’ve got a team outside here, with me,’ he says. ‘They tell me you’ve got a gun in there. I wonder if you can help me work out what’s going on?’
Nothing.
‘Nobody wants to come in. Least of all me. I wanted to talk, really, but first – I heard you like coffee, so I got you some. I’m going to place them – there’s four cups here, and some snacks – outside the door. And you have my word that if you open it and pick them up, nobody is going to do a thing. Right?’
On the other side of the door is total silence.
He places them on the ground, on a rubber mat with holes in it, feeling the back of his neck exposed and vulnerable. He straightens up, but still there’s nothing.
‘Starbucks. Lattes,’ he says.
Nothing.
‘So if you’re tired or hungry or thirsty – any of you – they’re here. All right?’
He wonders if the hostages can hear his futile attempts.
‘So – Luke?’ He uses his first name deliberately. ‘I’ll be moving away from the door shortly. And nobody is aiming at you. I don’t lie here. So, anything you want to ask me, you know that I’ll tell you the truth.’
Still nothing. Niall stands back, just waiting, but the coffees go untouched.
‘Now, you’re in control here, Luke,’ he says. ‘You decide whether to stay in or come out.’
This is what all hostage-takers want: control, and certainty. Or at least the illusion of it.
Still Deschamps doesn’t speak.
But just as Naill is about to leave, he hears it. A mumble. Nothing more. He raises a hand, knowing the officer with his eyes on Deschamps through the hole will have more idea than him.
A hand is raised back: continue.
Niall steps towards the door again. ‘Luke – your wife, Camilla, told us you like coffee,’ he says. ‘She’s very keen to get you home.’
At this, he hears something more distinct.
‘She’s missing you,’ Niall adds softly.
And there it is: a noise. So quiet, he wonders if his mic and recording device will capture it at all.
‘Luke? You OK in there?’ Niall asks. ‘It’s tough, isn’t it? When we’ve made decisions we wouldn’t ordinarily make. And perhaps for reasons you feel others wouldn’t understand.’
Now there’s silence. Niall turns around. A hand goes up. Proceed: Deschamps isn’t displaying dangerous behaviour.
And that’s when he realizes what the noise is: it’s sobbing. Deschamps is sobbing.
And this is the bit where it gets easy. The communication channel has opened, and Niall steps into it like it’s a fresh running stream that’ll carry him away.
‘There’s always a way out. And it doesn’t have to be as bad as you think. I can hear you’re crying,’ he says, and then he starts it: the priming, telling him things he wants him to think. ‘And I know that’s because you care. And I care, too, so let’s find a way to get you out of there together.’
And then Deschamps speaks.