Chapter 15
15
Niall
The scene erupts into chaos.
‘Armed officers in!’ Maidstone yells into a radio, which blares out on to everybody’s individual radio. ‘Two shots have been fired. Suspect moved everyone away from the hole in the wall. We didn’t see it play out.’
Niall whips around, staring at the black door, still banging slightly in the breeze. His head is full of questions he has no time to answer.
He releases Isabella, who stumbles towards a copper, who leads her to her husband, and Niall turns to head inside. He ought to arm himself, get some sort of clearance, but the situation has disintegrated into a free-for-all. Police flood into the warehouse like a backfilling tide, and Niall follows, too, not thinking. Not allowing himself to think.
The warehouse is cool inside, a perfume of wet stone and musk, lit by a single fluorescent bulb high above. Niall watches the police scatter, shouting, but he moves slowly, his eyes everywhere. Where is Deschamps? He could have his gun trained on Niall right now. And who’d you want to kill next more than the negotiator?
He creeps slowly forwards, watching the police in their riot gear.
Niall isn’t looking for the bodies. He intends to find the shooter, instead. And how could it not be Deschamps? He had the gun. Niall must find him, because it stops him from looking at the reality.
He needs to find the man who fired the shots despite Niall’s instincts that he wasn’t going to. The man Niall bought time for. Incorrectly, as it turns out. He has that nagging feeling people get when they know something enormous has happened to them but they’re not yet ready to fully turn and look right at it.
He needs to find Deschamps, and bring him to justice.
His gaze travels upwards to the door to the roof. Several police are already going up, the others spreading out in the vast warehouse, and Niall decides to follow them, takes the stairs two at a time.
Sixteen internal steps, one fire-escape door, and soon he is out on a staircase that accesses only the roof. The metal is white hot from the sun and momentarily blinding. His feet pound on the stairs, going up, up, up, the ground far below visible through the grating, the view shifting vertiginously.
The roof is flat and still and quiet, the only noise crackling police radios. Niall guesses an old metal fire escape used to be attached to the building, but no longer is.
The roof covering is made of some sort of carbon fibre, flush to the edges, new, bordered by metal railings. There are a couple of extractor fans, old and rusted, but nothing more, and neither of them large enough to hide Deschamps.
His radio blares: ‘Suspect not in warehouse. He is of unknown whereabouts.’
Niall gazes frantically around the roof. If Deschamps is up here, he wouldn’t have been able to get down again without being seen.
‘You shouldn’t be here!’ one of the armed officers yells at him from behind a helmet, but Niall ignores him. Where is he? The building is surrounded. The warehouse has one door. On the radio, nobody has located Deschamps. And he isn’t on the roof.
Where can he possibly be?
Niall spins in a slow circle, just looking.
There were definitely only two shots. He’s sure of that.
Below, Bermondsey glistens in the sun. Beyond that, Southwark, the park just visible, a square knitted patch of dried yellow grass. Police disperse on the roof, heading to the edges, staring downwards, but there’s nothing. There’s no one. No Deschamps. And no bodies yet.