Famous Last Words

Chapter 23

23

Niall

Gunshots.

Niall turns over in bed, perfunctorily checks the window to see if they’re real, but of course they’re not. They never are.

The dream gunshots wake him most nights, now. They started two years ago, infrequent at first. Niall hadn’t thought much of them at the time. Strange dreams, from his disaster of a negotiation that meant he went back on detective duties. It’s not surprising it resides somewhere in his consciousness, like a deep-sea creature you can only see if you look hard enough.

He tries to sleep again, but can’t. Time inches ever forwards. His room is black, the only light coming from the very edges of the windows – he got blackout blinds last year, to try to help, but they didn’t. Eventually, he switches the light on and sits up, rubbing his eyes.

He checks his phone. Four fifteen. Same as ever.

The dream begins to fade from his mind, Niall’s heartbeat slowing with it. He was asking for more and more and more time in it. Maidstone refusing. Niall insisting. Niall holding the released Isabella, her body soft and warm against his. Niall changing his mind, racing into the building, and then – always, always, always – the dream ends with the two shots, fired in quick succession, right behind Niall. He never gets there in time to stop them.

And then the bodies. The round bullet holes in their skulls. Their DNA flagged nothing on the police database. Their teeth matched no known dental records, nor any on international databases, either. No relatives ever, ever came forward for them, despite extensive appeals. It’s a mystery with no solution, no ending.

He tells himself it’s been on his mind more since the sighting in February. Deschamps, or someone who looks a lot like him, seen near Camilla’s house by a traffic officer. They couldn’t catch him in time. He got away. And maybe it wasn’t him, but … the dreams stepped up, from there.

Niall gives up on sleep, gets up and starts the day.

Later that morning, he sits in Jess’s office. She is, he is reluctant to say, his therapist. He’s been sent to see her – against his will – because he accidentally disclosed the gunshot dreams to Tim, his boss, who phoned it right in. Officers can’t be on the verge of PTSD, apparently, not without talking endlessly about it in beige rooms with boxes of tissues on the tables. Niall told them it isn’t PTSD, but, of course, nobody listens.

Jess practises on the first floor of a mid-century block of offices in Lambeth. Her room doesn’t smell like a therapist’s office: it smells of the bakery beneath it – hot cinnamon rolls and fresh bread and yeast. She is young, too young to be so wise, has blonde hair and dimples and a particular contrary tone she gets about her when Niall is saying something irrational without realizing it.

‘The same dream as ever?’ she says, and she is, Niall thinks, pleased that he’s discussing it. He mostly skirts around his two banned topics, this being the first, talking in broad terms about responsibility in policing in general, about the ops he has on, wasting time for the session. Niall is good at talking and good, too, at running down a clock, and he does it every week with Jess.

‘When you dream of it – what do you wish you could do in the dream?’ Jess asks. She sits forward. She knows what happened in the Bermondsey siege – she was briefed on it by the Met’s in-house occupational health team. But she’s never heard Niall outline more than the very basic facts.

‘Wake up,’ Niall says, but Jess doesn’t laugh, merely puffs air through her nose and looks down at her lap, then back up at him, waiting for a serious answer that may not come.

It’s almost the end of the session, and she leaves it a beat, still expecting some sort of disclosure from him.

‘Did you ever see the bodies?’ she asks. A surprising question, one that seems to come out of nowhere.

‘Yeah. In the station – the forensic pathologist …’

‘Can you describe them?’

Niall closes his eyes, not wanting to go back there. To the neat temple wounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, blue T-shirts, middle-aged, white, both of them. A Salvador Dalí drip of blood from the neckline downwards. Niall used to be bothered by things like this, used to drive home too fast and wake Viv up from sleep to hold her, but he isn’t any longer. The truth is, you really can see too much. Until seeing something like this – two people, shot to death – becomes just another bit of admin.

‘Do you wish you could stop it?’ she suggests. ‘When you hear those shots?’

‘I know that you will say I can’t control the actions of gunmen,’ Niall replies. Another deflection.

Jess smiles. ‘You don’t know what I will say.’

‘Isn’t it that?’

‘It is your job to prevent these things as much as is possible’ – she holds her hands, palms up, to him – ‘but you are also a human being.’

‘I know that,’ Niall replies. He likes that Jess still talks about his hostage negotiation career in the present tense. For him, it’s all past. The Met didn’t take him off negotiations: he took himself off them.

‘Vulnerable to mistakes, as is anyone.’ She pauses. ‘Marital or otherwise.’

This is the second banned topic, so Niall ignores Jess’s invitation.

He gazes down at his feet, saying nothing. Only earlier this morning he checked Viv’s WhatsApp, as he does sometimes. There she was in her profile photo in her pink T-shirt, smiling at him. Last seen 22:11 . He likes to look at that sometimes. See her continuing on even without him, living her life.

They have some contact. Every few months, one will text the other, something anodyne usually. Viv was very careful last year to let Niall know she is dating an American who – God forbid – has an actual RSPCA rescue dog. Be still Viv’s beating heart. Nevertheless, Niall does, in fact, still feel very close to Viv in that way you do sometimes when you don’t see a friend for over a year but when you meet up nothing has changed. Maybe this is a delusion. Probably. Even so, he hasn’t forgotten her birthday since.

‘Are you not allowed to make mistakes?’

‘I wasn’t. As a kid,’ Niall says sullenly, remembering falling off his bike and getting told off for it by his father, among other things.

‘Well – you are now,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How often are the dreams now?’ she asks.

‘Only once or twice a week,’ Niall lies.

It does not exactly surprise Niall when, that evening at seven, working late, he receives the alert from the Met’s surveillance team: a text has pinged on Camilla’s phone. She’s about to be sent a message from a service called textanon.com. The Met put covert surveillance back on her phone after the sighting. It does no harm and, once in a while, those on the run slip up.

Like this.

Niall springs into action, calling Claire in telecoms. Her kids are in their teens, now, and, if anything, she’s become even more formidable as her home life has eased.

‘I know why you’re calling,’ she says, ‘and if you let me get off the phone, I will call Text Anon myself and make a release request.’

‘Fine,’ Niall says, then waits. He sighs. It’s been a long day already, heralded by Deschamps’s own gunshots, and succeeded by boring detective work that doesn’t excite him. Domestics. Burglaries. Nothing where Niall needs to make a judgement call.

He stares out at London. It’s another perfect summer. No rain for weeks, the air crystalline and fragile with the heat, only just beginning to cool down now.

Five minutes, ten, and Claire comes back to him.

‘Good news,’ she says. ‘It’s not sent yet. They’re on a delay. We can intercept it.’

‘Brilliant,’ Niall says.

‘Anon say they hold the message before sending it, so I’ve asked them to capture it, and not send it,’ Claire says.

Damn, Niall likes her. She’s so smart. ‘Thank you,’ he says. Neither of them says the unsaid: that he ought not to be working on this file. Not after he passed it over.

‘I’m guessing,’ Claire says, ‘that … somebody … is going to go to the location, instead of Camilla?’

‘Right,’ Niall says, smiling for perhaps the first time today.

‘The original text said eight o’clock. At these coordinates,’ she says, rattling them off.

‘Excellent,’ Niall says, ringing off.

And then, for belt and braces, he sends Camilla a new message, anonymous, identical text, changing the time from eight to nine o’clock tonight: it will be interesting to see if she attends, and what she will do when she thinks her husband might want to meet her. And it will be even more interesting to go in her place, and see who wants to contact her so covertly.

Whoever this is – Deschamps? – has chosen a seemingly random location. Unfamiliar, deep in Islington. Niall walks there, the evening light gilding the tops of buildings, the streets in shadow.

They didn’t find many answers in the weeks and months following the siege. That the hostages were never identified is a fact Niall found most alarming, most disturbing. It tells him that the situation they dealt with was not normal, but he still cannot work out in what way. Two bodies. No identification. Left in a morgue for three months, then given paupers’ funerals, two unmarked graves. Niall has dealt with murder cases where the body was never found. He’s never dealt with murder cases where the victims did not appear to exist. It’s a clue. He just doesn’t know what it means.

They each had on them close to two hundred pounds in cash, pay-as-you-go Oyster cards, and nothing else. No mobile phones. No wallets. No house keys, car keys. Nothing.

Occasionally, over the intervening time, Niall researched things – on the quiet – but they never came to anything. Nothing Deschamps had worked on seemed at all sinister, at all salacious. No salient facts came to light. No visits to counsellors, no confessions to friends, not much weird behaviour at all, actually. A single suspicious Google search from Camilla about arguing with your husband is not enough to hang a case on.

Niall sat in on interviewing Isabella Louis, after the siege ended and before he left negotiation for good, in a dull police interviewing suite. She’d sat there, small of stature but clear and certain, and told Niall that she’d been cleaning up her warehouse for an incoming tenant to enter the following Monday when she’d heard the commotion. That she’d seen Deschamps pointing the gun at the two hostages, that he arrived with them and that, the second he saw her, he directed her on to a chair, too. He didn’t tie her hands, only the men’s, so when the phone rang, she’d chanced it, and darted to answer. She knew the layout of the building well enough. Niall had been vaguely curious about this. ‘Pretty ballsy,’ he’d said.

She’d shrugged, looked back at him, and said, ‘I thought I was dead either way.’

‘Fair,’ Niall had replied: other hostages had said similar to him.

The camera in the hole in the wall had captured all of this, but when Isabella answered the phone, Deschamps directed everyone to move. They’d lost sight of them.

Isabella filled in the gaps: when Deschamps had heard George’s threat on the end of the phone, Isabella said to him that she owned the building, and she could get him out of there if he released her.

‘I know it wasn’t the right thing to do,’ she said. ‘But anyone would’ve done it. To survive.’

Niall nodded. Perhaps Isabella took his silence for judgement, because she added, ‘I know in giving him the escape route I sentenced his hostages to death.’ Her voice caught on the final word.

‘I would have done the same,’ Niall said.

‘We were so thankful for Hamish,’ she said. ‘Our security guard, who works remotely. He captured it beginning, and therefore alerted you guys.’

‘And the media,’ Niall said lightly.

‘Well. Yes. But also the police. And George.’

She’d looked at him, then, clear-eyed and vulnerable, and Niall had immediately thought that he liked her. ‘Yes, thank God for him,’ he said. ‘What is the most significant thing you remember about it all?’ he probed. An open question, designed to pull detail out of her.

‘That I wet myself,’ she said, still looking him dead in the eye. ‘When he raised the gun to me, to get me to the chair, I wet myself, right then and there.’ She glanced down at her tiny hands, then back up again at Niall. ‘Then I had to sit in it. I think it’s why he didn’t tie me up. Felt sorry for me.’

Niall nodded, swallowing hard. ‘I get that,’ he said softly. He left it a few respectful beats before asking, ‘Why do you think Deschamps took his other hostages?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said after a pause. ‘There was no talk between them.’

‘Why do you think he killed them?’

‘I don’t know that, either. But I feel like perhaps he was always going to.’

‘Why?’

‘He didn’t negotiate with them. He didn’t say anything to them. It was like there was nothing anybody could’ve done.’

Niall had winced at that. How had he got it so wrong?

Isabella and her husband, George, moved on with their lives. She later told Niall she was getting therapy for dealing with a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder following her ordeal, and was trying to get over that and a fear of confined spaces, too. Niall hadn’t said he felt exactly the same. When they met again, a few years ago – as part of a victim-support scheme Niall is trying to get off the ground – she asked him if they ever found out who the hostages were. Survivors’ guilt, he thought. She told him she’d sold all of their buildings. That she was afraid to go in them.

Niall is almost at the coordinates. He thinks – on balance – that it won’t be Deschamps. Wouldn’t he send Camilla to somewhere significant – or somewhere very remote? Why the middle of London? He’d be seen by so many CCTV cameras. If he’s alive, he’s stayed hidden for seven years by not being careless.

Niall arrives, sweating, at half past seven – he likes to be early; he believes it shows good intent – and he walks a slow loop around the streets.

It’s an alleyway that bends on itself, threading between two buildings like a river snake and then into a courtyard. There’s a plain blue door leading off the alleyway. He tries it, and it’s locked, so he shines the torch on his phone on to the mechanism, but it’s a deadbolt, locked from inside. No chance. Using the light, he peers into the cracks, which reveal thin slices of the room to him. It’s some sort of storage cupboard. Small, carpeted. A broom, a mop bucket: he can’t see much else.

Niall has been waiting professionally for years, and so it doesn’t bother him at all to stand in the courtyard for half an hour: you can learn a lot just by looking and – more importantly – by listening, and so this is what he does to occupy himself, scanning the strange, disused space from the very edge, where he will be unseen when his anonymous texter arrives. It sits in the exact centre of a load of buildings, like an empty stomach in the human body. A quiet, calm oasis of concrete. There are two old whisky barrels dotted around, containing long-dead shrubs. A hot metal bench sits in a shaft of sun bounced from somewhere up high. A sprinkling of cigarette butts. And, way, way above him: a square of deep blue sky. Niall understands now: this could be the most private place in London.

How very interesting. Niall veers once again to thinking it’s Deschamps. It’s a smart location in which to stay hidden. Not at all overlooked. If you can run the London CCTV gauntlet and get here, you’d be able to do your dealings pretty much anonymously.

Time runs down slowly like sand through an hourglass. At approaching eight, Niall slinks into the shadows even further.

And soon, it is eight, then five past. Niall purses his lips, thinking.

He can’t imagine they’re not coming. Nobody who sends that sort of text would then ghost.

He takes a slow stroll around the cement island, and that’s when he sees it. A small envelope tucked into one of the barrels. It’s brown; it blended in. Niall picks it up between his index finger and thumb. It’s empty inside, but written on the back flap is a mobile number.

He types it into his phone, then sends a message with a simple I got your note x .

A text comes back immediately. Are you there?

Yes , Niall types back, keeping it simple, giving nothing away. Camilla would presumably do the same.

His phone rings, three times. There’s no way Niall can answer, so he merely stares down at it, waiting for whoever it is to ring off.

Speak to me , a text comes through.

I’m too scared to , he types.

I need to know it’s you .

Oh, it’s me .

Niall paces out of the courtyard, down to the alleyway. He pauses, then another message flashes up. It isn’t you .

Niall tries to reply, but it says: Number blocked .