Famous Last Words

Chapter 26

26

Niall

Niall was not surprised to find that Camilla went to the coordinates’ location. She waited for forty minutes – a perfectly normal and reasonable amount of time – and then left. Nothing suspicious about that. On her way in, she’d looked harassed and hopeful, and Niall would bet money on Deschamps never having made direct contact with her before. Whatever he’s up to, Camilla isn’t in on it.

Niall had stood there as she passed, in plain sight but wearing sunglasses despite the evening hour – you can get away with anything in London – just observing her. If he was in any doubt about what the coordinates might have meant to her, he needn’t have been: when she emerged, the emotions were written across her face. Perplexed, sad, hopeless. He’d not seen her for many years, but she was unchanged facially, though she’d cut her hair into a bob. Big eyes and short hair. Perhaps slimmer than back then, somehow tragic-looking, though maybe he was just reading that into her.

And now it’s time for Niall to act. To phone it in. To report it all to the creaking Met, which will impose its bureaucracy on him.

So it is this that brings him to his boss Tim’s office on a sunny Tuesday. He knocks once on the dark-wood door, doesn’t wait, then enters.

Tim, the Detective Superintendent, first and foremost, is a genius. Tidy in physical appearance and with an orderly and structured mind, too: he is able to assess a situation and cut through the weeds that pull other people down.

While Niall went into negotiating, Tim favoured hardcore policing. He was the lead on the Deschamps case, once it became homicide, but has now passed over most big cases in favour of management.

Tim is sitting behind his desk. There isn’t a single piece of paper on it. Only a laptop and a tall glass of water with – get this – a lemon slice bobbing around in it.

‘Can you do something for me?’ Niall asks.

‘How about Long time no speak, Tim – how are you ?’ Tim replies, folding his hands in a lattice and placing his chin on top of them.

‘Sorry. Long time no speak, Tim – how are you?’

Tim wrinkles his nose. ‘Have you been smoking ?’

Niall winces. He has replaced Coke with the very nostalgic menthol cigarettes that taste of smoking tobacco covered up ineffectively with chewing gum. They’re not sold any more in England; he has to import them from America on eBay.

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘Look – I need a favour.’

Outside Scotland Yard, the London Eye spins lazily, the trees in bright green bloom around it. Beyond that, the river is a purest blue. Summer’s turned up the saturation.

‘That is no surprise,’ Tim says, cupping his face and looking at Niall.

‘It’s quite delicate.’

Immediately, Tim’s expression changes into something more serious. ‘Shoot.’

‘I need to trace a phone number. I suspect it’ll be a burner phone, but I want to see first. I could’ve gone direct to Claire, but I’m coming to you.’

‘Uh-huh. Understood.’ Tim spreads his arms. ‘And?’ he says, a small, confused frown on his face.

‘I need to allocate it to a file.’

‘… OK.’

‘But once I do that, everyone is going to jump on this. And I’m not sure if I’m right here. The file is Luke Deschamps,’ Niall says.

‘Deschamps?’ Tim says. ‘Rearing his head again so soon since the sighting?’

Niall explains the situation to Tim.

‘Back from the beyond,’ Tim replies, an unreadable expression on his face. ‘Give me the number.’

Niall slides it across the desk. Tim glances at it and then begins typing to telecoms, and Niall is so pleased to have a boss who does things just as quickly as he wants them done. Tim waits a few seconds, then reads something off the screen. ‘It’s a disposable pay-as-you-go, as suspected. But it has pinged two masts.’ Tim’s expression changes into more than just mild interest. ‘One in central London – needle in a haystack. But then also, a mast in Dungeness.’

‘Pretty remote.’

‘Yeah.’

‘A good spot to hide?’

Tim holds Niall’s gaze. ‘Coordinates – now – is weird, isn’t it? Why not send them seven years ago?’

‘I know. Odd.’

‘We need a team on this.’

‘Yeah,’ Niall says. ‘I think we do.’

They pause for several seconds, Niall thinking, and assuming Tim is, too. ‘I suppose we will go down there,’ he says eventually.

‘South-east coast. Kent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ask some questions. Knock on some doors. Keep up the surveillance on Camilla.’

‘Leave it to me,’ Niall says.

Tim looks up at him, sips the water, then pauses, his expression perplexed. ‘So you’re on this case, are you? Or what?’ he asks; then he holds his hands up. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

‘I’m not negotiating, but I … I don’t know.’ Niall turns away from him, looks at the closed door to his office. ‘I don’t know,’ he says again quietly. ‘We’ll see.’

‘Sometimes, solving a case stops the demons,’ Tim says.

‘Sometimes, looking for a solution is the problem,’ Niall says, but he doesn’t truly believe it.

‘We’ll have you on the case until you say otherwise.’

The team – including Niall – is leaving for Dungeness in an hour, the force predictably ablaze with excitement at potentially capturing Deschamps after all this time. One of the PCs just told Niall he was thirteen when Deschamps went missing, remembers watching it on the news, to which Niall said, ‘Fuck me, I’m old.’

Right now, he is walking through the streets surrounding Scotland Yard to buy a new burner phone to contact Deschamps on, and smoking and thinking. He’s lucky that Tim is a friend as well as a colleague, who lets him pick and choose what he works on. He overheard Maidstone – now promoted – ask what Niall was doing back on the case, and Tim loyally deflect. He’s glad, too, that the Met is springing into action. So often with these things the budget won’t stretch, the boxes need to be ticked, and they lose the heat on the lead they have.

There is nowhere better to walk than London. Niall is near to Embankment. It’s a windy day, and he gazes at a man sketching the river on a plain pad of paper.

‘Niall?’ a voice says behind him. It belongs to a woman emerging from the Tube. Niall’s eyes meet hers, and it’s Rosalind, Viv’s sister.

‘How are you doing?’ Niall says carefully.

She is an avatar of Viv. Same huge head of hair – Niall even now, seven years on, finds strands of them in his flat – but she’s different, too. Smaller nose, a more contained personality. None of Viv’s wildness.

‘Yes, great,’ Rosalind says. She is a person who – Niall thinks – likes to pretend. She’s married to a banker called Freddie, who issues put-downs to her in company, which Rosalind pretends not to notice. Oh, or maybe he no longer does – Niall forgets, sometimes, that his information about Viv is long out of date. They keep in touch but not about anything that matters.

Niall and Rosalind haven’t yet decided if this will be a ten-second exchange or ten minutes, and Niall stands awkwardly as commuters dodge and weave around them.

‘You?’ Rosalind asks, perhaps only to be polite. It’s been years since Niall has seen her. He remembers a night about a week after Viv left. She went to stay with Rosalind, and Niall turned up at the door on an ill-advised pleading mission. ‘She’s sick of playing second fiddle to a job,’ Rosalind had said.

‘But she never said that,’ Niall said, standing right there on the doorstep in the rain like some tosser in a movie. ‘She never said.’

Rosalind had half closed the door. ‘Why should she have to sound the alarm to you?’ she said, eyes only just visible in the closing crack. ‘You should have known.’

Two weeks after that, the first lawyer’s letter had arrived. Niall called Viv up directly when he’d received it, even though it said not to do precisely that.

‘You were not ignored by me in favour of work,’ he had said, phone cradled into his ear at his desk. ‘That’s what it says here, item one of my “unreasonable behaviour”.’

‘Yes I was. You only had time for me if you didn’t have a job on.’

‘That’s the nature of my work. And everyone’s work.’

‘Nothing better to do.’

‘No, that’s not it.’

‘What did I do that day?’ she’d said. ‘The day of the siege.’

‘What? I don’t know.’

‘Did I go to work? How did I celebrate my birthday?’

‘Look: I’ll be better,’ he’d said. ‘Tell me what you’re up to. And I won’t – I won’t …’ He hadn’t been able to say it. I won’t ignore you, or take you for granted . The thing is, with Viv, like all stinging criticism, it had been warranted. Of course it had. Every copper’s marriage suffered.

‘Fine,’ Niall says now to Rosalind. ‘I don’t have long – I’m on a job.’

He doesn’t know why he says it. To goad her, perhaps. To provoke a reaction. Maybe to make himself feel that he lost it all for something: that work is more important to him, even when he is no longer sure of that at all.

And that’s when she does it. The slightest roll of her eyes. Niall catches it, the same way that you can only momentarily see a spider’s web tracing its way across your path in the sunlight. He says nothing back.

‘What job?’ she asks. Rosalind is in summer wear, flip-flops and sunglasses, her hair a lion’s mane.

‘An old siege rearing its head,’ he says. ‘How is Viv …?’

‘Fine.’

‘What is she up to?’

Rosalind pauses, clearly wanting to say something, but not knowing whether she ought to. Niall stubs his cigarette out on a nearby bin spilling over with rubbish, then tosses it in. ‘It’s fine, Ros,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to tell me anything.’

‘She’s broken up with Brad.’

Brad . The American.

‘Oh, why?’ he says, feigning sympathy, hot, pleasant hope rising up through him.

Rosalind holds his gaze for a second, there outside the busy Tube. A couple more people push past them, and Niall gestures for them to stand to the side, in the shade of a shop’s awning.

Rosalind looks down the street, at a man playing steel drums on Hungerford Bridge in the sun. Eventually, she looks back at him, and says: ‘They never stick.’

‘No.’ Niall doesn’t know what to say. It’s gauche to grill Viv’s sister. It’s unseemly to pester Viv herself. She told him what she wanted, and she got it. Their divorce was finalized four years ago, his unreasonable behaviour evidently confirmed and verified by a court, even though he was told they only rubber-stamp it.

And yet … sometimes, late at night, he will smoke on his balcony and think of her, and feel sure that, somewhere out there, she is thinking of him, too, right at that exact same moment.

‘Well …’ Niall says, ready to make the meeting two minutes, not ten, ready to stop this conversation and the awkwardness Rosalind is clearly feeling.

She removes her sunglasses and – yes – there are the eyes, those same eyes. Exactly the colour and shape of Viv’s: the dark lash line, everything. For a few seconds, Niall can only gaze at them, and pretend it’s her. ‘She said late one night that she still loves you oh my God I shouldn’t be saying this,’ Rosalind says, just like that, all in a rush.

‘Did she?’ Niall says. ‘When?’ All of his nerve endings feel alive.

She’d texted him a few months ago. Just a news story about somebody they used to see in the Barbican pushing a pram with two cats inside. He’d replied, and it had ended there, but he’d found it interesting, sad and loaded. The choice of topic: where they used to live together, with the stray animals she collected.

‘A few months ago,’ Rosalind says.

‘In what context?’

‘Just talk,’ Rosalind says. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve got to go. It’s just …’

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ Rosalind says. He goes to reach for her, but she waves him off, waves him away. And then, over her shoulder, she throws him a single line: ‘For a hostage negotiator, you are a terrible communicator in marriage.’

A terrible communicator in marriage . This is what Niall keeps thinking as they approach Dungeness, a small coastal wasteland two hours from Scotland Yard. Viv isn’t what his mind should be preoccupied with, but she is. The Bermondsey siege and his marital breakdown, forever twinned. Why did she use the present tense? You are a terrible communicator in marriage.

He shakes his head. What an idiot, finding a positive in that insult.

He’s sitting in the passenger seat of Tim’s car – he hates not driving, makes him feel sick – woozily reading old articles about the Deschamps case.

HOSTAGES NEVER FOUND THANKS TO BUNGLED INVESTIGATION

THE MET have admitted they still do not know, six weeks on, the identity of the men murdered during the Bermondsey siege

Just over six weeks after the explosive events of a siege in Bermondsey, London, in which writer, husband and father-of-one Luke Deschamps took three hostages and murdered two of them, police still do not know the identity of the dead hostages.

‘You would expect dental records, DVLA records, anything,’ our expert forensic investigator says. ‘These days, it’s impossible to not know the identity of a dead body.’

The perpetrator, Luke Deschamps, remains on the run

Niall sighs, doesn’t read the rest of the article, and looks at the straight horizon instead, trying to feel less queasy. It really can be impossible to know the identity of a dead body, despite what the Mail ’s expert forensic investigator says. If they don’t show up on the dental records website when you search their exact fillings by placement in the mouth and date. If they aren’t registered on the DVLA. It baffled Niall, but it’s nevertheless true.

The mast the burner phone pinged serves the entire Dungeness estate, a post-apocalyptic-looking cluster of beach huts and old radar stations sitting right on the shingled coast. Niall thought it was the UK’s only desert, though on the way Tim told him this is an urban myth, that it’s ‘not at all a desert, technically and environmentally’.

The sea is rough and tumbling when Niall, Tim and a small team arrive in unmarked cars. Niall gets out, and immediately a blunted, warm sea wind hits him. It disturbs the marram grass, making it sway and bend and crack. It’s hot, but wild.

Niall agrees with Tim: Dungeness possibly is a good place to hide. Not really a small village, more disparate and eerie holiday lets that people pass through week after week, separated by shingle and the sort of stiff plants you’d find in a terrarium, all cut through by a single winding tarmac path.

One lone pub with a swinging sign that sounds like grating metal. A tiny café that, even now, in the high summer, is closed. You could stay anonymous here, for sure. You could see almost nobody.

A lighthouse stands sentry, looking over everything, a single bulb burning at the top. An officer tries the door, but it is locked, the ground-floor window boarded up, empty.

They’re in plain clothes. An informal reconnaissance right now. The only way to leave the estate is by road, unless you have a boat, so it doesn’t matter that they’re conspicuous, in convoy. So far, the text and coordinates could be something and nothing, but Niall doesn’t think so. He feels a thrill work its way up his body as they begin to door-knock, officers spreading out in all directions.

The police spiral outwards, knocking on the doors of each small holiday home. Niall heads to one of the huts, a small black wooden structure no bigger than most people’s bedrooms called ‘Radar’ that stands, angular, on the horizon, like a crow. As he walks towards it, the pub sign squeaks behind him, and he wonders why nobody’s thought to oil it. The sound would drive him mad.

He reaches the door of Radar. It’s partially clad in corrugated iron, brown, sits right on the coastline, sea stretching out behind it. Niall raises a hand to knock, but just before his fist connects, he sees movement within, through the small round glass window. He pauses, staring, eyes gritty from sea spray.

Nothing more. He squints. It could be him. It really could. On the run for seven years. Imagine if he found him. Brought him to justice.

Niall sends a couple of team members a message, then waits, not moving, not wanting to alert the shadowy form within. He peers around the side of the small hut. There’s nowhere for him to escape this time.

Maidstone and another colleague, Robinson, arrive. They look through the glass, then brace themselves.

A single shout – ‘ Police! ’ – and they force the door. And, just like one of his dreams, Niall finds he can’t go in. His feet and legs stop working. He turns away, staying outside, his shoulders rounded and scared, a coward’s stance. Jess formally diagnosed complex PTSD, but Niall dismissed it. Almost every hostage negotiator has some trauma or other, he said, and she said, ‘Does that make it OK?’

‘Come on,’ Niall says to himself, then takes a breath and heads inside, thinking of that night seven years ago, the shots, Viv’s absence, and stares around. Open-plan kitchen, bedroom, living room, all in one.

There’s a coat, hung up by its hood on a wardrobe door that is swinging slightly in the breeze of a Dyson fan.

No Deschamps here.

Five minutes later, the owner of the coat arrives back. He’s been walking on the beach. That’s all.

Niall sighs. He’s wrong again. Spooked again. Later, in the pub, they will discuss him, he assumes.

He turns and walks to the next hut; that sentence uttered by Rosalind is still rattling around his brain, and rattling him: For a hostage negotiator, you are a terrible communicator. Well, maybe he’s a terrible hostage negotiator, too, he thinks. No one has yet found Deschamps on the estate. Niall brought everyone to the very end of Kent and all they found was a coat hanging on a wardrobe, a few holidaymakers, and no Deschamps. He made everyone wait to go into the warehouse, and look what happened there. He sighs, looking up into the arching summer sky, lights up a cigarette, and tries to stop thinking for a while. Just a little while.