Chapter 29
29
Niall
INTERNAL REPORT:
CAMILLA DESCHAMPS (NéE FLETCHER)
MOVEMENTS: AS NORMAL.
VISITORS TO PROPERTY: (1) SISTER, LIBBY.
PHONE CALLS: (2) SISTER, LIBBY; BOSS, STUART.
CONTACT WITH SUSPECT: NONE SEEN.
The Met has continued surveillance on Cam’s house. They’ve had her phone tapped for four months, but they now also have a small team watching her house on Bucks Avenue, in case Deschamps reaches out.
But that doesn’t stop Niall passing by today. Nobody can tell him not to go to Putney. Even if it is incredibly out of his way.
It’s five o’clock in the morning. OK – so it isn’t out of his way: he isn’t going anywhere at all; he got up after his gunshot dream and came. But he feels something, deep inside him. Somebody wanted to get hold of her. And the night-time is when people act on these impulses. Niall has on a Royal Mail T-shirt he bought off eBay which comes in handy in these sorts of situations: no one questions a postman.
Besides, he is more observant and more patient than anyone in the Met’s surveillance team. That’s the reality. So say he comes down here a few nights a week, sits for an hour, maybe two. He might catch Deschamps himself.
From Cam’s street you can see an unusual summer mist rising in the distance, coming off the river like ripped-up candyfloss after the wet night. The light at this hour is blue, the air cool, the houses sleeping. Only two lit-up windows on the whole street, night workers maybe, or else insomniacs. Probably police, Niall thinks drily.
He immediately clocks his colleagues’ car – unmarked – parked a few hundred yards down the road, and dodges out of its line of vision. Postman or not, he could do without being recognized, without his colleagues finding out that he believes surveillance teams merely sit, chat shit, eat McDonald’s, and wait to retire (though they absolutely do).
He stands in the shadow of an alleyway for ten minutes, twenty, just looking and watching. No Deschamps, no visitors at all. Cam and Polly likely sleeping inside, the owner of the Dungeness burner phone given up, for now maybe, knowing they’ve been traced.
Niall waits there for two hours, standing up. He’s not as fit as he used to be, and by seven his knees have begun to ache. He’s positioned himself near to her front door, then behind her house, too, checking the garden gate. He’s not certain the Met would be this thorough.
Back on the street, near to Camilla’s door, he stares down an alleyway across the road, his expression blank. Niall knows you have to monitor a house many times until you see something, so he’s surprised when he sees a form. No, a movement, at the end of an alley running between two terraced houses, dawn-lit at its opening. Out of the sphere of police surveillance. They will be looking at the house: Niall is looking into places where people might hide.
And just stepping across the alleyway is a man. Tall. Dark hair.
Without thinking, Niall hurries across the street, through the wrought-iron gate, and down the alley.
He reaches the end, looks left and right into the fenced-off gardens, dew on their grass, but there’s nobody. There are four more alleyways spiralling off, and he chooses one at random, runs down it, but it’s empty, nobody on the other side of it, either. He’s lost him. He made the wrong decision.
The Deschamps briefings stopped about a year after his disappearing act, and Niall hasn’t missed them. This is the first formal one since the arrival of those coordinates, and the mood in the Scotland Yard back boardroom is lazy, the dog days of late June, the weather too hot outside. Two DSs are unwrapping Soleros, the packets leaving sticky orange marks on the table.
He walks in just before it begins. Funny, he still feels self-conscious about this case. In the end, nobody moved him off it but himself, but still, failure is failure, to Niall. That’s what his dad used to say, anyway.
On the desk is a set of texts and calls Camilla has made. Two are to Luke’s number. Hang-ups. To hear his voice, he guesses. Something sympathetic spikes inside him. How sad.
‘In short,’ Lambert says, promoted up the ranks and now leading on this – he lets Niall sit in – ‘there is no indication the wife knows anything about Deschamps’s whereabouts. His passport remains unused, bank accounts closed or inactive, no CCTV sightings, nothing came up in our ramped-up surveillance of Camilla. We’ll monitor for another month, if the authorizing officer approves, and then stop again. Even she, herself, is applying to have him declared dead. Not exactly the behaviour of someone in touch with him. No need to waste more resources on it.’
A disappointed murmur moves around the meeting room. No coppers like cases without any answers at all: they’re trained not to. But this is more than that. Usually, there’s a working hypothesis. For this one, nothing. A missing man. Two dead, identity-less hostages. It makes no sense to anyone. Did Deschamps target them? How did Deschamps identify a crime that could be not quite victimless, but almost?
It’s time for Niall to speak up, though he doesn’t want to. The push/pull of being here, back on the Deschamps case. He wants answers, and he also wants out. To go to sleep and forget, to never be woken by those gunshots again.
‘Just …’ Niall says, and Lambert looks at him, expression blank: the sort of face that says, Feel free to speak up, but I’m not going to encourage you . ‘I’d rather surveillance don’t know, but I was passing there this morning, and I saw someone hanging around. Was it police? Tall guy, dark hair.’
‘Where?’ Maidstone says. He writes something down. Niall hopes he won’t pass it on: surveillance are always good to have onside, even if you think they’re inadequate.
‘At the end of the alleyway opposite Camilla’s house,’ Niall says. ‘Clearly looking across at her windows, until he saw me. It wasn’t Deschamps, but …?’
‘I’ll relay it, and we’ll keep an eye, but only for the next month.’
‘And that’s it – we just stop? Random men watching Camilla. Two dead – still unknown – hostages. The man himself sending coordinates to his wife …’
‘You might think it was him, but there’s very little evidence of that.’
‘Who else is it realistically going to be?’ Niall asks.
‘Could be anyone. Literally anyone in the world,’ Lambert says shortly.
‘Yeah, but who does that?’
‘We’ve pursued the lines of enquiry,’ Lambert says, his tone light, and Niall feels a surge of disappointment that this is who he ended up as. That rock-metal-loving DS who could get anything out of a suspect is now the same as all the others: by the book. ‘We went to Dungeness. We’re watching the house. So far, nothing. This is all expended resources, and it’s also heavy surveillance of an innocent woman.’
‘So that’s that then,’ Niall says.
‘What do you suggest?’ Lambert says, his tone ice.
‘Working a little harder? Or at least a little smarter.’
‘By which you mean …’
‘Keep looking for the man I saw. Keep looking for the man we saw on her street four months ago. Keep going back to Dungeness. Ask market traders in the area whether they sold a burner phone to anyone matching his description,’ Niall says, frustrated. This is how it goes with the Met. He’s sure some crimes remain unsolved due to lack of effort, rigid thinking and red tape. ‘Do Text Anon have any details of where the text was sent from?’
‘A VPN routed to Brazil. A proxy server, designed to hide a location,’ Lambert says.
‘Who would do that but a fugitive? Have you got Claire in telecoms on it?’ Niall says, but he will ask her himself.
‘Any spammer who wanted anything. A petty dealer who got the wrong number.’
‘Is that not a crime?’ Niall says – a cheap shot, really, one he doesn’t even mean.
‘Not worth a full surveillance budget,’ Lambert says humourlessly, conversation closed. ‘We can’t keep throwing good money after bad. If it was Deschamps, he will slip up again one day, if he’s out there.’
‘Yeah, and we won’t be looking,’ Niall says.
Lambert straightens some papers on the table, clears his throat. ‘Sometimes,’ he says lightly, ‘it’s best to just accept that some investigations are better off without your input. Speaking generally.’
Niall sits back in his seat, disappointed. He’s glad he bought the new burner phone the other day: and now’s the time to use it. He’s given the Met time to trace Deschamps officially, and they haven’t. It’s time for him to act.
Therapists, another hostage negotiator once told Niall, call it ‘hand-on-the-door syndrome’. When people reveal themselves only as they’re leaving, and then bring up the topic which means the most to them.
Jess wants to talk about the gunshots. She wants to get to the bottom of why he hears them. Doesn’t seem quite satisfied with the explanation that Niall made a mistake, and is haunted by it.
Hand-on-the-door syndrome. Niall does just that in Jess’s office today. It’s raining, rare summer rain, the world outside her windowpane a watercolour. ‘Rosalind said Viv never got over me,’ he says, summer jacket slung on, palm – proverbially only: Jess always opens the door for him – on the handle.
He has nobody to discuss it with, and the conversation keeps moving fast around his mind like a ping-pong ball. He’s got to get it out, somehow.
‘Oh,’ Jess says, clearly surprised. ‘And how do you feel about that?’
She takes her glasses off and begins to clean them on her shirt. Takes one to know one, thinks Niall: she’s telling him there’s no hurry, inviting him to talk even though the session is over, pretending she isn’t listening avidly. ‘Surprised,’ Niall says. ‘She ended it. Said she played second fiddle to my work.’
Jess pauses, perhaps weighing up what to say, then concluding that Niall can deal with it. She looks directly at him, no glasses, eyes clear. ‘And did she?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you regret that?’
Niall turns his mouth down, not saying anything.
‘What exactly did she say to Rosalind?’ Jess asks.
‘I don’t know. Rosalind said she’d finished with this boyfriend of hers, the American with the rescue dog’ – Jess raises her eyebrows at this – ‘and that it was because of me.’
‘Do you think it was because of you?’
‘I don’t know. I have no idea. After she left I …’ Niall says. His throat clogs as he thinks of that night. It’s all tied together for him. The rain intensifies outside. Jess’s office roof is flat; they can hardly hear each other over it.
‘I told her she didn’t play second fiddle to my job.’
‘But you said that she did.’
‘I know. But she wouldn’t. I … I don’t know. It’s mad,’ Niall says. ‘I forgot her birthday, is all.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. No. But sometimes I … I just think there’s another chance for us.’ Niall meets her eyes again as he says this, and Jess’s face falls in sympathy, perhaps feeling sorry for a deluded old fool.
‘Do you think Viv thinks that?’
‘I don’t know. Probably not.’
‘Maybe she didn’t believe you,’ Jess says lightly. ‘When you assured her.’ She puts her glasses back on. They magnify her eyes, a clear green, not unlike Viv’s.
‘Believe me?’
‘That she isn’t second fiddle.’
‘Rosalind said I am a crap communicator, considering what I do,’ Niall says.
‘Everyone is, about something,’ Jess says, seeing him out now into the corridor, where it’s quieter. ‘Their Achilles heel.’
‘Hmm,’ Niall says, turning to her as they part, hoping for more wisdom, but it doesn’t come. Time’s up.
Downstairs, he buys a pain au chocolat from the bakery and gets his new burner phone out. He’s going to try to contact Deschamps. He can’t leave the case to go cold again, Deschamps to simply remain on the run. Of course he sent those coordinates. Of course he did, and nobody is trying hard enough to find him.
He just needs to bait him with something he cares about, that’s all.
Without thinking of the firm boundary he’s crossing with the Met – sod the Met and their due processes – he dials Deschamps’s burner phone’s number. Voicemail. He tries again. Voicemail.
But, this time, he sends a text, thinking of himself, and what would get him moving. And it’s Viv. It’s always been Viv.
If you want to see your wife again, I can help you , he writes.