Chapter 35
35
Harry Grace does indeed live in the two-up two-down in Lewisham that the police searched right after Deschamps’s disappearance. Harry claimed not to know him, and they had no reason to suspect he did. A saved Rightmove property is not a connection. Camilla visited it, right after the siege ended, but gleaned nothing either though they questioned her about it.
But, since then, Harry has been arrested multiple times on petty offences, nothing connecting him to Deschamps, but slightly suspicious, nevertheless.
It looks like a perfectly normal house on a busy road. A bay window at the front, two Velux windows in the roof. The only curious thing is that he has three burglar alarms above the porch, all in a row above the door. Three different brands: ADT. Veritas. Yale. Underneath those, a Ring doorbell.
Interesting.
Niall’s been sent out in good faith by his old friend Tim, and trusted to talk – the thing he’s best at in the world, or so Tim says. And now, he’s deciding how to play it. He has no idea why Camilla would call a criminal, only best guesses and hunches. He’s meandered this way and that over strategy, enjoying the old detective instincts coming back to life within him, but, eventually, he realized that you can’t decide anything until you’re in front of somebody.
Niall doesn’t have to press the doorbell before a form appears behind the fake stained glass. A man, tall but stooped, gingery hair. Niall doesn’t recognize him, hasn’t dealt with him or interviewed him, and all he can think as Harry opens the door is that he doesn’t look like a criminal. He looks studious, like somebody who might recite poetry at an open mic night.
‘Harry Grace – Niall Thompson. Nice to meet you,’ Niall says cordially.
Harry reacts to this with suspicion, and then he says, ‘Police?’
Niall nods.
And, without a second’s hesitation, Harry says, ‘Warrant?’
Niall cracks a smile. OK, so he is a criminal – and a real pro, at that. ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘for once, you’re not in trouble.’
‘Right?’
‘A man you know is.’
‘And?’ Harry says. The sunlight illuminates his sallow skin momentarily, burnishing him orange. ‘Might be nice if I could come in and discuss? Away from the heat.’
A quick backward glance into the house tells Niall plenty. No invitation will be forthcoming, and Niall is too fixated on the job at hand to care.
‘I’m told you knew a man called Luke Deschamps,’ he says, deciding to play the first of his cards face up. And just the name, that distinctive name, it evokes raw emotion on Harry’s face. It isn’t anger or guilt, or any of the usual criminal fare: it’s fear. Something Niall sees often in hostage negotiation, more rarely elsewhere. Harry is afraid of that name, and what it might mean for him. That much is clear.
Still, Niall lays his next cards out carefully, one by one, all facing upwards. ‘I’m told if you pass us information about him, we could very easily make that count positively for you.’
‘I don’t need you: I’m out,’ Harry says. Shorthand for not currently in prison , and Niall is reminded – he forgets this – that a vast section of the British public are in and out of prison, of magistrates’ hearings, on bail, on remand, and that they treat this with as much significance as going to Tesco Express.
Harry paces a step backwards into the house, moving his face into shadow. Niall can’t work out whether this is an invitation to come in, so assumes it isn’t.
Their eyes meet, Harry clearly working out whether it’s better to discuss Deschamps in the open or let a copper into his home where, clearly, there is evidence of something.
He chooses the latter, which tells Niall he is more afraid of someone seeing him with Niall than he is of talking to him in private. He steps aside and leads him into a small kitchen that seems to be part way through some sort of renovation: tired pine cabinets and linoleum floor on one side, brand-new bifold doors on the other. A stack of new, modern, dark green kitchen units teeters in the corner. There are no appliances, no kettle, no toaster. Renovations mean money, and Harry doesn’t work: he recently stated to the magistrates’ court he was between jobs .
He doesn’t gesture for Niall to sit, and so they stand there, by the pots of paint samplers and boxes of tiles.
‘Farrow he’s holding a piece of bait out to a wild animal and waiting.
‘I don’t know much,’ he says. ‘Not really.’
‘Do you know if he’s alive?’
Harry turns away again, sifting through a stack of sandpaper with a B things he doesn’t need a warrant to uncover.
A scrap of paper sits in a wooden bowl along with some golf tees and loose change. Niall holds it up to the light while he waits, and reads.
– Username. Sully018747450
– Password: 84hfkHdn[]
– URL: jsudnj283738ndjh.onion.forum
A dark web login for a forum. Niall would know that kind of onion URL anywhere. He takes a photograph of it, then replaces it in the bowl. Upstairs, all is silent, and Niall waits for five more minutes before he accepts what he already knows to have happened.
He calls out, ‘Harry?’
Nothing. No running water, no footsteps.
Niall heads out into the sun-blanched hallway and up the stairs. Sure enough, the bathroom window – a large side-opening one – is wide open. It drops down on to the back of the living room, a flat roof that juts sharply into the garden. The back gate is open, still swinging. Niall thinks of the fear when he mentioned Deschamps. And, clearly, Harry doesn’t think he is saving himself from the police by escaping – he’s no stranger to police interviewing suites – but from somebody else, instead. Somebody more important. Somebody more dangerous.
This is the second time somebody has escaped from Niall on this case, he thinks, as he watches the gate blow on the breeze.
It’s late, after dark, and Niall heads to an internet café called ONLINE NOW. As he walks, his mind naturally turns to Viv – her house is just around the corner from here – and everything Jess said, and some things she didn’t, too.
He takes a detour, up two side streets and on to a main thoroughfare, and there it is. Viv’s house, in darkness. Why is he here? He feels like a creep standing there looking at the house she now lives in. Three windows across, two large ones downstairs. An ancient cat sits in the living-room window.
I miss you I miss you I miss you , said Camilla, and Niall could text the exact same thing, right now, right here. His eyes are wet with it. Her pots and pots of tea and the way she came home with bloody stray cats all the time, the way she must have sat alone on that day, her birthday, and hoped for a single text acknowledging it, from her self-involved, arsehole husband.
He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to make the gesture he wants to make – I fucking regret it, I regret it, I regret it – so he gives those windows one last look, willing it to come. How can he tell her, seven years too late, the truth? That he wishes he’d treated her differently. Better. The truth, also, is that he loves his job, and will probably do it again, one day.
Her bin is out. He lifts the lid like a psycho, and sees that it’s empty, the rubbish collected. Looking both ways, he grabs it by the handle and pulls it back up her path, leaving it in the bin store. He won’t tell her he did it. And it wouldn’t make any difference to her view of him if he did. But it might make her life easier, save her doing a small task that she hates, and that’s worth it, to him.
He enters the internet café to an electronic beep. There is nobody here at all, not even anybody behind the counter, and he waits until they emerge.
He’s not the kind of person Niall was expecting – an old man, late sixties maybe, with two pairs of glasses on: one over his eyes and one nestled in his hair. It smells of coffee in here: instant, cheap, take it black or white. Niall feels a pang of nostalgia for something he can’t name. Maybe it’s just the past. The simple bygone time where internet was dial-up and coffee was coffee.
He can’t access the dark web easily at work, so here he is. A fleeting visit on his way home, to attempt to find out a little more about Harry Grace and Sully. He’s glad the Met is caught up with the woman shot on her doorstep, Madison. Someone is murdered every three days in London, but, lately, deaths seem to depress him more than they used to. Another life lost needlessly.
It’s warm inside the café, and Niall takes off his jacket. Last night, beginning of July, it got darker slightly earlier than the previous, and Niall found himself looking forward to the end of summer, to autumn and to something new. Sometime in the future, when all this is over, where the gunshots may live in the past.
The man leads him over to a surprisingly modern-looking desktop Mac, which he pays fifteen pounds cash to use for forty minutes. ‘Let me know if you need anything,’ he tells Niall, but he says it listlessly, not looking at him. He takes a seat behind the counter and opens the front page of the Guardian on an iPad. It’s his coffee Niall can smell. Brown-grey, half finished.
Niall takes a seat and tries the login on four dark web forums without finding a hit. The URL was a dark web URL, but one temporarily generated that will have only worked for a period of time. So he needs to try the login manually on as many forums as he can find.
Outside, the leafy London street is black and neon, the colour of an eighties disco. Lit-up shops and headlights and streetlamps and dark air.
Four more forums, still nothing. He heads down and down and down the whirlpool of the web, searching more and more nefarious places. He isn’t put off – of course criminal enterprises have to hide themselves well from police – and, after a while, Niall pays for a second lot of forty minutes and orders his own instant grey coffee, too.
Nobody else would do this. Maybe Claire in telecoms, but that’s it. It’s old-school work, grunt work, but it almost always pays off.
Ninth forum, tenth, and there it is, on the eleventh. The login works.
He heads straight to the inbox, taking photographs of each message as he goes.
Sully018747450: I can do that for you. Meet at my address? 22 Grove Avenue, Lewisham.
As Niall suspected: Sully is Harry: Sully018747450 – protection 4 all ur needs.
He clicks all messages in thread and lets them load. Then sorts them by date, earliest to latest.
And there it is. In June 2017.
Bingo.
Not only has he found Harry: he’s found Deschamps himself, he’s sure of it, typing in the past. He shivers, moves his chair back, takes a breath, then begins to read those words from long, long ago that might finally provide answers.
LD47503038: Can you sell me a gun?
Sully018747450: Yes. What type?
LD47503038: A shotgun.
Niall scoots back from the computer. So this is where he got the gun.
LD47503038: How long?
Sully018747450: Two days.
Niall’s eyes flick to the date. It isn’t right. And it’s the wrong gun. Luke had a Beretta. This is the day before the siege: Deschamps didn’t have two days.
And Niall can feel it, that it is about to happen. An explanation is about to be provided to him from the mists, from all those years ago.