Famous Last Words

Chapter 36

36

LD47503038: I need it sooner.

Sully018747450: What’s the urgency?

LD47503038: I need some personal protection. I think somebody is going to murder me.

And there it is. The reason.

Deschamps thought that he was going to be murdered.

And he was right. He tried to arm himself in readiness.

Jesus Christ. It isn’t as it seems. Not at all. He stares out of the plate-glass windows, at the inverted ‘ONLINE NOW’ sign, the world deepening blacker the longer he looks.

He keeps reading.

LD47503038: How fast can you get me the gun? Somebody knows something about me. They want me to meet at a warehouse, in Bermondsey. I don’t know if they want to talk, or … I have to meet them though. They’ll come to my house if I don’t. They’ve been once already.

Ah. The burglary, Niall thinks, reading.

Sully018747450: Or what? Why don’t you tell me what happened?

LD47503038: I can’t, really. They have found out something about me. They want me to meet with two men at a warehouse.

Sully018747450: Two days for the gun. I can show you what to do. How to overpower and surprise people. But the gun will take two days.

LD47503038: It’s tomorrow.

Sully018747450: Or I can help to hide you. Come and see me in Lewisham.

They knew something about him. They wanted him dead.

Niall watches the case as he thought he understood it invert in front of him, right there on an Apple Mac in an anonymous café. The hostages are the perpetrators. The hostage-taker acting in defence. Deschamps didn’t start the siege: they came for him. And nobody saw how it began, so nobody knew. All Deschamps knew was that he was going to be murdered. He tried to arm himself in readiness.

LD47503038: I’m at the warehouse. I need help.

Sully018747450: The gun ain’t here yet.

LD47503038: I know. I’ve got to go in and meet them. Sully, they want me dead.

Sully018747450: Can you see in?

LD47503038: Yes. They’re in there already. They’re here to kill me. They are masked, black sacks on their heads with holes for eyes. Can you come and help me??

Sully018747450: I don’t deal direct with this stuff. Observe observe observe. Wait. Pause. What can you see?

LD47503038: I’ve got to go in or they’re going to come for me at my home, with my family.

Sully018747450: If they’re going to kill you, they will have a weapon. Can you get it?

LD47503038: They’ve got it. A pistol.

Sully018747450: Bide your time. Better to be late but with the advantage. Wait.

LD47503038: They’re talking.

Sully018747450: Wait.

There’s nothing more. Niall puffs his cheeks out, agog, then heads to the Met, downloads the archived CCTV footage, and rewatches it.

Deschamps arrives on the camera, hostages unseen.

And then – that quick movement at the edge of the screen. Niall pauses, rewatches, and he sees it: it’s Deschamps’s hand reaching for something.

He stops it again, then thinks. The hostages were already there. They must have come in the back, the place Deschamps himself escaped from.

Deschamps turned up unarmed, watched from the outside. Just like Harry said to do.

Then he went in, and waited until they put down their gun. The hand movement is him taking it from a table in the very corner of the footage. The Beretta the police thought he had – it was theirs.

Another inversion. Funny how things look different depending on what you know to be true.

He closes his eyes. It all makes sense. It all makes sense. It wasn’t a siege. There was no siege. It was the attempted murder of a man that turned into the death of two.

The best way to police is to be relentless with it. Harry will not be expecting Niall back so soon, and this is why Niall shows up, past midnight, and rings the bell.

Harry answers the door in dark clothes, shoes on, clear shock on his face.

‘Nice to see you, Sully.’

And, just like that, the threat is made: I know your criminal identity. I may know your business. I may know every single illegal thing that you’re doing.

Harry wordlessly lets him in. ‘And?’ he says.

‘And what?’

‘Nothing on the dark web ever gets to court.’ He leans against his kitchen counter. ‘Can’t trace it. And what if I am Sully?’

‘ And I am perfectly capable of getting your internet dealings to court.’

‘Don’t care,’ Harry says, but Niall knows that he does. Businessmen can’t work when they’re inside, after all.

‘All right then: unless you tell me what you know about Luke Deschamps, you’re under arrest.’

A pause. Niall treads so carefully with his words, you would never be able to hear his footsteps. What he’s musing on is why, if Deschamps murdered his enemies, has he disappeared.

‘What do you want to know?’ Harry says reluctantly, then thumps his weight back against the cupboards, the sort of power play a toddler might make.

‘Why don’t you tell me what you know – and then we’ll go from there,’ Niall says.

‘I don’t know where Luke is,’ Harry says, and Niall notes the familiarity of using Deschamps’s first name.

‘Is he alive?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘What do you know?’

‘Not much.’

‘Who was sent to murder him?’

‘I don’t know who ordered the job,’ Harry says.

Niall’s mouth forms a perfect O. ‘The job?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Niall says, though he thinks he does.

‘Luke told me when he came to see me that his enemies – I never knew who – were sending two contract killers for him.’

Niall’s head hits his chest. Of course. Of course. The identity-less hostages have no ID because they are experienced hired criminals. Had only cash on them and Oyster cards registered to nobody.

They didn’t have a personal vendetta against Deschamps. They were on a job, sent to kill him on behalf of someone else. Deschamps’s enemies are elsewhere. Niall has been looking in the wrong places.

And this means that Deschamps’s existing enemies are alive and well. He merely shot their messengers.