Famous Last Words

Chapter 49

49

Niall

Niall checks the tracker next on Deschamps’s email: it’s remained there for the entire seven years, as is the case with wanted and dangerous people, but it yields nothing. Deschamps must’ve turned off the confirmation from Text Anon, so only the website itself knew about it. He’s ditched the burner phone.

There is no trace of him.

Niall hunts around in the surveillance file for other activity, but there isn’t any. He is on borrowed time here. He ought to tell the Met what he knows. But he wants more information. He wants hard evidence of why Deschamps did what he did.

If he tells them Deschamps is very likely alive and well, they will throw the full force of the state into finding him. And incarcerating him. Or worse.

‘How are you feeling about Viv?’ Jess asks mildly.

‘Haven’t had a chance to think about her,’ Niall says. Downstairs, the bakery hums with activity. If Niall has a morning session it smells of bread. Lunchtime, sausage rolls. And now, near to evening closing, a mish-mash of leftovers. You can get a cinnamon swirl for ten pence if you time it right, which Niall very often does.

‘I don’t buy that,’ Jess says.

‘OK – I have, but … I … I don’t know,’ he says carefully, thinking how funny it is that for his entire career, he’s been trying to make people open up, and now, it’s him. It’s him who’s got to do it, and Jess, his negotiator, is sitting in front of him. ‘It’s weird, the Deschamps case resolving.’

‘They’re tied for you in your brain.’

‘Well. It was the same day,’ he says. ‘Obviously.’

‘But – beyond that?’ she probes. ‘That day when your man shot the hostages, and then you went home and Viv had gone. What, for you, stands out about then?’

In his mind, Niall turns away from the warehouse, and, suddenly, he’s in their flat in the Barbican, largely as it is now, except with a better kitchen, a more colourful one. He walks around their preserved apartment. Viv’s teapot out on the counter, the ceramic one she painted herself. Pasta in jars – the sort of thing she did, not him.

She didn’t take much stuff with her. He turns around in their kitchen and looks into the hallway, where she’s standing in his mind. Bags packed. A large suitcase and a small holdall too. Her fucking birthday. How could he have been so stupid? The mistake is so tangible it makes his regret bitter and black. If only, if only.

‘It’s this,’ Niall says, his eyes popping open, the kitchen and the hallway suitcases disappearing. ‘I missed it.’

‘That the hostage-taker would shoot?’

‘No. That, all the while, I was focusing on the case, and she was leaving me. Picking which clothes to take, which to leave. Taking her book from by the bed, her toothbrush … I was negotiating with the wrong person,’ Niall says, blinking back tears. ‘Fucking futile. All of it.’

Jess is looking at him, her expression somewhat sad, too. He isn’t too surprised: all good negotiators feel too much empathy.

‘I put her bin back for her. The other day.’

‘Her bin?’ Jess says, with the practised professional expression of somebody who has been told everything any human could ever admit.

‘She hated doing the bins. Her worst chore. Used to leave it out until the next week, easily. So I passed her house – legitimately, for work – and I just dragged it back up for her, put it in the bin store.’

‘Why did you do that?’ Jess says, but she doesn’t say it with criticism or judgement. Sometimes, Niall wonders whether she is paid to be on his side or if she really is.

‘I thought a lot after our last session,’ Niall says, and he’s surprised to find his cheeks are burning. ‘About what Viv actually said to me, and perhaps – what she really meant.’

‘Right – good,’ Jess says with a wide and genuine smile. ‘And what do you think she meant?’

‘I did put work first. I did. It’s undeniable. It wasn’t just about a birthday.’

‘And so the bin …’ Jess says, her tone dispassionate, and Niall suddenly wonders if she goes home to her husband and moans about counselling ordinary men about ordinary occurrences. ‘It was a whole session on bins today,’ she will say. Niall frowns at the thought of it.

‘What?’ she says. ‘What’s that—’ And then she scrunches up her face, a rough imitation of his.

‘Nothing. Just feel – I don’t know. Embarrassed to be telling you this stuff,’ he says. ‘It’s so – quotidian.’

‘Doesn’t seem it to me,’ she says lightly. ‘The bin, for you, is: I see you. You see Viv. What she likes to do, what she doesn’t. What she finds hard, or boring. And you did it for her.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think there is a way for you to do what you do for a living but not have it be top priority? Above all else?’

Niall thinks of the Inner Temple with Camilla, finally getting her to talk, betraying his own employer to do so. It had never even crossed his mind that it was out of hours, overtime. Some people tot up their time off in lieu, and those people are not police. ‘I don’t know,’ he says honestly. ‘When I’m chasing something down … when I’m negotiating … it’s like I can’t even see anything else.’

‘So you could say you would be conflicted about entering another relationship.’

‘I don’t want another relationship if I can’t have her.’

‘We know you are a bit of an all-or-nothing guy.’

‘Maybe so.’

‘And so, naturally, you obsess over your work,’ Jess says, leading him faithfully down the road she wants them to travel through.

‘Precisely,’ he says. ‘I feel like she made me feel guilty for working at all. And then didn’t even say anything. Didn’t give me a chance to put it right. Just – left.’

‘Maybe she felt you wouldn’t change.’

‘Maybe I wouldn’t,’ Niall says honestly.

‘Maybe she’d already said it.’

Niall says nothing to this. Jess waits a beat, then asks outright: ‘Had she?’

‘Sort of,’ Niall says, and she had, hadn’t she? ‘Yes.’

‘Right.’ Jess leaves a loaded pause, clearly hoping he will fill it.

‘Look,’ he says. ‘Hostage negotiating – it takes it out of you. Emotionally.’ He knows he shouldn’t defend himself, but he wants to. Doesn’t want to be consigned to the pool of untreatable maniacs.

‘Are you still getting the dreams?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still every night?’ she says: so she knows he lied about the frequency.

‘Pretty much,’ he says. ‘I’ve had breakthroughs on that case, now, but I don’t know. I think it’s a different trauma.’

‘The trauma of Viv.’

‘Exactly.’

She sighs, just slightly, but then steers him on to policing, instead, perhaps a kind distraction. ‘What kind of breakthroughs?’

Niall gratefully fills her in about what Camilla told him. About Madison Smith, and Alexander Hale and James Lancaster, and everything else. ‘The thing is, I looked,’ he says. ‘I looked, that night in April 2017, for signs of where Deschamps had been, and now it turns out there was a double murder. I just can’t understand how come I didn’t spot that on that day.’

Jess turns her mouth down. ‘I mean – I don’t know how policing works,’ she says. ‘At all. But … it doesn’t strike me that you’re the type of person to miss something.’

‘I am. I mean – the two hostages are dead because of me.’

‘Two men who came to kill Luke.’

‘Yes, but even so.’

‘Is it possible that it wasn’t there that day?’ she says to him. ‘This – entry on the database for the double murder?’

Niall closes his eyes, thinking. Checking HOLMES, sun slanting into the Wetherspoon’s, urgency in the air. Was he rushing – or had something else happened?

And that’s when the answer arrives, as easy as if it’s nothing at all: his brain supplies the solution, right there in fucking therapy. His eyes open and meet Jess’s. ‘You’ve got it,’ he says, rising to his feet, even though they’re only halfway through the session.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. You’ve cracked it.’ He’s at the door now, his hand on the knob. ‘I didn’t miss anything,’ he says to her. ‘I didn’t. You’re right. Someone took it off. That must be it: the double murder wasn’t on the system. The hostages had no identities on the system .’

Niall’s mind is racing, the way his brain speeds up sometimes when information is coming at him, piece after piece after piece slotting neatly, not being jammed or forced. He’s landed on it. He knows he has. ‘Someone could have removed information from the police computer,’ he says. ‘The only person who was connected both to the hostages, and to the police,’ he says. ‘A man called George Louis, Isabella’s husband. They weren’t victims: they were perpetrators.’