Chapter 52
52
Niall swings by the Louises’ house on his way home, debating phoning in George Louis’s corruption, but unable to resist just observing this family, for a little while, to see what secrets might reveal themselves.
He doesn’t want to act rashly. He wants to think. What does George Louis have to do with Deschamps’s murder? Why would he order it? And how does the Whitechapel murder feature? He takes his phone out and makes a request to Claire, to dig into any familial connections, any work connections, that George has. He trusts that she won’t escalate it up to management yet.
You can do a lot with information, but the most important thing is to try to get more of it, before you act. What really happened? Who are the heroes and who are the villains? Sometimes – just sometimes – you can get information by observing people, unseen, from the shadows. If the Louises are criminals, as he suspects they may be, then an admission is helpful. He can charge them with much more than corruption.
Niall’s skin shivers as he waits near their house, as though God himself has reached a hand down, passed it over his body, and said , Keep going. You’re almost there .
Niall stands there, a detective alone on a quiet London lane, glad of the police-issue pistol in the boot of his car, looking up at the buildings.
George Louis’s flat is in the basement, number 68b, one of the nicer ones. The street is leafy, that summer-sharp tang of plants in the air. There are sleeping policemen on the road, a cycle lane just to the left with a few bits and pieces of litter, dusty and wilted from the summer heat. The front door is wide and painted white, new paint. The kitchen is at the front, one of those half-and-half flats that are partly recessed but still have natural light. As a result, it’s easy for Niall to look down into it.
A white-walled kitchen. A light is on somewhere, casting it all in citrus colours. All Niall can see is a kitchen table. Huge, pine, four chairs around it.
Niall loiters on the street outside, appraising it. They’re not rich. That’s his first observation. Theirs is – maximum – a two-floor flat, a kind of maisonette, worth perhaps half a million: it is absurd but true that this buys you a completely average London home, no off-street parking, no office in the garden, nothing else except cramped conditions, too close neighbours, and rubbish on the street outside.
It’s late, and the air starts to deepen to black as Niall observes. He wants to watch and wait: if you are more patient than anybody else, you are eventually rewarded. He can’t risk being seen by the Louises – Isabella in particular would recognize him immediately – and so he walks slowly up and down the street, ready to turn and leave at any moment.
He hides in the shadows of the flat above the Louises’. It has five white stone steps leading to a front door, and they’re either in bed or away, the house shut up and silent. He hopes for the latter.
He peers down. He can see wrought-iron railings and the tops of the Louises’ bay windows, but nothing else. Can hear nothing.
Quarter past eleven, half past, twenty to twelve.
He stays very still, watching and waiting for nothing.
Until it becomes something. Isabella and George are leaving the flat.
‘Uh-huh,’ George says, phone held close to his ear, which lights it up, a white seashell. ‘Janet says just to go in,’ he adds to Isabella. ‘Door’s open.’
Niall reels. Janet. Janet Hale. Alexander’s mother.
‘Sure,’ Isabella says to her husband.
‘Thanks, sis,’ George says into the phone.
And there it is. They’re siblings. George Louis and Janet Hale. No surname in common, thanks to her marriage.
A pact made between family, who will do anything to help each other out. The Hales, whose child was killed, with a vendetta against Deschamps.
And the Louises, who arranged his murder.
But why? Did Deschamps kill their child?