Famous Last Words

Chapter 57

57

Niall

Following somebody is an art, not a science, and a skill Niall hasn’t recently practised. He hasn’t done it for years: he is brought to his hostages: they are captive, he is free. But this is different. He has a pistol on his front seat and a task to complete.

Two cars for cover. That’s right. He lets George leave, pulls away too, but looks for two cars to keep between them once they’re on London’s main streets. They take it slow, so Niall does too.

He keeps thinking about everything Isabella told him during the siege, and its aftermath. Her trauma had felt so real, and perhaps it was. Who knows the precise nature of what somebody’s been asked to do by their family? And how wrong things can go?

Their nephew dead. Grief drives people mad, Niall thinks as he follows them, feeling both sympathy and revulsion. And so does guilt: in a crime family, kids don’t die for no reason. They die because they’re in crime. Because their parents got them into crime.

The reason Alexander was murdered is because he murdered somebody else. And the reason he murdered somebody else is because his family schooled him in crime. Maybe they even demanded it. George Louis, probably one of the heads of the crime family. Alexander brought up hopelessly into it.

Their car rises and falls gently over the speed bumps, and Niall tries to act naturally. No disguises, no turning your lights off: you have to behave like a normal driver, else people notice.

And so, two minutes later, when they go through an amber light, he doesn’t gun it at the red, but waits, instead. Keeps his eyes on the horizon, watches them indicate left, up ahead, and the second he gets a green, he goes, glad for his car’s electric engine that doesn’t rev too loudly. He guesses their route, takes a shortcut through an estate, and catches up with them: hopes they have no idea.

They collect the Hales from Sarah Carpenter House. Then over the river. Through Greenwich. Niall knows where they’re going by the time they signal to get on to the A2. It’s busier, night-time but in summer, people out enjoying the end of the day, and Niall closes his gap to one car.

They’re going to Kent.

Has Deschamps stayed there all this time? He must have a good hiding place. Somewhere, or with someone, he trusts.

As Niall drives, he tries to think of somebody he could call to help him. Not work, not now time’s against him. Say he told them about George: they’d open an official weeks-long fucking corruption inquiry, all the while Deschamps’s enemies drive to kill him.

Or they’d come and – you know what? – they’d do the thing they wanted to do seven years ago: they’d shoot Deschamps. Get the truth later. He’s currently the fugitive, he’s the killer of the hostages, he is the killer of Alexander Hale.

But he is good.

The A2 rises and crests, gently hilly, and Niall uses these as vantage points, the way he always did when he was a copper on the beat. You can drop way back, prevent them from becoming suspicious, use the hills as a long-range view, before coming back into sight. If you can leave it long enough, they’ll never realize you were the same car driving close to them earlier.

The road is lit with red lights this way, white the other, the sky black, and they’re headed to the coast. It’s easy to follow somebody in London in the evening. A rural road at night is another story.

Niall presses his foot to the floor, thinking that he can’t tell Camilla now – not when it isn’t safe – but that, hopefully, at the end of this, he will bring Deschamps home to her.

And that is what matters. This is why, Niall thinks. This is why his job reigns supreme. Not because of the information, because of the mystery-solving. Not because of knowledge. For forever, he thought this was his thing, the thing he wanted above all else. But it isn’t.

It’s this. I miss you I miss you I miss you.

And now Niall sees, burning bright on the horizon like the moon, why he does this job.

Cam and Luke love each other, and deserve to be together. And so Niall does it for the humanity of it: he does it for love.