Chapter 59
59
Niall
Dungeness. A jut of land at the very bottom of England, sticking out like the crest of a tiny wave. The A-road turns coastal.
Niall’s speed slows even more. A bleak, post-apocalyptic tarmac road cuts through desert-flat headlands dotted with occasional huts and shops and pubs and lighthouses.
The car slows to a stop in front of an abandoned-looking hut, the nuclear power station in the background, lit up and blinking like a spaceship.
The air is warm and dark and the sea rushes elsewhere somewhere. Otherwise, all is quiet, the power station a sentient being in the background, the cars abandoned.
Is Luke in there? Niall stares at where the Hales and the Louises are heading. They can see Niall, now, and they’re running. They know he’s about to act.
They head to a lighthouse; Niall follows them. They must know his precise location. It must be in that book, the book that they have taken. After a second, Isabella turns around and looks at him, for just a moment. Their eyes meet and, suddenly, he wonders if she is the enemy after all, or just forced into crime by George.
The lighthouse is tall and striped black and white, windows boarded up, illuminated only at the top, throwing light and shadow on to the surrounding pavement. The windows of the hut are shut up, dark, nothing happening.
The Hales start to try to break into the lighthouse, pulling the wood away from the door. And it makes sense: the police never checked it. It looked boarded up, uninhabitable. Niall shakes his head.
Noise breaks out all around him. ‘You killed our boy!’ somebody yells. It’s Janet Hale.
‘Come out,’ George Louis commands. He reaches into a pocket, and pulls out a gun. A small pistol that he handles as easily and as familiarly as a mobile phone.
He cocks it, and Niall touches his own weapon and thinks of Luke, in there, alone and waiting.
George hasn’t turned around to acknowledge Niall yet.
‘Police!’ Niall barks.
George moves his body slowly, head fixed, to stare at Niall.
‘Put your hands in the air,’ Niall says, and his instruction goes ignored. Immediately, George whips back around and begins to try the door of the lighthouse, but it doesn’t budge.
Niall thinks of Cam. And he thinks of these people, who will never listen. Who will never accept their role in their child’s murder. Some people cannot be negotiated with. The truth is too painful for them.
George shoots at the mechanism of the door. The noise reverberates all around the quiet coast. Niall flinches with it. He didn’t know it would escalate so quickly. The second time he’s been surprised by gunshots.
‘Deschamps!’ George shouts. ‘Open up!’
‘Stop!’ Niall yells, and George whips around, the gun still trained. In his entire career, Niall’s never once looked into the barrel of a gun aimed at him. The round metal seems to fill his vision, a circle of menace.
‘No,’ Niall says, knowing it might be one of the last things he says. ‘You’ve got to stop this – Deschamps is—’
‘He – our – he would be here without him,’ George says, and pain constricts his words like tight laces.
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Niall says. ‘You can’t bring someone into crime and not pay the consequences …’ but his voice trails off. George is not listening. ‘What do you want to achieve?’ Niall says, but this is no negotiation. It’s not a two-way street. ‘You’ve killed, haven’t you? To try and avenge?’
‘She was going to break confidence,’ George replies.
‘What do you want?’
‘Revenge,’ George replies simply, and he’s turned away from Niall, and he’s got the door open.
The world becomes silent and distant as Niall realizes what is about to happen. He holds his own weapon close to his body, and seems to rise up above and outside himself. As he surveys his body language, he realizes, with all of his training and knowledge, that he is about to shoot: he has the agitated posture, he is aiming.
George Louis finally heads into the lighthouse, and points his gun. And Niall gets there first. He pulls the trigger, and sound explodes all around him. And that’s when he realizes it: the dreams weren’t the gunshots from the past: they were from the future. From now.
Afterwards, after everybody is maimed, tied up, his hostages, Niall opens the door to the lighthouse while he waits for the police. But it’s empty: no one there. He was protecting no one.