Famous Last Words

Chapter 61

61

Niall

Niall waits for the phone to be answered. It rings two times, four, six, eight, but, today, he knows they’re going to pick up.

‘Six hundred thousand,’ says a voice, a deep register, accented. Niall turns away from the payphone. He’s inside a bar in Bogotá. Outside on the street, yellow taxis rush by. There’s graffiti outside, a white Colombian sky, close weather, a McDonald’s opposite – aren’t there more McDonald’s restaurants in the world than anything else, or is that some sort of myth?

‘I can’t do six hundred,’ Niall says into the untraceable payphone. ‘Trust me when I say I don’t have the authority to.’ This is the language he is careful to use: he wants to comply, but can’t. He’s governed by forces beyond his control. Not his fault, he’s just the messenger.

Niall is fully freelance these days, but this is the weirdest job for a little while. He tilts his head back on the phone, listening and thinking. ‘What can you go to?’ the voice says, downbeat, no question imbued within it.

‘Half that.’

‘No deal,’ the voice says, and hangs up the phone. Niall rubs his head and sighs, walks away from the phone. He sips his drink – a virgin whiskey sour – and waits.

From the back room of the bar, the man arrives.

‘No deal,’ he repeats, a broad smile on his face.

‘Right,’ Niall says, turning with him to face the group of hostage negotiators in training looking up at them. ‘That’s what happens when you talk figures too early,’ he says, as his Colombian friend nods.

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘No deals.’

‘More tomorrow,’ Niall says. He checks his watch. It’s five o’clock: finishing time.

If there’s a McDonald’s on every street corner in the world, there may also be a Patisserie Valerie. Or, La Patisserie de Valerie , as it’s known here. And, outside it, there is Viv, holding a box.

‘Hello,’ she says to him, her face immediately brightening up like somebody has animated her. God, her eyes. ‘All done? Up-and-comers all educated?’

‘Not really,’ Niall says with a laugh. ‘Sometimes, I actually think you can’t teach this stuff.’

‘Oh.’

‘Which is good,’ he adds sarcastically. ‘As – now – a teacher.’

‘Oh dear, struck off from the Met and now from teaching?’

Niall smiles a half-smile, thinking of what led him to be struck off. The siege, the events afterwards, that night when Camilla found Deschamps. The second Deschamps sent the book, he went to sleep rough in the little lock-up Niall had peered inside. Waiting for her. He was there when Niall checked, hiding in the back, in the shadows. And he was there, too, on that night.

The whole time, Deschamps and Camilla were not in the lighthouse at all. He’d left another clue in the book. Leaving Niall free to shoot, alone.

Deschamps and Camilla had come to Dungeness that night when he’d asked them to, and had lied for him. Said they’d seen the shooting, that he had needed to do it. That it would have saved them, hiding in the lighthouse. Niall had got away without being charged, but he’d lost his job for withholding information. For acting alone. The Hales and the Louises he’d wounded had gone to prison.

‘No. Just done for the weekend.’

‘Well, I happened to buy four cakes,’ Viv says. She opens a second box, held in a bag by her side that he didn’t see. ‘And, oh my God, a teapot.’

‘Only you would come to Colombia and buy a teapot.’

‘Shush. Take your pick. I have no idea what the cakes are.’

Niall nods as he remembers the day she came back to him. Knocked on his door out of the blue. Asked if he wanted a tea. He’d said yes. They’d had five each. Whiled away an afternoon together, and only when the sun descended had they got on to the important stuff.

It’s evening, now, again, and Colombia bustles around them. Hot and colourful and only slightly dangerous – it’s best for his trainees to learn on the ground, and this week’s course is all about Bogotá and its varied practices. Viv walks more closely to him than at home, and Niall’s glad she came. He wouldn’t have come if she hadn’t wanted to.

‘It’s coffee and walnut,’ Viv says, taking a bite, ‘old-fashioned but nice.’

Niall gazes at her. Perhaps she no longer thinks about back then, their separation, their reunion, but Niall does, every single day. Viv comes first, work second, and that’s the natural order it has to be.

She shows him the other slices, and Niall thinks there could literally be a piece of shit in that box and he would still eat it with her.

‘What do you want to do tonight, and until we go home?’ Niall asks.

‘Don’t mind,’ she says. ‘But – about home. There’re a few stray cats waiting for us …’

‘Uh-oh,’ Niall says. ‘How many is a few?’

‘A good number. Four.’ Viv leans right up against him, head on his shoulder, and Niall looks into the distance. They still have the one-eyed cat.

Niall thinks about that stupid cat, and the others joining them soon, and muses that it’s funny: all this time he was trying to reunite Deschamps and Camilla, his own two strays. Deschamps wrote that he had spent seven years living in a boarded-up lighthouse on the Dungeness estate, coming out only at night, but really, he had been cleverer than that. He’d worked cash in hand, no ID needed. Couch-surfed, slept rough, paid for motels and short-term lets all over the south-east, in notes he was paid with that left no trace. He’d only ever gone to Dungeness to ping the mast, should anyone have intercepted his book.

Niall worked so hard to bring them back together, but it took a lot of time, and a lot of therapy, for him to realize that what he needed to do was give that to himself. To reunite himself with who he loved most.