Page 108 of Famous Last Words

Cam’s back goes cold. Her face feels numb with fear. All those times she thought she was being watched.

‘Will you look?’ she says, the book temporarily forgotten.

Charlie nods once, expression serious, and Cam lets herself inside, stands nervously in the hallway, waiting for him. Hoping he’s wrong.

‘Couldn’t get them. I saw someone leaving, but they ran,’ Charlie says, letting himself in five minutes later, cheeks red with exertion.

‘So weird.’

‘Really.’

He pauses, then says, ‘Coffee?’ and she thinks, Yes, OK.He can stay, and keep her safe. The book is more valuable than she could have imagined. Somebody might want it.

And as she joins Charlie in her kitchen, all she is thinking is what better way for Luke to tell her his side of the story – if he remains in danger – than to disguise it in fiction? It even fooled her. Names changed for legal reasons. Her husband, writing it from the perspective of a teenager now deceased. She should’ve guessed: her husband, the ghostwriter.

51

Niall

Niall gets to the car park after Jess’s session and knows he only has to make one phone call to confirm George’s involvement. It’s the evening, London’s lights scattering glitter around and above him, and he breathes slowly as he dials Claire in the communications team.

As he waits for her to answer – she always diverts her desk phone to her mobile after hours – he leans against the railings of the multistorey. ‘I need somebody who can mine for information,’ he says when Claire picks up. ‘Ideally now. Busy?’

‘At the boys’ five-a-side, but not busy,’ she says. ‘I’ve got my phone, so I can help.’

‘Great,’ Niall says. ‘I think something was deleted from HOLMES in 2017. And I think two people had their DNA taken off too.’

Claire pauses. In the background, he hears a whistle blow. ‘Those are big claims,’ she says.

Niall paces the length of the car park. ‘I’m trying to work a few things out before I accuse anybody, before I go on record.’ And it’s funny, it’s so funny that this sentence has, somehow, become true. He was off record because his appetite to solve the Deschamps case was insatiable, to atone for his own mistake. And now he’s off record because he suspects there’s a copper at the heart of it. It’s almost like heknew, in some big, wise part of himself that was always in charge, even when he didn’t know it.

Down below, wide streets are lined with ugly roller-shutter doors that remind him of Bermondsey. A hot breeze whips in between the layers of the multistorey. ‘I can’t – Niall …’ Claire says.

‘Please just look at the system. Look up the name Andrew Smith. He’s one of the hostages. His details were removed from the system,’ Niall says. He is not privy to this information, available only to the telecoms team.

‘Give me five – I can’t do it on my phone while talking. Hang on,’ Claire says. ‘There are loads of Andrew Smiths.’

Niall waits in the car park, walking back to his car and then away from it, past puddles that could be rainwater and could be God-knows-what. It’s virtually empty, almost quite tranquil in a weird way, and he walks and thinks about Viv and Deschamps and how some things just take their time to work out, to sort out. He leans on the railings again, where a light rain splatters his knuckles, and tries to exhale the way Jess taught him to.

Niall’s body begins to slow down in a way it has never before been able to. Funny, he thought being on the go, anxious, addicted to various things, was what fuelled him, but, actually, it got in the way. Now his mind is calmer, he is all the more able to think.

He avoided what Viv wanted most in the world – him, and his time – because it was easier to face other people’s problems than his own.

That’s the truth of it, he thinks, breathing still slow. And he has to live with that. The true mistake at the heart of the Bermondsey case.

His phone blares after just a couple of minutes, Claire’s extension, and he answers it.

‘Entry deleted by George Louis, on June twenty-first, 2017,’ she says. ‘The records shows he deleted a second, too, for a man called Pete Arbuthnot. The other hostage, I am guessing. This is why they never flagged anything on the system: they were no longer there. He also deleted the Alexander Hale and James Lancaster murders, but reinstated them a few days later.’

Niall nods: reinstating them prevented anybody from ever knowing. At some point, deleted entries that stayed deleted would’ve been noticed, and officers are regularly audited. This way, he only hid them for the minimum time period.

‘Thank you,’ Niall says, tilting his face up to the rain and almost smiling. He was right. He’d worked it out.

‘So the accidental hostage …’ Claire says, and Niall suddenly and vividly recalls Isabella’s vulnerability, her shock, that she wet herself in fear.

All made up. That article in theMailNiall read years ago about her inner trauma. Obviously sold to them. A clever bluff.

This case continues to invert and invert, like a sand timer tipped this way and that, the grains falling one way and then completely the other.

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