Page 23 of Famous Last Words

‘What would be your only tip – if you had to give just one?’ Niall had asked him.

Larry had paused for a minute or two as they reached his car – as old as his Apple Mac computers, a 1980s racing-green Mini – then replied: ‘Above all else, reciprocity: never give up something without getting something in return.’

Niall had thought about that a lot in the weeks that followed. But the more experienced he’s become, the more he’s realized that the rules are just that: rules. And, sometimes, they’re there to be broken.

And so Niall is going to offer Deschamps some coffee, and ask for nothing in return just yet. He’s offering it only because he wants Deschamps to know Niall is willing to give, not just take, somebody who wants to listen to him, and to what he likes. His wife says he likes coffee. It’s their thing.

‘Coffee can be the very beginning of a dialogue,’ Niall says now to Maidstone. They hurry down the street. ‘Coffee as an invitation – to open up.’

‘We are running out of time very quickly here.’

Maidstone is the sort of copper who finds doing nothing too anxiety-provoking, would rather take a different kind of risk. He favours action. Niall favours patience, especially with a man who looks too frightened to shoot.

The job of a hostage negotiator, in many ways, is to simplyrun down the clock. Let the kidnapper become tired, jaded, know that it isn’t going anywhere.

Maidstone flicks his gaze to Niall. ‘You can deliver the coffee,’ he says. ‘It’s an offer of coffee, left by the door. That’s all. You tell him just that. You’ve got half an hour.’

Niall directs an assistant to go and get the coffees. Starbucks, four lattes, four cinnamon swirls. Uncontroversial. Isabella’s husband calls in, speaks to Maidstone, says he’s heard nothing from Isabella. Says she would have texted if at all possible. Niall closes his eyes for a few moments to think about the hostages. Their fear. Their beating hearts inside that building, relying on Niall to save them.

He heads to stand outside while he waits for the coffees, wishing they’d be faster, and skim-reads a report he’s been CC’d in on with information Camilla has given, wondering when Maidstone will pull the plug and stop his plans.

Hmm. Interesting: Deschamps has wiped tech and failed to report a crime. See? This is why you wait. You find stuff out with the time that you buy. And all of this points to a man who is hiding something.

He continues scanning the report.No access to recent internet searches as yet … Suspect is not on Prevent list or known to have terrorist associations … combing his current contacts now … no list of recent iPhone locations visited since April …

Niall stops reading at that and dials the telecoms team who – in situations like this – answer immediately: one of the many reasons Niall likes the dynamism of an unfolding real-time situation.

‘Why are Deschamps’s locations post-April not available?’ he says.

‘I know – we’re on it,’ the analyst says. ‘It’s top of my list.’ It’s Claire. He likes her, mum to three, therefore a brilliantmulti-tasker, doesn’t miss a trick. ‘He stopped his phone from location tracking on the twenty-first of April this year. Could just be an iOS update thing.’

‘I doubt that,’ Niall says flatly. In his experience, coincidences do not really exist in policing, not as much as people seem to think, anyway. ‘Twenty-first of April. What time?’

‘Just before midnight,’ Claire says. ‘Which coincides with an iPhone update while it was charging.’

‘Or somebody out doing something at close to midnight that they didn’t want anybody to know about,’ Niall replies, wandering into the cool shade of the pub again as he rings off.

Where the fuck are the coffees? Niall grabs a laptop in frustration, begins the research into Deschamps’s locations as the clock ticks ever down.

The investigation management system has an old-style display, green text on black, and he’s searching for any crime committed on the twenty-first of April this year. It’s plausible that something happened involving Deschamps that led him to where he is now: so what was it?

He narrows the search to Putney and Bermondsey, the two places Deschamps is most likely to have been on that day. There’s a red spot for every single crime reported, most of them petty. Muggings, burglaries, assaults, batteries: this is London. Niall scrolls and scrolls, hoping that something will jump out at him, scanning for murders, anything very serious, but there isn’t one.

He flicks his gaze out of the window to the warehouse. Anything could be happening in there …

Concentrate. He goes to the automatic number plate recognition database. Somebody in the intelligence bureau will be doing this, but Niall can’t resist performing his own search for faster answers.

He types in Deschamps’s registration, which pulls up a hundred hits, and Niall scrolls to the twenty-first of April.

Six hits.

22:00: Putney High Street

22:20: an A road in Clapham

22:40: Camberwell

23:05: Whitechapel

---