Page 47 of Famous Last Words

And then, for belt and braces, he sends Camilla a new message, anonymous, identical text, changing the time from eight to nine o’clock tonight: it will be interesting to see if she attends, and what she will do when she thinks her husband might want to meet her. And it will be even more interesting to go in her place, and see who wants to contact her so covertly.

Whoever this is – Deschamps? – has chosen a seemingly random location. Unfamiliar, deep in Islington. Niall walks there, the evening light gilding the tops of buildings, the streets in shadow.

They didn’t find many answers in the weeks and months following the siege. That the hostages were never identified is a fact Niall found most alarming, most disturbing. It tells him that the situation they dealt with was not normal, but he still cannot work out in what way. Two bodies. No identification. Left in a morgue for three months, then given paupers’ funerals, two unmarked graves. Niall has dealt with murder cases where the body was never found. He’s never dealt with murder cases where the victims did not appear to exist. It’s a clue. He just doesn’t know what it means.

They each had on them close to two hundred pounds incash, pay-as-you-go Oyster cards, and nothing else. No mobile phones. No wallets. No house keys, car keys. Nothing.

Occasionally, over the intervening time, Niall researched things – on the quiet – but they never came to anything. Nothing Deschamps had worked on seemed at all sinister, at all salacious. No salient facts came to light. No visits to counsellors, no confessions to friends, not much weird behaviour at all, actually. A single suspicious Google search from Camilla about arguing with your husband is not enough to hang a case on.

Niall sat in on interviewing Isabella Louis, after the siege ended and before he left negotiation for good, in a dull police interviewing suite. She’d sat there, small of stature but clear and certain, and told Niall that she’d been cleaning up her warehouse for an incoming tenant to enter the following Monday when she’d heard the commotion. That she’d seen Deschamps pointing the gun at the two hostages, that he arrived with them and that, the second he saw her, he directed her on to a chair, too. He didn’t tie her hands, only the men’s, so when the phone rang, she’d chanced it, and darted to answer. She knew the layout of the building well enough. Niall had been vaguely curious about this. ‘Pretty ballsy,’ he’d said.

She’d shrugged, looked back at him, and said, ‘I thought I was dead either way.’

‘Fair,’ Niall had replied: other hostages had said similar to him.

The camera in the hole in the wall had captured all of this, but when Isabella answered the phone, Deschamps directed everyone to move. They’d lost sight of them.

Isabella filled in the gaps: when Deschamps had heard George’s threat on the end of the phone, Isabella said to himthat she owned the building, and she could get him out of there if he released her.

‘I know it wasn’t the right thing to do,’ she said. ‘But anyone would’ve done it. To survive.’

Niall nodded. Perhaps Isabella took his silence for judgement, because she added, ‘I know in giving him the escape route I sentenced his hostages to death.’ Her voice caught on the final word.

‘I would have done the same,’ Niall said.

‘We were so thankful for Hamish,’ she said. ‘Our security guard, who works remotely. He captured it beginning, and therefore alerted you guys.’

‘And the media,’ Niall said lightly.

‘Well. Yes. But also the police. And George.’

She’d looked at him, then, clear-eyed and vulnerable, and Niall had immediately thought that he liked her. ‘Yes, thank God for him,’ he said. ‘What is the most significant thing you remember about it all?’ he probed. An open question, designed to pull detail out of her.

‘That I wet myself,’ she said, still looking him dead in the eye. ‘When he raised the gun to me, to get me to the chair, I wet myself, right then and there.’ She glanced down at her tiny hands, then back up again at Niall. ‘Then I had to sit in it. I think it’s why he didn’t tie me up. Felt sorry for me.’

Niall nodded, swallowing hard. ‘I get that,’ he said softly. He left it a few respectful beats before asking, ‘Why do you think Deschamps took his other hostages?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said after a pause. ‘There was no talk between them.’

‘Why do you think he killed them?’

‘I don’t know that, either. But I feel like perhaps he was always going to.’

‘Why?’

‘He didn’t negotiate with them. He didn’t say anything to them. It was like there was nothing anybody could’ve done.’

Niall had winced at that. How had he got it so wrong?

Isabella and her husband, George, moved on with their lives. She later told Niall she was getting therapy for dealing with a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder following her ordeal, and was trying to get over that and a fear of confined spaces, too. Niall hadn’t said he felt exactly the same. When they met again, a few years ago – as part of a victim-support scheme Niall is trying to get off the ground – she asked him if they ever found out who the hostages were. Survivors’ guilt, he thought. She told him she’d sold all of their buildings. That she was afraid to go in them.

Niall is almost at the coordinates. He thinks – on balance – that it won’t be Deschamps. Wouldn’t he send Camilla to somewhere significant – or somewhere very remote? Why the middle of London? He’d be seen by so many CCTV cameras. If he’s alive, he’s stayed hidden for seven years by not being careless.

Niall arrives, sweating, at half past seven – he likes to be early; he believes it shows good intent – and he walks a slow loop around the streets.

It’s an alleyway that bends on itself, threading between two buildings like a river snake and then into a courtyard. There’s a plain blue door leading off the alleyway. He tries it, and it’s locked, so he shines the torch on his phone on to the mechanism, but it’s a deadbolt, locked from inside. No chance. Using the light, he peers into the cracks, which reveal thin slices of the room to him. It’s some sort of storage cupboard. Small, carpeted. A broom, a mop bucket: he can’t see much else.

Niall has been waiting professionally for years, and so it doesn’t bother him at all to stand in the courtyard for half an hour: you can learn a lot just by looking and – more importantly – by listening, and so this is what he does to occupy himself, scanning the strange, disused space from the very edge, where he will be unseen when his anonymous texter arrives. It sits in the exact centre of a load of buildings, like an empty stomach in the human body. A quiet, calm oasis of concrete. There are two old whisky barrels dotted around, containing long-dead shrubs. A hot metal bench sits in a shaft of sun bounced from somewhere up high. A sprinkling of cigarette butts. And, way, way above him: a square of deep blue sky. Niall understands now: this could be the most private place in London.

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