Page 22 of Famous Last Words

Niall clicks off the video, sighing. The armchair detectives will soon be out in full force.

The silent drills have finally reached the other side of the thick old warehouse walls, and Niall’s been summoned to the scene now to observe it. He’s been stripped of his radio, his mobile phone, anything that will make any noise.

‘You’re not going to like it,’ Maidstone says grimly to him, shiny shoes bouncing the sunlight around as they walk, and he’s right.

The warehouse stands square and sunlit, the inner cordon static around it: a hundred or so armed officers making zero noise or movements, like Niall has walked into a military painting. The police are in riot gear: helmets and shields, MP5s held cross-body.

Maidstone leads Niall across the car park, down a ramp bordered by a small orange brick wall, and to the side of the warehouse that sits in shadow – the sunny side would let too much light in and give them away.

Two officers stand sentry by a tiny hole about a foot offthe ground – down low is less noticeable – and they nod to Niall as he arrives.

A recording device is attached to the wall, gazing in through the hole with its electronic eye, and this will be being broadcast in the RVP for people to see, but Niall wants to see it in real time, in the flesh. There’s enough room for him to peer in alongside it.

He crouches down. If he so much as sneezes, he will give the game away. Immediately, his knees begin to ache, but he ignores them. They don’t have much time. He needs to look, then think, then act.

The hole is less than a centimetre wide, the wall thick, and, at first, Niall can’t make anything out, the view small and imperfect, the inside of the warehouse dim.

But then he sees him, in the fish-eye of the foot-deep cylindrical hole: Deschamps. He is in miniature: at the centre of a dollhouse tableau of a horror scene. He is standing in front of his hostages, pacing. Seven steps one way, seven back.

But it’s the gun. It’s the gun that does it: his arms are as straight as they were on the CCTV, ready to deal with relay, but the barrel is directly and intentionally trained on the head of each hostage in turn. The woman then the man then the man. The man then the man then the woman.

Niall’s heart descends downwards from his chest to his feet. This looks like a person who wants to shoot: he can’t deny it. Maidstone will be all over this. This changes everything.

His body language is taut, ready to act, but not especially agitated. No. His shoulders are up, his footsteps quick, now, but he looks … what? Niall gets occasional glimpses at Deschamps’s features, and he looks … well, scared. That’s it. He has got scared body language. Furtive and somehow quitemeek. Niall assesses the gun. It’s aimed but not cocked. But Deschamps’s finger is on the trigger.

Niall eventually moves away, and one of the other officers takes his place. Niall touches his shoulder as he leaves. Standing sentry is no easy job.

‘I see what you mean,’ he says in greeting to Maidstone.

‘Right,’ Maidstone replies. ‘We’ve got to go in there. He’s practically taking aim. Agree?’

Niall hesitates. Heis. But he’s scared. And scared people want a way out. ‘Iwouldlike to have a go at contact,’ he says. He waves his phone containing the email from the coppers searching Camilla Deschamps’s house. ‘I’ve got some intel, and I’ve got an idea.’

‘Are you joking?’ Maidstone says coldly. ‘We said … if the gun’s pointing at them, we go in.’ He has sweat patches beginning to form at his armpits and the small of his back.

‘No,yousaid that. Body language is made up of more than just a weapon.’

‘I disagree.’

‘I think one attempt at contact is reasonable,’ Niall says, and he can’t explain it, but he just doesn’t think Deschamps will go through with it. Something about his glossy profile on his wife’s agency’s website, his books, co-working space – now searched – containing nothing of any note at all, his GP records showing zero concerns.

Despite everything. Despite the captured civilians, the purchased gun, Niall just can’t see it. Fear isn’t often compatible with malice. Some deep instinct somewhere tells him to wait.

‘What’s your idea?’ Maidstone asks.

Niall pauses. ‘He likes coffee.’

Niall undertook his hostage negotiation course in 2010 in a draughty country manor in Surrey. He was taught – and later mentored – by a DI called Larry who collected old Apple Mac computers. Every weekend he went to some fair or other and bought another, kept them in his loft. It was Larry who taught Niall his cardinal rule: that everybody wants something. Niall – who’d had a harsh Catholic upbringing full of guilt – was pleasantly surprised by the humanity in negotiating, and in Larry.

The first day was lectures that Niall found so dry he slow-blinked his way through them, texting Viv under the desk to stay awake. The final three days were role plays: armed fugitives, terrorists, everything. This, Niall needed no distracting from. This was what he was there for.

He sat outside a stately room that an actor playing an armed perpetrator had locked himself inside, and tried to get him to talk with methods he’d only just learnt. Open questions, slow and steady, build rapport.What do you like to do in your spare time? You’re having some intense feelings now, but they will pass. Me? I can’t wait to get home to my girlfriend and watchSeinfeldwith her: we’re rubbish at modern TV, we are still in the nineties.Niall always told the truth in these negotiations: he and Viv really do like old telly. Or, rather, they did: when did they last watch reruns together?

They learnt about pacing and leading, about priming the suspect to start to agree with you.

They did theory in the mornings, practicals in the afternoons and into the evenings. Eleven o’clock finishes, sometimes midnight, after which they were encouraged to drink at the bar together, hitting the dorm rooms at three, up again for eight. Niall had at first assumed this was a bonding exercise, but later realized that the instructors’ aims were to tire them out. The practical assignments got harder the moreexhausted they got, and that’s when they transformed: into people who could think fast, people who could hold their emotions at any cost. The only way to learn it was to do it.

On the final day of the course, Niall had walked with Larry to the car park across pale gravel that crunched underfoot and through high autumn winds that rattled leaves. Like every immersive experience, at the end of the week Niall had felt changed.

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