Page 27 of Famous Last Words

Deschamps doesn’t speak again. Silence follows silence follows silence. Niall stays there for half an hour, but, just like that, the communication channel is shut off again, the stream run dry.

Furthermore, when Niall gets back to the RVP, and watches it all back, he sees Deschamps only held the gun down by his side once: when he sobbed, wiping tears away roughly from his eyes with the back of his hand, like a child. The rest of the time, he kept it trained on his hostages.

‘Gold commander thinks we need to go in. And I agree,’ Maidstone says, arriving by Niall and talking quickly. ‘Threat to life. He’s still aiming at them. He failed to engage. Article Two of the European Convention on Human Rights. These hostages have a right to life, Niall.’

Niall heaves a sigh that seems to come right from his trainers. He knows that this is theoretically right, but he doesn’t agree on this occasion that their lives are truly under threat. Something in Deschamps is hesitating, and he wants to listen to it. ‘He said he loves his wife.’

Maidstone looks incredulous. ‘Like a final parting shot? A goodbye? A suicide note?’

Niall appraises Maidstone. How can two people read the same set of circumstances so completely differently? ‘I took it as a gesture of submission,’ he says. ‘He trusted me enough to tell me that. To be his messenger. Of his first message.’

‘He’s issuing goodbyes.’

‘If we go in, hewillshoot,’ Niall says, looking directly at Maidstone. ‘If we get him talking, he won’t. He hasn’t shot anyone yet. I want Camilla in.’

‘We bring the wife in, he says goodbye, he shoots them and then himself. It’s Negotiating 101.’

Niall stares at his feet, a hand in his hair. He disagrees that negotiating is this simple. The thing is, Deschamps doesn’t want to be there. The body language, the sobbing. All of it.

That’s what it is. That’s what his instincts say.

‘At the moment, everyone is alive,’ Niall says. ‘We have eyes directly on him. I want totalkto him.’

‘We could hear a shot right now, right this second. We’d get no warning. Bang – and we’d all be done for,’ Maidstone says. ‘Our hesitation would not be excusable.’

‘There are four human beings in there, not three.’

Maidstone turns away from Niall, and he thinks he’s going to actually storm off like a teenager, but he’s looking down at his beeping phone. There are reams and reams of messages on there, emails, calls, texts. Niall ought to be more sympathetic: running a show like this is madly stressful, much worse than being the negotiator.

Maidstone flicks his gaze to Niall. ‘George Louis has arrived. Wants to be in here.’ He turns his mouth down, obviously disapproving. ‘Wants to know what’s going on.’

‘Let him in. It’s his wife in there,’ Niall says. ‘I’d want to be in the cordon. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Relatives at the scene is … Having Camilla Deschamps here is bad enough,’ Maidstone says with the tone of voice of an irritated ex-husband.

‘He’s police. He’ll know how to behave himself,’ Niall supplies.

Maidstone turns away from him, but Niall reaches to touch him on the shoulder. ‘Besides, we need to interview him anyway. Find out what his wife’s like under pressure. Ifshe has any connection to Deschamps. We can speak to him. We might be able to get information.’

Maidstone chucks his phone on to a table, where it skitters. ‘He’s on his way. Bring on George. Bring Camilla, too. Seems I get no say in the matter. Bring the whole fucking circus.’

THE SUN

WHO HAS BEEN TAKEN IN THIS ABANDONED WAREHOUSE IN BERMONDSEY?

Three hostages sit on two wooden chairs in a warehouse in Bermondsey.But what is most mysterious about these events isn’t the man taking hostages: it’s that nobody – not even the police – seems to know who two of the hostages are.

DO YOU KNOW THESE MEN?

Believed to both be six feet tall, broad, white. Look at the CCTV screenshots below and call in if you recognize their clothes.

11

Cam

Cam is numb in the back of a police car, and all she can think is that Polly will be having her lunchtime nap, now. She winces as she imagines her in that unfamiliar place. They sleep on floor beds at the nursery, and something about this rattles Cam, like her mind is fixating on this instead of everything else. She tries to pull it back to the mystery at hand.

‘I don’t understand how you don’t have a record of the burglary,’ she says to Smith. ‘Itdidhappen. It did. He did report it. He said he had a crime number, that you’d look into it.’

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