Page 34 of Famous Last Words

Isabella doesn’t respond immediately. Her hair is staticky and messy from the hood, which has drifted to the floor like a popped balloon, and she pulls her hands to her chest, then her cheeks, then leans right into Niall and sobs.

His muscles untense as he holds her. Maybe they got away with it. Maybe he was correct to ask for more time, to wait, to have Camilla to come on to the scene. Maybe Deschamps will release the others, next.

They stay like that for several minutes, Niall trying to slow her breathing by slowing his.

And just as he’s thinking that they will be OK, he hears them.

Two gunshots.

The ones that, ultimately, will end his career. They go off, loud and true, right behind him like a fireworks display that he can’t see, only hear.

14

Cam

Cam is waiting on a verge by the side of the road, with two police officers as her keepers. She goes someplace else. All she can think about, see and hear is Luke, on slow, in her mind. A montage plays out for her as her eyes glaze and she listens to the silence of what might be his own denouement. Luke at a publishing prize ceremony with her last summer, a man who doesn’t care for literary fiction but likes an outing, saying to her, ‘I don’t even know which book this is!’ Luke mainlining Quality Streets last Christmas with her, not moving for hours, turning to her and saying he might just wet himself rather than get up, he was so comfortable. Luke in the labour ward, wet-eyed and quiet and gazing at Polly.

Maybe her mind already knew it was going to happen, and immersed her in these memories, because she hears them while she stands on the roadside in the warm summer air.

The gunshots that everyone has always known would come.

Two gunshots and two echoes, and Luke pops clean from her mind.

She waits for a moment in the quiet calm, the same way you know you will feel pain right after you injure yourself but it takes several seconds to come. This time, she almost thinks that it won’t.

But, of course, it does. And here it is, a wave of awfulclosure, of fear. The question of whether he was the shooter or the victim. She thinks she’s going to collapse.

Neither of the police reacts at all. Cam’s legs are trembling with adrenaline, jiggling uncontrollably. Gunshots. Gunshots.

‘What was that?’ she asks needlessly, a hand to her mouth. Her jaw is quivering and she begins to chatter her teeth against her fingertips.

‘We’ll let you know as soon as we know anything,’ one of the officers replies.

One of their radios crackles but no words are said.

Cam stares at the lit-up warehouse, at the drone and helicopter above it, at the hundreds of police around it. But wait. What’s that …?

As she watches, it becomes clearer. There’s something happening on the roof.

She squints, trying to look, but knowing that if she makes it obvious the police may move her.

The roof is so far away, so high up, they look like moving figurines, but they are yet more police in riot gear, running, shouting, perhaps searching. Against her own moral code, Cam hopes that they’re searching for her husband, and that he got away, that he wasn’t shot. Against all the things she now knows. That he left this morning, leaving only a shitty, cryptic note. That he went to that warehouse. That he did all this.

15

Niall

The scene erupts into chaos.

‘Armed officers in!’ Maidstone yells into a radio, which blares out on to everybody’s individual radio. ‘Two shots have been fired. Suspect moved everyone away from the hole in the wall. We didn’t see it play out.’

Niall whips around, staring at the black door, still banging slightly in the breeze. His head is full of questions he has no time to answer.

He releases Isabella, who stumbles towards a copper, who leads her to her husband, and Niall turns to head inside. He ought to arm himself, get some sort of clearance, but the situation has disintegrated into a free-for-all. Police flood into the warehouse like a backfilling tide, and Niall follows, too, not thinking. Not allowing himself to think.

The warehouse is cool inside, a perfume of wet stone and musk, lit by a single fluorescent bulb high above. Niall watches the police scatter, shouting, but he moves slowly, his eyes everywhere. Where is Deschamps? He could have his gun trained on Niall right now. And who’d you want to kill next more than the negotiator?

He creeps slowly forwards, watching the police in their riot gear.

---