Page 45 of Famous Last Words

Marrakech, 2022

The call to prayer wakes me. A singular man’s voice, shortly thereafter joined by a second, then a whole chorus. Pearlescent, early skies, amber at their edges, pink at the top. Flat-roofed, pale-stone buildings. I shouldn’t be here. And I don’t know it now, but life is about to change for ever.

Cam reads and reads. She’s in Morocco, she’s a male, middle-aged ex-spy called Alfie. She’s not separated from Luke; she’s not following coordinates. She’s not abandoned Charlie to finish a goat’s cheese tart alone. She’s someone else. Someplace else.

She reads the whole way home, feeling safely ensconced in another world. She barely feels the hot and stale Tube air around her, doesn’t see the flickering lights and doesn’t feel the jarring carriage.

But as she climbs the steps at Putney, she feels it. Something intangible. A shivering creeping at the back of her neck, like an ice cube touched just lightly to hot skin.

She turns around on the spot. Just beyond the Tube exit are a street artist and two market researchers holding clipboards, hoping to engage pedestrians. Nothing else. She presses her debit card to the barrier, trying to forget. Maybe he’s nowhere. Maybe heisdead.

Funny. She was so sure it was him, she never considered that it might be somebody else. Somebody sinister. Somebody dangerous. Her back shudders as she thinks it, and she makes her way home, alone, like she always does. She tells herself she’s used to it now. The solo bedtimes and books and television shows she watches by herself and the lone mug she washes up before bed.

But it had been nice to think it might have an end in sight.

23

Niall

Gunshots.

Niall turns over in bed, perfunctorily checks the window to see if they’re real, but of course they’re not. They never are.

The dream gunshots wake him most nights, now. They started two years ago, infrequent at first. Niall hadn’t thought much of them at the time. Strange dreams, from his disaster of a negotiation that meant he went back on detective duties. It’s not surprising it resides somewhere in his consciousness, like a deep-sea creature you can only see if you look hard enough.

He tries to sleep again, but can’t. Time inches ever forwards. His room is black, the only light coming from the very edges of the windows – he got blackout blinds last year, to try to help, but they didn’t. Eventually, he switches the light on and sits up, rubbing his eyes.

He checks his phone. Four fifteen. Same as ever.

The dream begins to fade from his mind, Niall’s heartbeat slowing with it. He was asking for more and more and more time in it. Maidstone refusing. Niall insisting. Niall holding the released Isabella, her body soft and warm against his. Niall changing his mind, racing into the building, and then – always, always, always – the dream ends with the two shots, fired in quick succession, right behind Niall. He never gets there in time to stop them.

And then the bodies. The round bullet holes in their skulls. Their DNA flagged nothing on the police database. Their teeth matched no known dental records, nor any on international databases, either. No relatives ever, ever came forward for them, despite extensive appeals. It’s a mystery with no solution, no ending.

He tells himself it’s been on his mind more since the sighting in February. Deschamps, or someone who looks a lot like him, seen near Camilla’s house by a traffic officer. They couldn’t catch him in time. He got away. And maybe it wasn’t him, but … the dreams stepped up, from there.

Niall gives up on sleep, gets up and starts the day.

Later that morning, he sits in Jess’s office. She is, he is reluctant to say, his therapist. He’s been sent to see her – against his will – because he accidentally disclosed the gunshot dreams to Tim, his boss, who phoned it right in. Officers can’t be on the verge of PTSD, apparently, not without talking endlessly about it in beige rooms with boxes of tissues on the tables. Niall told them it isn’t PTSD, but, of course, nobody listens.

Jess practises on the first floor of a mid-century block of offices in Lambeth. Her room doesn’t smell like a therapist’s office: it smells of the bakery beneath it – hot cinnamon rolls and fresh bread and yeast. She is young, too young to be so wise, has blonde hair and dimples and a particular contrary tone she gets about her when Niall is saying something irrational without realizing it.

‘The same dream as ever?’ she says, and she is, Niall thinks, pleased that he’s discussing it. He mostly skirts around his two banned topics, this being the first, talking in broad terms about responsibility in policing in general, about the ops hehas on, wasting time for the session. Niall is good at talking and good, too, at running down a clock, and he does it every week with Jess.

‘When you dream of it – what do you wish you could do in the dream?’ Jess asks. She sits forward. She knows what happened in the Bermondsey siege – she was briefed on it by the Met’s in-house occupational health team. But she’s never heard Niall outline more than the very basic facts.

‘Wake up,’ Niall says, but Jess doesn’t laugh, merely puffs air through her nose and looks down at her lap, then back up at him, waiting for a serious answer that may not come.

It’s almost the end of the session, and she leaves it a beat, still expecting some sort of disclosure from him.

‘Did you ever see the bodies?’ she asks. A surprising question, one that seems to come out of nowhere.

‘Yeah. In the station – the forensic pathologist …’

‘Can you describe them?’

Niall closes his eyes, not wanting to go back there. To the neat temple wounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, blue T-shirts, middle-aged, white, both of them. A Salvador Dalí drip of blood from the neckline downwards. Niall used to be bothered by things like this, used to drive home too fast and wake Viv up from sleep to hold her, but he isn’t any longer. The truth is, you really can see too much. Until seeing something like this – two people, shot to death – becomes just another bit of admin.

‘Do you wish you could stop it?’ she suggests. ‘When you hear those shots?’

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