Page 53 of Famous Last Words

The team – including Niall – is leaving for Dungeness in an hour, the force predictably ablaze with excitement at potentially capturing Deschamps after all this time. One of the PCs just told Niall he was thirteen when Deschamps went missing, remembers watching it on the news, to which Niall said, ‘Fuck me, I’m old.’

Right now, he is walking through the streets surrounding Scotland Yard to buy a new burner phone to contact Deschamps on, and smoking and thinking. He’s lucky that Tim is a friend as well as a colleague, who lets him pick and choose what he works on. He overheard Maidstone – now promoted – ask what Niall was doing back on the case, andTim loyally deflect. He’s glad, too, that the Met is springing into action. So often with these things the budget won’t stretch, the boxes need to be ticked, and they lose the heat on the lead they have.

There is nowhere better to walk than London. Niall is near to Embankment. It’s a windy day, and he gazes at a man sketching the river on a plain pad of paper.

‘Niall?’ a voice says behind him. It belongs to a woman emerging from the Tube. Niall’s eyes meet hers, and it’s Rosalind, Viv’s sister.

‘How are you doing?’ Niall says carefully.

She is an avatar of Viv. Same huge head of hair – Niall even now, seven years on, finds strands of them in his flat – but she’s different, too. Smaller nose, a more contained personality. None of Viv’s wildness.

‘Yes, great,’ Rosalind says. She is a person who – Niall thinks – likes to pretend. She’s married to a banker called Freddie, who issues put-downs to her in company, which Rosalind pretends not to notice. Oh, or maybe he no longer does – Niall forgets, sometimes, that his information about Viv is long out of date. They keep in touch but not about anything that matters.

Niall and Rosalind haven’t yet decided if this will be a ten-second exchange or ten minutes, and Niall stands awkwardly as commuters dodge and weave around them.

‘You?’ Rosalind asks, perhaps only to be polite. It’s been years since Niall has seen her. He remembers a night about a week after Viv left. She went to stay with Rosalind, and Niall turned up at the door on an ill-advised pleading mission. ‘She’s sick of playing second fiddle to a job,’ Rosalind had said.

‘But she never said that,’ Niall said, standing right there onthe doorstep in the rain like some tosser in a movie. ‘She never said.’

Rosalind had half closed the door. ‘Why should she have to sound the alarm to you?’ she said, eyes only just visible in the closing crack. ‘You should have known.’

Two weeks after that, the first lawyer’s letter had arrived. Niall called Viv up directly when he’d received it, even though it said not to do precisely that.

‘You were not ignored by me in favour of work,’ he had said, phone cradled into his ear at his desk. ‘That’s what it says here, item one of my “unreasonable behaviour”.’

‘Yes I was. You only had time for me if you didn’t have a job on.’

‘That’s the nature of my work. And everyone’s work.’

‘Nothing better to do.’

‘No, that’s not it.’

‘What did I do that day?’ she’d said. ‘The day of the siege.’

‘What? I don’t know.’

‘DidIgo to work? How did I celebrate my birthday?’

‘Look: I’ll be better,’ he’d said. ‘Tell me what you’re up to. And I won’t – I won’t …’ He hadn’t been able to say it.I won’t ignore you, or take you for granted. The thing is, with Viv, like all stinging criticism, it had been warranted. Of course it had. Every copper’s marriage suffered.

‘Fine,’ Niall says now to Rosalind. ‘I don’t have long – I’m on a job.’

He doesn’t know why he says it. To goad her, perhaps. To provoke a reaction. Maybe to make himself feel that he lost it all for something: that workismore important to him, even when he is no longer sure of that at all.

And that’s when she does it. The slightest roll of her eyes.Niall catches it, the same way that you can only momentarily see a spider’s web tracing its way across your path in the sunlight. He says nothing back.

‘What job?’ she asks. Rosalind is in summer wear, flip-flops and sunglasses, her hair a lion’s mane.

‘An old siege rearing its head,’ he says. ‘How is Viv …?’

‘Fine.’

‘What is she up to?’

Rosalind pauses, clearly wanting to say something, but not knowing whether she ought to. Niall stubs his cigarette out on a nearby bin spilling over with rubbish, then tosses it in. ‘It’s fine, Ros,’ he says. ‘You don’t need to tell me anything.’

‘She’s broken up with Brad.’

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