Page 7 of Famous Last Words

But he has. He has done it.

The police lead her gently into the back of the car while her colleagues watch on, their mouths agape, their eyes wide in the glass foyer, like visitors at a zoo.

5

Niall

One of the many things Niall didn’t count on when he became a hostage negotiator is that hostage situations hardly ever happen. And so, ghoulish as this may be, most of his days are spent waiting for one, like a footballer on the bench. Or, worse, he’s called to one that resolves while he’s on the way. Niall does more U-turns at motorway roundabouts than he does negotiating.

He is at this precise moment on light duties in the police back office of the Met – he’s a detective on the side, though a pretty unwilling one since his hostage training. If he’s lucky, he might get a negotiation with a petty criminal who has stolen a bottle of vodka and decided to hold up Tesco Express with a water pistol instead of coming out.

He sifts through the application forms he has for a vacancy in his department, but he can’t settle to it today, keeps putting the forms down and buying things on Amazon Prime (a home beer-making kit, a spinning shelf that goes in the fridge that he can put his chutneys on).

It is not especially coincidental to Niall, then, when the call does come, because he’s always waiting for it. Vivienne tells him he even answers these calls in his sleep. ‘“What’s the situation?” you say. Some wives would hope you would call their name in your dreams.’

‘DCI Thompson,’ he says into the phone as he answers now – fully awake, or so he hopes.

‘White male holding up a warehouse in Bermondsey,’ the call handler says.

He holds the phone between his ear and shoulder and drops the forms, interested. They scatter, drifting off the desk this way and that like feathers, but Niall is much beyond caring what becomes of them. He opens and takes a sip of his Coke – the first gulp of the day is always the best; everyone has their vices – fizzy metal liquid bubbling on his tongue, tilts his head, and says, ‘What exactly do you mean by “holding up”?’ He stares at the can. He wrote his name on it with a Sharpie, so that nobody would steal it from the work fridge, pathetic as that is.

‘He has taken three hostages. Sadly, the media already has it – a security guard being paid to watch the CCTV remotely called 999, which was good, but he also leaked the footage on Facebook.’

Niall feels a frisson rush up his body. This is not a domestic. And it’s not a shoplifter, either. A livestreamed siege.

‘He’s put bags on their heads.’ Her voice is deadpan. It’s Sheridan, Niall realizes. She took a call for him five years ago, about a man set to jump on to the M4, and she’d said flatly, then, ‘There’s probably nothing anyone can do now, but he’s still there …’ She’s bored with the job, and understandably so, but Niall finds it embarrassing when the police do not care enough. He went to the M4, as it goes. Talked him down.

‘I have that CCTV for you. Hang on …’ Sheridan says.

‘Just WhatsApp it to me.’

‘I’m supposed to email it, one sec …’

‘OK,’ he says. ‘We need to get down there. Where in Bermondsey?’

‘Behind Shad Thames.’

Niall knows it well. Iron bridges in an alleyway that connect apartments above like a Kerplunk! game.

‘Perpetrator is called Luke Deschamps.’

Niall hears his email beep in his ear. He opens it on his laptop and clicks the link, the phone on speaker.

‘I’ll be there,’ he says, watching the video load, standing back from his desk, hands on his hips.

He squints, trying to work out how the perpetrator has power over the individuals in their hoods, and then he sees it: the handgun tucked into his dark sleeve. A Beretta, a pistol.

Bermondsey High Street looks shabby and tired even in the bright sunlight when Niall arrives. He and Vivienne moved last year to the Barbican, at his insistence to be near work, and now everywhere looks somehow unclean compared to the sanitized holiday-complex feel of his home, a penthouse in a building called Ben Jonson House that looks like something fromBattlestar Galactica. Viv works for the RSPCA and – from time to time – brings home animals she can’t rehouse that look kind of out of place in the clean-lined apartment. Niall often approaches the front door with real trepidation, worse than he feels at work, unable to forget the time there was a surprise kestrel in the shower.

He grabs his phone and sends her a text now.Got called on to a job. No idea how long I’ll be, he writes.A job or a job job?she replies immediately.A job job – proper one!He smiles down atthe phone. She once told him she finds it impossibly sexy when he’s on a hostage situation, which Niall has never forgotten.

But, today, Viv doesn’t reply exactly as he expects.Right x, she replies, and that’s all.

She will be pissed off with him, Niall thinks with a sigh. They’re tussling at the moment, locking horns over work. He got halfway round the North Circular one Friday a few weeks ago to a job that got called off before he got there, but it had made him so late back they had to cancel their weekend away in the Lake District.

But work’s work. Policing is antisocial. Everybody knows it.

He ventures down the High Street with a bounce in his step, walking past proper London – corner shops with loose and hot fruit and veg outside, neon Tube signs and graffiti and fire escapes Rapunzelling down the back of buildings.

---