Page 76 of Famous Last Words

‘Did you? Protect him?’

‘I did protect him. Though not very well.’

And Niall can tell he’s lost him. His stare becomes evasive, looking behind Niall at nothing.

‘Harry – why did he need protection?’ Niall asks.

Harry ventures forward, now, steps right into a sunbeam which illuminates his shabby black clothes and strawberry-blond hair. He pauses. Stares down at the floor, evidently thinking. He’s wearing mismatched socks.

Harry’s a criminal, but here he looks vulnerable. So slight, his voice with the sort of watery tone of somebody full of regret.

‘I do business,’ Harry says. ‘And I keep people’s business private. That’s the deal.’

‘Even with immunity on the table?’

‘That’s the deal,’ he repeats, but it didn’t seem like the deal earlier, not until Niall really started probing.

‘He’s a wanted man, right?’ Harry says.

‘Yup.’

‘So … it’s not a deal, is it? That you’re offering me. It’s a threat.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Niall says, but, actually,really, it is. This guy is no idiot. ‘Did you offer him a safe harbour? The night of the siege?’

‘No. Hang on,’ Harry says, and he exits the kitchen without another word. Niall can hear his footsteps on bare wood stairs, and cocks his head and waits. A minute passes, two.Above, he hears the flush of a toilet. He has no doubt Harry is stalling for time, but time is good for Niall, too, who goes to the kitchen counter and scans it. He opens drawers – empty, due to the renovation – and begins a slow loop around the kitchen. By the back doors is a hip-height desk housing all the accoutrements associated with work. Pieces of paper, notepads, pens, elastic bands, drawing pins. Niall moves some of them around, quietly, trying to pretend they are things he could have noticed incidentally; things he doesn’t need a warrant to uncover.

A scrap of paper sits in a wooden bowl along with some golf tees and loose change. Niall holds it up to the light while he waits, and reads.

– Username. Sully018747450

– Password: 84hfkHdn[]

– URL: jsudnj283738ndjh.onion.forum

A dark web login for a forum. Niall would know that kind of onion URL anywhere. He takes a photograph of it, then replaces it in the bowl. Upstairs, all is silent, and Niall waits for five more minutes before he accepts what he already knows to have happened.

He calls out, ‘Harry?’

Nothing. No running water, no footsteps.

Niall heads out into the sun-blanched hallway and up the stairs. Sure enough, the bathroom window – a large side-opening one – is wide open. It drops down on to the back of the living room, a flat roof that juts sharply into the garden. The back gate is open, still swinging. Niall thinks of the fear when he mentioned Deschamps. And, clearly, Harry doesn’t think he is saving himself from the police by escaping – he’s no stranger to police interviewing suites – but fromsomebody else, instead. Somebody more important. Somebody more dangerous.

This is the second time somebody has escaped from Niall on this case, he thinks, as he watches the gate blow on the breeze.

It’s late, after dark, and Niall heads to an internet café called ONLINE NOW. As he walks, his mind naturally turns to Viv – her house is just around the corner from here – and everything Jess said, and some things she didn’t, too.

He takes a detour, up two side streets and on to a main thoroughfare, and there it is. Viv’s house, in darkness. Why is he here? He feels like a creep standing there looking at the house she now lives in. Three windows across, two large ones downstairs. An ancient cat sits in the living-room window.

I miss you I miss you I miss you, said Camilla, and Niall could text the exact same thing, right now, right here. His eyes are wet with it. Her pots and pots of tea and the way she came home with bloody stray cats all the time, the way she must have sat alone on that day, her birthday, and hoped for a single text acknowledging it, from her self-involved, arsehole husband.

He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know how to make the gesture he wants to make – I fucking regret it, I regret it, I regret it – so he gives those windows one last look, willing it to come. How can he tell her, seven years too late, the truth? That he wishes he’d treated her differently. Better. The truth, also, is that he loves his job, and will probably do it again, one day.

Her bin is out. He lifts the lid like a psycho, and sees that it’s empty, the rubbish collected. Looking both ways, he grabsit by the handle and pulls it back up her path, leaving it in the bin store. He won’t tell her he did it. And it wouldn’t make any difference to her view of him if he did. But it might make her life easier, save her doing a small task that she hates, and that’s worth it, to him.

He enters the internet café to an electronic beep. There is nobody here at all, not even anybody behind the counter, and he waits until they emerge.

He’s not the kind of person Niall was expecting – an old man, late sixties maybe, with two pairs of glasses on: one over his eyes and one nestled in his hair. It smells of coffee in here: instant, cheap, take it black or white. Niall feels a pang of nostalgia for something he can’t name. Maybe it’s just the past. The simple bygone time where internet was dial-up and coffee was coffee.

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