Page 106 of Famous Last Words

‘Look,’ he says. ‘Hostage negotiating – it takes it out of you. Emotionally.’ He knows he shouldn’t defend himself, but he wants to. Doesn’t want to be consigned to the pool of untreatable maniacs.

‘Are you still getting the dreams?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still every night?’ she says: so she knows he lied about the frequency.

‘Pretty much,’ he says. ‘I’ve had breakthroughs on that case, now, but I don’t know. I think it’s a different trauma.’

‘The trauma of Viv.’

‘Exactly.’

She sighs, just slightly, but then steers him on to policing, instead, perhaps a kind distraction. ‘What kind of breakthroughs?’

Niall gratefully fills her in about what Camilla told him. About Madison Smith, and Alexander Hale and James Lancaster, and everything else. ‘The thing is, I looked,’ he says. ‘I looked, that night in April 2017, for signs of where Deschamps had been, and now it turns out there was a double murder. I just can’t understand how come I didn’t spot that on that day.’

Jess turns her mouth down. ‘I mean – I don’t know how policing works,’ she says. ‘At all. But … it doesn’t strike me that you’re the type of person to miss something.’

‘I am. I mean – the two hostages are dead because of me.’

‘Two men who came to kill Luke.’

‘Yes, but even so.’

‘Is it possible that it wasn’t there that day?’ she says to him. ‘This – entry on the database for the double murder?’

Niall closes his eyes, thinking. Checking HOLMES, sun slanting into the Wetherspoon’s, urgency in the air. Was he rushing – or had something else happened?

And that’s when the answer arrives, as easy as if it’s nothing at all: his brain supplies the solution, right there in fucking therapy. His eyes open and meet Jess’s. ‘You’ve got it,’ hesays, rising to his feet, even though they’re only halfway through the session.

‘Have I?’

‘Yes. You’ve cracked it.’ He’s at the door now, his hand on the knob. ‘I didn’t miss anything,’ he says to her. ‘I didn’t. You’re right. Someone took it off. That must be it: the double murder wasn’t on the system. The hostages had no identitieson the system.’

Niall’s mind is racing, the way his brain speeds up sometimes when information is coming at him, piece after piece after piece slotting neatly, not being jammed or forced. He’s landed on it. He knows he has. ‘Someone could have removed information from the police computer,’ he says. ‘The only person who was connected both to the hostages, and to the police,’ he says. ‘A man called George Louis, Isabella’s husband. They weren’t victims: they were perpetrators.’

50

Cam

Cam makes her excuses to Adam and tries to leave, weaving her way across the rooftop, past authors and agents and people serving drinks.

‘Shit,’ she says, under her breath to Charlie.

‘I know – really awkward,’ he says.

Her mind is reeling.

All this time. All this time. That book’s been in her house. She tells herself it’s a general submission, some author who’s found her address.

But she doesn’t think so.

The kid selling the drugs. From a crime family.

One of the murdered teens.The double murder.

The other teen, from a rival crime family.