Page 118 of Famous Last Words

‘I see,’ Cam says softly, thinking of all of the years past, how many times they had just missed each other, the danger he was in, how if Luke hadn’t been out that night, if Polly hadn’t been awake, if, if, if … ‘And you put the story in the book. Their story. And the clues for me to find you.’

‘You were always good at reading me,’ he says simply. ‘And my words.’

He looks at Cam, his eyes full of love. ‘What is she like?’ he asks, and Cam knows just who he means: their daughter, Polly, the only witness to Luke’s crime. The person who, all along, knew the score, but didn’t know it, too.

Act Four

SEVEN YEARS AFTER THE SECOND SHOOTING

61

Niall

Niall waits for the phone to be answered. It rings two times, four, six, eight, but, today, he knows they’re going to pick up.

‘Six hundred thousand,’ says a voice, a deep register, accented. Niall turns away from the payphone. He’s inside a bar in Bogotá. Outside on the street, yellow taxis rush by. There’s graffiti outside, a white Colombian sky, close weather, a McDonald’s opposite – aren’t there more McDonald’s restaurants in the world than anything else, or is that some sort of myth?

‘I can’t do six hundred,’ Niall says into the untraceable payphone. ‘Trust me when I say I don’t have the authority to.’ This is the language he is careful to use: he wants to comply, but can’t. He’s governed by forces beyond his control. Not his fault, he’s just the messenger.

Niall is fully freelance these days, but this is the weirdest job for a little while. He tilts his head back on the phone, listening and thinking. ‘What can you go to?’ the voice says, downbeat, no question imbued within it.

‘Half that.’

‘No deal,’ the voice says, and hangs up the phone. Niall rubs his head and sighs, walks away from the phone. He sips his drink – a virgin whiskey sour – and waits.

From the back room of the bar, the man arrives.

‘No deal,’ he repeats, a broad smile on his face.

‘Right,’ Niall says, turning with him to face the group of hostage negotiators in training looking up at them. ‘That’s what happens when you talk figures too early,’ he says, as his Colombian friend nods.

‘Exactly,’ he says. ‘No deals.’

‘More tomorrow,’ Niall says. He checks his watch. It’s five o’clock: finishing time.

If there’s a McDonald’s on every street corner in the world, there may also be a Patisserie Valerie. Or,La Patisserie de Valerie, as it’s known here. And, outside it, there is Viv, holding a box.

‘Hello,’ she says to him, her face immediately brightening up like somebody has animated her. God, her eyes. ‘All done? Up-and-comers all educated?’

‘Not really,’ Niall says with a laugh. ‘Sometimes, I actually think you can’t teach this stuff.’

‘Oh.’

‘Which is good,’ he adds sarcastically. ‘As – now – a teacher.’

‘Oh dear, struck off from the Met and now from teaching?’

Niall smiles a half-smile, thinking of what led him to be struck off. The siege, the events afterwards, that night when Camilla found Deschamps. The second Deschamps sent the book, he went to sleep rough in the little lock-up Niall had peered inside. Waiting for her. He was there when Niall checked, hiding in the back, in the shadows. And he was there, too, on that night.

The whole time, Deschamps and Camilla were not in the lighthouse at all. He’d left another clue in the book. Leaving Niall free to shoot, alone.

Deschamps and Camilla had come to Dungeness thatnight when he’d asked them to, and had lied for him. Said they’d seen the shooting, that he had needed to do it. That it would have saved them, hiding in the lighthouse. Niall had got away without being charged, but he’d lost his job for withholding information. For acting alone. The Hales and the Louises he’d wounded had gone to prison.

‘No. Just done for the weekend.’

‘Well, Ihappenedto buy four cakes,’ Viv says. She opens a second box, held in a bag by her side that he didn’t see. ‘And, oh my God, a teapot.’

‘Only you would come to Colombia and buy a teapot.’