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Niall

‘No more news here.’ The next day, Lambert is at the front of the boardroom, one hand on the edge of the whiteboard, the other on his hip. ‘Niall was sent to grill Harry Grace, so over to him.’ He turns to Niall, expression expectant.

Niall pauses. He relays briefly his conversation with Harry and what he found on the dark web. He talks fast, excitedly.

When he’s finished, Tim seems to be considering things, turning his mouth down, thinking. He’s in on this briefing – usually, findings are reported up to him – and seems mostly unable to stop himself from interjecting. ‘That is a lot of information,’ he says eventually.

‘I know,’ Niall says, and there begins a creeping thud of disappointment.

‘So he was come for by hitmen?’

‘Exactly,’ Niall says. And, right then, he gets another bad feeling about it. The room isn’t reacting as he wanted.

‘And your only proof of this is a conversation on the dark web? You have no idea who sent them?’ Tim’s voice is imbued with scepticism.

‘Yes …’

‘What evidence do you have of what Deschamps needed protecting from?’ Tim says.

‘Only what he wrote.’

‘I’m thinking about self-defence.’ Tim says, a barrage of questions beginning now.

‘Clearly, he needed help.’ The feeling of unease grows: he is the only one trying to turn a tide. He’s standing there, at the shore, doing it all himself.

‘Well, Deschamps could’ve easily written anything he liked on the dark web, to cover up what he wanted to do,’ Tim says mildly. ‘Proving self-defence is a high bar. The threat has to be to someone’s life, and an immediate one.’

‘He asked for help on there in a panic.’

‘No: all we really know is he posted on the dark web – and then he still went into that warehouse and shot two men.’

Niall shakes his head. ‘That is not what we know,’ he says. ‘What about the stuff that isn’t hard evidence? That here’s a guy with zero criminal history, who never wanted to kill anybody, who was begging for help. That here’s someone who could’ve picked up and used their gun, in self-defence.’

‘Instead he tried to buy his own,’ Tim says. ‘Which doesn’t look a lot, to me, like self-defence. It looks like pre-meditation.’

‘He didn’t get it in time.’

‘Despite trying. Look – we are nothing without evidence,’ Tim remarks, while the rest of the team watch the tennis match of an argument, looking awkward. Conflict hums in the air like a piano key depressed and then released, the air almost silent afterwards. Niall shifts slightly away from his boss and jiggles his foot in irritation.

‘We have no idea whether Deschamps used their gun,’ Tim says. ‘As I recall it, the footage doesn’t show it.’

‘Exactly. It doesn’t. I think the men turned up in their balaclavas,’ Niall says. ‘I don’t think Deschamps bagged them. But we can’t tell. They arrived off CCTV, only stepped into the frame once it was done.’

‘Or, Deschamps herded them in, also off-camera. Look – we can keep the file open. We can look for hit men who were operating then,’ Tim says, and it’s a weak compromise. No direct action. No reinvigorating of the whole case. No desperate search for Deschamps, to find and exonerate him.

‘OK – next steps,’ Lambert says. ‘I am not minded to throw a lot of resource at who did what in that warehouse: Deschamps is long gone.’

‘Camilla is not in touch with Deschamps, that’s very clear,’ Claire says. ‘Her call to 999 last night about the figure in her garden is probably something and nothing. Paranoia. But she wouldn’t do that if it was Deschamps.’

Niall is worried for Camilla, and he can feel where this is going. As he sinks his head to his chest and tries to take deep breaths, his anger begins to simmer. They’re giving up. Leaving a mystery unsolved. A woman perhaps in danger. They ignored him about what he saw in the alleyway off her street.

Lambert continues: ‘I still think we leave surveillance on Camilla for another month. We can see if we can figure out the basics of who the contract killers were and who hired them. But nothing more than that. There isn’t the money here to chase this around London for another seven years on the off chance that this wasn’t Deschamps’s fault. He fired the shots. That’s the main thing.’

There’s a murmur of assent around the room.

‘What?’ Niall explodes. ‘Hang on – I mean … are we not trying to solve a mystery here? Does the why not matter? Or self-defence?’

Tim’s eyes flash, but he says nothing, doesn’t back Niall up.

‘I was sent to get information from Harry Grace, and I did. I got you all the information you wanted,’ Niall continues. ‘And for what?’

‘Information, maybe, but all of it insubstantial,’ Tim says.

‘No it’s not.’

‘We can’t verify that it was even Deschamps typing on the web. Imagine,’ Tim says, his voice now slightly raised, too – as incensed as he ever gets. ‘Imagine if we acted on this, Niall. Let’s say we find him. We go in with the wrong tactics, because we believe him not to be dangerous, but instead – some sort of victim.’

Niall’s sitting slack-jawed at the table, though, really, he ought not to be surprised. This sort of game-playing has gone on his entire career. If this, then how will it look? If that, then how will we cover our own arses? The police are only ever interested in toeing the line. If something doesn’t fit with their narrative, they’re not complying.

‘Anyway,’ Lambert says, ‘it is so unlikely Deschamps is alive. In seven years, not a single sighting, no slip-ups, no passport pinged, no bank cards used. What would he even be living off?’

The windows are open, the summer sweeps its smells in, and Lambert concludes the briefing. An end-of-term feeling settles around the room. Any further activity on the Dungeness burner phone will be called in, but that’s all. A perfunctory search for the contract killers’ real identities that Niall knows, without big budget, will yield nothing: how could it?

‘Sometimes,’ Lambert says, wheeling the whiteboard to the back of the room, then rolling his shirt sleeves up, ‘you just don’t get the answers.’ Possibly he thinks this is some sort of pitch-perfect ending to the briefing but, really, he just sounds like he’s in a hokey cop movie. Niall catches Tim’s eye, and Tim gives him a small, sad smile full of pity, and they leave the briefing together.

Outside in the too warm corridor, Tim stops at a translucent blue water dispenser, pours himself a drink, and sips it neatly. ‘You know, I did think we would one day get answers on this one. Pains me to end it, but it’s so expensive and I don’t think it would achieve much.’

‘Sure,’ Niall says, and Tim’s face falls into relief. Niall grabs his own cup and fills it. He thinks, these days, that he likes to have a drink on him partially to buy time. That was what the Coke was about: thinking time. He gulps the water down now, fingertips on the ridges of the plastic cup. ‘Just the small matter of justice.’

‘Oh, Niall, don’t be like that,’ Tim says. ‘Two people are dead. Possibly three. We’re never going to find out exactly what went on in that building, no matter how much we read on the dark web. It would only ever be Deschamps’s account of it.’

‘You’re no longer interested, then. On to the next?’

‘I am never not interested in my old cases.’

‘I didn’t mean the case,’ Niall says coolly. Tim waits. ‘I meant the truth,’ Niall says.

They’re in an anodyne place for such a significant moment in their relationship. The water cooler. A grey-carpeted corridor. A fake plant at the end that the cleaner sometimes absent-mindedly waters.

Deschamps might be innocent. Niall believes that he is.

Deschamps knew two men were sent to kill him. And Niall knows, deep somewhere in his heart, that Deschamps might therefore have been acting in defence of himself. The problem is, he’d never get off on self-defence. For that, his life would have to be under immediate threat. Somebody pointing a gun at him, about to fire it. If he took their gun, it won’t work. In so many ways, Tim is right, but that doesn’t mean you stop trying to find the truth, does it?

There must be an answer, now that Niall knows the two men were sent to kill him. Why were they there? Why did Deschamps decide to shoot after so long?

He has to find out.

The police don’t care at all. They won’t care that he murdered two men because they were sent to kill him.

They’ll simply go after him, and, if they find him, charge him, let a jury decide on self-defence.

And if when they try to arrest him he even appears to be armed, they will probably kill him.

That is what Tim meant by his statement: Imagine … we go in with the wrong tactics, because we believe him not to be dangerous.

This is the Met. This is what Niall’s struggled with all along. The due process, the red tape, the by-the-book attitudes. If he complies, it sentences Deschamps to life.

I miss you. I miss you I miss you I miss you . The texts to Deschamps’s old number, sent by Camilla out into the ether.

How could he? When he knows Deschamps may now be the victim?

‘I care about the truth,’ Tim replies, but he says it reflexively.

‘Yeah, well,’ Niall says, thinking that nothing can stop him from looking into this by himself. And nothing can stop him trying to find Deschamps, and get the right ending for him, too. Off record. He buys a new burner phone, later, calls the number again. This time: phone not in use. Deschamps, if it is him, has ceased using it.

It’s funny, Niall is thinking as he climbs the stairs to Jess’s consulting room that evening, he wanted nothing to do with therapy, and now it’s the first place he wishes to come tonight, when in need. As though his brain has begun to exist outside of his body, a ball of yarn being unspooled by a professional, someone who only wants the best for him. Who takes the knots out and gives him back his thoughts in neat, segmented strands.

It’s a later session, the bakery below shut up, but also the other consulting rooms, too. Jess lets them both in with her own key, and they sit down in her room, which is chilly from lack of use. She clicks a small heater on and places it between them.

‘The gunshot case,’ Niall says carefully. It’s the very first sentence he utters to her.

‘Yes …’ Jess says, her expression as sharp as a bird’s. Finally: her topic.

‘This is confidential, right?’ he says, blowing a laugh out of the side of his mouth.

‘Right,’ Jess says. The heater begins to glow orange at her feet, pumps out the smell of burnt toast.

‘No ifs, no buts?’

‘The only but is if you might be thinking of murdering somebody,’ Jess says, and she means it in a completely offhand way, but it gives Niall a shiver. No, he’s not. But, with policing, with hostages, you never quite know where someone might end up.

‘Of course not,’ he says, deadpan.

‘What about the gunshot case?’

Niall looks down at his hands, folded in his lap, and then back up at her. ‘I found something out,’ he says. ‘And I’ve fallen out with work over it.’

Jess pauses, perhaps thinking that this goes far beyond a therapist’s job.

She reaches to straighten her notebook on the desk. ‘OK. So. What’s going on?’

‘The man who shot his hostages …’

‘… Yes.’

‘Two people were sent to murder him,’ Niall says. ‘The hostages were hitmen. That’s why he killed them. He wrote online, before it all, that he knew he was going to be murdered. It makes sense to me that it was self-defence. Or that he had no choice. He knew they were there to kill him, so he got in first. They knew something about him, but I don’t know what.’

Jess seems to shudder, just slightly, looking at Niall. He’s never seen her nervy before.

‘Horrible, isn’t it?’

‘It really is,’ she says. ‘So …’

‘So?’

‘This is the case where you made the police wait to enter, because you thought the hostage taker wasn’t going to kill?’

‘That’s right.’

Niall wants advice. He wants to focus on practicalities, on what to do next. He isn’t sure why she’s saying this. But, as always, Jess is smarter than he is.

‘Well – isn’t this kind of good, then?’ she says.

‘Huh?’ Niall says dumbly. ‘I mean – I’ve now lost the support of the police in looking into it.’

‘Not that. I meant … that – after all – your instincts about Deschamps were nailed on.’ She sits back in her chair, crosses her legs at the knee. She’s so young. Maybe only thirty. She’s so young to be so wise. ‘You weren’t wrong, after all.’

‘I …’

‘You were right to stall, even if it didn’t work out like you expected. He was not the perpetrator everyone said he was. And, somewhere deep down, you knew this.’

Niall closes his eyes, stands up, then sits down again. Something feels like it is bubbling up through him. Something that feels like relief. In all the murkiness.

He had been right.

Outside, it begins to rain. A fat patter of raindrops that are the way they should be in summer: huge and loud, a tin of marbles being emptied on the roof above them.

‘It always rains when I’m here,’ Niall says.

‘Hey, Niall,’ Jess says. ‘Stay with it. Lean into it.’

‘Hmm.’

‘You did nothing wrong. You can trust yourself.’

He opens his eyes, and Jess is still looking at him. He thinks about his own correct instincts, and he thinks about the off-record call he’s going to make to tell Camilla that her husband was good.

Jess wordlessly scoots the box towards him. It’s the first time he’s needed the tissues in a session with her.