Page 78 of Famous Last Words

Jesus Christ. It isn’t as it seems. Not at all. He stares out of the plate-glass windows, at the inverted ‘ONLINE NOW’ sign, the world deepening blacker the longer he looks.

He keeps reading.

LD47503038: How fast can you get me the gun? Somebody knows something about me. They want me to meet at a warehouse, in Bermondsey. I don’t know if they want to talk, or … I have to meet them though. They’ll come to my house if I don’t. They’ve been once already.

Ah. The burglary, Niall thinks, reading.

Sully018747450: Or what? Why don’t you tell me what happened?

LD47503038: I can’t, really. They have found out something about me. They want me to meet with two men at a warehouse.

Sully018747450: Two days for the gun. I can show you what to do. How to overpower and surprise people. But the gun will take two days.

LD47503038: It’s tomorrow.

Sully018747450: Or I can help to hide you. Come and see me in Lewisham.

They knew something about him. They wanted him dead.

Niall watches the case as he thought he understood it invert in front of him, right there on an Apple Mac in an anonymous café. The hostages are the perpetrators. The hostage-taker acting in defence. Deschamps didn’t start the siege: they came for him. And nobody saw how it began, so nobody knew. All Deschamps knew was that he was going to be murdered. He tried to arm himself in readiness.

LD47503038: I’m at the warehouse. I need help.

Sully018747450: The gun ain’t here yet.

LD47503038: I know. I’ve got to go in and meet them. Sully, they want me dead.

Sully018747450: Can you see in?

LD47503038: Yes. They’re in there already. They’re here to kill me. They are masked, black sacks on their heads with holes for eyes. Can you come and help me??

Sully018747450: I don’t deal direct with this stuff. Observe observe observe. Wait. Pause. What can you see?

LD47503038: I’ve got to go in or they’re going to come for me at my home, with my family.

Sully018747450: If they’re going to kill you, they will have a weapon. Can you get it?

LD47503038: They’ve got it. A pistol.

Sully018747450: Bide your time. Better to be late but with the advantage. Wait.

LD47503038: They’re talking.

Sully018747450: Wait.

There’s nothing more. Niall puffs his cheeks out, agog, then heads to the Met, downloads the archived CCTV footage, and rewatches it.

Deschamps arrives on the camera, hostages unseen.

And then – that quick movement at the edge of the screen. Niall pauses, rewatches, and he sees it: it’s Deschamps’s hand reaching for something.

He stops it again, then thinks. The hostages were already there. They must have come in the back, the place Deschamps himself escaped from.

Deschamps turned up unarmed, watched from the outside. Just like Harry said to do.

Then he went in, and waited until they put down their gun. The hand movement is him taking it from a table in the very corner of the footage. The Beretta the police thought he had – it was theirs.

Another inversion. Funny how things look different depending on what you know to be true.