Out from edom book i of.., p.28
Famous Last Words, page 28
“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 identities on 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.
The Hales and the Lancasters.
The man who killed the narrator’s killer accidentally, in trying to help. The good Samaritan returns to the scene and is spotted.
Luke, driving that night to Whitechapel. Using more fuel than she expected. Covering up his locations. Crying over onions. Attending a funeral.
The family of one of the dead teenagers finds out who he is.
Luke, who had people break in, to ID him, in a burglary that wasn’t. Luke, who had two men sent to kill him.
She opens her eyes. Could it be? She didn’t notice. She’d been so sure it was Adam’s manuscript. And maybe this was his aim. A dead narrator. The story not told from Luke’s perspective. A disguise.
It could be about him.
It could be from him.
She.
Has.
Got.
To.
Get.
That.
Book.
And if it’s his . . . he was definitely alive to deliver it to her. She blinks. This thought is too huge, like she’s staring at a close-up and can’t see the whole picture.
She needs to get out of here.
“Shall we go?” she says to Charlie.
“Definitely,” he says, oblivious to her internal turmoil, not having connected the dots himself.
“Are you going?” Stuart says to her as they’re on their way out, unaware. “Can I introduce you to one of my newest authors?” He is standing with a woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a long slip skirt and a nervous expression on her face.
“Sure,” Cam says, distracted, not wanting to leave work things early again, not wanting to appear still unhinged, still stuck in the past. “Hi,” she says. Charlie’s arm is around her waist, and all she can think about is how she can renege on their plans, her child-free night, and be alone with that book.
“What are you writing?” she asks Stuart’s author mechanically.
“Well,” she starts, but Cam doesn’t listen to the rest.
She stands there, rictus grin, thinking, My husband wrote his story down for me.
“. . . hoping to reach readers who like Lisa Jewell,” the woman finishes, and Cam is smiling and nodding along. A rights assistant joins them, and Stuart tells her Adam’s delivered his manuscript, and Cam can’t bear to correct him.
Stuart pats her on the shoulder as she leaves, and she’s glad of him, her colleague of over a decade who’s never once asked too much of her.
Cam is silent on the walk from the Tube to her house. She hasn’t found a way to tell Charlie he isn’t coming in after all. She needs to find an excuse, and quick. She’ll tell him she’s changed her mind about everything.
At her front door, she turns to him, but he’s looking behind him. “What was that?” he says.
“Huh?”
“I’m sure I saw someone go into the alley behind yours.”
Cam’s back goes cold. Her face feels numb with fear. All those times she thought she was being watched.
“Will you look?” she says, the book temporarily forgotten.
Charlie nods once, expression serious, and Cam lets herself inside, stands nervously in the hallway, waiting for him. Hoping he’s wrong.
“Couldn’t get them. I saw someone leaving, but they ran,” Charlie says, letting himself in five minutes later, cheeks red with exertion.
“So weird.”
“Really.”
He pauses, then says, “Coffee?” and she thinks, Yes, OK. He can stay and keep her safe. The book is more valuable than she could have imagined. Somebody might want it.
And as she joins Charlie in her kitchen, all she is thinking is what better way for Luke to tell her his side of the story—if he remains in danger—than to disguise it in fiction? It even fooled her. Names changed for legal reasons. Her husband, writing it from the perspective of a teenager now deceased. She should’ve guessed: her husband, the ghostwriter.
51
Niall
Niall gets to the car park after Jess’s session and knows he only has to make one phone call to confirm George’s involvement. It’s the evening, London’s lights scattering glitter around and above him, and he breathes slowly as he dials Claire in the communications team.
As he waits for her to answer—she always diverts her desk phone to her mobile after hours—he leans against the railings of the multi-story. “I need somebody who can mine for information,” he says when Claire picks up. “Ideally now. Busy?”
“At the boys’ five-a-side, but not busy,” she says. “I’ve got my phone, so I can help.”
“Great,” Niall says. “I think something was deleted from HOLMES in 2017. And I think two people had their DNA taken off too.”
Claire pauses. In the background, he hears a whistle blow. “Those are big claims,” she says.
Niall paces the length of the car park. “I’m trying to work a few things out before I accuse anybody, before I go on-record.” And it’s funny, it’s so funny that this sentence has, somehow, become true. He was off-record because his appetite to solve the Deschamps case was insatiable, to atone for his own mistake. And now he’s off-record because he suspects there’s a copper at the heart of it. It’s almost like he knew, in some big, wise part of himself that was always in charge, even when he didn’t know it.
Down below, wide streets are lined with ugly roller shutter doors that remind him of Bermondsey. A hot breeze whips in between the layers of the multi-story. “I can’t—Niall . . .” Claire says.
“Please just look at the system. Look up the name Andrew Smith. He’s one of the hostages. His details were removed from the system,” Niall says. He is not privy to this information, available only to the telecoms team.
“Give me five—I can’t do it on my phone while talking. Hang on,” Claire says. “There are loads of Andrew Smiths.”
Niall waits in the car park, walking back to his car and then away from it, past puddles that could be rainwater and could be God-knows-what. It’s virtually empty, almost quite tranquil in a weird way, and he walks and thinks about Viv and Deschamps and how some things just take their time to work out, to sort out. He leans on the railings again where a light rain splatters his knuckles, and tries to exhale the way Jess taught him to.
Niall’s body begins to slow down in a way it has never before been able to. Funny, he thought being on the go, anxious, addicted to various things, was what fueled him, but actually, it got in the way. Now his mind is calmer, he is all the more able to think.
He avoided what Viv wanted most in the world—him, and his time—because it was easier to face other people’s problems than his own.
That’s the truth of it, he thinks, breathing still slow. And he has to live with that. The true mistake at the heart of the Bermondsey case.
His phone blares after just a couple of minutes, Claire’s extension, and he answers it.
“Entry deleted by George Louis, on twenty-first June 2017,” she says. “The records show he deleted a second, too, for a man called Pete Arbuthnot. The other hostage, I am guessing. This is why they never flagged anything on the system: they were no longer there. He also deleted the Alexander Hale and James Lancaster murders, but reinstated them a few days later.”
Niall nods: reinstating them prevented anybody from ever knowing. At some point, deleted entries that stayed deleted would’ve been noticed, and officers are regularly audited. This way, he only hid them for the minimum time period.
“Thank you,” Niall says, tilting his face up to the rain and almost smiling. He was right. He’d worked it out.
“So the accidental hostage . . .” Claire says, and Niall suddenly and vividly recalls Isabella’s vulnerability, her shock, that she wet herself in fear.
All made up. That article in the Mail Niall read years ago about her inner trauma. Obviously sold to them. A clever bluff.
This case continues to invert and invert, like a sand timer tipped this way and that, the grains falling one way and then completely the other.
And this way around, it makes perfect sense. The Louises owned the warehouse. A shabby, unassuming place to siphon their wealth into. They arranged to kill Deschamps in it, a place that has a back lift, somewhere they could control, and dispose of the body. They sent two men to do it for them, and Isabella to oversee it. The only error they made was that they forgot about their tenant having hired a remote security guard, who streamed it. Their private, criminal act that went so badly wrong when witnessed, and when Deschamps retaliated.
Niall shivers with it, remembers all those years ago, the way George blew the siege. Of course he did: he and his wife organized the killers, and it went wrong.
They weren’t caught up in it. They were it.
The only question that remains is why?
Does he have enough to hand this right over to the Met, knowing how they will respond? Maybe. Maybe.
52
Niall swings by the Louises’ house on his way home, debating phoning in George Louis’s corruption but unable to resist just observing this family, for a little while, to see what secrets might reveal themselves.
He doesn’t want to act rashly. He wants to think. What does George Louis have to do with Deschamps’s murder? Why would he order it? And how does the Whitechapel murder feature? He takes his phone out and makes a request to Claire to dig into any familial connections, any work connections, that George has. He trusts that she won’t escalate it up to management yet.
You can do a lot with information, but the most important thing is to try to get more of it before you act. What really happened? Who are the heroes and who are the villains? Sometimes—just sometimes—you can get information by observing people, unseen, from the shadows. If the Louises are criminals, as he suspects they may be, then an admission is helpful. He can charge them with much more than corruption.
Niall’s skin shivers as he waits near their house, as though God himself has reached a hand down, passed it over his body, and said, Keep going. You’re almost there.
Niall stands there, a detective alone on a quiet London lane, glad of the police-issue pistol in the boot of his car, looking up at the buildings.
George Louis’s flat is in the basement, number 68B, one of the nicer ones. The street is leafy, that summer-sharp tang of plants in the air. There are sleeping policemen on the road, a cycle lane just to the left with a few bits and pieces of litter, dusty and wilted from the summer heat. The front door is wide and painted white, new paint. The kitchen is at the front, one of those half-and-half flats that are partly recessed but still have natural light. As a result, it’s easy for Niall to look down into it.
A white-walled kitchen. A light is on somewhere, casting it all in citrus colors. All Niall can see is a kitchen table. Huge, pine, four chairs around it.
Niall loiters on the street outside, appraising it. They’re not rich. That’s his first observation. Theirs is—maximum—a two-floor flat, a kind of maisonette, worth perhaps half a million: it is absurd but true that this buys you a completely average London home, no off-street parking, no office in the garden, nothing else except cramped conditions, too-close neighbors, and rubbish on the street outside.
It’s late, and the air starts to deepen to black as Niall observes. He wants to watch and wait: if you are more patient than anybody else, you are eventually rewarded. He can’t risk being seen by the Louises—Isabella in particular would recognize him immediately—and so he walks slowly up and down the street, ready to turn and leave at any moment.
He hides in the shadows of the flat above the Louises’. It has five white stone steps leading to a front door, and they’re either in bed or away, the house shut up and silent. He hopes for the latter.
He peers down. He can see wrought-iron railings and the tops of the Louises’ bay windows, but nothing else. Can hear nothing.
Quarter past eleven, half past, twenty to twelve.
He stays very still, watching and waiting for nothing.
Until it becomes something. Isabella and George are leaving the flat.
“Uh-huh,” George says, phone held close to his ear, which lights it up, a white seashell. “Janet says just to go in,” he adds to Isabella. “Door’s open.”
Niall reels. Janet. Janet Hale. Alexander’s mother.
“Sure,” Isabella says to her husband.
“Thanks, sis,” George says into the phone.
And there it is. They’re siblings. George Louis and Janet Hale. No surname in common, thanks to her marriage.
A pact made between family, who will do anything to help each other out. The Hales, whose child was killed, with a vendetta against Deschamps.
And the Louises, who arranged his murder.
But why? Did Deschamps kill their child?
53
Anonymous Reporting on Camilla
I have information, I text him.
My phone rings immediately, and I reject the call. Text, I type to him, though my brother doesn’t often like to deal in writing.
He reads it and doesn’t reply. Deschamps has contacted her, I type to him. I’m here in her house. I’m going to get hold of what he’s sent. I’ve made up a reason I need to stay here a while.
Thanks, Charlie. Knew you’d crack it when we dispatched you in.
You’re welcome, George.
54
Cam
Charlie is making them coffees and all Cam can think about is that her husband’s story lies on her sofa in her living room. It seems to glow and throb in there like an ancient talisman. Cam is desperate to read it but doesn’t yet want Charlie to leave either, in case somebody is waiting for her outside.
“I used to be able to have caffeine and go to sleep,” Charlie chatters, “but I just can’t, after turning forty. Will be up all night.”
“I used to drink buckets of the stuff with Luke,” Cam replies, her husband’s presence so vibrant in the room with her that she can’t not mention him. “Hardly do now.”
In the living room, Charlie turns on the lamp himself, fingers scurrying up the pole to find the switch by the bulb. Something about it momentarily unsettles Cam, but she’s distracted by the light it provides, which illuminates the bound manuscript, right there on the sofa. Bright-white pages, black text. So mundane. The perfect disguise.
Neither of them mentions it, even though Cam is itching to. Charlie overheard the conversation but has clearly decided not to pry.
Darkness fully closes in outside. Charlie beckons Cam toward him on the sofa. “Anyway,” she says, injecting a note of finality into her tone. “It’s been so nice. Let’s have the coffees and then I think I need to get an early night.”
Charlie’s face betrays some strong emotion Cam hasn’t seen in his eyes before. A flash, like the lightning just after the thunder. Blink and you’d miss it.
“I thought I’d stay—at least for a while,” he says. “That person outside, I . . .”
“Really, it’s fine,” she says, thinking only: the book, the book, the book.
“Let’s see how you feel when I’ve finished.” He raises the mug to her. He takes a sip, his eyes on her. “Wait—I forgot to stir it.” He grimaces as he swallows.
“I’ll do it,” she says, taking the cup.
In the kitchen, the tiles are cool underneath her feet, the window cracked open, a long strand of wisteria attempting to snake its way in. It’s a female kitchen, with a pink toaster that Polly wanted. A paperback proof Cam has been reading is splayed on the side. She misses, suddenly, a man’s touch. A discarded tie, a wallet, a set of cufflinks. She stirs Charlie’s coffee, staring at the swirling topography of the bitter blackness and milk as they mix. Is she delusional? Is this book merely nothing? An unsolicited manuscript, meant to be packaged up and sold, nothing more than that?
Charlie is sitting where he was in the living room when she brings in the coffee, inclined back onto the cushions, his legs crossed at the ankles on the table.
But the book. The book, so central in Cam’s mind it may as well be the North Star, the book has moved. At least a foot along the sofa, its pages slightly rifled-looking, the front cover sheet now skewed: he’s read something in it.
Her footsteps slow. Charlie turns his head to her.
And their eyes connect. He tilts his head, just a fraction. The slightest movement. You’d miss it if you weren’t looking for it.
55
