Famous Last Words, page 12
But the timescale does. The application she filled in last night. Does Luke somehow know? And want her to know that he isn’t . . . ?
No. She can’t think this way. He killed people. He left. He didn’t come back. Sometimes, it’s been easier for Cam to believe that he’s dead, rather than in hiding. But then, who knows what she believes? At times searching for her husband, at times vowing to move on, at times angry, at times sad. Everyone wants Cam to have consistency on his disappearance, and she just doesn’t. Who could? The truth is, Cam is consistent: she pretends to believe he is dead or bad, while the real, true her believes he is alive and good. That’s the truth of it.
Nine o’clock. Forty minutes to go.
She could make it.
She’s going to go.
The Tube is the other way down the street, and she has to double back and walk past Côte again. As she does so, feet tripping with hurrying, she sees Charlie, supposedly the new man in her life. He’s got his food to go, in a little white cardboard box, and something sad unspools in her stomach as she sees hers untouched. He didn’t take it.
Eight fifty-five and Cam is one minute from the set of coordinates. She’s fast-walking up the street, eight fifty-six, eight fifty-seven. She can’t bear to ponder it, to hypothesize. Like most people prone to overthinking, in a crisis Cam’s head is cool. Has become more so, since Luke left: she can rely only on herself.
She arrives near to the spot on Google Maps. It is an alleyway leading off a totally normal London high street. Railway arches, co-working spaces, phone kiosks, and takeaways.
A bus passes, the N19, and she winces. The N19 to Finsbury Park: she’d know it anywhere. Luke’s old borough from when they were dating. He once failed to get that bus back there . . .
Cam had been representing him for nine months. After the sale to Penguin Random House, she had gone on to sell U.S. rights to HarperCollins and by the time she called him with their twentieth translation deal, he’d stopped answering the phone formally and started saying, “Hey, it’s the good-news train!”
Calls became five minutes of business and twenty of chat. Two minutes of business and forty of chat. Cam wasn’t getting anything done. One-line emails about contract terms had giant personal PSs attached that moved to texts and then to WhatsApps—his avatar gave her a thrill every time it popped up—that didn’t, strictly speaking, need sending at all. Remind me, did you do your Swedish translator queries—I can’t find them? she once sent, then looked around her. Friday, nine o’clock at night, her bare toes at the end of the bathtub, glass of prosecco on the side. She didn’t need to know about Swedish queries, and she could’ve asked her rights colleague anyway. This was not work. This was . . . something she couldn’t yet name, or perhaps was afraid to.
But something about him, his effervescence, as bubbly as the drink beside her . . . Luke was more than just somebody she liked a lot, and certainly more than just another author client: he was a gateway to . . . to something more than good times. Luke was relaxation. Luke was “Oh, God, just turn your bloody brain off.” Luke was “Look, just have some Jaffa Cakes and forget about it.” And sitting behind those fun times was care. Care for her. Something she doesn’t have now as she battles bedtime and school-uniform ironing and birthday-card shopping alone, alone, alone.
Their first project together had been a success, the way Cam knew it would be. Friends emailed to say how much they’d enjoyed it. Even Libby said she couldn’t help reading it. Cam found it amusing that everybody’s reaction to it was precisely her own reaction to him: Luke was entertaining.
One night, nine months into their working relationship, they’d left a meeting with Simon & Schuster about a new deal for a singer-songwriter’s autobiography. They were walking across London Bridge, having gone for dinner and then drinks and then more drinks. It was way beyond a business meeting, and by this stage both of them knew it.
“I’ll walk you to the Tube,” Luke had said at midnight, his tone light. Cam remembers he had said ya, not you, an overfamiliarity she liked so much she’d played it back over and over in her mind as they strolled.
It began to rain as they crossed the street. “I’ll be fine from here,” she said.
“It’s cool.” Luke indicated a row of bus stops. “I’m going to go from there, anyway.” He drew the hood of his parka up with one hand, fur framing his face, and looked at her from within it. “Least I know you’re home safe. Or near enough.”
And it wasn’t about what he said, but somehow the atmosphere changed between them—just like that—as if someone had reached in and wordlessly flicked on mood lighting. The electricity of the weather, maybe: that it was raining was a satisfying pathetic fallacy to Cam, a woman who liked to live in literature where possible. Just as she thought this, the droplets got fatter, striking the pavements with little explosions. Cam was in flimsy shoes, and her feet became squeaky with water.
“That’s your bus,” Cam said to him as the number N19 pulled in, Finsbury Park emblazoned on its front, but Luke ignored it. And that was the moment Cam knew.
“I’ll get the next,” he had said, his eyes on hers.
He didn’t.
And now here she is alone, watching that same bus speed away.
She walks into the alleyway, her breath held. It bends in a semicircle between two buildings. She thinks of all of the things she knows about the siege and the weeks before it: that the dead hostages were never identified, that Luke never reported the burglary. They are pieces of a puzzle. And there is an answer, but it doesn’t materialize, no matter how much Cam tries to put them together. She has just a handful, from a thousand-piece set. Maybe she will never get the rest.
Or maybe she is about to get them all.
The alleyway winds back on itself into a courtyard but it’s empty. Nobody here. No windows look into the barren and uninhabited concrete square. All it contains are a few dead shrubs and a bench.
Google tells her she is standing at the precise coordinates. It’s twilight: she can’t see a soul. On the dim street, in a rectangle of light at the end of the alley where a streetlamp stands, the world continues. For the first time, Cam shivers. It’s late. Nobody knows she’s here. But what else was she supposed to do?
She double-checks the coordinates and then the time. And this is it. She stands there in the dark, in this weird, closed-off courtyard, closes her eyes, and waits for nine o’clock. Eight fifty-eight. Eight fifty-nine. Nine.
22
Cam opens her eyes and London plays out around her exactly as it was. Another bus passes loudly nearby. A busker down the road plays “Brown Eyed Girl.” And all the while, a courtyard with no one in it, only her, alone, the way it always is.
She stares at her feet and waits, doing nothing more than that. It’s ten past nine. It’s twenty past nine. It’s twenty-five past, and nobody is coming. Her heart begins a slow and sad descent down her chest, disappointment made worse by its tessellation with shame. Was it him, and he didn’t show? Or was it never him, just spam? Or someone else? Someone who knows something? And if it was him . . . was she going to just forgive him for a notorious double murder and seven years’ abandonment?
She wanders out of the courtyard, past a locked door that seems to lead to a small basement office, down the alleyway, and out onto another quintessentially London street: Amazon lockers, rows of electric bikes for hire, a Tesco Express. Things are different these days and yet the same.
Cam shivers in the June twilight. In the autumn, as soon as the sun slides lower and the light fades to amber, something in Cam relaxes. But here, walking in the musky heat, it’s as if no time has passed at all since that summer seven years ago.
Nine thirty, nine forty, and Cam hurries now, leaving the scene. She walks back down the high street and gets the Tube. She’ll tell Libby, if she asks, that Charlie bailed early on her, and then, later, she will get into bed and hide under the duvet, alone. She won’t admit she was out, alone on a street, waiting for a ghost from the past, like always.
Of course. Of course he let her down and didn’t come. Like always, she thinks angrily while the Underground puffs and shakes its way around London.
It probably wasn’t even him, but nevertheless, Cam’s anger at her estranged husband flares back up.
She was always a reader but, these days, she buries herself in books and work. The cocktails and the anti-publishing chat with Charlie are not real. This is true Cam: she represents wide-ranging fiction, but her taste could be described easily in one word: escapism. There’s a German word for this too: Weltschmerz. Translated as “world-grief.” To Cam, it is perfect.
She goes through her submissions, tracking the ones she wants to request in her dedicated notebook. She looks at what’s at the top of the Kindle store, and finally opens a manuscript she requested yesterday.
Marrakech, 2022
The call to prayer wakes me. A singular man’s voice, shortly thereafter joined by a second, then a whole chorus. Pearlescent, early skies, amber at their edges, pink at the top. Flat-roofed, pale-stone buildings. I shouldn’t be here. And I don’t know it now, but life is about to change forever.
Cam reads and reads. She’s in Morocco; she’s a male, middle-aged ex-spy called Alfie. She’s not separated from Luke; she’s not following coordinates. She’s not abandoned Charlie to finish a goat’s cheese tart alone. She’s someone else. Someplace else.
She reads the whole way home, feeling safely ensconced in another world. She barely feels the hot and stale Tube air around her, doesn’t see the flickering lights and doesn’t feel the jarring carriage.
But as she climbs the steps at Putney, she feels it. Something intangible. A shivering creeping at the back of her neck, like an ice cube touched just lightly to hot skin.
She turns around on the spot. Just beyond the Tube exit are a street artist and two market researchers holding clipboards, hoping to engage pedestrians. Nothing else. She presses her debit card to the barrier, trying to forget. Maybe he’s nowhere. Maybe he is dead.
Funny. She was so sure it was him, she never considered that it might be somebody else. Somebody sinister. Somebody dangerous. Her back shudders as she thinks it and makes her way home, alone, like she always does. She tells herself she’s used to it now. The solo bedtimes and books and television shows she watches by herself and the lone mug she washes up before bed.
But it had been nice to think it might have an end in sight.
23
Niall
Gunshots.
Niall turns over in bed, perfunctorily checks the window to see if they’re real, but of course they’re not. They never are.
The dream gunshots wake him most nights, now. They started two years ago, infrequent at first. Niall hadn’t thought much of them at the time. Strange dreams, from his disaster of a negotiation that meant he went back on detective duties. It’s not surprising it resides somewhere in his consciousness, like a deep-sea creature you can only see if you look hard enough.
He tries to sleep again but can’t. Time inches ever forward. His room is black, the only light coming from the very edges of the windows—he got blackout blinds last year, to try to help, but they didn’t. Eventually, he switches the light on and sits up, rubbing his eyes.
He checks his phone. Four fifteen. Same as ever.
The dream begins to fade from his mind, Niall’s heartbeat slowing with it. He was asking for more and more and more time in it. Maidstone refusing. Niall insisting. Niall holding the released Isabella, her body soft and warm against his. Niall changing his mind, racing into the building, and then—always, always, always—the dream ends with the two shots, fired in quick succession, right behind Niall. He never gets there in time to stop them.
And then the bodies. The round bullet holes in their skulls. Their DNA flagged nothing on the police database. Their teeth matched no known dental records nor any on international databases either. No relatives ever, ever came forward for them, despite extensive appeals. It’s a mystery with no solution, no ending.
He tells himself it’s been on his mind more since the sighting in February. Deschamps, or someone who looks a lot like him, seen near Camilla’s house by a traffic officer. They couldn’t catch him in time. He got away. And maybe it wasn’t him, but . . . the dreams stepped up from there.
Niall gives up on sleep, gets up, and starts the day.
Later that morning, he sits in Jess’s office. She is, he is reluctant to say, his therapist. He’s been sent to see her—against his will—because he accidentally disclosed the gunshot dreams to Tim, his boss, who phoned it right in. Officers can’t be on the verge of PTSD, apparently, not without talking endlessly about it in beige rooms with boxes of tissues on the tables. Niall told them it isn’t PTSD, but of course nobody listens.
Jess practices on the first floor of a midcentury block of offices in Lambeth. Her room doesn’t smell like a therapist’s office: it smells of the bakery beneath it—hot cinnamon rolls and fresh bread and yeast. She is young, too young to be so wise, has blond hair and dimples and a particular contrary tone she gets about her when Niall is saying something irrational without realizing it.
“The same dream as ever?” she says, and she is, Niall thinks, pleased that he’s discussing it. He mostly skirts around his two banned topics, this being the first, talking in broad terms about responsibility in policing in general, about the ops he has on, wasting time for the session. Niall is good at talking and good, too, at running down a clock, and he does it every week with Jess.
“When you dream of it—what do you wish you could do in the dream?” Jess asks. She sits forward. She knows what happened in the Bermondsey siege—she was briefed on it by the Met’s in-house occupational-health team. But she’s never heard Niall outline more than the very basic facts.
“Wake up,” Niall says, but Jess doesn’t laugh, merely puffs air through her nose and looks down at her lap, then back up at him, waiting for a serious answer that may not come.
It’s almost the end of the session, and she leaves it a beat, still expecting some sort of disclosure from him.
“Did you ever see the bodies?” she asks. A surprising question, one that seems to come out of nowhere.
“Yeah. In the station—the forensic pathologist . . .”
“Can you describe them?”
Niall closes his eyes, not wanting to go back there. To the neat temple wounds. Dark hair, brown eyes, blue T-shirts, middle-aged, white, both of them. A Salvador Dalí drip of blood from the neckline downward. Niall used to be bothered by things like this, used to drive home too fast and wake Viv up from sleep to hold her, but he isn’t any longer. The truth is, you really can see too much. Until seeing something like this—two people, shot to death—becomes just another bit of admin.
“Do you wish you could stop it?” she suggests. “When you hear those shots?”
“I know that you will say I can’t control the actions of gunmen,” Niall replies. Another deflection.
Jess smiles. “You don’t know what I will say.”
“Isn’t it that?”
“It is your job to prevent these things as much as is possible”—she holds her hands, palms up, to him—“but you are also a human being.”
“I know that,” Niall replies. He likes that Jess still talks about his hostage-negotiation career in the present tense. For him, it’s all past. The Met didn’t take him off negotiations: he took himself off them.
“Vulnerable to mistakes as is anyone.” She pauses. “Marital or otherwise.”
This is the second banned topic, so Niall ignores Jess’s invitation.
He gazes down at his feet, saying nothing. Only earlier this morning he checked Viv’s WhatsApp, as he does sometimes. There she was in her profile photo in her pink T-shirt, smiling at him. Last seen 22:11. He likes to look at that sometimes. See her continuing on even without him, living her life.
They have some contact. Every few months, one will text the other, something anodyne usually. Viv was very careful last year to let Niall know she is dating an American who—God forbid—has an actual RSPCA rescue dog. Be still Viv’s beating heart. Nevertheless, Niall does, in fact, still feel very close to Viv in that way you do sometimes when you don’t see a friend for over a year but when you meet up nothing has changed. Maybe this is a delusion. Probably. Regardless, he hasn’t forgotten her birthday since.
“Are you not allowed to make mistakes?”
“I wasn’t. As a kid,” Niall says sullenly, remembering falling off his bike and getting told off for it by his father, amongst other things.
“Well, you are now,” she says. “Trust me.”
“Hmm.”
“How often are the dreams now?” she asks.
“Only once or twice a week,” Niall lies.
It does not exactly surprise Niall when, that evening at seven, working late, he receives the alert from the Met’s surveillance team: a text has pinged on Camilla’s phone. She’s about to be sent a message from a service called textanon.com. The Met had put covert surveillance back on her phone after the sighting. It does no harm and, once in a while, those on the run slip up.
Like this.
Niall springs into action, calling Claire in telecoms. Her kids are in their teens now, and, if anything, she’s become even more formidable as her home life has eased.
“I know why you’re calling,” she says, “and if you let me get off the phone, I will call Text Anon myself and make a release request.”
“Fine,” Niall says, then waits. He sighs. It’s been a long day already, heralded by Deschamps’s own gunshots, and succeeded by boring detective work that doesn’t excite him. Domestics. Burglaries. Nothing where Niall needs to make a judgment call.
He stares out at London. It’s another perfect summer. No rain for weeks, the air crystalline and fragile with the heat, only just beginning to cool down now.
