Famous Last Words

Chapter 3

3

Somewhere, in some previously inaccessible part of Cam’s brain, a trapdoor opens, and she begins falling through it. ‘What? No he isn’t,’ she says, the notion so absurd to her that Lambert merely needs to be corrected. As she looks at him, he shifts, and his tattoo disappears once more.

Cam’s colleagues have begun clustering in the foyer, because of the news, or the police, she isn’t sure, and she becomes momentarily distracted by them. Instead of processing what’s being said to her, she is trying to work out what her colleagues must be thinking, in that strange way people in crisis focus on the wrong thing sometimes.

‘He’s taken hostages?’ she says to Lambert.

He wordlessly hands her a phone displaying a video on which he presses Play. It’s the same one the news had on.

In the centre of the frame are three hostages, sitting silently on three wooden chairs. They have their heads covered with black material, like something from a film. They’re so motionless it looks like a freeze-frame, until she sees that they’re breathing. The slightest rise and fall of their shoulders. Three sentient, terrified beings, taken.

It’s grainy CCTV, hard to make out. For a few seconds, all is still, but then the hostage-taker steps into view.

Tall and slim, all in dark clothes, he moves in front of them, left to right, five, six, seven steps, then pauses, about to turn and move in the other direction. His walk, the shape of his arms … Cam sits very still, watching this eerily familiar man.

And then he turns and looks properly at the camera. It’s just a glimpse, no more than a second.

But it is him.

It’s him.