Chapter 7
7
Cam
Cam is back in Putney after a silent and loaded car journey, back at their house that she left two hours or perhaps a century ago. The police follow her in, not saying anything, just standing too close behind her in the sunlit hallway. She walks past Polly’s car seat, and past a stack of mail on the doormat, presumably delivered during the transformation from the before to the afterlife.
She avoids her own gaze in the mirror by the front door, turns to Lambert and says woodenly, ‘Living room is upstairs.’
Luke calls their house the upside-down house: bedrooms and bathroom on the ground floor, kitchen, living room and dining room on the first. Cam has always liked the quirkiness of it, a house not like other people’s. At night they fall asleep to the sounds of the London foxes in their garden, in the summer to snippets of neighbours’ conversations like misheard lyrics.
Or they used to.
They file upstairs and sit down together in an awkward row on the grey corner sofa, next to two manuscripts and a proof of a novel. Cam’s eyes are everywhere. Luke’s mug on the end table containing the remnants of his cup of coffee. Filter. Two sugars. That coffee-scented kiss. His car key. How can this be? She’s seen the video. It’s clearly him. So, really, she knows the question isn’t how? but why ?
But, all the while, Cam is remembering things. More and more and more the longer this goes on. Last week, Luke had banged the top of the coffee machine when it needed more water. The plastic casing had cracked. So unlike him. He was never alpha, never competitive, never physical. A breezy, sunshiny day of a man. The type who couldn’t be bothered to make a coffee if the machine had run out of water, not the type to inflict damage on it.
The week before that, he’d received a letter in the post, turned around, and looked at Cam, expression low and furious. ‘The car was due its MOT three weeks ago,’ he’d said, but his tone wasn’t rueful, or even slightly irritated: it was ice cold.
‘Oh, shit,’ she’d said. She was hanging laundry out in the corner of their kitchen. ‘I totally forgot.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Guess this is life with a baby.’
‘She’s nine months old,’ he’d said, putting his foot angrily on to the bin pedal and dropping the letter inside. ‘We should’ve remembered.’
‘It’s fine. Look – we’ll just … get it done now,’ she said, but he hadn’t looked at her. Had just stood there by the closed bin, staring down. Cam had put it down to tiredness at the time, but was it?
It was so unlike Luke, Mr Que Sera Sera himself: the man who on their first official date said to Cam he never wanted to waste time worrying when he ‘could be having fun’. Who throws World Cup Final parties at their house. Who turns in projects late because the weather has been nice. Who holds and holds and holds her anxieties, heavy as boulders, and never lets the weight show.
‘Camilla, we need some facts,’ Lambert says urgently now. ‘We have a warrant to search, which PC Smith is going to commence, alongside a team, who are almost here.’
‘OK,’ Cam says in a small voice. Her eyes are still roving around the living room, at everything he’s left. An Amazon parcel on the dining table just through the doorway. A pair of shoes sticking out from underneath the sofa.
Smith stands and puts on a pair of forensic gloves. Cam looks at her closely. She has a Roman nose, brown hair scraped back from her forehead, eyes that slant downwards at their sides. Not a scrap of make-up. Cam feels like a powdered clown in hers. The stupid, optimistic war paint of somebody expecting a good day and getting the worst of her life.
Smith leaves the room, starting who-knows-where, the most humiliating and private places, maybe? The bedroom? Polly’s nursery? Cam watches her pass the doorway twice. Her poker face, when she doesn’t know she’s being watched, drops. She becomes more judgemental. Looking around curiously, but with an element of Schadenfreude , too.
‘Camilla, we need to get this information and quickly. The police need to know as much background as possible before we get you down there and get you speaking to him. If, at any point, they have to make the decision to go in, they need to know who it is they’re dealing with.’ Lambert interrupts her thoughts.
‘Go in?’ she says, without thinking, but he doesn’t clarify. Imaginary scenes come into Cam’s mind. Guns. Snipers. Riot gear.
‘Let’s cut to the chase. Any idea why he would do this?’
‘He’s – he’ll be being forced into this. Or he’s having a mental health episode … he won’t be doing it – because he wants to,’ Cam says, feeling like she’s brainstorming with a client about fictional motives.
‘OK,’ Lambert says easily, clearly not listening to the protestations of a woman who will always defend her husband. His phone rings, and he picks it up seamlessly, moving from talking to her to talking to somebody else. ‘Yes … yes. Fifteen minutes?’ he says, then rings off without saying goodbye, just like they do in the movies.
‘All right, Camilla,’ Lambert says. ‘We want you at the scene to talk to Deschamps. Is that something you feel you can do?’ he says, even though it sounds to Cam like he’s just agreed it.
‘Yes,’ Cam says, then feels the need to add: ‘It’s Luke. He goes by Luke.’ Her husband is the main character in her life, and what he goes by matters to her in this out-of-control environment.
Lambert ignores her. She stares at him, this stranger sent to question her. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but this is all Cam can glean about the human behind Protect and Serve .
‘We’ll get you to the scene with our hostage negotiator,’ he says. ‘When we’ve got the lie of the land here. Fifteen minutes or so.’
She looks at the sunlight again, trying to forget, trying to be somewhere else, to be free falling again, but it doesn’t work now. Denial is over.
A hostage negotiator. Like a movie, with a wire-tapped phone and ten million pounds delivered in a suitcase. A shoot-out. None of it could possibly, possibly feel any more surreal than it already does.
‘No ideas at all here on his motivation?’ Lambert barks.
‘No.’
‘The more you tell us, the more we can help your husband,’ Lambert says dispassionately, and Cam wonders if this is quite true. She is a tool to be used by the police to get to Luke, but will that help him?
‘What’s the most unusual thing that’s happened for you guys in the last six months?’
Cam thinks, then remembers possibly the most significant thing: ‘We were burgled.’
‘When?’
Cam thinks. ‘Six weeks ago. Got home from the park – in the day. Place had been messed up. Luke called the police.’
‘Right,’ Lambert says, his eyes already on his phone, finding a contact, and dialling. ‘You never know what’s connected,’ he says to Cam. ‘Paul, I need a read-out on a burglary. Took place six weeks ago at 24 Bucks Avenue.’
Cam dispassionately observes his quick mind working in overdrive, while hers is on go-slow. They’d taken Polly to the swings. They’d returned home to their house which felt cool, the patio doors open in the bedroom. Drawers gone through, kitchen cupboards, too. Cam had looked around, holding Polly, at first not comprehending it, until her eyes had met Luke’s.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he’d said, and perhaps, perhaps , in hindsight, had he seemed more rattled than she would expect? No, not really. A burglary was a horrible thing.
Luke had called the police, had complained about how long he was on hold for, spoken to them out in the garden. Cam had watched him pace, dragging a hand through his blond hair over and over.
That night, Cam couldn’t sleep, nor the next, jumping at sounds, imagining strangers’ fingers rifling through their things. Yet they hadn’t taken anything. Not even a laptop that Luke had left out.
And now look. She watches Smith walk into the kitchen and begin opening her cupboards. Other strangers join her, all searching.
Perhaps her story arouses suspicion in Lambert, or perhaps he always intended to do this, but he sets a recording device down next to Cam. It looks incongruous on her sofa, an old-fashioned black box. ‘Interview with wife of suspect commencing ten twenty-two, June twenty-first, 2017,’ he says. ‘When did you last see your husband?’
Something collapses in Cam.
‘Last night,’ she says. ‘Or perhaps this morning.’
Lambert looks at her. ‘Which?’
The search team arrives. Cam hears them downstairs. Boots on stairs. Lowered voices.
‘Camilla?’ Lambert prompts, ignoring the team arriving. He is completely and totally focused on her. ‘We have to get on with this. Get you to the scene. Before something happens.’
She pauses, thinking of Luke’s note. The cryptic note. This whole situation feels surreal, but this especially so. Could she refuse to answer anything? Is she here – wife of suspect – leading the police to her husband?
‘He left this morning before I got up. He wrote me a note,’ she says carefully, knowing that she is not the sort of person who can refuse to cooperate, who can easily lie. ‘He kissed me. I think.’ And he did. She really thinks he did. He always does.
‘Where’s the note?’
‘Got it,’ Smith calls through. She appears again in the doorway – false smile spreading across her features – and the love note from husband to wife is double-bagged. Smith passes it to Lambert, who reads it quickly.
He brandishes it. ‘What does the back mean? If anything ? The crossed-out part?’
If anything … Did he mean he knew something was going to happen? That he was going to do something? Should she have hidden it? Is this note her thirty pieces of silver, handing her husband over?
‘I don’t know.’
‘No idea?’
‘No.’
‘Have you texted him?’
‘Yes. They’re undelivered.’
‘What time did he leave here?’
‘I don’t know. It’s a – our baby doesn’t sleep well, so it’s a blur …’
Lambert’s eyes catch the sunlight. They’re an unusual patterned camouflage green. Funny, this man must eat breakfast, sleep, get dressed in the morning, but Cam can hardly imagine that he is a human being beyond a detective.
‘So he gave you the impression he was heading to work? He’s a writer, correct?’ Lambert says.
‘Yes, he is. He has a co-working space he sometimes goes to … It is – it’s in Bermondsey,’ Cam says, knowing the power this word holds. ‘But he didn’t say he was going.’
‘What’s the address? We’ll order a search.’
‘Umm, it’s called the Water Cooler co-working space.’
Cam’s back prickles as she says this. What if he’s hidden something there? Some explanation – another note for her? What if it’s been so lovely was some sort of clue? Cam is used to reading her husband’s writing, used to analysing him, editing him. But this one is lost on her.
What if there’s something darker there? Evidence? She is handing her husband over to the police. In the face of him or good citizenship, she’s unwittingly chosen.
She went to his co-working space only a few weeks ago, took Polly down to see him one sunny afternoon. ‘The Water Cooler’ was written above the door in brass letters. Luke rented a dedicated office he said he could close the door on – though he never did. While they were there, another occupant of the co-working space arrived to see him, carrying two ping-pong bats and a ball.
But all Cam really remembers is that he had a framed photograph of them on the shelves. In the evening snow, Cam in a purple hat, scarf and gloves, he in a black beanie, the light behind them sodium yellow. Flurries of snow whirled around them, obscuring parts of their faces, some of them blurred, some of them in focus.
How absurd it is that they were once there in the snow together, then in the office, and now here she is, talking to the police about him while he holds captive three innocent people. The shock repeats on her like rolling thunder.
‘OK.’ Lambert fires off an email right in front of her. He doesn’t even hide the screen from her, fingers flying across the keys. ‘Why does he work in Bermondsey?’
‘He used to live near there. And the co-working space has good coffee,’ Cam says honestly, her voice catching. ‘He likes good coffee.’ They like coffee. Or did ? It’s one of their things. Luke bought beans on subscription just recently for them to share. They’re being delivered tomorrow. If he did that – if he intended to …?
‘He’s a ghostwriter, yeah?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good work ethic?’ Lambert receives an email, reads it, then looks back at Cam.
‘Tries, but he is extroverted.’
‘Ah. Prefers to socialize?’
‘Yes. Likes the research and interviewing people. Less so the typing.’
‘Right,’ Lambert says, perhaps with a slice of judgement. And maybe it’s easy to judge Luke, if you don’t really know him. If you don’t know the way he can make a story about buying a pint of milk entertaining. If you don’t know how well he writes, how he knows the precise way to command a story. If you don’t know that he cooks their every meal, says he enjoys it, but Cam knows it’s because she hates it. Just recently, she’d caught a glimpse of a note called this week’s dinners on his phone, and thought how glad she was that he was hers. The load truly shared, and never resentfully.
‘He working on anything particularly … interesting, at the moment? Anything that might’ve landed him in some sort of hot water?’ Lambert gets out a piece of gum and begins chewing it, offers Cam one, which she declines. His chewing irritates her, adds an air of mania to his fast questioning. Cam wonders how much time they truly have until something escalates in the warehouse.
‘He’s doing a biography of an MP and researching one for an actor.’
‘Who?’
‘Alan Pastor and Tristan Hughes.’
Lambert makes a bemused face. He might not even have heard of them: an under-the-radar Green Party MP and an actor currently in Macbeth at the Globe. Could these people have somehow led to … all this? Some awful exposé? It would be ridiculous. She can’t imagine. Niche, not likely to attract huge sales and certainly won’t be of interest to a copper.
‘Not worth our time looking into them,’ Lambert says, and Cam is struck by someone making constant and urgent judgement calls.
‘I don’t think they’re anything big,’ she says, thinking that these contracts will almost certainly be cancelled now, the money handed back. God … his income. His reputation. Her reputation. The aftershocks of it all keep hitting as she sits there, battered by repercussions.
‘Is it unusual for him to be gone before you wake?’ Lambert continues.
‘Yes.’
‘He stressed?’ he says. Another look at the phone.
‘Is something happening?’
‘Is your husband under stress?’
‘I mean, no,’ Cam says, but the second she speaks these words, she knows that they are lies. Luke is not ordinarily stressed, but hasn’t he been – lately?
Sometime in the spring Luke had got in late from driving Polly around, then hardly slept one night. She’d been aware of him moving around in the bed next to her, in the small hours. After a while, she’d woken again to him watching television on his iPad, headphones in, the blue flickering of the screen interrupting her sleep. The next day, she’d asked him about it, but he’d said only that Polly had taught him how to be an insomniac. ‘Really?’ she’d said. ‘I fall asleep the second I’m horizontal.’
‘Ha, yeah,’ he’d said, and that was that. None of his usual humour.
The truth is that Luke’s been tetchy for a good few weeks, exploding sometimes over undone household admin, nappies, the MOT.
Cam meets Lambert’s eyes and something seems to cross between them. He – Protect and Serve – wants information at any cost. But these things, these intangible but damning things, Cam is not willing to give to him. There are some lines she cannot cross, and here they are.
Because, despite everything – everything – she believes her husband to be good.
Lambert breaks her gaze, looks out of the window. She deflects the question. ‘Nothing beyond the usual stresses of having a baby.’
Lambert’s head swivels around like an owl’s. He doesn’t miss it. ‘So Luke is stressed?’
‘No!’ Cam says, thinking maybe Luke has had enough of them. Is that it? He’s had some sort of mental health event, his brain broken, betraying him, some sort of split from reality after nine months of propping Cam and her worrisome Google searches up? Of giving her time to herself that she needed? Of cooking every single dinner? God, how selfish she has been, reading a book every night in the garden while her husband carried the load. No other new mother gets that me-time, she thinks viciously about herself.
Or is it sleep deprivation, and everything else?
‘Can I see your phone?’
More invasions of privacy. She numbly unlocks her phone and hands it over, reminded – perversely – of childbirth, where after the first examination, all inhibitions were lost. Look at anything, she thinks despondently. Go through it all. I no longer care.
Lambert scrolls, pen poised in his hand. Cam lets out a sigh. Luke’s jacket is on the chair and she has a bizarre urge to go and fold herself inside it, the zip done right up to the top. She’s had enough of the questioning. She is peopled out, if nothing else, feels the way she does at the end of a working day, at parties. Sometimes, too, after an evening with her chatty husband.
Lambert is studying her message chain with Luke. They’re the ones from yesterday. They’d gone to a café and texted while Luke sat at the table with Polly and Cam had ordered at the counter. A last outing before Cam went back to work.
Luke: Chicken salad with mayo or similar? Can’t see the menu!
Luke: Unless they have a car quiche? lol
Cam: Let me see what they’ve got.
Cam: I’m afraid no quiche!! I can do chicken salad. Caesar dressing?
Luke: DEFINITELY.
Cam: Coming up. Coffee?
Luke: Obviously.
Car quiche. One of the many monikers they have made up. Perhaps due to their occupations, Cam and Luke are more prone than most couples to adopting their own lexicon. Car quiche refers to a quiche they once ate from a service station that they both deemed the best of their life, only afterwards they couldn’t remember where it was from. They have spent several years trying to track it down.
Cam and Luke have dozens of these words, some of them made up entirely. Slabbidon, an invented word for when you’re feeling jaded and under the weather for no reason. A Ford Focus moment – named after a time Cam worked out a problem with her client’s manuscript in the car: breakthroughs of any kind were thus called this. Ordering the fillet steak, that time a friend of theirs checked they were splitting the bill, and then ordered the most expensive item on the menu, now a sobriquet for chancers everywhere.
And sweepy, perhaps their favourite expression, coined by Luke. ‘I feel a bit woe-is-me,’ he had said one day, not long after they’d first got together and he still worked in journalism. They were eating out somewhere, the sort of place they went to before kids. Cam can’t remember the name, only that they’d sat outside and it had rained unexpectedly, rivulets running off awnings like tassels. They had stayed out there – Oh, fuck it, I’m not moving now , said Luke – the night still warm, their arms and ankles occasionally getting splashed.
‘How so?’ Cam had said.
Luke had gestured with a slim hand holding his drink. ‘A bit down on myself. Captain Pete –’ how he referred to his boss – ‘wants me to try and bring advertisers in for the paper.’
‘And?’
‘He wants me to just cold-call sponsors, like a pathetic little … I don’t know. A chimney sweep, begging people to let me in.’
Cam had laughed so loudly it had echoed on the rainy, empty terrace. ‘Are you now a Victorian? Fancy yourself the new Dickens?’
‘The metaphor stands.’
And so feeling sweepy became a term used for when one is feeling disheartened, down or small. Cam felt sweepy when the baby cried too much, when she ran out of day and didn’t get to do anything she really wanted to. Luke felt sweepy when, years after his first book came out, his publisher sent him 63p in royalties, and even sweepier when Cam took her commission off.
‘And that was yesterday. So this morning you …’ Lambert continues, putting her phone down.
‘Took my daughter to nursery.’
‘There someone who can pick her up?’ he says, and Cam’s heart snaps in two right there like a fortune cookie.
‘It’s her first day. No, I …’ Cam says, panicked. Polly will think she’s abandoned her. Died.
‘You will be needed throughout today, Camilla.’ And his ominous tone is enough to make her do it.
He gestures to her phone, and Cam scrabbles for it, calling Libby. It connects immediately. Despite their near-constant texts, Cam and Libby do not ever call each other – they both hate the phone – which is why Libby answers with a panicked ‘You OK?’
‘I need you to collect Polly,’ Cam says woodenly. ‘From nursery.’
‘What? Why?’ Libby says. This is not something Cam would ordinarily ask: Libby has been trying to have a baby herself for five years. Two years of trying, two failed rounds of IUI, she and her husband, Si, are now about to embark on their first round of IVF. Cam supposes that the relationship with Polly might be a step too close for Libby, who always looks slightly wounded when she sees her, who once said on text, I sometimes think she looks like me . It had been so unexpected, and so loaded for her caustic sister, who only ever deflects pain with humour, that Cam hadn’t known what to say back.
‘Well, if you think I’m the best person to ask, then …’ Libby says.
And Libby doesn’t know it, but she is. There are friends, there are colleagues, but when the police are standing over you, you really only want your family.
Cam breathes down the line. ‘Luke is – The police are …’ She dry-gulps on the words. ‘They’re investigating something they say he’s done.’
Cam sees Lambert’s facial expression flicker at her careful wording.
Libby heeds the family emergency, and snaps into pragmatism, the way she always does. ‘What do I need to do?’ she asks, and Cam closes her eyes in gratefulness. A heart of gold sits in her sister’s chest.
‘You need to get to the nursery for five. It’s – it’s the one on my road. You need a code word. I set it up – hang on …’ Cam puts her hand to her forehead, trying to think. What was that word? God, Libby will be so triggered by this. She should have asked someone else. ‘It’s upside-down,’ she says. ‘The phrase you need to say.’ She puts Libby on speaker, then fiddles with the app for the nursery, clicking the button to say someone else will be collecting Polly.
‘OK.’ Libby hesitates, the pause tinny in Cam’s living room, and she leans into it, this sisterly, supportive silence that travels down the line to her. ‘You OK?’ she says. Cam takes her off speaker, embarrassed.
‘Yeah,’ Cam lies. ‘Yeah.’
‘OK. Stay in touch – if you can,’ she says, and Cam is so, so thankful Libby doesn’t ask what Luke’s been said to have done.
Smith walks into the room and picks up Luke’s laptop. She’s put her hair in a bun on the top of her head, looks slightly exerted from searching, flushed. She is holding several items in clear plastic bags. Cam squints at them. His toothbrush. Two notebooks. But it’s the toothbrush that really gets to her: DNA. A private, intimate ablution, swabbed.
Two more officers thunder past her, one of them holding Luke’s wallet and passport. He didn’t even take his wallet … surely that must mean that he didn’t intend to leave for long? Or go far?
Or that he didn’t intend to go to work for the day at all …
Cam suddenly wants to take off and hide everything. Grab their things and go. Keep his secrets for him. This morning, she had a happy marriage. Now, she’s supposed to hand him over to the police, together with everything she knows about him.
‘There,’ Cam says, pointing to the armchair where his laptop sits. Smith heads to it, but picks up his coat first, searches the pockets. She brings out a clutch of receipts and a letter. She scrutinizes them for a few seconds, then looks at Cam, who immediately stands up and looks at them. Smith doesn’t stop her doing so, but she doesn’t acknowledge it at all, leaving Cam feeling like a creep at a party.
RECEIPT 21/04
***TESCO CLUBCARD FUELSAVE***
PENCE PER LITRE DIESEL: 120
POINTS THIS VISIT: 148
SUNDRIES: CADBURY STARBAR
PAID BY CARD ENDING 4592
RECEIPT 23/04
***TESCO CLUBCARD FUELSAVE***
PENCE PER LITRE DIESEL: 123
POINTS THIS VISIT: 172
SUNDRIES: CADBURY TWIRL
PAID BY CARD ENDING: 4592
Cam stares at the receipts. And it isn’t their contents which makes her suspicious: it’s the frequency. Fuel twice in two days, and they live in London. Hardly drive. She tries to anchor the dates in her mind, but can’t. Where had he been in order to fill up twice in the spring?
A crumpled-up letter unfurls in Smith’s hand. Luke’s bank statement.
Cam’s gaze skims the withdrawals. The two petrol fill-ups are there. Way more than normal. Cash, too. But these could mean anything.
Smith’s gaze is on her. ‘Anything jump out?’ she says lightly, and Cam suddenly thinks how foolish they are, how stupid to think that Cam might be honest about something like this, something nebulous, where her concerns can hide between the lines of the itemized bank statements.
‘Nothing,’ Cam lies. They’d been driving around to get Polly to sleep, but only for twenty minutes here and there …
Smith bags the papers. ‘Does he have any other computers or assets?’
‘No – I … No. Just his phone and his laptop.’
‘Social media?’
‘He’s not bothered by it.’
‘Right, Cam,’ Lambert says, while Smith takes the laptop away. ‘Anything else unusual happen recently? Anything you can think of other than the burglary? However small.’
Cam closes her eyes and sees Polly on a swing in her mind, Luke laughing as she kicks her little legs and windmills her arms. That is real. That is what matters. They stay there for a few seconds in her imagination, sun in their yellow hair.
Cam opens her eyes.
Immediately, she remembers the onions. It was sometime recently, perhaps a month or slightly more ago: she can’t find anything to fix it on, and time moves both fast and slow since having Polly. Maybe April: it had been colder, dark after Polly’s bedtime.
Cam had been in the bath upstairs, had come down to the smell of dinner cooking. Luke hadn’t heard her footsteps. His back was to her, lit by the kitchen spotlights. He was chopping something, chicken sizzling noisily in a wok.
‘It was so nice to have a bath and read,’ she’d said. Polly had suddenly started going to bed. Previously, they’d had to drive her around sometimes to get her to sleep. The difference a few hours to themselves made had been life-changing. A drop of expensive bath oil, a crime thriller, and, most nights, Cam was away somewhere else. Rural Scotland playing detective. Nineteen sixties Paris. Or just London, but a different London to her own.
‘Huh?’ Luke had replied jumpily. He’d spun and looked directly at her.
And it was his eyes.
His expression was carefully, deliberately open. Studied. But his eyes. Red-rimmed, bloodshot. And his jaw was set, too, his lower lip tense in that way it is when you’re crying but pretending not to.
‘Are you OK?’ she said.
‘Yes?’ he’d said, an edge to it.
‘You look like you’ve been crying?’
‘No,’ he’d said, and then, like it just occurred to him, he’d gestured to the chopping board. ‘Onions.’
Cam had thought about it a few times since. In the storm of the baby days, she had told herself that they were normal for feeling frazzled, for grieving an old life, unable to get anything done, competitively tired, but this had been maybe seven months afterwards. Unexplained crying. Or perhaps just onions. Who’s to say?
But last night … hadn’t he seemed fine? I’m chatting to you and eating Jaffa Cakes. The truth is, the good days with a baby are better than the greatest days in your pre-baby life. They had been a family. A unit. Memories flit through Cam’s mind like an old projector movie. Polly’s first laugh, like liquid bubble gum. That time she recognized them in the mirror and her eyes went round with shock. The key-in-lock feeling you get when you hold them close to your chest …
But had he been somewhere? Been out burning fuel? That night he’d hardly slept? The one she can only just remember, can’t place the date of?
Her reverie is interrupted by Smith’s appearance in the doorway, and Cam somehow knows from a place deep inside her that she’s about to tell her something significant.
‘Camilla?’ she says. She’s holding the laptop. And is there just something slightly triumphant about her expression? Maybe, Cam thinks warily, wanting to shrink away from her like an injured animal.
‘What?’ Cam says.
Smith pauses. Their eyes lock. ‘Do you have any idea why this laptop was wiped at just before five o’clock this morning?’
Cam’s cheeks get hot. Smith turns, her face catching a slice of sunlight, obscuring her expression momentarily, one side light, one shaded, a Phantom of the Opera.
‘No … I … No. I don’t know why.’
Her husband is a writer. All of his material is on there. He’d only delete everything if he intended to … Cam can’t let herself finish the sentence, not even in her mind. The sentence that ends with something like premeditation, with malice aforethought, with intent .
‘We’ll take it in,’ Smith says, her words mundane but the tone serious. ‘See if we can restore it.’
She disappears again, and Cam can hear her rustling forensic bags.
Lambert meets her eyes and there’s an uncomfortable beat. An awkward silence. Cam thinks it is because of the laptop, but it’s actually to do with a revelation of his own.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Camilla, there’s another piece of evidence missing.’