Chapter 8
8
‘What’s that?’
‘Your husband has a gun,’ he says flatly. ‘I assume he bought it, and kept it here. But no paraphernalia has been found. No receipt, no box, no spare cartridges. Did you ever see that gun? It would help us enormously to know more about it, and where it came from.’
Cam realizes instantly that this is an accusation. ‘He can’t have a gun,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t.’
A gun. A gun. A gun. She didn’t see that on the footage. It was hidden. Had he concealed it?
‘I haven’t seen a gun,’ she adds.
‘He does have one. If you felt it was best to turn a blind eye until now, that’s fine, Cam,’ he says, misunderstanding her: he thinks she means in the house .
Cam looks at Lambert, and then at the recording device, and wonders if actually this has been the point of the interview all along. Perhaps she hasn’t been the only one withholding information.
And then the thought body-slams her: poor, poor Polly. She didn’t ask for this. Sieges and guns kept in houses and police ransacking her nursery. Cam can hardly stand it. Twinned with this comes anger, maternal anger burning bright. How could he do this? How could he leave Cam to deal with the fallout? To implicate her in it, or at least not exonerate her? To not explain a thing to Cam, to leave his baby daughter?
‘ Is it OK?’ she says, incredulous. ‘To turn a blind eye to a gun? Besides, I haven’t. If I saw a gun in my house, the one my baby lives in, I’d … I’d …’ She flounders, can’t finish the sentence.
‘OK,’ Lambert says. ‘Has he been buying anything else unusual?’
‘Like what?’
‘Hydrogen peroxide, bags of nails …’
‘No,’ Cam says, and she almost laughs with the mad absurdity of it. ‘You think he’s made a bomb.’
‘I have no idea,’ Lambert says, as though Cam is the one asking insane questions. ‘But we have to have as much information as possible about what might await us in that warehouse.’
Await us . Cam deals in words for a living, and these are not lost on her. They’re going to go in. Isn’t that what happens? The police go in and shoot? The suspect dies, makes the news, maybe the hostages are rescued, maybe not, and, the next week, everyone’s forgotten all of them.
‘Who are they?’ Cam asks, her voice faltering and hoarse, shame lacing it that she didn’t ask earlier. Only cared about the perpetrator. ‘The hostages?’
Lambert’s green eyes connect with hers, then he looks away. ‘No names yet.’
He pauses, seeming to hesitate, but doesn’t add anything else. ‘Deschamps was easier to identify. But he bagged the hostages almost immediately. Hoods make it kind of difficult.’
Bagged.
‘Are you going to go in?’ she asks.
‘No firm plans to at the moment,’ he says. ‘So long as your husband cooperates.’
‘OK,’ Cam says in a small voice, thinking, Please cooperate, oh please, whatever it takes. Whatever cooperation is.
‘I’ll need contact details for all of his friends and family that you can think of,’ Lambert says. ‘As part of the profiling, we need to talk to everybody.’
Cam mutely starts to write them down on a plain pad with a pen he provides her with. The pen isn’t police-issue, has the name of a rock band on the side of it that Cam’s vaguely heard of. Her handwriting is strange and jagged, the plastic pen slick with sweat, her phone hot in her hand.
And Cam doesn’t know where the thought comes from, only that it arises: there won’t be a second child. Not unless there is an amazingly credible explanation for all of this. She almost doubles over in shock from the strength of this revelation. What else won’t there be? Won’t Luke go to prison, even once the siege is done?
Poor, poor Polly. A criminal for a father.
Cam will be a single parent.
She thinks she might be sick.
She stares at her feet, lost. As lost as if she had landed on the moon, alone. She’s still wearing the shoes she put on to take Polly to nursery, when Luke was merely missing.
Lambert’s phone rings again, making Cam jump, and he takes the call, uttering only one-word sentences.
‘Camilla,’ Smith says, arriving back in the room. ‘We’ve restored a few apps, but most are deleted even from the servers. Anything relevant to you in here? Anything you want to flag?’ she says lightly, and Cam is suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps the police are not merely fact-finding, here. Perhaps this is Cam’s only opportunity to confess about anything suspicious – or run the risk of being implicated herself …
UBER EATS ACCOUNT
Your Orders
Starbucks (Putney)
￡9.13 (LARGE) COFFEE X 2
18 Jun 08:02AM
DELIVERY CHARGE: ￡3.40
Starbucks (Putney)
￡4.10 DOUGHNUT (CUSTARD-FILLED) X 1
18 JUN 08:40AM
DELIVERY CHARGE: ￡2.50
Cam blows a dark, sad laugh out of the side of her mouth. Here he is. Her husband’s character. He loves Uber Eats, once said he would Uber a Mars bar to the sofa if he could.
She looks at the recent searches on his Spotify:
White noise for babies
Lullabies for babies
Music for anxiety
Anxiety .
Cam stares at it. Sure enough, Smith doesn’t miss it either. ‘He usually anxious?’
‘No,’ Cam says.
‘Hmm.’
‘It was probably just – you know. Having a new baby …’ she prattles. ‘I’ve found it hard. It was maybe for me.’
‘Was it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ she says again, and Smith gives her a hard stare that lasts a second or two too long. Eventually, she moves on, showing her the next set of apps.
ASOS
Recent orders
OUT FOR DELIVERY 24 June 2017: Stonewashed jeans, slim fit, size M
And his Safari search history:
Remove page break on Microsoft Word
Meditation exercises
Krispy Kreme stockists London
Nine month sleep regression?
How to concentrate better
Meditation . Cam stares at that, too. Same way she stared at anxiety . Luke is not a meditator. Not in any way, has zero interest in it. In fact, likes his busy mind, the way it flits from this to that.
‘All pretty benign,’ Cam says lightly. ‘Meditation to concentrate better, probably.’
‘Right.’
One final app. Rightmove. One saved search: Grove Avenue, Lewisham. Photographs of a house for sale.
‘Ring any bells?’ Smith says, and Cam stands at a crossroads once more. At the fork in the road. Here it is: the opportunity. The truth is, Cam doesn’t recognize that property, has no idea why Luke has saved it, and on that app.
But she doesn’t want the police to go there, to check it out. What if … what if he’s hiding something there? What if it’s significant, somehow, in ways she doesn’t yet know? What if this location is just for her?
Cam stares at the decision, but the truth is that there isn’t one, not for her. She is his wife. And, here and now, she tumbles across an invisible line, drawn somewhere between her and Smith, made of loyalty and love for her husband.
‘It’s a house we thought about buying, but decided not to.’
On the other side of the line, everything feels different.
‘Right, OK,’ Smith says quickly, and Cam thinks the second she has a moment, she will go to Grove Avenue herself, and find the house. Alone.
‘I wanted to ask you,’ Smith says. ‘Do you know when your husband last ate and drank?’
‘What? Why?’ Cam says, still thinking about his Google searches, that house.
‘It’s just for – so we know a bit more about his physical state,’ she explains. ‘And any medical conditions?’
‘No. None. Coffee, this morning, I think.’
‘Right,’ Smith says. ‘I heard you say – it’s … he likes it, right – he likes coffee?’ She looks at Cam, and her tone softens slightly, like butter just beginning to melt around the edges, though Cam is certain it is put on.
‘Right.’
A weighty silence seems to settle between them, though Cam doesn’t know why. ‘That’s a good thing for us to offer up,’ Smith says.
Cam winces. Clearly, they want to entice him out, like he is … what? An animal? Prey? Cam feels dirty, as though she wants to shower this grubbiness off – no, go out and wash herself off in rain that, this summer, doesn’t seem to want to come. She’s giving them information, preferences. Things that they will use to bait her husband. How can Cam be complicit in this? It is these thoughts which she uses to justify it, keeping her secret Lewisham house to herself.
Smith disappears. ‘OK,’ Lambert says one last time into the phone, then hangs up.
‘This burglary,’ he says. And oh please, please let him say Luke found out who did it, is teaching them a lesson, something irrational but perhaps understandable, something that, if they can end the situation, he will recover from eventually, serve his time for. These are now Cam’s hopes, as surreal as they are.
‘Your husband didn’t report the burglary,’ he says, voice low: the tone of a man aware a woman’s husband has lied to her.
‘What?’
‘No phone call was made.’
‘That’s – that’s not … I was there,’ Cam says, but she immediately thinks that, actually, she wasn’t. He was in the garden: a strange place to make a call.
‘Did you ever follow up yourself?’
‘No. He did it all. Maybe he – was on hold, and thought he’d try later?’
‘I’m sorry. There’s no police record of it. No call, no crime number. Nothing.’
‘He did call. I saw him. Surely it’s an – an admin error?’
‘And Vodafone say no call was made that afternoon.’
Cam pauses, stunned. ‘So – what? He pretended?’
A beat. ‘Yeah. Looks like it.’
The doorbell goes, interrupting Cam’s thoughts. ‘I’ll get it. Stay put,’ Smith says quickly, and Cam is surprised and then shame-filled at the notion that she is no longer at liberty to answer her own front door.
She inches along the sofa and picks up Luke’s coat. A scarf is tucked in the pocket. Cam bought it for him. It’s merino, navy blue. She pulls it out and it runs between her hands as softly as running water. She holds it to her face. It smells of him. Earthy and clean. She stays there for a few minutes, scarf held to her chest, just trying to slow her breathing against his scent. It’s funny, she thinks: it hasn’t been coat weather for months.
She looks up, startled, as Smith arrives with Libby.
Tall, broad-shouldered, her sister is as safe a pair of hands as it is possible to be, and Cam can only think of one person she’d rather see more. She stands there on the threshold of the living room, hand still on the doorknob, and says, ‘Sorry, I—’ She looks at Smith, evidently feeling awkward. ‘I needed to – to grab the sling to carry Polly, when I collect her – sorry …’ A curl has sprung out from her ponytail, and she grabs at it scattily.
Cam moves towards her. She’s standing in a patch of sun in the living room, and molten heat runs down Cam’s back as she reaches her, her only other living relative. She feels her shoulders drop several inches. She relaxes into the hug in the way that happens sometimes when surrounded by people who have known you for all of your life.
Libby doesn’t say anything, just makes a funny kind of gesture as she releases Cam, hands spread slightly, like, What can I say?
Cam draws a breath in. ‘They say Luke – There’s a hostage situation in Bermondsey and they say – he’s caught up in it.’
Smith stands impassively by the door. Cam darts a look over at her. Is this conversation being observed? Why can’t she even give her a moment’s privacy?
‘What?’ Libby says. Her lips blanch. Somewhere deep inside, Cam is touched by Libby’s concern for Luke, is ashamed that she is about to obliterate it.
‘They say he started it. He’s taken three hostages. With a gun.’ She pauses, then says it again, to affirm it to herself as much as to Libby. ‘He’s got a gun.’
‘What?’ Libby says again, and she says it, this time, bullishly, in the way she only does when truly shocked. Cam is perversely glad to see this surprises her sister as much as her. And something about this, the sunlight, her sister’s safe presence in her living room, it makes Cam double over, right there in front of Smith.
‘Tell me what to do,’ she says, breathing, panicking, her hands on her knees like an exhausted athlete. ‘Just tell me what to do.’ It’s a sentence that comes easily from her, the younger to the elder sibling.
‘For once I don’t know,’ Libby says, a flash of dark humour in her voice. She looks like their mother, something Cam finds comforting today. Both of their parents are dead, same as Luke’s. Something Cam used to find tragic but, today, she can’t quite locate that specific grief amid the shock.
‘I …’ Cam is, for once, lost for words. ‘I have to go,’ she says simply. ‘To the scene.’
‘I … Jesus, Cam,’ Libby says, and Cam is unsettled by her seriousness, how changed their relationship feels right now, one that is built on trading stupid texts and unconditional love.
She touches Cam’s head, like a vicar. Cam stays there, bent over. Saying nothing. Feeling her sister’s hand on her scalp.
‘I’ll stay here. And I’ll get Polly. Please don’t worry about anything,’ Libby says.
‘Thank you. I never would’ve asked you to get Polly if—’
‘Don’t worry about that. Happy to. I’ll stay here until pick-up. And sleep here.’
‘I need to show you – where we keep … the bottles, everything,’ Cam says, straightening up and thinking that, somehow, with a baby, all these things must still keep going. As she thinks of her daughter, she feels a familiar jolt, a kind of yearning, like the notion of going home. It’s a simple desire to place her face close to Polly’s, to breathe her in, to feel her puffy bottom in her nappy, her chest against Cam’s. There is something about it that is like medicine, even on a day like today. Especially on a day like today.
‘Yes, do that,’ Libby says. ‘It’ll be so nice to see her one on one,’ she continues, and Cam is so glad for the kind lie.