Chapter 11
11
Cam
Cam is numb in the back of a police car, and all she can think is that Polly will be having her lunchtime nap, now. She winces as she imagines her in that unfamiliar place. They sleep on floor beds at the nursery, and something about this rattles Cam, like her mind is fixating on this instead of everything else. She tries to pull it back to the mystery at hand.
‘I don’t understand how you don’t have a record of the burglary,’ she says to Smith. ‘It did happen. It did. He did report it. He said he had a crime number, that you’d look into it.’
Smith’s sympathy is disappearing; perhaps was faked, anyway. ‘I’m afraid we can only deal with the facts here, Camilla. And he didn’t.’
‘Maybe your systems are faulty.’
‘Did anybody ever visit? Take fingerprints?’ Smith asks, with two raised brows in the rear-view mirror, and Cam shakes her head no. She didn’t think. Was too busy, subsumed into the chaos that is parenting a young child.
‘No,’ Cam replies.
‘Is that why you wanted to move? The house on Rightmove?’
‘Right,’ Cam says faintly, thinking how funny it is that sometimes fiction – lies – make more sense than reality. ‘Yes.’
Smith says nothing, braking softly at some lights. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to Cam, looking at her again. ‘I know how it feels to be lied to.’ All Cam sees is those eyes: no other clues in her face. And all she can think is that her husband is a good person. He is .
Cam blinks, unsure if Smith means personally or professionally, but doesn’t ask. They’re on different sides. She’s desperate to check out the Rightmove house, but can’t imagine when she will be able to.
Cam ponders Smith’s plain statement, and it is this that makes her truly doubt her husband for the first time. What is it called – Occam’s razor? That the simplest explanation is true? Her husband has wiped his laptop. He has lied to her about reporting a crime to the police. He has taken three hostages and is holding them in a warehouse.
It should be clear that he is not good .
They round a corner. They’re coming on to the road the warehouse sits on, and the scene is eerie. A fire engine is on the grass verge. The lights of a nearby corner shop are switched off, shut up, a news stand outside bearing a headline from yesterday. Another police car pulls away in front of them, bumping one wheel at a time off the kerb.
The entire street is cordoned off, and the road outside the warehouse is barricaded by police in concentric circles. Cam stares at them, rows and rows of coppers, eventually reaching the building containing the love of her life.
It’s a 1970s-style brick building, pitched roof, zero windows anywhere. A single door stands in the exact centre, perfunctory, unremarkable, faded black paint become matt with age, like a chalkboard. A single, small boarded-up window in the wood. Cam stares at it, this building with no windows, thinking only one singular thought: that this was planned. Look at it. No glass in the door. No possibility of a witness. Her eyes drift upwards to the layers of brick after brick after brick: and no escape.
As she sees it, Cam suddenly and violently misses the before-life. Normality. It’s gone for ever, her brain helpfully tells her, and she could keel over with the strength of this thought. The notebook she uses to track her reading at work. Her working theory that blue covers sell the most. Her favourite mug for her morning coffee. Her husband’s arms around her in bed at night. Gone, all gone.
Smith parks and lets Cam out: her door has a child safety lock on it. The air is hot and close as she stands, and her body unfurls. She’s been tense for hours.
She glances across the street. Being led from another police car is a tall, dark-haired police officer in uniform. How strange: two other officers are perhaps restraining him, or at the very least controlling where he goes. He looks exhausted. Their eyes lock, and Cam feels something pass between them. His gaze doesn’t leave hers as they walk across the sun-bleached pavements.
‘Over here,’ Smith says, interrupting. She checks something on her phone, and leads Cam – much to her surprise – to a pub several hundred yards away. The summer’s day continues surreally around them as they walk. Heat rises in fast, jagged shimmers off the tops of police cars, migrainous and sparkling. The air is as sticky as molten butter. Police are milling around in hi-vis. It could be a local football derby, a marathon, a festival. Not this, a gruesome crime scene, a negotiation, a place where Cam’s communications with her own husband will be listened to with held breaths.
As they walk, she can still feel the man’s eyes on her back.
The pub is flat-roofed, a Wetherspoon’s with green signage and maybe ten police cars parked in front of it. Three coppers stand sentry, and they stop talking as Cam arrives. Beyond them, towards the warehouse, are the armed police. Cam’s eyes keep straying to their automatic rifles. Panicked tears rise up through her throat like boiling water, scorching and painful.
‘This is the hostage negotiator,’ Smith says to Cam, indicating a man just emerging from the double doors, and Cam simply cannot, cannot believe that this is happening. Her sister’s voice appears from nowhere in her mind – An actual fucking hostage negotiator! she would say.
But, nevertheless, he is real, and he is maybe forty-five, tall, lithe – though the sort of person who looks as though he misses meals rather than keeps deliberately in shape – with a closely shaved head and chunky glasses with clear plastic frames. He is carrying a glass of Coke held down by his side and wearing faded jeans, trainers with no socks, and a jaded expression.
He reaches to shake her hand. ‘Niall,’ he says. Gravelly voice, Northern Irish. ‘DCI Niall Thompson.’
So he’s police. His aim will be to capture her husband. Immediately, Cam begins to distance herself from him.
He has a very direct stare. Grey eyes. As Cam’s eyes meet his, she can’t help but think of everything of Luke’s that she is holding. The crying over the onions. The argument about the MOT. That he shouted at her the other day when his phone rang, then apologized. Ran a hand through his hair, a rattled man. Cam keeps thinking of these things. More and more keep coming to her.
Niall leans against an A-frame chalkboard sign and says, ‘Let’s talk.’ Cam watches as the authority he has plays out in front of them: the police officers scatter like disturbed insects the second he invites her to speak, leaving them alone in the blazing heat. Niall squints into the sun, then shades his eyes and looks back at her.
‘Here’s me,’ he says, passing her a business card. ‘You need me, day or night, I’m here.’
‘Thank you,’ Cam says, taking it. She likes that he’s kept her out here, not taken her into a car or interviewing suite somewhere. Just two individuals standing together outside.
Niall pauses, his hands brought together in front of his body. He takes a breath. ‘I have just made contact with your husband. By the door. I introduced myself to him.’
Cam feels her jaw slacken. Contact . They’ve spoken. She had no idea. Nobody told her until now. She wonders if Smith knew. ‘What did he say?’
Niall looks down at the ground and then back up at her. ‘He said just one thing,’ he says, his tone gentle, like he is handling glass with it.
‘What?’
‘That he loves you. You and Polly.’ He holds her gaze.
Cam can’t speak for a moment. ‘He said that.’
‘Yes.’
‘Only that.’ Cam can’t … She can’t understand this. Not at all. She’s choked up by it. She’s angry about it. She’s – lost. Just totally lost. What is he doing? What is he thinking?
‘That’s all he said. Tell my wife that I love her. Her and Polly. ’ Niall removes his glasses, gets a pair of shades out of his pocket, and slides them on. Aviators. They reflect and distort the street around him into technicoloured fragments. Suddenly, Cam wonders if he kept her out here so he could easily hide his eyes, his expression. His innermost thoughts.
And she thought she might find his contact with Luke reassuring, but she doesn’t. ‘Did everyone hear?’ she adds, and she doesn’t know why, only that it feels vaguely unsettling to know that he shouted that out, and that the only people who heard him were police.
‘Just me,’ Niall says, which Cam suspects is a lie.
‘Was it some sort of goodbye?’ Cam says, fear firing up through her.
Niall seems to appraise her, silent. ‘Do you think that sounds like a farewell, or an invitation to talk to you?’
‘If he wanted to talk to me, I think he would ask,’ Cam says honestly. ‘He’s a direct sort of person.’
‘ Is he.’
‘Usually.’
‘I think getting you on the line will be really helpful, given everything.’
Cam stares down at her feet. The grass verges are a faded wheatgrass colour against the pavement, their edges a fringed old rug. ‘Niall. Is there a chance he isn’t doing this of his own free will? Like – that he’s been told to?’
Niall raises his eyebrows, his features arranged into the sort of face you’d make at a dinner party if you met someone who did an interesting job. Mild intrigue. Let’s try and get to the truth together. ‘I’m under pressure to get you on the phone. We don’t have much time.’
‘OK,’ Cam says in a small voice.
‘I have some questions: what sort of person is Luke?’ he asks. And Cam’s glad of this. Niall has none of Lambert’s fact-finding. He is all about character.
He brushes a hand over his stubble, and Cam finds herself wondering the same things about him: does he have a wife? Kids? How many hostage situations has he ended? Has he ever killed in order to end them? The last question circles in Cam’s mind like water going down a drain, around and around and around.
‘Happy,’ Cam says definitively. She finds it easy to describe Luke. ‘Enjoys his life. Doesn’t sweat the small stuff.’ As she says this last phrase, she wonders if it is quite true now. That is certainly the man she fell in love with. But is it the man who exists today, who shouts about MOTs? And, if not, when did the change truly begin? Was it just this past week or two, or has it been longer?
Tell my wife that I love her .
Niall gestures for her to follow him into the pub. They sit at a table he leads her to that is scattered with torn beer mats. He takes his sunglasses off. Underneath, his eyes look pale and raw.
‘Ghostwriter is interesting. He didn’t want the public profile?’
Cam blinks. She’d never thought of it like that. ‘No, I think he just likes writing and researching. Was a journalist. It’s … it’s an easy job. Not great money, but not bad either. You can work for yourself, on your own time. That appeals to him.’
‘Why?’
‘He … he likes to do what he wants to do, when he wants to do it.’
Behind Niall, two officers begin working on his phone, attaching a recording device. Cam can’t stop watching them, the intricate motions of their fingers, the reality of this situation rushing towards her. They’re going to call him and try to negotiate. And, if he won’t …
‘Come on, Niall,’ one of them says to him. ‘Two minutes.’
He ignores them. ‘Interesting. You think it could be connected to this?’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. You tell me.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I need to know everything he’s worked on lately.’
Cam pauses. She can’t stop thinking about Luke shouting that he loved her. What does it mean? Is this gruesome act somehow dedicated to her? Is he on the brink? About to do something? Is he sorry ?
‘He has an MP and an actor. Then in the past, he’s published a book about a Premier League team, a singer, a tennis player and a biography of a judge.’
‘A judge?’
‘Yes, a district judge.’
‘Any controversies? Name?’ he says
‘I mean – how could writing about a judge two years ago lead to …’ Cam says, making a hopeless gesture.
‘I don’t know. But we will find out.’ He pauses, then says: ‘You googled arguing with your husband,’ he says softly, and holds his hands up. ‘I don’t lie, and the Met have checked your Google account’s search history. They might not tell you – but I will. It was on your work PC.’
‘Oh,’ Cam says, stunned. Those open tabs. ‘No – I … We’d bickered about the night wakes, that’s all. Normal post-baby stuff … I was looking for reassurance,’ she says. ‘That other couples do that too.’ Her thoughts begin to race about everything she hasn’t told them. Could they possibly know? Arrest her, too?
‘All right then,’ he says, and it’s loaded, but she doesn’t speak. ‘Look. We need to get you on the phone. But does the twenty-first of April mean anything to you?’ He begins to clean his glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt.
‘Why?’
‘Your husband went somewhere into central London. Around ten, eleven at night. Turned off his location data at that point.’
Cam stares at her hands resting on the table, racking her brains. ‘We had to drive Polly around sometimes, to get her to sleep,’ she’d said. ‘We went through a bit of a phase of it. Maybe it was that.’ And she’s so glad that she can provide a credible explanation for this one tiny thing. But it isn’t, is it? That fuel bill … he’d filled the car up. Twice. He’d come home one night in the spring, and tossed and turned in bed. Was tearful, later, over the onions.
‘Ah, the old car nap,’ Niall says. ‘So why would he turn his location data off?’ As he asks this, he waves away a non-uniformed officer who seems to be hurrying him.
‘I don’t know? He didn’t tell me that he had,’ Cam says. But all she is thinking about is that something happened to her husband on 21 April. Something that made him drive a long way, and cover things up … that later made him cry. But what?
She looks at Niall. But she can’t tell him. She can’t.
‘Just to be clear …’ he says, trying to hold her gaze again, ‘it was a normal trip out?’
‘Yes. As far as I know. I don’t remember it exactly.’
Somebody outside shuts the doors of the pub. Without the breeze it’s too hot. Cam can feel sweat forming along her hairline, can smell stale beer slowly cooking in the carpets.
‘What’s he like under stress?’
‘Doesn’t get stressed,’ Cam says. It’s a lie, but it wasn’t always. He once got let go from a newspaper and, after receiving the email, opened a Mars bar with his teeth and said, ‘Well, that’s their loss.’
Niall pauses, evidently weighing up how to proceed, then says, ‘I have met a lot of people through my work and have never known a single one who doesn’t get stressed.’
‘He doesn’t. Not really.’
‘No recent moments of being quick to anger?’
‘No.’
‘No temper, you say?’ he asks again and, clearly, he’s getting at something here, but Cam’s chosen her line.
‘No temper,’ she lies. Because she knows that, when they go in, if they know he is angry, they will be more likely to kill him.
‘Right, Cam,’ Niall says. ‘Time’s against us because the entry team want to go in, as you may have gathered. I’m trying to make contact to avoid that. We have a number for the warehouse but we haven’t called it yet. You get one shot in these situations, and we wanted our ticket with us: you.’
‘Do you expect him to answer the phone?’ Cam is unable to stop herself asking.
Niall spreads his hands in front of him, and then deflects. ‘Do you?’
She thinks about how much her husband loves to communicate. Usually. They talk much more than other couples, often about total rubbish. And now, nothing. One sentence uttered to Niall. Nothing else.
‘He didn’t answer me calling his mobile.’
‘If he’s smart, he will answer the landline.’
‘He is smart,’ Cam says automatically. ‘And he likes to talk,’ she adds quietly.
‘Well, then,’ he says lightly. He looks at her, holds her gaze for a few seconds.
‘What if he does? Answer?’ Cam says.
Niall looks at the table, then back up at her. ‘Surrender’, he says, ‘is the only acceptable resolution. So – we work towards that.’
Cam stares at the warehouse, just visible through the pub windows. She surveys the walls, Luke just inside, she outside, separated only by molecules of brick and air, nothing more, but a million ideological miles apart. It is absurd to Cam that they can’t just go in, unplanned. The way her husband has been available to her for their entire marriage.
‘I don’t know why he’d do that,’ she says. ‘I don’t know anything. He’s a good person. If he doesn’t answer the phone,’ Cam gabbles, ‘surely I could go in? He wouldn’t shoot me ?’
This is the first time Niall’s eyes flash with any kind of emotion, though he covers it up well. ‘Did you think he’d do any of this?’ he says mildly, while the sand continues to run down the hourglass.
God, she just wants to do it now. Go in. End this.
Evidently, Niall can read a witness, because he says, ‘Right, let’s do it,’ seeming to make a decision and sitting up straighter. ‘We offer you up, and we hope in return – well, we hope for reciprocity, always.’
‘The release of a hostage,’ Cam says in understanding. Of course: the police care primarily about the hostages – and about arresting her husband. And she’s here to assist with that. Nothing more.
‘Exactly,’ Niall says smoothly. ‘Let’s run through a script of what you say if he answers.’
‘ When he answers,’ Cam says.
‘If he answers,’ Niall replies. ‘The cardinal rule: you don’t lie to him. If he asks if you’re with police, you say yes. If he asks if he will be arrested, you say you don’t know.’
‘Right.’
‘But don’t disclose anything you don’t need to.’
‘But – what should I say?’
Niall moves his phone out of the way and rests his hands, palms up, on the table. ‘My entire aim is to give him a way out,’ he says. ‘So that should be yours, too. What does a way out look like for him?’
‘I …’ Cam says, thinking that she is not equipped to answer this, to make this call. She thinks for a few seconds about Luke, about herself, about their marriage.
‘I suppose that I will always love him,’ she says eventually, her voice gloopy with uncried tears. ‘That Polly will, too. That he’s her father. That he can’t leave us.’
‘Exactly. Tell him that. Tell him it’s OK to come out. Tell him he hasn’t killed anybody yet.’
After this, like two people about to jump from a plane, he looks at her, checks she’s OK, checks the Met are ready, puts an earpiece in, and then presses Call.
The tinny ring blares out into the pub around them. Two rings. Cam can just imagine him about to answer. Four. His warm voice, his jovial tone. The explanation, whatever it is. Six.
Eight. By ten, Cam knows Luke isn’t going to answer.
Only, Niall holds a hand up, then, and says, ‘We don’t hang up. Not yet.’
Twelve. Fourteen.
Sixteen.
And Niall was right to wait, because that’s when somebody answers.
But it isn’t Luke.