Famous Last Words

Chapter 18

18

‘If you think of anywhere your husband is likely to head, call,’ Lambert says, his parting shot outside Scotland Yard, where Cam’s been held practically all night, answering question after question about her husband, who is now – officially, thank God, thank God? – on the run.

‘I will,’ Cam says, for perhaps the tenth time. ‘I don’t know where he would go,’ she adds, even though she’s said this, too. She’s given them his friends, his co-working space. She has nothing left. She’d give it if she knew it: she’s too exhausted to care.

But she can’t deny she’s relieved: criminal or not, her husband is alive, and Cam feels a weird kind of shameful relief at this.

The police offer her a lift from a PCSO, but she tells them she wants to walk. They ask her several times, but she only repeats this, thinking that she is not going to go home. Her whole body craves holding her daughter, but she must head to Lewisham. To the street containing the Rightmove property.

It’s just after three thirty in the morning, and the air is dark and soupy, the world outside the Uber silent. The sky slowly lightens beyond the car as she travels. It’s been night for what feels like only a few hours, the way it is in June. And Cam watches the sky and thinks how somewhere the answer is out there, as obvious as the dawn itself, but still hidden in night.

She winds the window down and it’s cooler as they cross the river. The tang of the salt and brine of the water. The air turns from grey to white, a new day beginning.

They arrive at Lewisham. It’s easy to find the street, and on that, the exact house she has memorized from Rightmove: a white semi-detached building with an untidy garden and several burglar alarms above the door.

Cam hesitates outside, and the cool air goosefleshes her skin: she is dressed for a day at the office, not an illegal night-time venture. A security light flashes on, blanching her view, and she stands in its beam, wondering if he is here, waiting for her. It clicks off, then on again when she moves, and she wonders if lights like this will remind her of the warehouse for ever. Eventually, a male figure comes to the window. Cam holds her breath, looking up. The address, held deep in an app. Was it for her? Is he here? Her husband, the fugitive?