Famous Last Words

Chapter 19

19

The figure stares down at her for a few seconds. No. It isn’t her husband. She’s never seen him before. Tall and pale, with gingery hair. After a moment, he opens the window. ‘What?’ he calls. Disappointment throbs through her.

‘I’m sorry – I’m … I’m looking for my husband,’ she says.

‘What? You’ve woken me up.’

‘Luke?’ she calls up plaintively. ‘He had your address. I …’ she says, feeling pathetic. The Uber driver turns off his engine and looks out curiously at them.

‘Piss off or I’ll call the police,’ he calls back down, closing the window – and her last bit of hope – with a bang.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I …’

The window opens again, and slams shut even harder. The owner of the house is clear, and the last thing she wants is police contact. But why was this stranger so easy to wake? Was he waiting?

She waits for a minute longer, bewildered, then instructs the Uber to take her home, the leather of the seat cold against her legs. She doesn’t think at all on the way home, for perhaps the first time in her entire life. Not a single thought. She keeps them at bay, an ugly dam with water behind it swelling and building.

As she arrives, she sees a police car, two cars back, following her. Cam blushes with shame. Somehow, her last, desperate act being witnessed by the authorities makes it worse. She wonders if they will question her over it, or leave it: accept that she has as little idea as them where her husband may be.

She lets herself in her front door, walks straight up to the kitchen, turns off the light, and closes the door, her eyeballs burning in the early-morning dimness. She needs to be completely alone to think, and not be witnessed, not by her sister, not by the police outside, her daughter, not even by the lights above her.

The house must have been nothing. Research for a book. Something accidental.

Nothing.

No clue. No explanation waiting for her.

That house in Lewisham was a symbol of hope on the dawn horizon. And now.

He isn’t hiding out. He didn’t leave Rightmove as a clue. A stranger lives there. There is no narrative payoff here. No denouement, only confusion.

Well, now. She must face the truth.

My husband is a murderer. She forces herself to think this thought over and over, as though she will burst through some pain barrier and accept it. My husband is a murderer.

She sinks down against the counters to sit on the floor, head lolling backwards against a cupboard full of their possessions that were earlier ransacked by the police. Glasses they bought from IKEA. Mugs exchanged for birthdays and Christmases. Polly’s sippy cups that, only yesterday, Cam was worried she wasn’t using yet.

But Cam can’t even hide from the daylight. The very early-morning sun lights the appliances silver. The fridge, the hob, the toaster. Her husband used these appliances with her until just recently, and now he is a murderer.

She clutches at the skin on her stomach, at her hair. She wants to scream at her broken heart to stop beating. He’s a killer.

Cam’s head tilts forward on to her knees and she tries to cry, but she can’t. She is disgusting. A fool. A scorned woman. There are no tears available. She has hardened, like clay, the moisture dried out of her into cynicism.

She closes her eyes, scrunches them up, but it’s futile. She stays there for an age, not crying, not thinking, not doing anything except staring at the greyscale kitchen around her and thinking of standing outside that Lewisham house, alone and abandoned by her husband.

After who knows how long, she walks into the living room.

She checks her phone. She dimly registers that Penguin has offered a six-figure sum in a two-book deal for Adam’s novel that she doesn’t even open beyond the preview.

She ignores everyone, looks at her texts from yesterday with Luke, from before they went to the café, from before before before.

Cam: Are you working very hard or can you have Polly while I have a five minute peaceful wee?!

Luke: Absolutely! Hang on!

Cam: It was a good wee. Thank you.

Luke: xx

But then she spies the volume of other texts she’s had. Over sixty.

Holly: OMG – just seen the news. Are you OK?

Stuart: Don’t worry about work. All here if you need us.

There are more. She becomes quickly overwhelmed by them. They don’t make sense to her, don’t seem to mean anything. Friend after friend after friend and relatives and distant acquaintances. Holly: her closest friend, a former commissioning editor, now freelance, saying she’s seen the news. A text Cam herself might send, but is furious at receiving.

The police must have told the media his name. Cam blinks dumbly on the sofa.

So everyone knows. Everyone knows what he’s done.

How can she go on? She holds her phone to her chest. How can she?

She checks BBC News. There’s a live feed.

15:50 Siege ends in dramatic shooting

15:55 Plea for information: Suspect at large and dangerous named as Luke Deschamps

17:01 RECAP: How did we get here?

18:10 brEAKING: Last note left by criminal husband seen by press

Cam can’t help but open the final item, and there it is. Her private communication, his last words to her, beamed as large as if projected on to the night sky for all to see. Insult added to injury after injury.

‘It’s been so lovely with you both’ is the cryptic message left from husband to bewildered wife the morning he chose to take three hostages in a siege that gripped London , it reads. Cam clicks off it in disgust. How could they? It might as well be a diary entry. Her cheeks heat with shame. Everyone will have read it. Everyone will know.

#LondonSiege is the top trending topic on Twitter.

Absolutely disgusting, innocent people taken , one user has written.

They should have just gone in and blown him up – terrorists are terrorists , another comment says. Cam’s chest seems to expand and contract, a cartoon heart beating in shock.

Did anyone see THE NOTE he left his wife? WTF?? #LondonSiege

She flips the phone face down on to the sofa, where it creates a pale white rim of light, and sits forward, unable to bear it.

She wanders through her house. Their belongings are disturbed, put together but not quite right, which makes Cam feel uneasy, like when a hotel room has been cleaned without your knowing.

The search has been thorough, most things looked through. Cam leafs listlessly through a notepad on the hall table, at the John le Carré novel he was reading, at their calendar hanging on the wall in the kitchen. Nothing. No clues left remaining. What did she expect?

She pads downstairs again and into the nursery, where Polly is sleeping. On her stomach, bottom in the air, blonde hair mussed all over the place like whipped meringues. Cam traces a finger down her cheek, just once, thinking that this is how. This is how she goes on. Your father is a murderer, Cam thinks. Poor, poor you. Worse off than me.

She picks her up, unable to resist, her daughter a warm, sweet-scented heavy sack. She still has that newborn scrunch, at times: legs held up near her body like a frog; and Cam presses her baby to her abdomen, the way she grew her, nuzzles her nose into her daughter’s neck.

Eventually, she puts her down and walks to her own room, where Libby is sleeping, too. She watches her sister for just a few seconds, her face at rest, then gets on the bed and lies down the wrong way, fully clothed. She should sleep, and maybe she will, right here in her jeans. She begins to slow blink. She’s alone now. Untethered. Suddenly, she craves the siege, the hostage negotiator, the structure of it. What is she supposed to do now?

Libby must feel her presence because she stirs, opening her eyes.

‘Hi,’ she says softly. The dawn has the bedroom in grey fuzz.

‘Hi,’ Cam says.

Libby sits up. Next to her, on her pillow, Polly’s baby monitor whirrs softly. Something about it turns Cam’s heart over. How hard this would have been for her sister, yet she did it anyway, to help her.

Cam lies there on her back, looking down her body at her sister, topping and tailing like they used to do as children. ‘I’m so sorry this has happened,’ Libby says, a simple sentiment, but one that Cam appreciates. ‘I can’t even think of …’

‘There’s nothing to say.’

Libby reaches over and rests her hand on Cam’s knee.

‘I mean …’ Cam says, her brain just starting the most tentative beginning of processing. ‘Like – even if he came back now, he’d go to prison for life.’ She stops. How could anybody begin to talk about this or truly absorb it?

‘What have they said happens now?’ Libby asks.

‘It’s a manhunt. He escaped out the back like someone in – I don’t know – Mission Impossible ?’

‘I know … Do they know who the hostages are yet?’

‘I don’t know,’ Cam says.

‘I think you should get some sleep,’ Libby says gently.

‘Maybe.’

Libby rolls on to her side, her body close to Cam’s, and they stay like that for a long time, awake but silent.

Cam’s eyes close completely. The months of sleep deprivation catching up, the past day’s adrenaline. She lets herself sink into sleep like a deep, tepid bath, as comforting as childhood. She dreams of Luke, that he’s outside, on the street, that he comes back for her, shouts to her – Tell my wife that I love her – but when she wakes, she’s alone in the afterworld.