Famous Last Words

Chapter 30

30

Cam

Cam saved the social media posts about the funerals for here: in bed, early in the morning, by herself. She’d started reading last night, became too spooked, and resumes now. Things feel calmer in the lemonade morning light.

The facts are that one event matches what Cam is looking for: there was a funeral held for a teenager called Alexander Hale on 16 June the year Luke went missing. There was also a funeral for a James Lancaster the week before.

Both teenagers were murdered, their bodies found together in the grounds of a housing estate in east London. It’s easy to find the story in the national papers. Their killer was never found.

It feels to Cam like each individual hair on the back of her neck is rising up, until they’re standing and quivering.

Alexander – Alex to his friends – was eighteen, a Just Eat delivery driver and amateur footballer, and he was murdered on 21 April. Found with a catastrophic head injury at the back of his skull.

James was found with a bullet wound to his temple.

Their bodies only inches from the other.

Their funerals didn’t happen for seven to eight further weeks because of the police investigation into their murders.

And Luke cancelled seeing Adrienne because of a funeral on the same day. The sixteenth. That was Alexander’s funeral.

But … 21 April was the date Luke turned off his location data, wasn’t it? Didn’t Niall say that?

Here is a date that matches when Luke attended a funeral, and a date that matches him obscuring his location data.

She flicks back through her calendar on her iPhone, grateful it still seems to remember every detail of her life, but there’s nothing for her on 16 June. Not a single entry.

She wonders idly how many funerals take place per day in Whitechapel. She couldn’t even guess it. There must be many that aren’t so high profile, and aren’t on social media. She must be jumping to conclusions.

She puts the date into the photo app on her iPhone, not able to quite admit to herself what her suspicions are, and she starts to scan, hoping to jog her own memory, and she is immediately assaulted with something more painful than a weapon: the past. Nostalgia exists for other people, not Cam, and she physically winces as she sees their family unit of three populate on her phone. Cam, Luke, Polly. Tiny baby feet in laps. A selfie of her and Luke in bed at eight thirty at night.

Her heart hurts with it, feels dense and heavy, like somebody has put their palm to Cam’s chest and pressed down. Everything they had, everything they lost, because of him. In the days after the siege and Luke’s disappearance, Polly had swivelled her head to the door a couple of times, perhaps looking for Luke, perhaps not. And that had been the only hint that she’d noticed at all: her father gone, before her brain had fully formed. Later, people told Cam to find comfort in this – that Polly didn’t know any different – and Cam had thought about zoo animals who never knew the bliss of freedom. Later, Polly had started to babble, idle nonsense: da-da-da, like all babies, only to Cam it was extra loaded.

She finds nothing for the date of the funeral or the day in April that can pinpoint where she was, where Luke was, if he was absent.

Jesus. What is she thinking, here? That Luke went out for that drive in April, killed two people, with their baby present, turned his location data off, then went to his funeral, like some sort of Victorian evil villain?

No.

She’s definitely read too much fiction.

She goes back to Google, and reads more about James Lancaster, an article beneath a photo of him in sportswear, standing outside a football pitch, one leg up on a wall, broad grin, crazy hair, his mother next to him.

JAMES LANCASTER was found bleeding heavily from a single gunshot wound to the temple at midnight on 21 st April, heading into the 22 nd . Paramedics worked on him for over an hour but he was declared dead at the scene. His parents, who he lived with, were informed.

No perpetrator was ever found, despite extensive enquiries, CCTV combing, Ring doorbells, car dashcam footage, and door-knocking.

‘No expense was spared,’ said a spokesperson from the Met.

Then, beneath a school photograph of Alexander Hale:

ALEXANDER HALE was said to be full of a zest for life. He was found with a head injury to the back of his skull, believed to be from a blunt weapon. He is survived by his parents, Michael and Janet.

Cam reads the report, and the stories about the murders, there in bed by herself, shivering as the early-morning wind and the rain rattle past her patio doors.

Justice for James, heartbroken parents’ plea , headlines the Daily Mail . Cam stares at his mother and father, and she recognizes something in their expressions. A kind of heaviness. The thing about grief is that, when it happens to you, you go through the looking glass. Suddenly, everyone else lives one kind of life, with one set of problems, and you another. You’re in a different world now, one you can never return from. And you only realize too late how good the first world was.

She keeps reading. The parents of each teenager never appear in the same article. No joint story sold, but then Cam wonders if she would do the same. Maybe they didn’t know each other. Maybe that’s part of the mystery.

ALEX was out alone, walking to the corner shop around eleven at night. It was less than five minutes from the Hales’ house in Whitechapel, only he never came home.

James was travelling home from a friend’s house.

It is there that the murder case begins: nobody knows who killed them, or why. A head wound and a gunshot.

Both parents were alerted less than an hour later: a pensioner in a house nearby reported hearing shouting, then a gunshot. Paramedics were called to the scene but couldn’t save them.

Extensive enquiries were made of the local residents of Whitechapel. Anybody who knows anything is urged to call the designated hotline below.

She googles Alexander Hale’s name together with the judge whose book Luke worked on, but nothing comes up. She does the same with James Lancaster. She keeps reading, article after article after article, reaching the depths of the internet, moving on to Facebook posts.

My cousin Alexander Hale was killed on 21 st April.

Somebody out there will know what happened.

The funeral will be held at St George-in-the-East on 16 th June 2017.

According to a follow-up post, the funeral was attended by 250 people.

And Cam, seven years later, is wondering if one of them was her husband.

And, if so, why.

Form N208

Status: Under way

Cam is out in the garden an hour later, in the already blazing sun, bare toes warm in parched, spiked grass that rustles like straw. She will miss this house if she ever manages to move, this simple house with its neat garden, her single deckchair worn to faded in the middle where she’s sat and read reams and reams of fiction.

In the sunlight, the rain evaporating off her patio, the Whitechapel double murder and the coincidence of the location data and the funeral no longer feel as frightening or as urgent. She’s connected the dots too quickly, too rashly, taking her twos and coming up with five. Luke could’ve been anywhere on 16 June. Adrienne could have been mistaken.

She looks at her phone. Another email update from the government site sits in her inbox, about her application for Luke. It’s moved from Being processed to Under way , whatever that means. The handler helped her to find the documents, and stated none were needed where they didn’t have them. She sighs, the air close, her breath feeling heavy. Soon, then, he will be declared dead, and Cam will have to stay in the afterworld, alone, questions over coordinates unanswered, like everything.

Her work email is full to bursting with submissions and people chasing her, but she’s on leave, it’s Friday, Polly has an inset day. She sips her coffee and reads the Bookseller and then, as the morning stretches on, Facebook – God, it’s so nice that Polly lies in like this! – and then finally WhatsApp. Libby: she’s up early.

Libby: ???

Libby: Have you seen the Mail Online?

Libby: There’s a news story there about you? ‘Wife of siege-starter speaks out: still searching’

‘Oh fucking fuck,’ Cam says aloud, standing up in the garden. ‘Fuck.’

She opens it, then closes it, then paces. She walks to the back doors, the soles of her feet damp and warm from the puddles, then opens the article again. Task switching, biting her nails. How has this happened?

It’s a whole bloody piece. This is bad. It is so bad. It is worse than when they ran the story on the note Luke left her.

A SOURCE close to Camilla Deschamps, wife of wanted Luke Deschamps, who held three hostages in a warehouse in 2017 before murdering two of them and disappearing, says literary agent Camilla, who now uses her maiden name Fletcher, is still not ‘over’ her husband’s betrayal.

Shit.

They have linked her maiden name to her married name in the article.

Her clients will see this. Charlie. Her boss. The other school-gate mums. Her daughter, one day: newspaper articles live for ever. Polly’s on the verge of being able to search for them herself, and now this.

And Luke , a small and stupid part of her brain adds.

Next to this is a pull quote in bold saying, You don’t get over it. You just remain sad about it , accompanied by a photograph of her taken from the agency website. It looks as though Cam has sold this article to a fucking tabloid. What will everyone think?

She closes the web page then opens it again, finishing the article.

Who could have done this? She thinks of her conversation with Adrienne at the party. She’s sure it isn’t her, casts her mind back over and over that night. Why would she?

The Daily Mail .

The Daily Mail . And – of course. The nearby journalist. The one she hoped her client would get a Mail review from. No such luck. She must have earwigged, instead, written up the whole story she told Adrienne. How could Cam have been so foolish?

Got a STORY or a COMMENT? the bottom of the article says. Call us on …

Cam waits, then dials it impulsively. She might be able to get it taken down. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

A tinny voice informs her she is in a queue and she puts her phone on speaker on the garden table and stands by the rose bushes, hands on her hips, breathing deeply.

‘You are caller number nine in the queue,’ the voice says, and Cam casts a disparaging glance at it. When, when, when will this ever leave her? This grief. This forever-invasion of her life. This infamy .

In a rage, she hangs up the phone. She’s not going to tell the call handler who she is, and even if she does, she knows they won’t remove the article. They never do. Forget it.

She will ignore it.

Within two minutes, she’s back on the website. RELATED STORIES , it says underneath, populated by the articles of those first few days of the siege, but one other, too. She has never seen it before; she long ago stopped googling herself or Luke. She clicks on it, opens it up.

ISABELLA LOUIS was taken hostage five years ago, and still bears the scars today , it reads. Cam winces, not wanting to read it. She can live under the delusion her husband is good if she never hears from his victims.

She goes to close the article, but then she sees that Isabella likely didn’t consent to this article, either. It bears a paparazzi shot of her leaving an office with ‘Hope Therapy’ above the door, Isabella clearly unaware. Cam cringes. Some opportunist photographer, maybe, who recognized Isabella. How embarrassing. The stories that get told. How no one knows the truth of things unless they’re in them, not really.

She goes inside to get Adam’s manuscript. She’s only a few pages into his novel, too tired to read, but somehow savouring it, too. He might just be her favourite client. The prose is beautiful. A young male narrator, raised into a criminal family who deal in drugs and murder. On his first familial task, something is about to befall him, Cam just knows it because of the tone of the writing.

The streets are black, the windows are black, the world is black, and I am alone .

It’s a departure for him, a real hardboiled thriller, but Cam is enjoying it, when her brain can focus on it for long enough.

She gets it out to read while the real world tumbles down around her. She feels her breathing slow as she enters the portal to rainy London. Streetlights. A misty night-time outing in winter that goes wrong. She clutches the manuscript, and she’s there. She’s there, and not here.

You’re probably wondering about me. Mum and Dad were in old crime. The sort you don’t know about until you’re in it too. Money’s like water. If you have it, you pay it no attention. If you don’t, you’re in drought. We had nice cars, growing up, but they always had blacked-out windows. Dad told me my first assignment: ‘All you have to do is stand on a street corner. Literally, that’s all.’

It wasn’t all – I had to supply. Drugs. Stand there with my consignment, waiting for the dealers.

The first go, I pretended to myself that I had something else in the lining of our car: documents, gold bars. Anything but what it was.

The second time was easier.

Then the third.

Cam, engrossed, writes in the margin: Right: so this is the descent into drugs of a young man? Bold!

Her phone trills. Once, twice. Insistent, the same way it was all those years ago, like no time has passed at all. Message after message after message.

Frustrated, Cam puts the manuscript on the table, then flicks around on her phone uselessly, trying to stop them. Acquaintances, school-gate mums. Libby again. She wants to bury the phone deep in the manicured flower beds and run far away. She’s always been able to use fiction to drown out the real world … but not today.

The school gate is worse the following Monday, after a weekend spent in paranoia about the article. Hundreds of pairs of eyes on Cam, it feels like, a torch shone into the woods at night illuminating every creature. It reminds her of the weeks after the siege. The weeks the papers speculated on Luke’s note to her.

She stares down at her Kindle, even though it is being splattered by summer raindrops, reading a submission from an unpublished author, blocking it out, telling herself she’s imagining it anyway. Her phone beeps, making her jump, but she’s not checking it today, can’t deal with the prying WhatsApps, the new Facebook friend requests. She will just throw her phone away. She doesn’t need it. She doesn’t. She’ll bin it, live off-grid.

Just as she’s thinking these irrational thoughts, a woman approaches her. Older than Cam, early fifties, maybe. The first thing that Cam thinks is that this woman doesn’t want to be seen. A baseball cap, nondescript clothes, furtive body language. Maybe because of the rain, maybe not. Cam flicks her eyes to her, then back down to her Kindle, but the woman’s gaze pierces through the air towards Cam, like arrows hitting her back, one after the other after the other.

‘Excuse me?’ comes the voice, and Cam isn’t surprised. It’ll be a voyeur. It’ll be about the article, that stupid, stupid fucking article. ‘Camilla?’

‘Not interested,’ Camilla says, eyes still down at the Kindle.

‘No – I … Camilla.’ She steps closer to her. Cam inches away, goosebumps rising over her arms. ‘Please.’

‘What?’

‘I need to talk to you. You know me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I am the wife,’ she says. ‘ Was . Of one of the hostages.’

Cam’s head snaps up and, at the too warm school gate, their eyes meet. Cam can’t stop looking at her, this stranger.

‘You were …?’

The woman nods quickly, mouth a tight line, eyes wet. ‘Yes.’

And Cam sees now that this visitor is a golden ticket. A key. A clue in the mystery. This woman means that Cam will now know who one of the hostages was.

‘What’s your name?’ Cam says, turning to her.

To Cam’s surprise, the woman steps backwards, perhaps panicked. ‘Can you meet? Somewhere not here?’ she says. ‘Somewhere you don’t regularly go?’ Her eyes flick left and right, and then she takes another step, moving away from Cam, tucking her grey hair further underneath her cap. Clearly, she’s compromised her safety to come here, today, to see Cam. But why?

‘Yes. OK.’

They pause, the woman clearly wanting to get away, but Cam steps towards her once again. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Who was your husband? What was his name?’

‘They told us,’ the woman says, voice hoarse. ‘They told us not to report them as missing. As dead.’

‘Who?’

She says nothing.

‘When? Shall we meet?’ Cam asks, desperate for information.

‘Tomorrow?’ she says. ‘Meet at Shadwell station. Nine o’clock in the morning. That isn’t on your commute or anything?’

Cam nods quickly, thinking, Oh my God, this woman is a widow because of Luke, but thinking, most of all, that she said Somewhere you don’t regularly go , which must mean that Cam is being followed.