Famous Last Words

Chapter 32

32

Cam

The stranger is not at Shadwell station. It’s way beyond nine in the morning, closer to ten, and Cam is tired and pissed off with following clues that dry up, that end up nowhere. She leaves the station after forty minutes, annoyed she didn’t get the woman’s name or number, but something about her approach has vaulted Cam fully into investigative mode, like the detective novels she represents, and so instead of catching the train and going to work, she walks from the station to St George-in-the-East in the lime-green summer sun.

Alexander Hale was buried here seven years ago in a plot at the back. James Lancaster was cremated, no grave that Cam can find.

The church is bordered by a park, huge and flat, its grass covered by a sprinkling of leaves already from the too hot summer, though today it’s drizzling. As she rounds the corner, it looms into view, an ancient white building with a crypt out front. In the background, London’s housing estates continue on around it, like the church is some mirage. Cam turns around slowly before heading in.

There’s nobody around. Through the doors, the church opens up above like a globe. It’s a storybook church, the kind a child would draw. She lingers there for a few minutes, looking at the font, the pews, the kneelers for prayer. She heads out again, round the back, to the graveyard.

A path twists its way through roses, reaching gravestone after gravestone in the sun. Most are old – from the 1700s – and Cam instinctively heads deeper in, as the path winds between two tall pine trees. It’s now July, but churches and graveyards never feel like summer to her, the light of a spindly autumnal quality, the graves mossed and in shadow.

And there it is. She finds it easily. One of the newer headstones. Seven years old, but still looks brand new. White, gold blocky text, the grave laid with fresh flowers.

ALEXANDER HALE. SURVIVED BY HIS PARENTS MICHAEL AND JANET HALE. FRIEND, COUSIN, brOTHER, AND, ABOVE ALL, BEST BOY.

Cam’s eyes mist over. To her, now, all children who die are Polly, and all parents are Cam. And here she is, feeling sympathy for them, but she is here for the wrong reasons. Because perhaps her husband stood near here. Perhaps he came to this church, one day seven years ago. Perhaps the reason he did so is because he was responsible for the double murder. Same as killing the hostages. Two men: dead.

On the grave is a handful of photographs. Old-style, Polaroid-type ones. Clearly maintained and replaced often. Cam doesn’t pick them up, can’t bring herself to, it isn’t her place. But she does bend down into the dry grass, sun on her back, and peer closely at them. There’s one that might be of the funeral. This very church, heaving with people all in black. It’s taken from the back, and they’re spilling out, around the pews, out of the doors, down the steps. A wedding photo but inversed, truly a negative. Cam squints at it, but can’t see Luke there.

But then, if you attended a funeral secretly, you’d be sure not to get in the photograph.

The Hales’ address is online, on 192.com, though the Lancasters’ is not. They live in a flat in an apartment block called Sarah Carpenter House. Cam doesn’t know quite why she’s here. Only that it was just down the road. Only that she can’t bring herself not to follow everything up.

The communal front door is tired, black paint ancient and crackly, the plastic buzzer cracked and broken, the latch off, and so it’s easy for her to let herself inside it and into an even tireder foyer full of rattling mailboxes, bags of rubbish and a buggy parked up under the stairs. It has a distinct smell about it. The same as in youth clubs, libraries, village halls. Some sort of vague communality, something municipal.

The Hales’ flat is number 78, and Cam gets a rattling lift up to the seventh floor based on guesswork. It’s a 1930s building, draughty as she walks the corridors, single-glazed sash windows left open, letting summer in. It creates a wind tunnel that whips and tangles Cam’s hair. A dog barks at her as she passes one of the flats. Another flat blares a television.

Number 78 has a ‘Please no unsolicited callers’ sticker just above the silver door handle, which Cam has to choose to ignore, though wonders specifically why it’s there for these people. There’s a spyhole and a doormat that says ‘The Hales’ on it.

She raises a hand and knocks, and immediately hears movement inside. She’s surprised: it’s almost the middle of the day, and she had wondered if anybody would be here. Perhaps she hoped they wouldn’t.

A man opens the door, his expression blank. Behind him, Cam sees photographs on the hallway walls: clearly of Alexander.

‘Sorry – I was wondering if you might be able to help me,’ Cam says. She takes a deep breath, then prepares to introduce herself with her full name. She wants to observe any reaction. ‘I’m Camilla Deschamps.’

She is used to a response to her old name, but she’s not sure if this man has one. He has dark hair, large, expressive eyes, low-set ears. He’s in office wear, which Cam finds strange given he is at home: suit trousers, a rumpled shirt, tie perhaps discarded somewhere as the collar remains askew. He meets her gaze and raises his eyebrows. ‘Sorry – I’m not …?’

‘I wondered if you might know my husband,’ Cam says, thinking she has nothing to lose, surely. If Luke has something to do with this family – well. Luke is long gone.

‘Who is your husband?’ he says. He shifts his weight on his feet. Behind him is an immaculate flat. Mid-century. Expensive-looking furniture, a drinks cart, a rocking chair. Exposed brick walls.

‘Luke Deschamps,’ she answers.

The man turns his mouth down. ‘No, sorry,’ he says, taking a quick step back, palms up, and closing the door. Cam hesitates. She can’t work out if this was a usual dismissal or a suspicious one, and she doesn’t know what to do if it’s the latter.

She raises a hand to knock again, but really, what would she say? My husband went out the night your child was murdered? Possibly he attended his funeral? She would be as bad as the kind of people who try to get information from her at parties, occasionally at work. The people who pre-date her name change. ‘I couldn’t help but remember …’ they will say, and Cam will want to close her door, too. She can’t do it to him.

And, anyway, Cam does have things to lose. She acts like she doesn’t, she tells herself she doesn’t, but she does: the memory of him. That belief she has that is sometimes weak and sometimes cast iron: that he was good. If he had a hand in a murder before the siege, then she has to stop telling herself that taking hostages was some sort of mistake, something he was forced to do, a no-win situation. It will cheapen his legacy, for ever.

She leaves Sarah Carpenter House, and then Whitechapel, rattled, alone. She hurries to the station the way you might rush up the stairs after turning the light out. She tells herself it’s nothing, her imagination, reading too many thrillers, but, at the last moment after she has boarded the DLR at Shadwell, a man gets on too, a full carriage away, all in black. The same man? She can’t tell. She tries to look at his face, but he takes off down the crowded train, away from her, his walk quick. As she strains to watch his tall, retreating form, she wonders if it could be her husband, but she’d know that, wouldn’t she? Wouldn’t she?