Chapter 39
39
Cam
Cam has not told the police about Madison. She’s too scared to. A woman has died because of her. What if going to the authorities makes it worse? Instead, Cam buries herself in Adam’s manuscript. She’s now a quarter of the way through it, and it is really, really good.
Twenty-five per cent in, he kills the narrator: And that’s me, gone. Pissed off an enemy of the family. One shot. Bang. And then, that’s me dead.
Cam draws a red exclamation mark in the margin, eager to carry on, but Charlie is coming over. Wait , she adds. So who’s narrating? A ghost?
I knew this might happen to me one day. This is the way, when you grow up in crime. And, afterwards, as I sat high up above, watching my body give up, I started to make a plan for those left behind.
Say someone in my family wanted out. Say my death drew a line for them: enough.
In that case, I hoped those dear to me would find my instructions, hidden deep within the words I’d left them. That, if anything … if anyone ever wanted to escape the family business, the weapon I always used was buried in the garden. That important items were in a lock-up under my name.
She lays the manuscript down softly on the sofa and thinks of the narrator, dead, making provision for those left behind. Something about it makes Cam shiver, makes her think of Madison, also gone. And Madison’s husband, and the other hostage … and she can’t help but wonder who will be next.
‘“Where is my car quiche?”’ Charlie remarks to Cam, fifteen minutes later, holding up a mug with this emblazoned on its sides. He’d texted her earlier, saying he was passing, asked to come in. Cam is glad for the company with Polly in bed, tired of checking her windows and doors are locked. And she was especially pleased he made the suggestion given that she’d left him by himself in C?te. So far, he doesn’t yet seem to have seen the article online about her.
She prickles now, though, as he brandishes the cup. It was a gift, from Luke, of course. One of the few things she just couldn’t bear to throw away in her so-called moving-on session.
‘Long story,’ she says weakly, not wanting to explain, not wanting to discuss that shared lexicon with him yet.
Her stomach aches slightly as Charlie picks it up and starts making drinks. A new man’s hands where his predecessor’s used to be.
It’s early evening, sun slanting on to grass, rain temporarily stopped, smell of barbecues in the air.
Charlie spots the hot water tap hanging over the sink and begins to try to make it work himself. He does this sort of thing sometimes in her house, confident things, proprietorial things, but she doesn’t dislike them. It’s nice to have someone to take the lead when you are lost.
‘Jesus, this seems to be beyond me,’ he says. ‘Help a man out, CF?’
‘Press down twice then turn,’ she says, and she reaches, too. Their hands brush for the briefest of seconds, and she remembers what Libby said about moving on. She could throw this mug out, the memories too, and move forward, with him. Stop trying to solve the mystery which, as much as anything, has become habitual. Something she simply unconsciously wonders about daily, like how some people think about their hobbies or their job.
Still the tap does nothing. ‘A reluctant boiling water tap!’ Charlie says. ‘All technology hates me. You ever just feel like a proper old bloke?’
‘Not really,’ Cam says drily.
‘Ha. Well, I do. Useless,’ he says, and there it is again: that slice of sharp vulnerability, an open wound that Cam could almost reach out and touch. She recognizes it in him because it lives within her, too.
Just as she’s thinking this, across the kitchen island, her phone lights up, she initially thinks with a text but then sees that it’s a call. She crosses the room to get it.
No Caller ID .
Slide to answer .
She reaches for it, telling herself that it’ll be nothing. It’ll be yet more spam. A wrong number. Nothing.
And yet. She can’t help it. She is a helium balloon of hope. It’s me , he will say. And I can explain everything.
But what if it’s to do with Madison? What if it’s the police?
‘Like, there’s this bastard key-card system at the office,’ Charlie continues, oblivious to her silently ringing phone, then looks at her, sees her expression. ‘OK?’
‘Yeah,’ Cam says, mechanically, gesturing to the phone. ‘Hello?’ she says, taking the call. Charlie looks interested, then pretends not to.
‘Camilla Deschamps?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s Niall Thompson here. I was …’
Cam’s body fizzes with surprise, as though somebody has plugged her right into the mains, lightning bolts around her head, hair shocked and standing on end. It’s physically painful, her limbs jangling and aching with the surge of it.
Shit.
It is the police. It must be about Madison. Why was she so foolish as to not disclose it?
‘… The hostage negotiator,’ she says to Niall. On the other side of the kitchen island, Charlie glances up, but he keeps his face impassive. As polite and kind as ever. He turns away from her and busies himself folding her tea towels. It doesn’t need doing. It would never need doing.
‘Yes, Camilla, would you be able to come and – have a chat?’
Or – worse. They’ve found him. They’ve found him. They’ve found his body. She clutches the edge of the kitchen island. It’s all over if they have. She thinks she might be sick.
‘Have you found him?’ she says, her voice shrill.
She crosses out of the kitchen, still holding her phone, and into the living room, where she closes the door.
‘Camilla,’ Niall’s voice says calmly, clearly, and everything comes back to Cam. The heat. The Wetherspoon’s. The forensics officers, the slow progress of the ambulance.
‘Have you found him?’ Cam asks again. She glances at her living-room door. God. What must Charlie be thinking? She rakes her hair back from her forehead, paces this way and that, in the same room the police interviewed her in, all those years ago. She should’ve moved. Changed her number. He’s going to be dead, and her heart is going to be fucking broken. She had no idea of the hope she had been holding. Imagining she saw him on the Tube. Imagining a spammy text came from him. Everything.
A pause. And then an answer: ‘No.’
Cam leans forward over the sofa, her body a ragdoll thrown on a heap. ‘Thank God,’ she says, thinking how stupid it is that she would rather this call be that the police want to investigate her for what happened to Madison than be told her murderous, absent husband is dead. Sometimes, the way we react to things can reveal so much about ourselves.
‘Don’t worry. It’s not …’ Niall starts.
‘Do you know something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it where he is?’
‘No.’
‘Is it about Madison?’ she says, the words rattling out of her mouth before she can stop them. Relief: the most potent of emotions.
Another pause, this time longer. ‘Can we meet to talk, Camilla?’
‘So it is about Madison?’
A pause. ‘Yes,’ he says.
And that’s it. That yes . It is about Madison. And it is clearly about Luke. And maybe it’s about the worst of all things: that Luke is alive, and killing his enemies still.
‘But I’d really like to do this in person.’
‘Yes. OK. Whenever. Now,’ Cam answers, her head hitting her chest. She’s not thinking logistics. She’s numb.
A soft, understanding laugh. ‘Tomorrow? I’ll send you the address of a place where we can talk privately.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she agrees. She will have to ask Libby to have Polly.
Niall rings off, and Cam just sits there. She has somehow landed on her floor, though she doesn’t remember how. A candle is lit – she and Charlie were going to come in here – and she watches the flame bend and bow left and right.
It will be that Luke murdered Madison. She draws her knees to her chest, watching the wick and the wax.
Niall hasn’t found him, and he doesn’t know where he is. He is still a fugitive, on the run, her husband.
But perhaps for more than one crime.
‘I’m very sorry,’ Cam says, ten minutes later. The tea Charlie made her has cooled, and Cam knows she’s been rude, sitting there in the living room, silent and alone. ‘I had to take that.’
‘Everything OK?’ he asks. He’s finished his tea, is looking at her with an open expression, the way you might after somebody has embarrassed themselves. Been sick from too much wine on a first date, or called you by the wrong name.
‘Sort of …’ she says. She sips her tea and then swallows, deliberating. ‘I think I probably need to fill you in on something.’
‘Well,’ Charlie says, turning away from her, ‘I enjoyed my tea so much I’m going to make a second. So I’m all yours.’
And it’s that sentence that does it. He’s been so patient. Four months of sporadic dates and closed-off conversations and abandonments in C?te Brasserie.
She thinks about what Libby said in Gordon’s, and about what Niall might be telling her tomorrow about a woman, shot at point-blank range on her own doorstep, then looks at Charlie’s open face, those sweetly folded tea towels, and takes a tentative step towards him. She could tell him. She could just confide in him, and see what happens. She could use an ear, anyway, if nothing else, tonight, while she waits for bad news once again, once more.
‘It really is a long story,’ she prevaricates.
‘Always best told over tea,’ Charlie says, raising the mug in a kind of apologetic gesture. ‘Shall we go out? It’s so warm now …’
Cam nods. ‘Yes.’
Together, they head down and out into the garden, through Cam’s bedroom, one half stuffed full of books, one half empty that Charlie glances at in surprise. It’s awkward; they ignore it.
Outside is warmer than the house, and humid, too, and they sit down at the table together. Charlie’s face is slightly expectant in the last of the evening sun.
‘I mean – you really wouldn’t believe it,’ Cam says.
‘Try me.’
‘Do you remember,’ she says, hesitating, the shame of it still weighing on her like the close air, set to storm again, ‘a siege in central London in 2017, where the hostages were found dead?’
Charlie’s brow furrows, lowering, then clears in understanding. Cam is used to this sequence as people try to recall what to them was a news story they may or may not have read that took up less than two minutes of their life. ‘Maybe – yes. I don’t know. What happened?’
‘One was released. Two died. And the kidnapper disappeared.’
‘Oh,’ Charlie says. ‘Yes. I do remember. I had a very boring job at the time. Even more so than now,’ he adds, his tone gentle, aware that the conversational topic is difficult. ‘I remember refreshing the news.’
‘Well, I’m the wife.’
He holds her gaze, saying nothing.
‘… Of the kidnapper. Of Luke,’ she adds. ‘Deschamps.’ She hesitates. ‘It’s my married name.’
Charlie blows a breath out of the side of his mouth. ‘Right. I see.’ His eyes flick this way and that. Cam waits patiently, lets it land.
He pauses for a beat, working it out. Then his eyes meet hers. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says. She isn’t sure she’s ever heard him swear like that.
She explains the full story. The siege, the aftermath, the coordinates just recently, the phone call from Niall, while Charlie listens, his expression concerned. The only things she leaves out are Alexander Hale, James Lancaster and Madison. The darker, weirder things that she doesn’t want to – and can’t – explain. The things more closely associated with present-day criminality.
‘Put off yet?’ she ventures when she’s finished. ‘I mean – there’s baggage and then there’s baggage .’
‘No, not put off – never put off.’ Charlie’s voice is soft and serious on those syllables, and Cam sets her tea down on the table, still unfinished, and looks at him.
‘It’s – I … I’ve …’ she says, tired now. ‘It’s been a hard seven years.’
‘I get that. So, you’re not CF, but CD.’
‘Sort of. It was easier to go back,’ she says.
‘I see.’
‘I think Niall is going to tell me something bad, tomorrow,’ she says.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I think Luke was into something pretty dark,’ she says, deliberately vague.
Charlie nods. ‘You don’t need to – you don’t need to be embarrassed, Cam,’ he says, his voice muted, low key, empathetic. The perfect reaction. ‘I understand. It happened to you.’
Cam gazes at him. She didn’t expect this. That this would feel so intimate, and so right, while Niall is out there with some unknown piece of information. Funny how things happen sometimes. Maybe she really will move on, and maybe she will get answers, too, and maybe one of those things will aid the other.
Cam closes her eyes, draws her cardigan down over her hands, and sits back in the chair. ‘I’m exhausted,’ she says. ‘I’m exhausted by it.’
‘I can only imagine.’
‘Tell me something dysfunctional about you.’
‘I’m attracted to baggage,’ he says, quick as a cat, and she lets out a surprised burst of laughter.
‘Something real,’ she says.
‘Well, I’m childless even though I didn’t want to be, I’m a researcher even though it’s boring. I think …’ He clears his throat. ‘… that maybe it’s easy to regard yourself as other – and obviously what happened to you is huge. But, actually, may I remind you that most everyone feels utterly fucked up by life.’
Cam pauses. ‘That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,’ she says.
Charlie laughs. ‘Oh dear – a very depressing message from me.’
‘Really not.’
‘What do you think he knows – this Niall?’ he asks, after a few seconds’ pause.
‘I have no idea. It could be anything. But I’ve never had good news about it, you know? It’s always been something worse. First that he had taken hostages. Then that he’d killed them. Then that he’d disappeared.’
‘Understood.’
The air cools to a scented chill, later. They switch to red wine. ‘Inside, or stay out?’ she asks when it’s become too dark to see.
‘Out, I think, don’t you?’ Charlie says. He tilts his head back, the orb of London sky above them fading from worn to new denim.
‘I have no lights. Just a horrible security one,’ Cam says, thinking about it clicking on the previous night. She’s glad Charlie’s here.
‘None needed.’
Charlie moves from the table and on to Cam’s back step, the door to her bedroom open behind him, his legs stretched out in front. He pats the space next to him. There is an unopened bottle of white wine lined up ready. Cam hesitates, then joins him, shifting a tall planter out of the way.
Charlie waves a hand in the darkness. The security light clicks on eventually. ‘This is very not ambient,’ Cam says, when it blinds them.
‘Kind of industrial,’ Charlie says with a small laugh. ‘But better than nothing. You said you read out here?’
‘Sometimes. In the summer,’ she says.
‘Kindle and wine?’
‘Bliss.’
Cam wants to keep him here. She’s not felt that before, but she does tonight. Telling him has unlocked something for her, and on the strangest night, too.
The light pops off again and they’re back in the swampy dark. Charlie leans over and tops up their wine. That aftershave. His closeness. ‘Nice to layer the white on top of the dregs of the red, as all wine connoisseurs would say.’
Cam laughs. ‘I can’t even see the glasses.’
Charlie hands her hers. The night air is sweet and dark, and Cam suddenly feels safe here, with him. The loneliness she carries around with her has frayed just slightly at the edges into softness.
‘What was your very boring job? The one in 2017?’
‘It was my job to look after a set of masts. It was called project management, though I have no idea why. It was really, really fucking dull.’ The wine has loosened his tongue, and she likes it.
‘What did you actually do?’
‘Honestly, Cam, I have no idea,’ he says with a small, self-deprecating laugh. ‘All I remember is being so bored that one day I changed my email signature to a different name, just to see if anyone would notice.’
‘And did they?’
‘No.’ He sets his glass down with another sniff of a laugh.
Cam gazes at him, thinking that she doesn’t like him as much as Luke, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t like him at all. That there can be shades of grey here, in the afterworld.
‘You know,’ she says, ‘I wish I’d told you about the coordinates.’
‘You should’ve,’ Charlie murmurs.
He looks behind them, up at the house, and she’s glad he doesn’t push it, wanting to know more about Luke, the way a lot of people might. ‘So you’re declaring him dead to move from here? I bet you’ll be happy. I moved after Saskia left. Was nice to just – put a stamp on somewhere new. You know?’
‘I know,’ she says softly. ‘Maybe. I don’t know if I’ll move yet.’
‘You will.’ Charlie is drinking quickly, maybe preparing to leave. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I know what it’s like to …’
Cam waits, but he doesn’t continue. ‘You know what it’s like to …’ she prompts.
He pauses for a second, his eyes down, then looks straight at her. ‘To not ever have any answers,’ he says simply. He hesitates, his fingers on the base of the wine glass, then adds, ‘Saskia, I mean. It’s not the same as what you went through.’
‘But …?’
‘I don’t know whether she just didn’t want a baby with me . You see? Did she need to meet someone else, or … did she just change her mind, down the line?’
‘I see.’
‘It was just – well, I imagine you know exactly how I feel.’
‘I thought he was alive for the longest time. Maybe I still do.’
‘Yeah?’
‘I don’t know. But, anyway, he didn’t …’
Charlie nods. ‘I know. Even if he’s out there,’ he says, ‘even if he didn’t mean to do it, he never came back to you.’
‘That’s it,’ Cam says. ‘Really, I can never forgive him. There can’t be an excuse for what he did. For staying away so long.’
She leans against Charlie, then. His shoulder next to hers, his body warm, his arm around her. And, for the first time in forever, she doesn’t want to go to bed and read and shut out the world.
Maybe it’s Charlie, or maybe she’s simply putting it off, the way you feel sometimes the night before test results you’re expecting the worst from. She wants to stay up, with him, and let tomorrow be damned. Let them come for her. She doesn’t care: she has him.