Famous Last Words

Chapter 42

42

Cam

Relief. A high, tidal sort of feeling, rising up through her body and washing her clean from the inside out. He was good. He was the man she married. Night after night, she slept next to him, and she did know him. The circumstances of the siege, though still unknown, were not as clear cut as they seemed. She had been right about him. And that is what matters most.

Cam and Niall walk under a bridge that joins two buildings. The rain is so loud it’s like white noise. Her feet might be wet. She doesn’t know, doesn’t care. She can’t yet bring herself to speak properly.

A police officer says men were sent to murder her husband.

That he retaliated.

That, all this time, they were the ones sent to kill, and he the one who defended himself.

She blinks. Niall is looking down at her.

‘You don’t think he wanted to kill anyone,’ she says softly. Just checking and checking and checking again.

‘No,’ Niall says. A pause. ‘I never did, actually. Which was why we didn’t go in. I wouldn’t authorize it.’

‘But …’

‘I know. There’s a lot to unpack. I don’t think the rain’s going to stop – hang on,’ Niall says, and he leads her across a courtyard, then lets them inside a wooden door and up to the rafters. ‘I know a barrister who knows the caretaker,’ he explains.

The corridor is old-fashioned, royal-feeling, deep red carpets faded up to rose pink, portraits on the walls, iron knockers on old-fashioned doors. Niall opens room number five.

The room is chilly inside, like a church, and Niall perches by the windowsill. Cam lets a breath out, and holds her information close to her. Her husband was a victim. He was good.

She chokes on the thought. A storm of emotions: relief; a happiness she hasn’t felt in years; sadness, too.

And fear. Somebody wanted her husband dead. And he knew it, and told nobody. The dread he must have felt, alone with it, chopping onions and hiding his tears … Cam had dismissed that clue from seven years ago, put it down to stress, but now she holds it up in a new light. The sunlight strikes it at the exact right angle, finally, and it fragments out into a rainbow. Somebody wanted him dead. He was a man with few options, desperately trying to find some before they came for him.

Cam’s head begins to clear from the shock of it, and she starts to try to work out what she needs to do. How much to tell Niall. Which parts to keep to herself.

But there is liquid happiness in her chest, gloopy as childhood medicine and just as comforting. He didn’t want to do it. He is not, he was not, bad. Cam swallows it down greedily. He took their weapon. The one they wanted to murder him with.

‘How did you find out?’ she asks him, her heart happy/sad.

‘He contacted a man called Harry Grace just before the siege. You’re aware of him?’

‘Yes, I am,’ Cam says in surprise.

‘Well, Harry lurks on the dark web. He’s a criminal from Lewisham. People use him when they want protection. Deschamps reached out to him on there.’

‘Lewisham,’ Cam says. Harry, in Lewisham.

‘Yes. The Rightmove house. Very clever, to obscure a meeting point in that way. When questioned, Harry said he didn’t know him.’

‘Why did someone want him dead?’

‘I don’t know that, Camilla. But I’m working on it.’

‘And why would he go on the run? He’d face the police if it was only the police who wanted him. I know he would,’ Cam says. He’d come back and serve his time. We’d visit him. ‘The people who want him dead – they killed Madison. They’re still at large.’

‘I know.’

‘How did you know? To contact Harry?’

‘Look – the Met have been surveilling your phone,’ Niall says softly, slowly. ‘They wanted to be sure Deschamps wasn’t using you to hide. I shouldn’t be telling you that. I could be sacked.’

‘You’ve been looking at – at my communications?’ Cam says, reeling. Seven years on, and she still is under suspicion.

‘The Met were surveilling you after you were sent the coordinates. Briefly. It enabled them to try and get some answers.’

‘Right,’ Cam says, trying to digest this, trying to work out how she feels. ‘I didn’t know you knew about those.’

‘Sadly,’ he says, sympathetically, ‘it yielded nothing.’

She pauses. ‘I don’t care about the Met,’ she says. ‘I care about the truth.’

The truth. ‘I know. Me too.’ Niall kicks his trainer against the old carpet. It’s cold in the room, and Cam is beginning to shiver in her wet clothes. ‘They don’t know I’m here. They were not interested in what I found out. They want only to catch your husband.’

Cam nods in understanding. ‘I see,’ she says, grateful for a copper who will go out on a limb.

Cam walks over to the windowsill and joins Niall. She closes her eyes. London disappears, replaced momentarily by blackness. She opens them again and there it is, still shimmering below. ‘Do you think he’s alive?’ Cam says, looking at the cityscape beneath them.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, and Cam is again grateful – for his honesty.

Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance.

A beat. Lightning brightens overhead like a flashbulb.

‘I don’t know,’ Niall says again.

‘I can feel it,’ Cam says. ‘I can feel it.’ She looks at Niall, hoping she can trust him. Hoping that this is the beginning of the end. That two heads are better than one and, eventually, they can find out what happened, once and for all.

Niall seems to hesitate, just slightly. The information begins to freefall, as fast as the rain outside. ‘The man on the dark web – Harry. He told Deschamps he could hide him, if necessary – way back when.’

London tilts beneath Cam, as though she is in a lift. ‘You think he could still be hiding.’

‘Maybe.’

She puts a palm to the glass, for a second pretending Luke is just beyond it, his palm against the other side, looking in at her, waiting for her.

‘I’m going to keep working on this. Off record.’ He looks directly at her.

This opens the floodgates for Cam. As the rain whirls around outside, she tells Niall everything she knows. The funeral, Alexander Hale and James Lancaster. Alexander’s father and the frosty reception she got at their flat. Luke going out that night in April. His outbursts in the weeks before the siege. The things she’s never told anybody. This man who is betraying the police must be on her side.

She pauses, then says: ‘When Madison asked to meet me – she said somewhere you don’t regularly go .’

These words seem to have an effect on Niall, who clenches his jaw. ‘And she was still killed,’ he says softly. ‘Even though, clearly, it was you who she thought may be followed.’

Cam looks at him, thinking. ‘Right,’ she says eventually.

‘I think whatever Luke was caught up in clearly wasn’t something he felt he could report,’ Niall says, looking at her directly. He leaves a pause.

‘And he hasn’t killed his enemies, after all. He killed their heavies,’ she fills in.

‘Yes,’ Niall says, his expression knowing and sad, eyebrows raised, mouth turned down.

They both know the implication of this, though they don’t say it. Whoever wanted Luke dead is still out there somewhere. They have killed Madison Smith. They might even have killed Luke.

And they might want Cam dead, too.

Niall and Cam stay in room five for a long time, watching London’s lights glow and pulse beneath them. They talk about the past and the future, about the man Cam thought she saw in her garden, about the coordinates, and about the siege that only lasted for a day but changed several lives for ever, Niall listening avidly, just as he did way back when.