Page 11 of Famous Last Words

She avoids her own gaze in the mirror by the front door, turns to Lambert and says woodenly, ‘Living room is upstairs.’

Luke calls their house the upside-down house: bedrooms and bathroom on the ground floor, kitchen, living room and dining room on the first. Cam has always liked the quirkiness of it, a house not like other people’s. At night they fall asleep to the sounds of the London foxes in their garden, in the summer to snippets of neighbours’ conversations like misheard lyrics.

Or they used to.

They file upstairs and sit down together in an awkward row on the grey corner sofa, next to two manuscripts and a proof of a novel. Cam’s eyes are everywhere. Luke’s mug on the end table containing the remnants of his cup of coffee. Filter. Two sugars. That coffee-scented kiss. His car key. How can this be? She’s seen the video. It’s clearly him. So, really, she knows the question isn’thow?butwhy?

But, all the while, Cam is remembering things. More and more and more the longer this goes on. Last week, Luke had banged the top of the coffee machine when it needed more water. The plastic casing had cracked. So unlike him. He was never alpha, never competitive, never physical. A breezy, sunshiny day of a man. The type who couldn’t be bothered to make a coffee if the machine had run out of water, not the type to inflict damage on it.

The week before that, he’d received a letter in the post, turned around, and looked at Cam, expression low and furious. ‘The car was due its MOT three weeks ago,’ he’d said, but his tone wasn’t rueful, or even slightly irritated: it was ice cold.

‘Oh, shit,’ she’d said. She was hanging laundry out in the corner of their kitchen. ‘I totally forgot.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Guess this is life with a baby.’

‘She’s nine months old,’ he’d said, putting his foot angrily on to the bin pedal and dropping the letter inside. ‘We should’ve remembered.’

‘It’s fine. Look – we’ll just … get it done now,’ she said, but he hadn’t looked at her. Had just stood there by the closed bin, staring down. Cam had put it down to tiredness at the time, but was it?

It was so unlike Luke, Mr Que Sera Sera himself: the man who on their first official date said to Cam he never wanted to waste time worrying when he ‘could be having fun’. Who throws World Cup Final parties at their house. Who turns in projects late because the weather has been nice. Who holds and holds and holds her anxieties, heavy as boulders, and never lets the weight show.

‘Camilla, we need some facts,’ Lambert says urgently now.‘We have a warrant to search, which PC Smith is going to commence, alongside a team, who are almost here.’

‘OK,’ Cam says in a small voice. Her eyes are still roving around the living room, at everything he’s left. An Amazon parcel on the dining table just through the doorway. A pair of shoes sticking out from underneath the sofa.

Smith stands and puts on a pair of forensic gloves. Cam looks at her closely. She has a Roman nose, brown hair scraped back from her forehead, eyes that slant downwards at their sides. Not a scrap of make-up. Cam feels like a powdered clown in hers. The stupid, optimistic war paint of somebody expecting a good day and getting the worst of her life.

Smith leaves the room, starting who-knows-where, the most humiliating and private places, maybe? The bedroom? Polly’s nursery? Cam watches her pass the doorway twice. Her poker face, when she doesn’t know she’s being watched, drops. She becomes more judgemental. Looking around curiously, but with an element ofSchadenfreude, too.

‘Camilla, we need to get this information and quickly. The police need to know as much background as possible before we get you down there and get you speaking to him. If, at any point, they have to make the decision to go in, they need to know who it is they’re dealing with.’ Lambert interrupts her thoughts.

‘Go in?’ she says, without thinking, but he doesn’t clarify. Imaginary scenes come into Cam’s mind. Guns. Snipers. Riot gear.

‘Let’s cut to the chase. Any idea why he would do this?’

‘He’s – he’ll be being forced into this. Or he’s having a mental health episode … he won’t be doing it – because he wants to,’ Cam says, feeling like she’s brainstorming with a client about fictional motives.

‘OK,’ Lambert says easily, clearly not listening to the protestations of a woman who will always defend her husband. His phone rings, and he picks it up seamlessly, moving from talking to her to talking to somebody else. ‘Yes … yes. Fifteen minutes?’ he says, then rings off without saying goodbye, just like they do in the movies.

‘All right, Camilla,’ Lambert says. ‘We want you at the scene to talk to Deschamps. Is that something you feel you can do?’ he says, even though it sounds to Cam like he’s just agreed it.

‘Yes,’ Cam says, then feels the need to add: ‘It’s Luke. He goes by Luke.’ Her husband is the main character in her life, and what he goes by matters to her in this out-of-control environment.

Lambert ignores her. She stares at him, this stranger sent to question her. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring, but this is all Cam can glean about the human behindProtect and Serve.

‘We’ll get you to the scene with our hostage negotiator,’ he says. ‘When we’ve got the lie of the land here. Fifteen minutes or so.’

She looks at the sunlight again, trying to forget, trying to be somewhere else, to be free falling again, but it doesn’t work now. Denial is over.

A hostage negotiator. Like a movie, with a wire-tapped phone and ten million pounds delivered in a suitcase. A shoot-out. None of it could possibly, possibly feel any more surreal than it already does.

‘No ideas at all here on his motivation?’ Lambert barks.

‘No.’

‘The more you tell us, the more we can help your husband,’ Lambert says dispassionately, and Cam wonders ifthis is quite true. She is a tool to be used by the police to get to Luke, but will that help him?

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