Page 17 of Famous Last Words

Her reverie is interrupted by Smith’s appearance in the doorway, and Cam somehow knows from a place deep inside her that she’s about to tell her something significant.

‘Camilla?’ she says. She’s holding the laptop. And is there just something slightly triumphant about her expression? Maybe, Cam thinks warily, wanting to shrink away from her like an injured animal.

‘What?’ Cam says.

Smith pauses. Their eyes lock. ‘Do you have any idea why this laptop was wiped at just before five o’clock this morning?’

Cam’s cheeks get hot. Smith turns, her face catching a slice of sunlight, obscuring her expression momentarily, one side light, one shaded, a Phantom of the Opera.

‘No … I … No. I don’t know why.’

Her husband is a writer. All of his material is on there. He’d only delete everything if he intended to … Cam can’t let herself finish the sentence, not even in her mind. Thesentence that ends with something like premeditation, with malice aforethought, withintent.

‘We’ll take it in,’ Smith says, her words mundane but the tone serious. ‘See if we can restore it.’

She disappears again, and Cam can hear her rustling forensic bags.

Lambert meets her eyes and there’s an uncomfortable beat. An awkward silence. Cam thinks it is because of the laptop, but it’s actually to do with a revelation of his own.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Camilla, there’s another piece of evidence missing.’

8

‘What’s that?’

‘Your husband has a gun,’ he says flatly. ‘I assume he bought it, and kept it here. But no paraphernalia has been found. No receipt, no box, no spare cartridges. Did you ever see that gun? It would help us enormously to know more about it, and where it came from.’

Cam realizes instantly that this is an accusation. ‘He can’t have a gun,’ she says. ‘He wouldn’t.’

A gun. A gun. A gun. She didn’t see that on the footage. It was hidden. Had he concealed it?

‘I haven’t seen a gun,’ she adds.

‘He does have one. If you felt it was best to turn a blind eye until now, that’s fine, Cam,’ he says, misunderstanding her: he thinks she meansin the house.

Cam looks at Lambert, and then at the recording device, and wonders if actually this has been the point of the interview all along. Perhaps she hasn’t been the only one withholding information.

And then the thought body-slams her: poor, poor Polly. She didn’t ask for this. Sieges and guns kept in houses and police ransacking her nursery. Cam can hardly stand it. Twinned with this comes anger, maternal anger burning bright. How could he do this? How could he leave Cam to deal with the fallout? To implicate her in it, or at least not exonerate her? To not explain a thing to Cam, to leave his baby daughter?

‘Isit OK?’ she says, incredulous. ‘To turn a blind eye to a gun? Besides, I haven’t. If I saw a gun in my house, the one my baby lives in, I’d … I’d …’ She flounders, can’t finish the sentence.

‘OK,’ Lambert says. ‘Has he been buying anything else unusual?’

‘Like what?’

‘Hydrogen peroxide, bags of nails …’

‘No,’ Cam says, and she almost laughs with the mad absurdity of it. ‘You think he’s made a bomb.’

‘I have no idea,’ Lambert says, as though Cam is the one asking insane questions. ‘But we have to have as much information as possible about what might await us in that warehouse.’

Await us. Cam deals in words for a living, and these are not lost on her. They’re going to go in. Isn’t that what happens? The police go in and shoot? The suspect dies, makes the news, maybe the hostages are rescued, maybe not, and, the next week, everyone’s forgotten all of them.

‘Who are they?’ Cam asks, her voice faltering and hoarse, shame lacing it that she didn’t ask earlier. Only cared about the perpetrator. ‘The hostages?’

Lambert’s green eyes connect with hers, then he looks away. ‘No names yet.’

He pauses, seeming to hesitate, but doesn’t add anything else. ‘Deschamps was easier to identify. But he bagged the hostages almost immediately. Hoods make it kind of difficult.’

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