Page 21 of Famous Last Words

She touches Cam’s head, like a vicar. Cam stays there, bent over. Saying nothing. Feeling her sister’s hand on her scalp.

‘I’ll stay here. And I’ll get Polly. Please don’t worry about anything,’ Libby says.

‘Thank you. I never would’ve asked you to get Polly if—’

‘Don’t worry about that. Happy to. I’ll stay here until pick-up. And sleep here.’

‘I need to show you – where we keep … the bottles, everything,’ Cam says, straightening up and thinking that, somehow, with a baby, all these things must still keep going. As she thinks of her daughter, she feels a familiar jolt, a kind of yearning, like the notion of going home. It’s a simple desire to place her face close to Polly’s, to breathe her in, to feel her puffy bottom in her nappy, her chest against Cam’s. There is something about it that is like medicine, even on a day like today. Especially on a day like today.

‘Yes, do that,’ Libby says. ‘It’ll be so nice to see her one on one,’ she continues, and Cam is so glad for the kind lie.

9

Niall

With every minute that passes, Deschamps could shoot. But Niall doesn’t think that he’s going to.

‘It’s odd we have no ID on the other hostages yet,’ Niall says as Maidstone’s shoes kick up the dust by the side of the road into brown clouds. The warehouse stands in the distance, and Niall begins to sweat. The unknown hostages are troubling him. Usually, they would have been identified by now, reported missing by their families and recognized on the news by their clothes. ‘It’s making me wonder. If all is not as it seems.’

‘Faces are covered, aren’t they?’

‘There are all sorts of tells even with covered faces,’ Niall remarks. ‘If they’re missing, the relatives see the news and recognize what they’re wearing. Don’t you think it’s strange?’ he presses. ‘No one missing them yet. No one phoned it in.’

Maidstone pauses. ‘It is weird,’ he says. Even he can’t deny it. ‘The force intelligence bureau are on it.’ He looks at Niall. ‘What’s your first approach going to be?’

‘I’m thinking,’ Niall says.

‘Well, think faster. He could take a shot right now.’

‘He hasn’t,’ Niall says.

Luckily, DS Steven Lambert interrupts them: Niall wantstime, is all. He wants to work out what is really happening, and why.

‘How’s it looking?’ Lambert says, arriving from the bar with what looks to Niall like a half of cider but which he hopes isn’t. ‘We’ve visited the wife. Seems very shocked. Nothing suspicious in her behaviour so far.’

Niall nods. Lambert is a good judge of character but not at when to act. The cordon could be divided into the strategists and what the negotiators would call the knuckle-draggers, and Lambert is most definitely the latter. He likes Metallica, horror movies and extracting information from people, which he is excellent at. Once, when Lambert was still in uniform and part of an inner cordon, Niall heard him say over the wiring equipment, ‘We should just kick the fucking door down now and then we could all go home.’

‘Do you have any idea why no one has claimed the hostages yet?’ Niall asks.

‘No. It’s odd, isn’t it? In this day and age … with it on the news, too. I’d expect people to ring up the second they can’t get hold of someone who matches their descriptions.’

‘I know. And their clothes are obvious.’ He pauses. ‘What’s Camilla like?’

Lambert turns his mouth down. ‘Nice,’ he says. ‘Scared. Bewildered. Whole body was shivering.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘Smart.’

‘Do you think she’s covering for him?’

‘No.’ Lambert places his drink on Niall’s table, then puts his hands on his hips, which somehow makes his forearms and biceps look even larger. ‘But I think that shewould.’

‘Why?’

‘Loves him,’ Lambert – terminally single, on all the dating apps – says softly. ‘It’s kind of sad, actually.’

‘It is.’

A woman faces to camera in a TikTok video, holding a handheld mic. She has dark hair and blue eyeshadow.

‘So, there’s this siege happening in Bermondsey, right. A guy has taken three hostages in a warehouse. However, the news outlets say nobody knows the identity of the hostages. And I’m just thinking – isn’t that really creepy??! Here’s the footage – do you know them?’

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