Page 30 of Famous Last Words

‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I need to know everything he’s worked on lately.’

Cam pauses. She can’t stop thinking about Luke shouting that he loved her. What does it mean? Is this gruesome act somehow dedicated to her? Is he on the brink? About to do something? Is hesorry?

‘He has an MP and an actor. Then in the past, he’s published a book about a Premier League team, a singer, a tennis player and a biography of a judge.’

‘A judge?’

‘Yes, a district judge.’

‘Any controversies? Name?’ he says

‘I mean – how could writing about a judge two years ago lead to …’ Cam says, making a hopeless gesture.

‘I don’t know. But we will find out.’ He pauses, then says: ‘You googled arguing with your husband,’ he says softly, and holds his hands up. ‘I don’t lie, and the Met have checked your Google account’s search history. They might not tell you – but I will. It was on your work PC.’

‘Oh,’ Cam says, stunned. Those open tabs. ‘No – I … We’d bickered about the night wakes, that’s all. Normal post-baby stuff … I was looking for reassurance,’ she says. ‘That other couples do that too.’ Her thoughts begin to race about everything she hasn’t told them. Could they possibly know? Arrest her, too?

‘All right then,’ he says, and it’s loaded, but she doesn’t speak. ‘Look. We need to get you on the phone. But does the twenty-first of April mean anything to you?’ He begins to clean his glasses on the bottom of his T-shirt.

‘Why?’

‘Your husband went somewhere into central London. Around ten, eleven at night. Turned off his location data at that point.’

Cam stares at her hands resting on the table, racking her brains. ‘We had to drive Polly around sometimes, to get her to sleep,’ she’d said. ‘We went through a bit of a phase of it. Maybe it was that.’ And she’s so glad that she can provide a credible explanation for this one tiny thing. But it isn’t, is it? That fuel bill … he’d filled the car up. Twice. He’d come home one night in the spring, and tossed and turned in bed. Was tearful, later, over the onions.

‘Ah, the old car nap,’ Niall says. ‘So why would he turn his location data off?’ As he asks this, he waves away a non-uniformed officer who seems to be hurrying him.

‘I don’t know? He didn’t tell me that he had,’ Cam says. But all she is thinking about is that something happened to her husband on 21 April. Something that made him drive a long way, and cover things up … that later made him cry. But what?

She looks at Niall. But she can’t tell him. She can’t.

‘Just to be clear …’ he says, trying to hold her gaze again, ‘it was a normal trip out?’

‘Yes. As far as I know. I don’t remember it exactly.’

Somebody outside shuts the doors of the pub. Without the breeze it’s too hot. Cam can feel sweat forming along her hairline, can smell stale beer slowly cooking in the carpets.

‘What’s he like under stress?’

‘Doesn’t get stressed,’ Cam says. It’s a lie, but it wasn’t always. He once got let go from a newspaper and, after receiving the email, opened a Mars bar with his teeth and said, ‘Well, that’s their loss.’

Niall pauses, evidently weighing up how to proceed, then says, ‘I have met a lot of people through my work and have never known a single one who doesn’t get stressed.’

‘He doesn’t. Not really.’

‘No recent moments of being quick to anger?’

‘No.’

‘No temper, you say?’ he asks again and, clearly, he’s getting at something here, but Cam’s chosen her line.

‘No temper,’ she lies. Because she knows that, when they go in, if they know he is angry, they will be more likely to kill him.

‘Right, Cam,’ Niall says. ‘Time’s against us because the entry team want to go in, as you may have gathered. I’m trying to make contact to avoid that. We have a number for the warehouse but we haven’t called it yet. You get one shot in these situations, and we wanted our ticket with us: you.’

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