Page 37 of Famous Last Words

‘I will,’ Cam says, for perhaps the tenth time. ‘I don’t know where he would go,’ she adds, even though she’s said this, too. She’s given them his friends, his co-working space. She has nothing left. She’d give it if she knew it: she’s too exhausted to care.

But she can’t deny she’s relieved: criminal or not, her husband is alive, and Cam feels a weird kind of shameful relief at this.

The police offer her a lift from a PCSO, but she tells them she wants to walk. They ask her several times, but she only repeats this, thinking that she is not going to go home. Her whole body craves holding her daughter, but she must head to Lewisham. To the street containing the Rightmove property.

It’s just after three thirty in the morning, and the air is dark and soupy, the world outside the Uber silent. The sky slowly lightens beyond the car as she travels. It’s been night for what feels like only a few hours, the way it is in June. And Cam watches the sky and thinks how somewhere the answer is out there, as obvious as the dawn itself, but still hidden in night.

She winds the window down and it’s cooler as they cross the river. The tang of the salt and brine of the water. The air turns from grey to white, a new day beginning.

They arrive at Lewisham. It’s easy to find the street, and on that, the exact house she has memorized from Rightmove: a white semi-detached building with an untidy garden and several burglar alarms above the door.

Cam hesitates outside, and the cool air goosefleshes her skin: she is dressed for a day at the office, not an illegal night-time venture. A security light flashes on, blanching her view, and she stands in its beam, wondering if he is here, waiting for her. It clicks off, then on again when she moves, and she wonders if lights like this will remind her of the warehouse for ever. Eventually, a male figure comes to the window. Cam holds her breath, looking up. The address, held deep in an app. Was it for her? Is he here? Her husband, the fugitive?

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The figure stares down at her for a few seconds. No. It isn’t her husband. She’s never seen him before. Tall and pale, with gingery hair. After a moment, he opens the window. ‘What?’ he calls. Disappointment throbs through her.

‘I’m sorry – I’m … I’m looking for my husband,’ she says.

‘What? You’ve woken me up.’

‘Luke?’ she calls up plaintively. ‘He had your address. I …’ she says, feeling pathetic. The Uber driver turns off his engine and looks out curiously at them.

‘Piss off or I’ll call the police,’ he calls back down, closing the window – and her last bit of hope – with a bang.

‘Please,’ she says. ‘I …’

The window opens again, and slams shut even harder. The owner of the house is clear, and the last thing she wants is police contact. But why was this stranger so easy to wake? Was he waiting?

She waits for a minute longer, bewildered, then instructs the Uber to take her home, the leather of the seat cold against her legs. She doesn’t think at all on the way home, for perhaps the first time in her entire life. Not a single thought. She keeps them at bay, an ugly dam with water behind it swelling and building.

As she arrives, she sees a police car, two cars back, following her. Cam blushes with shame. Somehow, her last, desperate act being witnessed by the authorities makes it worse. She wonders if they will question her over it, or leaveit: accept that she has as little idea as them where her husband may be.

She lets herself in her front door, walks straight up to the kitchen, turns off the light, and closes the door, her eyeballs burning in the early-morning dimness. She needs to be completely alone to think, and not be witnessed, not by her sister, not by the police outside, her daughter, not even by the lights above her.

The house must have been nothing. Research for a book. Something accidental.

Nothing.

No clue. No explanation waiting for her.

That house in Lewisham was a symbol of hope on the dawn horizon. And now.

He isn’t hiding out. He didn’t leave Rightmove as a clue. A stranger lives there. There is no narrative payoff here. No denouement, only confusion.

Well, now. She must face the truth.

My husband is a murderer. She forces herself to think this thought over and over, as though she will burst through some pain barrier and accept it. My husband is a murderer.

She sinks down against the counters to sit on the floor, head lolling backwards against a cupboard full of their possessions that were earlier ransacked by the police. Glasses they bought from IKEA. Mugs exchanged for birthdays and Christmases. Polly’s sippy cups that, only yesterday, Cam was worried she wasn’t using yet.

But Cam can’t even hide from the daylight. The very early-morning sun lights the appliances silver. The fridge, the hob, the toaster. Her husband used these appliances with her until just recently, and now he is a murderer.

She clutches at the skin on her stomach, at her hair. Shewants to scream at her broken heart to stop beating. He’s a killer.

Cam’s head tilts forward on to her knees and she tries to cry, but she can’t. She is disgusting. A fool. A scorned woman. There are no tears available. She has hardened, like clay, the moisture dried out of her into cynicism.

She closes her eyes, scrunches them up, but it’s futile. She stays there for an age, not crying, not thinking, not doing anything except staring at the greyscale kitchen around her and thinking of standing outside that Lewisham house, alone and abandoned by her husband.

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