Page 44 of Famous Last Words

She arrives near to the spot on Google Maps. It is an alleyway leading off a totally normal London high street. Railway arches, co-working spaces, phone kiosks and takeaways.

A bus passes, the N19, and she winces. The N19 to Finsbury Park: she’d know it anywhere. Luke’s old borough from when they were dating. He once failed to get that bus back there …

Cam had been representing him for nine months. After the sale to Penguin Random House, she had gone on to sell US rights to HarperCollins and by the time she called him with their twentieth translation deal, he’d stopped answering the phone formally and started saying, ‘Hey, it’s the good-news train!’

Calls became five minutes of business and twenty of chat. Two minutes of business and forty of chat. Cam wasn’t getting anything done. One-line emails about contract terms had giant personal PSs attached that moved to texts and then to WhatsApps – his avatar gave her a thrill every time it popped up – that didn’t, strictly speaking, need sending at all.Remind me, did you do your Swedish translator queries – I can’t findthem?she once sent, then looked around her. Friday, nine o’clock at night, her bare toes at the end of the bathtub, glass of Prosecco on the side. She didn’t need to know about Swedish queries, and she could’ve asked her rights colleague anyway. This was not work. This was … something she couldn’t yet name, or perhaps was afraid to.

But something about him, his effervescence, as bubbly as the drink beside her … Luke was more than just somebody she liked a lot, and certainly more than just another author client: he was a gateway to … to something more than good times. Luke was relaxation. Luke was ‘Oh, God, just turn your bloody brain off.’ Luke was ‘Look, just have some Jaffa Cakes and forget about it.’ And sitting behind those fun times was care. Care for her. Something she doesn’t have now as she battles bedtime and school-uniform ironing and birthday-card shopping alone, alone, alone.

Their first project together had been a success, the way Cam knew it would be. Friends emailed to say how much they’d enjoyed it. Even Libby said she couldn’t help reading it. Cam found it amusing that everybody’s reaction to it was precisely her own reaction to him: Luke was entertaining.

One night, nine months into their working relationship, they’d left a meeting with Simon & Schuster about a new deal for a singer-songwriter’s autobiography. They were walking across London Bridge, having gone for dinner and then drinks and then more drinks. It was way beyond a business meeting, and by this stage both of them knew it.

‘I’ll walk you to the Tube,’ Luke had said at midnight, his tone light. Cam remembers he had saidya, notyou, an overfamiliarity she liked so much she’d played it back over and over in her mind as they strolled.

It began to rain as they crossed the street. ‘I’ll be fine from here,’ she said.

‘It’s cool.’ Luke indicated a row of bus stops. ‘I’m going to go from there, anyway.’ He drew the hood of his parka up with one hand, fur framing his face, and looked at her from within it. ‘Least I know you’re home safe. Or near enough.’

And it wasn’t about what he said, but, somehow, the atmosphere changed between them – just like that – as if someone had reached in and wordlessly flicked on mood lighting. The electricity of the weather, maybe: that it was raining was a satisfying pathetic fallacy to Cam, a woman who liked to live in literature where possible. Just as she thought this, the droplets got fatter, striking the pavements with little explosions. Cam was in flimsy shoes, and her feet became squeaky with water.

‘That’s your bus,’ Cam said to him as the number N19 pulled in, ‘Finsbury Park’ emblazoned on its front, but Luke ignored it. And that was the moment Cam knew.

‘I’ll get the next,’ he had said, his eyes on hers.

He didn’t.

And now here she is alone, watching that same bus speed away.

She walks into the alleyway, her breath held. It bends in a semicircle between two buildings. She thinks of all of the things she knows about the siege and the weeks before it: that the dead hostages were never identified, that Luke never reported the burglary. They are pieces of a puzzle. And thereisan answer, but it doesn’t materialize, no matter how much Cam tries to put them together. She has just a handful, from a thousand-piece set. Maybe she will never get the rest.

Or maybe she is about to get them all.

The alleyway winds back on itself into a courtyard, but it’sempty. Nobody here. No windows look into the barren and uninhabited concrete square. All it contains are a few dead shrubs and a bench.

Google tells her she is standing at the precise coordinates. It’s twilight: she can’t see a soul. On the dim street, in a rectangle of light at the end of the alley where a streetlamp stands, the world continues. For the first time, Cam shivers. It’s late. Nobody knows she’s here. But what else was she supposed to do?

She double-checks the coordinates and then the time. And this is it. She stands there in the dark, in this weird, closed-off courtyard, closes her eyes, and waits for nine o’clock. Eight fifty-eight. Eight fifty-nine. Nine.

22

Cam opens her eyes and London plays out around her exactly as it was. Another bus passes loudly nearby. A busker down the road plays ‘Brown Eyed Girl’. And all the while, a courtyard with no one in it, only her, alone, the way it always is.

She stares at her feet and waits, doing nothing more than that. It’s ten past nine. It’s twenty past nine. It’s twenty-five past, and nobody is coming. Her heart begins a slow and sad descent down her chest, disappointment made worse by its tessellation with shame. Was it him, and he didn’t show? Or was it never him, just spam? Or someone else? Someone who knows something? And if itwashim … was she going to just forgive him for a notorious double murder and seven years’ abandonment?

She wanders out of the courtyard, past a locked door that seems to lead to a small basement office, down the alleyway and out on to another quintessentially London street: Amazon lockers, rows of electric bikes for hire, a Tesco Express. Things are different these days and yet the same.

Cam shivers in the June twilight. In the autumn, as soon as the sun slides lower and the light fades to amber, something in Cam relaxes. But here, walking in the musky heat, it’s as if no time has passed at all since that summer seven years ago.

Nine thirty, nine forty, and Cam hurries now, leaving the scene. She walks back down the high street and gets the Tube. She’ll tell Libby, if she asks, that Charlie bailed early on her, and then, later, she will get into bed and hide under theduvet, alone. She won’t admit she was out, alone on a street, waiting for a ghost from the past, like always.

Of course. Of course he let her down and didn’t come. Like always, she thinks angrily, while the Underground puffs and shakes its way around London.

It probably wasn’t even him, but, nevertheless, Cam’s anger at her estranged husband flares back up.

She was always a reader but, these days, she buries herself in books and work. The cocktails and the anti-publishing chat with Charlie are not real. This is true Cam: she represents wide-ranging fiction, but her taste could be described easily in one word: escapism. There’s a German word for this, too,Weltschmerz. Translated as world-grief. To Cam, it is perfect.

She goes through her submissions, tracking the ones she wants to request in her dedicated notebook. She looks at what’s at the top of the Kindle store, and finally opens a manuscript she requested yesterday.

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