Page 5 of Famous Last Words

‘We pause for a moment, here,’ the news presenter on the television says, something unusual and grave in her tone, ‘to bring you breaking news from central London.’

As Cam watches, the screen goes black andBREAKINGflashes across it in white text. The voiceover switches to a male broadcaster. ‘Police are trying to end a siege that began an hour ago in central London.’ A grainy image appears on the screen. Cam stares at it, but she can’t make it out. ‘A man has taken three hostages in a warehouse in London. We have exclusive CCTV footage from a security guard on duty.Authorities are present at the scene and believe it to be a hostile act.’

Before Cam can digest this, she spots them outside: police.

Two officers, one wearing a white shirt and black stab vest, one in a suit, no caps in hands but otherwise just the way she imagined, striding into her workplace. And Cam knows, somehow, in some deep dark place inside her, that they’re here for her. She tells herself she is being stupid, highly strung because of Luke’s unread texts and absence, but that’s the precise moment that she hears them say her name.

2

Cam’s legs feel imaginary, too light. She walks across the foyer and could swear she’s four inches from the ground, a ghost floating around a literary agency. It must be shock. Fear.

‘That’s me,’ she finds herself saying loudly in the foyer. ‘Camilla.’

‘Are you the wife of Luke Deschamps?’ One of the coppers turns from talking to the receptionist and looks directly at Cam.

‘Yes,’ she says quickly, thinking that at least it’s not Polly. How strange it is the way the order of disasters inverts post-baby.

It’s been so lovely with you both. What did he mean by that? Was that – agoodbye?

‘DS Steven Lambert,’ one of the coppers says. Late thirties maybe. Pale, freckled. He’s accompanied by a woman who introduces herself as PC Emma Smith. She has with her a notepad and biro, just holding them, standing there like a journalist from the eighties.

‘Have you got time to have a quick chat?’ Smith says, her tone gentle, but in the way somebody has when they’ve been told to do it.

‘What’s happened?’

‘Is there somewhere we can …’

Cam indicates a meeting room off the foyer without thinking, wanting only information, and as quickly as possible.

‘Is Luke OK?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

Cam’s shoulders drop six feet. In her relief, she bursts into an occupied room, apologizes and heads to the one next door.

Steven Lambert meets her gaze and he looks tired. He is a cliché of a workaholic. Dark circles, coffee on his breath. ‘There is a hostage situation unfolding,’ he says plainly.

‘I saw it – on the news,’ Cam says, blinking. Stunned that these two pieces have connected together: the police and the news story. Maybe she’s dreaming. Maybe she’s reading a novel.

‘A siege. A man has taken three hostages in a warehouse in Bermondsey.’

Bermondsey. Luke’s co-working space is in Bermondsey, and the word hits Cam with the strength of an anvil. She feels utterly disorientated,Bermondseyreverberating around her skull. Cartoon stars appear above her head. Her neck goes hot, a rising tide of blood working its way towards her face like a filling bath. She brings her hands to her chest and feels her pulse in both wrists.

‘Oh my God,’ Cam says. She brandishes her phone. ‘That’s why … is he OK?’ And then she adds, to explain: ‘I texted him – he … has someone got him?’

Lambert hesitates, and something about the gravity in his expression makes Cam stop speaking. He shifts in his seat, his shirt moving slightly up his arm, revealing a wrist tattoo. Cam can’t quite make it out, some swirled symbol or other.

His eyes meet hers. ‘Your husband hasn’t been taken.’

‘Oh! Good!’

‘We believe that he is the person who has taken the hostages,’ he finishes quietly.

3

Somewhere, in some previously inaccessible part of Cam’s brain, a trapdoor opens, and she begins falling through it. ‘What? No he isn’t,’ she says, the notion so absurd to her that Lambert merely needs to be corrected. As she looks at him, he shifts, and his tattoo disappears once more.

Cam’s colleagues have begun clustering in the foyer, because of the news, or the police, she isn’t sure, and she becomes momentarily distracted by them. Instead of processing what’s being said to her, she is trying to work out what her colleagues must be thinking, in that strange way people in crisis focus on the wrong thing sometimes.

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