Page 50 of Famous Last Words

‘Oh… I haven’t dealt with that one before,’ the call centre worker says, surprise in her voice. ‘Let me … yes, OK, wow. So it’s a declaration of presumed death you’re looking for,’ she says. ‘Without a death certificate?’

‘Right, yes,’ Cam says, thinking that she doesn’t want to be doing this this morning in her sunny office.

Cam gives her reference. ‘The thing is – there are a lot of unusual parts to my husband’s case,’ she says, the words well-worn trauma.

‘Okey-dokey,’ she says. ‘You will need a designated handler on this one, who can look into the facts for you, but I think you will need to make a separate rider statement about – the events.’

‘OK.’

Cam swallows. It has been her new year’s resolution, the last seven Januarys, to stop going over and over what Luke left behind. His papers and books and old computers. She’s almost stuck to it, this year, and it’s now June. Only had one slip-up after a bad day in February when she began the process of selling the house. She had a dream Luke came back for her, was shouting on the street, then disappeared.

But, nevertheless, a part of Cam – the whole of her, really – knows that, one day, she is going to get the answer.

It’s why she hasn’t told Polly the full truth. When Polly was two, Cam told her she had a daddy, but he was away. When Polly was four, Cam said he was pretty far away, but that he loved her very much. When Polly was six, Cam told her he may never come back, that he didn’t want to be away, but some people said he’d done a bad thing. Just recently, they’d had the same conversation, but, this time, Polly had sat up in bed and asked, ‘What bad thing did he do?’

Cam had puffed air into her cheeks, thinking, This is it. You never get any warning as a parent. Years ofHe’s had to go awayandHe’d never willingly leave youhad led them here. And what was she supposed to say?

Cam had stared into the middle distance. ‘Well, the police think that he harmed two men, but I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No. Your father was …’ Cam struggled on the tense, her voice treacled around the tough words. ‘He was a good person. The truth is, I don’t know what happened. But I know what he was like.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Fun. Loyal. Loved you.’

‘Doesn’t sound like someone that would do bad things.’

‘No,’ and this seemed to be enough for Polly, right then. She’d rolled on to her side, pulled towards her the Jellycat Plushie she’d been dressing up in different outfits – Pollylovesclothes–each morning, and shut her eyes, leaving Cam to think that she was on borrowed time. Soon, Polly would be able to google him. Someone would surely tell her his name, even though Polly now has Cam’s surname. Playground gossip would make itself known. The details would come out, somehow, probably this year or next, but Cam couldn’t bring herself to force it.

As she’d finished a more traumatic solo bedtime than usual, she passed her own room and stared in at the bed, at the single lamp. ‘I hate you,’ she said to Luke, to Luke’s absence, to Luke’s total lack of explanation. ‘I fucking hate you,’ she said again.

Cam had decided to end that day prematurely. She headed downstairs. She moved a three-feet-high stack of books out of the way of her bed, deposited them in two piles on herbedside table, and got under the duvet, looking up at the underside of it, eyes wide.

She didn’t hate him. Not at all.

She reached for her phone, found him, and called. It was why she continued to pay the bill. No rings, but his voicemail. That sweet, sweet voicemail.

‘This is Luke Deschamps. Please leave me a message.’

She’d called it twice that night. Just to know that he might be out there somewhere, somehow, listening to her.

She finds her own voice is shaking now.

‘And was there an inquest for the …’ the call handler says.

‘Yes, but nobody knows who they are.’

Cam attended the inquest, all in black, sitting in the public gallery. Listening as the facts repeated themselves like demolitions. Out of character. No explanation for it. A bullet wound in each temple. Two men, aged forty to forty-three. No ID on them. No one reported them missing, or identified their bodies.

The day after the inquest had finished, she’d applied to change her and Polly’s surname.

‘All right, I am going to assign you a handler. She’s called Daisy. She will call you back. Are you OK to make the £628 payment on the website?’

‘Yes,’ Cam says, thinking, What’s six hundred quid, given everything else that’s been taken from her?

Cam and Polly walk through the front door that afternoon, hot sunlight behind them. ‘How long, exactly, until the holidays?’ Polly asks Cam, breaking away from holding her hand and running up the stairs without waiting for the answer.

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