Page 60 of Famous Last Words

‘It’s fine.’

Adrienne puts her glass on a nearby shelf and begins typing, two-handed, on her phone. And Cam thinks that something is happening, something is brewing. She can feel it as close as the storm outside.

Nothing for years. Nothing, nothing, nothing – just thesteadfast trying to move on, like swimming against a current, putting in all that effort just to get nowhere. Reminding herself of what he did. A double murder of two anonymous souls.

But now this. Coordinates. Information. Cam knows somewhere deep inside her that it is significant.

She stares at Adrienne’s hammered silver thumb ring as she types. It throws little diamonds of light over the walls. She’s looking at her slim wrists, her purple-painted nails, thinking nothing. Trying to think nothing. Trying not to hope.

‘The sixteenth of June,’ Adrienne says. ‘Like I said. He said he had a funeral. He got his phone out to check his calendar. I think it said Whitechapel.’

‘That’s five days before the … the siege.’

‘I’m sorry – I … I didn’t think anything of it.’ The unsaid lingers in the air between them:And I didn’t think it mattered to you any more.

‘No. And why would you?’ Cam says.

‘I mean …’ Adrienne says, but the sentence goes nowhere.

‘I’d better go,’ Cam says. She’s had too much to drink; she’s said too much. Suddenly, the quaint surroundings feel menacing. Cam has always cautioned authors about running their mouth at publishing dos fuelled by alcohol, and here she is, doing just that herself. Oversharing. Asking for information. She’s forgotten herself.

‘Sure, nice to chat,’ Adrienne says lightly. ‘And yeah – I hope … I hope I haven’t upset you. I don’t know.’

Cam says goodbye to her client, leaves and heads out on to the wet, hot street. The air smells of evening petrichor and she takes the long way home, across Waterloo Bridge, thinking of those coordinates further north. Her head is swimming with Prosecco and the conversation she’s just had. A funeral.

Halfway across, she stops and stares down at where the deep, navy-blue water sits and sloshes. And right there, in the middle of the bridge, she googles it.Funeral 16 June 2017, Whitechapel. Maybe it’ll show something. Some archive somewhere.

And it does.

29

Niall

INTERNAL REPORT:

CAMILLA DESCHAMPS (NÉE FLETCHER)

MOVEMENTS: AS NORMAL.

VISITORS TO PROPERTY: (1) SISTER, LIBBY.

PHONE CALLS: (2) SISTER, LIBBY; BOSS, STUART.

CONTACT WITH SUSPECT: NONE SEEN.

The Met has continued surveillance on Cam’s house. They’ve had her phone tapped for four months, but they now also have a small team watching her house on Bucks Avenue, in case Deschamps reaches out.

But that doesn’t stop Niall passing by today. Nobody can tell him not to go to Putney. Even if it is incredibly out of his way.

It’s five o’clock in the morning. OK – so it isn’t out of his way: he isn’t going anywhere at all; he got up after his gunshot dream and came. But he feels something, deep inside him. Somebody wanted to get hold of her. And the night-time is when people act on these impulses. Niall has on a Royal Mail T-shirt he bought off eBay which comes in handy in these sorts of situations: no one questions a postman.

Besides, he is more observant and more patient than anyone in the Met’s surveillance team. That’s the reality. Sosay he comes down here a few nights a week, sits for an hour, maybe two. He might catch Deschamps himself.

From Cam’s street you can see an unusual summer mist rising in the distance, coming off the river like ripped-up candyfloss after the wet night. The light at this hour is blue, the air cool, the houses sleeping. Only two lit-up windows on the whole street, night workers maybe, or else insomniacs. Probably police, Niall thinks drily.

He immediately clocks his colleagues’ car – unmarked – parked a few hundred yards down the road, and dodges out of its line of vision. Postman or not, he could do without being recognized, without his colleagues finding out that he believes surveillance teams merely sit, chat shit, eat McDonald’s, and wait to retire (though they absolutely do).

He stands in the shadow of an alleyway for ten minutes, twenty, just looking and watching. No Deschamps, no visitors at all. Cam and Polly likely sleeping inside, the owner of the Dungeness burner phone given up, for now maybe, knowing they’ve been traced.

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