Page 63 of Famous Last Words

‘Hmm,’ Niall says, turning to her as they part, hoping for more wisdom, but it doesn’t come. Time’s up.

Downstairs, he buys a pain au chocolat from the bakery and gets his new burner phone out. He’s going to try to contact Deschamps. He can’t leave the case to go cold again, Deschamps to simply remain on the run. Of course he sent those coordinates. Of course he did, and nobody is trying hard enough to find him.

He just needs to bait him with something he cares about, that’s all.

Without thinking of the firm boundary he’s crossing with the Met – sod the Met and their due processes – he dials Deschamps’s burner phone’s number. Voicemail. He tries again. Voicemail.

But, this time, he sends a text, thinking of himself, and what would get him moving. And it’s Viv. It’s always been Viv.

If you want to see your wife again, I can help you, he writes.

30

Cam

Cam saved the social media posts about the funerals for here: in bed, early in the morning, by herself. She’d started reading last night, became too spooked, and resumes now. Things feel calmer in the lemonade morning light.

The facts are that one event matches what Cam is looking for: there was a funeral held for a teenager called Alexander Hale on 16 June the year Luke went missing. There was also a funeral for a James Lancaster the week before.

Both teenagers were murdered, their bodies found together in the grounds of a housing estate in east London. It’s easy to find the story in the national papers. Their killer was never found.

It feels to Cam like each individual hair on the back of her neck is rising up, until they’re standing and quivering.

Alexander – Alex to his friends – was eighteen, a Just Eat delivery driver and amateur footballer, and he was murdered on 21 April. Found with a catastrophic head injury at the back of his skull.

James was found with a bullet wound to his temple.

Their bodies only inches from the other.

Their funerals didn’t happen for seven to eight further weeks because of the police investigation into their murders.

And Luke cancelled seeing Adrienne because of a funeral on the same day. The sixteenth. That was Alexander’s funeral.

But …21 April was the date Luke turned off his location data, wasn’t it? Didn’t Niall say that?

Here is a date that matches when Luke attended a funeral, and a date that matches him obscuring his location data.

She flicks back through her calendar on her iPhone, grateful it still seems to remember every detail of her life, but there’s nothing for her on 16 June. Not a single entry.

She wonders idly how many funerals take place per day in Whitechapel. She couldn’t even guess it. There must be many that aren’t so high profile, and aren’t on social media. She must be jumping to conclusions.

She puts the date into the photo app on her iPhone, not able to quite admit to herself what her suspicions are, and she starts to scan, hoping to jog her own memory, and she is immediately assaulted with something more painful than a weapon: the past. Nostalgia exists for other people, not Cam, and she physically winces as she sees their family unit of three populate on her phone. Cam, Luke, Polly. Tiny baby feet in laps. A selfie of her and Luke in bed at eight thirty at night.

Her heart hurts with it, feels dense and heavy, like somebody has put their palm to Cam’s chest and pressed down. Everything they had, everything they lost, because of him. In the days after the siege and Luke’s disappearance, Polly had swivelled her head to the door a couple of times, perhaps looking for Luke, perhaps not. And that had been the only hint that she’d noticed at all: her father gone, before her brain had fully formed. Later, people told Cam to find comfort in this – that Pollydidn’t know any different– and Cam had thought about zoo animals who never knew the bliss of freedom. Later, Polly had started to babble, idle nonsense: da-da-da, like all babies, only to Cam it was extra loaded.

She finds nothing for the date of the funeral or the day in April that can pinpoint where she was, where Luke was, if he was absent.

Jesus. What is she thinking, here? That Luke went out for that drive in April, killed two people, with their baby present, turned his location data off, then went to his funeral, like some sort of Victorian evil villain?

No.

She’s definitely read too much fiction.

She goes back to Google, and reads more about James Lancaster, an article beneath a photo of him in sportswear, standing outside a football pitch, one leg up on a wall, broad grin, crazy hair, his mother next to him.

JAMES LANCASTER was found bleeding heavily from a single gunshot wound to the temple at midnight on 21stApril, heading into the 22nd. Paramedics worked on him for over an hour but he was declared dead at the scene. His parents, who he lived with, were informed.

No perpetrator was ever found, despite extensive enquiries, CCTV combing, Ring doorbells, car dashcam footage, and door-knocking.

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