Page 80 of Famous Last Words

It’s late, and Cam’s in bed still clothed, reading Adam’s manuscript.

The problem is, I suppose my dad would say, I had too much heart. If the drugs got queried; I took them back. If people couldn’t pay the full fee; I let them off. In the end, profits dropped, and Dad found out.

Cam can’t concentrate, and not on something so dark. Drugs and gangs. A kid getting mixed up in it because his family made him. Men being bad men, the way they are. She puts the manuscript aside.

Sometimes, Cam thinks access to the internet from a formative age gives her the impression she can solveanythingon Google. A small part of her thinks she might find Luke out there, hiding in some virtual tab or other, his address written somewhere, or shown as a red pin on a map, and it’s this impulse that leads her, after brushing her teeth and closing the curtains on the patio doors, to Google. She intends to search, as she hasn’t done for years, for a description of her husband on Reddit. Posters detail missing persons on there, and other people who might have seen them reply. Tall, blond men are not in enormous supply, and hope surges up through Cam every time she does it. Misguided, toxic hope. She’d given this up. She was doing better. And now look.

But what’s that? In bed, face washed and shining, neat half of the room on her right, patio doors and her books on the left, Cam starts: the security light has clicked on outside, in her back garden.

It has never once gone on by itself. Not for foxes or swaying trees or anything: only if you’re out there. Her arms and legs throb with her heartbeat. She ought to look. She ought to get out of bed right now, rip open the curtains, but, actually, she simply freezes in fear, thinking of what the stranger at the school gate said:Somewhere you don’t regularly go.

And then she indulges in that most toxic of habits: she pretends. Just for a few seconds, the same way she does when she hears car engines idling outside or unexpected knocks at her front door or missed calls from strange numbers. Ordinary occurrences are no longer so, for Cam.

She pretends it’s Luke. Come back. Returned. Just for a few moments.

Eyes open, pretending over, she heads upstairs, to the living room, where she can peer out from a vantage point. The curtains open a bright, floodlit slice of white, and she blinks as it hits her.

Nothing. Nobody in the garden: she stares out for a full five minutes, the tension slowly leaving her body, her heart rate coming down.

The light clicks off, and she relaxes. She heads downstairs, reaches the door and opens it. Cool air pipes in, and Cam ventures out, barefoot, on to the still-warm patio. All she can hear is crickets, the distant sound of traffic. Nothing else. The light re-illuminates as she walks a slow loop around her garden, picking out the green bushes and the parched grass. Cam glances at her neighbours’ houses, no lights on, and shivers, alone there in the night.

Just as she turns to go back inside, she hears it: the crunch of gravel underfoot, on the path that runs to the back of their gardens.

She freezes, listening, stays still so long she lets the light click off.

Another crunch. Another step. Somebody trying hard to be quiet. Cam’s breath is held. She stands in indecision, wanting to find out but not wanting to do so alone. Her head is telling her this is too many coincidences, too many occasions when she thought she was followed. Her heart is telling her it’s Luke, come back for her.

No. She won’t check alone. It would be foolish. Polly needs her. She needs to be careful, as the only remaining parent. Even if it might be Luke. Especially because it might be Luke.

She heads inside, then locks up carefully and goes back upstairs to look into the alleyway from above.

As she watches, a form becomes clear, standing at the back of her fence, stock still; she had missed him the first time around. Without hesitation, Cam’s heart speeds up and she calls 999.

‘There’s somebody outside my house,’ she tells the operator.

‘OK – have they attempted to break in?’

‘Well – no, but they’re – they’re by my fence, I think they might be scouting the property,’ Cam says hurriedly. ‘Please send someone – I’m alone.’

The call handler takes her details, and Cam stands at the dark window, looking down. The light clicks off, and, by the time the police arrive twenty minutes later, the person is gone.

‘Do keep an eye out,’ a friendly PCSO tells Cam. ‘And you could even get CCTV.’

‘But that won’t stop them coming back, or getting in,’ she says.

‘If your house is secure that is very unlikely,’ he says. ‘Most burglars are opportunists.’

‘I don’t know if it is a burglar or … I …’ she says. The PCSO watches, standing there in her kitchen with his notepad. ‘I feel like I’m being watched.’

He nods, just once, and doesn’t dismiss it, which Cam likes. ‘Any idea why?’

‘No,’ she says, not disclosing her identity. She’s sure the police must already know. ‘But there was someone at my daughter’s school – a man. And then someone on the Tube …’

‘All right – keep a log of that, too, and here’s my mobile number,’ he says, passing it to her. ‘Any problems, you call, OK?’

Cam takes the card gratefully, her hands shaking, wanting to prolong the meeting so that he doesn’t leave her alone again. But he does leave, heading to other jobs, for other vulnerable people, she supposes.

She keys his number into her phone, adds it to favourite contacts, hoping she will never need it.

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