Page 81 of Famous Last Words

In bed, later, not expecting sleep, Cam recommences her googling. But before she can, she sees it: a headline, on the news tab of Google, and a photograph.

A photograph of the woman at the school gate.

Cam stares at it in shock.Forty-seven-year-old Madison Smith found dead at home in Shadwell.

And then more:Dead at not-yet-fifty: the London murder that has police FLUMMOXED.Madison Smith: Who was she?

There in the night-dark room, Cam’s chest becomes hot. A woman approached her, saying she was related to one of the hostages, and now she’s dead. Cam looked into her eyes just the day before yesterday, but now she’s gone.

And there was somebody in Cam’s garden just now.

She paces across the room, hands to her cheeks, panicking.

Madison was killed yesterday morning. Cam would’ve heard about this soon enough, without googling at all, and she wonders if that might have been better than this. A clandestine Google search late at night, alone.

THE FAMILY of Madison Smith have spoken out after she was murdered on her doorstep early yesterday morning. ‘We lost a bright and beautiful mother, sister and friend today,’her son, Joseph, told the Metropolitan Police at noon today. ‘If anybody knows anything, please, please, call in.’

DCI Timothy Young from the Met confirmed that Madison opened her door early yesterday morning, while her adult sons were still in bed, and was shot in the chest and died immediately. Paramedics attempted to revive her but were not successful. CCTV and residential camera footage have captured her killer on film below.

Cam loads up the video, thinking: A woman who found me is dead. A woman whose husband was murdered by my own seven years ago. She can’t begin to fathom what it means, only that another person is dead. Alexander Hale. James Lancaster. Two hostages. And now the wife of one of them. Five souls now gone, and all connected to Luke.

She shivers.

There is no mention of Madison’s husband in the papers, but there’s a video of her assailant. It’s grainy and blurred.Two cars pass. A woman walks a poodle across the screen. A man steps into the frame. A man wearing a balaclava, his hood up. He reaches with a black-leather-gloved hand to knock.

The door opens.

The back of Madison Smith’s head appears.

Then the video ends.

Cam watches it again and looks at him. She doesn’t think it’s Luke. It’s not his walk. But she can’t know for sure.

She tries to find Madison’s husband online, on the marriage records, on birth and deaths, but there’s nothing.

She pauses.

Surely, surely, she’s got to tell the police of this contact they had? Cam might be the only person in the world who knows she was married to one of the anonymous hostages.

But Madison reached out to Cam, and was then murdered. Cam stood right by her, at the school gate, so close to Polly.

And now she’s dead. How can Cam involve herself in this?

Somewhere you don’t regularly go.

She shivers again by the doors to her garden, feeling alone but wondering if it’s worse: that she’s not alone, only thinks that she is.

38

Niall

‘No more news here.’ The next day, Lambert is at the front of the boardroom, one hand on the edge of the whiteboard, the other on his hip. ‘Niall was sent to grill Harry Grace, so over to him.’ He turns to Niall, expression expectant.

Niall pauses. He relays briefly his conversation with Harry and what he found on the dark web. He talks fast, excitedly.

When he’s finished, Tim seems to be considering things, turning his mouth down, thinking. He’s in on this briefing – usually, findings are reported up to him – and seems mostly unable to stop himself from interjecting. ‘That is a lot of information,’ he says eventually.

‘I know,’ Niall says, and there begins a creeping thud of disappointment.

---