Page 16 of Famous Last Words

***TESCO CLUBCARD FUELSAVE***

PENCE PER LITRE DIESEL: 123

POINTS THIS VISIT: 172

SUNDRIES: CADBURY TWIRL

PAID BY CARD ENDING: 4592

Cam stares at the receipts. And it isn’t their contents which makes her suspicious: it’s the frequency. Fuel twice in two days, and they live in London. Hardly drive. She tries to anchor the dates in her mind, but can’t. Where had he been in order to fill up twice in the spring?

A crumpled-up letter unfurls in Smith’s hand. Luke’s bank statement.

Cam’s gaze skims the withdrawals. The two petrol fill-ups are there. Way more than normal. Cash, too. But these could mean anything.

Smith’s gaze is on her. ‘Anything jump out?’ she says lightly, and Cam suddenly thinks how foolish they are, how stupid to think that Cam might be honest about something like this, something nebulous, where her concerns can hide between the lines of the itemized bank statements.

‘Nothing,’ Cam lies. They’d been driving around to get Polly to sleep, but only for twenty minutes here and there …

Smith bags the papers. ‘Does he have any other computers or assets?’

‘No – I … No. Just his phone and his laptop.’

‘Social media?’

‘He’s not bothered by it.’

‘Right, Cam,’ Lambert says, while Smith takes the laptop away. ‘Anything else unusual happen recently? Anything you can think of other than the burglary? However small.’

Cam closes her eyes and sees Polly on a swing in her mind, Luke laughing as she kicks her little legs and windmills her arms. That is real. That is what matters. They stay there for a few seconds in her imagination, sun in their yellow hair.

Cam opens her eyes.

Immediately, she remembers the onions. It was sometime recently, perhaps a month or slightly more ago: she can’t findanything to fix it on, and time moves both fast and slow since having Polly. Maybe April: it had been colder, dark after Polly’s bedtime.

Cam had been in the bath upstairs, had come down to the smell of dinner cooking. Luke hadn’t heard her footsteps. His back was to her, lit by the kitchen spotlights. He was chopping something, chicken sizzling noisily in a wok.

‘It was so nice to have a bath and read,’ she’d said. Polly had suddenly started going to bed. Previously, they’d had to drive her around sometimes to get her to sleep. The difference a few hours to themselves made had been life-changing. A drop of expensive bath oil, a crime thriller, and, most nights, Cam was away somewhere else. Rural Scotland playing detective. Nineteen sixties Paris. Or just London, but a different London to her own.

‘Huh?’ Luke had replied jumpily. He’d spun and looked directly at her.

And it was his eyes.

His expression was carefully, deliberately open. Studied. But his eyes. Red-rimmed, bloodshot. And his jaw was set, too, his lower lip tense in that way it is when you’re crying but pretending not to.

‘Are you OK?’ she said.

‘Yes?’ he’d said, an edge to it.

‘You look like you’ve been crying?’

‘No,’ he’d said, and then, like it just occurred to him, he’d gestured to the chopping board. ‘Onions.’

Cam had thought about it a few times since. In the storm of the baby days, she had told herself that they were normal for feeling frazzled, for grieving an old life, unable to get anything done, competitively tired, but this had been maybeseven months afterwards. Unexplained crying. Or perhaps just onions. Who’s to say?

But last night … hadn’t he seemed fine?I’m chatting to you and eating Jaffa Cakes.The truth is, the good days with a baby are better than the greatest days in your pre-baby life. They had been a family. A unit. Memories flit through Cam’s mind like an old projector movie. Polly’s first laugh, like liquid bubble gum. That time she recognized them in the mirror and her eyes went round with shock. The key-in-lock feeling you get when you hold them close to your chest …

But had he been somewhere? Been out burning fuel? That night he’d hardly slept? The one she can only just remember, can’t place the date of?

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