Page 28 of Famous Last Words

Smith’s sympathy is disappearing; perhaps was faked, anyway. ‘I’m afraid we can only deal with the facts here, Camilla. And he didn’t.’

‘Maybe your systems are faulty.’

‘Did anybody ever visit? Take fingerprints?’ Smith asks, with two raised brows in the rear-view mirror, and Cam shakes her head no. She didn’t think. Was too busy, subsumed into the chaos that is parenting a young child.

‘No,’ Cam replies.

‘Is that why you wanted to move? The house on Rightmove?’

‘Right,’ Cam says faintly, thinking how funny it is that sometimes fiction – lies – make more sense than reality. ‘Yes.’

Smith says nothing, braking softly at some lights. ‘I’msorry,’ she says to Cam, looking at her again. ‘I know how it feels to be lied to.’ All Cam sees is those eyes: no other clues in her face. And all she can think is that her husband is a good person. Heis.

Cam blinks, unsure if Smith means personally or professionally, but doesn’t ask. They’re on different sides. She’s desperate to check out the Rightmove house, but can’t imagine when she will be able to.

Cam ponders Smith’s plain statement, and it is this that makes her truly doubt her husband for the first time. What is it called – Occam’s razor? That the simplest explanation is true? Her husband has wiped his laptop. He has lied to her about reporting a crime to the police. He has taken three hostages and is holding them in a warehouse.

It should be clear that he is notgood.

They round a corner. They’re coming on to the road the warehouse sits on, and the scene is eerie. A fire engine is on the grass verge. The lights of a nearby corner shop are switched off, shut up, a news stand outside bearing a headline from yesterday. Another police car pulls away in front of them, bumping one wheel at a time off the kerb.

The entire street is cordoned off, and the road outside the warehouse is barricaded by police in concentric circles. Cam stares at them, rows and rows of coppers, eventually reaching the building containing the love of her life.

It’s a 1970s-style brick building, pitched roof, zero windows anywhere. A single door stands in the exact centre, perfunctory, unremarkable, faded black paint become matt with age, like a chalkboard. A single, small boarded-up window in the wood. Cam stares at it, this building with no windows, thinking only one singular thought: that this was planned. Look at it. No glass in the door. No possibility of awitness. Her eyes drift upwards to the layers of brick after brick after brick: and no escape.

As she sees it, Cam suddenly and violently misses the before-life. Normality. It’s gone for ever, her brain helpfully tells her, and she could keel over with the strength of this thought. The notebook she uses to track her reading at work. Her working theory that blue covers sell the most. Her favourite mug for her morning coffee. Her husband’s arms around her in bed at night. Gone, all gone.

Smith parks and lets Cam out: her door has a child safety lock on it. The air is hot and close as she stands, and her body unfurls. She’s been tense for hours.

She glances across the street. Being led from another police car is a tall, dark-haired police officer in uniform. How strange: two other officers are perhaps restraining him, or at the very least controlling where he goes. He looks exhausted. Their eyes lock, and Cam feels something pass between them. His gaze doesn’t leave hers as they walk across the sun-bleached pavements.

‘Over here,’ Smith says, interrupting. She checks something on her phone, and leads Cam – much to her surprise – to a pub several hundred yards away. The summer’s day continues surreally around them as they walk. Heat rises in fast, jagged shimmers off the tops of police cars, migrainous and sparkling. The air is as sticky as molten butter. Police are milling around in hi-vis. It could be a local football derby, a marathon, a festival. Not this, a gruesome crime scene, a negotiation, a place where Cam’s communications with her own husband will be listened to with held breaths.

As they walk, she can still feel the man’s eyes on her back.

The pub is flat-roofed, a Wetherspoon’s with green signage and maybe ten police cars parked in front of it. Threecoppers stand sentry, and they stop talking as Cam arrives. Beyond them, towards the warehouse, are the armed police. Cam’s eyes keep straying to their automatic rifles. Panicked tears rise up through her throat like boiling water, scorching and painful.

‘This is the hostage negotiator,’ Smith says to Cam, indicating a man just emerging from the double doors, and Cam simply cannot, cannot believe that this is happening. Her sister’s voice appears from nowhere in her mind –An actual fucking hostage negotiator!she would say.

But, nevertheless, he is real, and he is maybe forty-five, tall, lithe – though the sort of person who looks as though he misses meals rather than keeps deliberately in shape – with a closely shaved head and chunky glasses with clear plastic frames. He is carrying a glass of Coke held down by his side and wearing faded jeans, trainers with no socks, and a jaded expression.

He reaches to shake her hand. ‘Niall,’ he says. Gravelly voice, Northern Irish. ‘DCI Niall Thompson.’

So he’s police. His aim will be to capture her husband. Immediately, Cam begins to distance herself from him.

He has a very direct stare. Grey eyes. As Cam’s eyes meet his, she can’t help but think of everything of Luke’s that she is holding. The crying over the onions. The argument about the MOT. That he shouted at her the other day when his phone rang, then apologized. Ran a hand through his hair, a rattled man. Cam keeps thinking of these things. More and more keep coming to her.

Niall leans against an A-frame chalkboard sign and says, ‘Let’s talk.’ Cam watches as the authority he has plays out in front of them: the police officers scatter like disturbed insects the second he invites her to speak, leaving them alone in theblazing heat. Niall squints into the sun, then shades his eyes and looks back at her.

‘Here’s me,’ he says, passing her a business card. ‘You need me, day or night, I’m here.’

‘Thank you,’ Cam says, taking it. She likes that he’s kept her out here, not taken her into a car or interviewing suite somewhere. Just two individuals standing together outside.

Niall pauses, his hands brought together in front of his body. He takes a breath. ‘I have just made contact with your husband. By the door. I introduced myself to him.’

Cam feels her jaw slacken.Contact. They’ve spoken. She had no idea. Nobody told her until now. She wonders if Smith knew. ‘What did he say?’

Niall looks down at the ground and then back up at her. ‘He said just one thing,’ he says, his tone gentle, like he is handling glass with it.

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