Page 55 of Famous Last Words

The police spiral outwards, knocking on the doors of each small holiday home. Niall heads to one of the huts, a small black wooden structure no bigger than most people’sbedrooms called ‘Radar’ that stands, angular, on the horizon, like a crow. As he walks towards it, the pub sign squeaks behind him, and he wonders why nobody’s thought to oil it. The sound would drive him mad.

He reaches the door of Radar. It’s partially clad in corrugated iron, brown, sits right on the coastline, sea stretching out behind it. Niall raises a hand to knock, but just before his fist connects, he sees movement within, through the small round glass window. He pauses, staring, eyes gritty from sea spray.

Nothing more. He squints. It could be him. It really could. On the run for seven years. Imagine if he found him. Brought him to justice.

Niall sends a couple of team members a message, then waits, not moving, not wanting to alert the shadowy form within. He peers around the side of the small hut. There’s nowhere for him to escape this time.

Maidstone and another colleague, Robinson, arrive. They look through the glass, then brace themselves.

A single shout – ‘Police!’ – and they force the door. And, just like one of his dreams, Niall finds he can’t go in. His feet and legs stop working. He turns away, staying outside, his shoulders rounded and scared, a coward’s stance. Jess formally diagnosed complex PTSD, but Niall dismissed it. Almost every hostage negotiator has some trauma or other, he said, and she said, ‘Does that make it OK?’

‘Come on,’ Niall says to himself, then takes a breath and heads inside, thinking of that night seven years ago, the shots, Viv’s absence, and stares around. Open-plan kitchen, bedroom, living room, all in one.

There’s a coat, hung up by its hood on a wardrobe door that is swinging slightly in the breeze of a Dyson fan.

No Deschamps here.

Five minutes later, the owner of the coat arrives back. He’s been walking on the beach. That’s all.

Niall sighs. He’s wrong again. Spooked again. Later, in the pub, they will discuss him, he assumes.

He turns and walks to the next hut; that sentence uttered by Rosalind is still rattling around his brain, and rattling him:For a hostage negotiator, you are a terrible communicator.Well, maybe he’s a terrible hostage negotiator, too, he thinks. No one has yet found Deschamps on the estate. Niall brought everyone to the very end of Kent and all they found was a coat hanging on a wardrobe, a few holidaymakers, and no Deschamps. He made everyone wait to go into the warehouse, and look what happened there. He sighs, looking up into the arching summer sky, lights up a cigarette, and tries to stop thinking for a while. Just a little while.

27

Cam

Sometimes, Cam thinks she sees him. In a crowd, boarding a Tube. She does it today at the school gate, somebody in a dark blue jacket and a hat, even in the heat, disappearing behind a flower-lined wall.

Cam blinks. It was nothing. But something about it makes her stop, makes her chest feel hollow and spooked. The feeling of eyes on her, just like at the Tube at Putney. She darts across the pavement, looks up the street, but he’s gone.

Polly appears in the distance, distracting Cam, surrounded as ever by a gaggle of friends. ‘You’ll have to give me a tour of your house!’ Cam hears her exclaim to somebody so new Cam doesn’t even recognize her. She stares at her shoes and smiles at the overfamiliarity of her daughter, the American inflection from too much YouTube, and waits, thinking how interesting parenthood is. That this person was in there all along; even as a baby she found everything funny and happy-making. Cam spent her childhood reading Goosebumps books on playground benches: she sometimes finds she has no idea how to parent an extrovert.

The weather is close, air clouded over, sun only occasionally slicing through, like smoke curling underneath a door.

A conversation between two school mums, Kelly Bentley and Isobel Morris, plays out next to Cam, the tone gossipy. Cam pauses, her body as still as an animal in the wild. Nobodyat the school apart from the head has yet worked out what Luke did. Many have assumed he’s an absent father, an acrimonious divorce somewhere in Cam’s past, and Cam never corrects them. She is therefore, as Cam Fletcher, mostly under the radar, but goes on high alert whenever she overhears anything remotely salacious.

Polly has stopped walking now, but is still talking animatedly with her new friends.

‘I have such awful IBS,’ Isobel says to Kelly, and Cam relaxes. IBS, not infamy. Well, good. But it reminds her of conversations she used to have with friends … her closest friend, Holly, the freelance editor. Their relationship limped on for a year or so after the siege, but Cam couldn’t keep pretending her life was normal enough to have a glass of wine with a mate. It just wasn’t. They lost touch, texts unanswered by Cam.

Kelly catches Cam looking, and says, ‘Sorry for the overshare. TMI discussion over here.’

‘Not at all,’ Cam says, waving a hand. ‘I used to have that, but, do you know, peppermint tea reallydidhelp.’ This is a total lie, but it erupts out of Cam, nevertheless. This is how she does it. Keep them going. Keep them talking. Never let them know she’s weird, and lonely, and fragile. Act natural, so natural no one ever gets too close.

She distracts herself with her phone. Libby has sent a characteristic string:

So jaded this morning.

Look at this awful house I have to market.

A photo of a messy living room, clothes everywhere, a curtain hanging off the rail at one end.

Also.

How’re you?

‘You’re based on Bucks Avenue, right?’ Kelly says, interrupting Cam’s reading.

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