Page 65 of Famous Last Words

A SOURCE close to Camilla Deschamps, wife of wanted Luke Deschamps, who held three hostages in a warehouse in 2017 before murdering two of them and disappearing, says literary agentCamilla, who now uses her maiden name Fletcher, is still not ‘over’ her husband’s betrayal.

Shit.

They have linked her maiden name to her married name in the article.

Her clients will see this. Charlie. Her boss. The other school-gate mums. Her daughter, one day: newspaper articles live for ever. Polly’s on the verge of being able to search for them herself, and now this.

And Luke, a small and stupid part of her brain adds.

Next to this is a pull quote in bold saying,You don’t get over it. You just remain sad about it, accompanied by a photograph of her taken from the agency website. It looks as though Cam has sold this article to a fucking tabloid. What will everyone think?

She closes the web page then opens it again, finishing the article.

Who could have done this? She thinks of her conversation with Adrienne at the party. She’s sure it isn’t her, casts her mind back over and over that night. Why would she?

TheDaily Mail.

TheDaily Mail. And – of course. The nearby journalist. The one she hoped her client would get aMailreview from. No such luck. She must have earwigged, instead, written up the whole story she told Adrienne. How could Cam have been so foolish?

Got a STORY or a COMMENT?the bottom of the article says.Call us on …

Cam waits, then dials it impulsively. She might be able to get it taken down. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

A tinny voice informs her she is in a queue and she putsher phone on speaker on the garden table and stands by the rose bushes, hands on her hips, breathing deeply.

‘You are caller number nine in the queue,’ the voice says, and Cam casts a disparaging glance at it. When, when, when will this ever leave her? This grief. This forever-invasion of her life. Thisinfamy.

In a rage, she hangs up the phone. She’s not going to tell the call handler who she is, and even if she does, she knows they won’t remove the article. They never do. Forget it.

She will ignore it.

Within two minutes, she’s back on the website.RELATED STORIES, it says underneath, populated by the articles of those first few days of the siege, but one other, too. She has never seen it before; she long ago stopped googling herself or Luke. She clicks on it, opens it up.

ISABELLA LOUIS was taken hostage five years ago, and still bears the scars today, it reads. Cam winces, not wanting to read it. She can live under the delusion her husband is good if she never hears from his victims.

She goes to close the article, but then she sees that Isabella likely didn’t consent to this article, either. It bears a paparazzi shot of her leaving an office with ‘Hope Therapy’ above the door, Isabella clearly unaware. Cam cringes. Some opportunist photographer, maybe, who recognized Isabella. How embarrassing. The stories that get told. How no one knows the truth of things unless they’re in them, not really.

She goes inside to get Adam’s manuscript. She’s only a few pages into his novel, too tired to read, but somehow savouring it, too. He might just be her favourite client. The prose is beautiful. A young male narrator, raised into a criminal family who deal in drugs and murder. On his first familial task,something is about to befall him, Cam just knows it because of the tone of the writing.

The streets are black, the windows are black, the world is black, and I am alone.

It’s a departure for him, a real hardboiled thriller, but Cam is enjoying it, when her brain can focus on it for long enough.

She gets it out to read while the real world tumbles down around her. She feels her breathing slow as she enters the portal to rainy London. Streetlights. A misty night-time outing in winter that goes wrong. She clutches the manuscript, and she’s there. She’s there, and not here.

You’re probably wondering about me. Mum and Dad were in old crime. The sort you don’t know about until you’re in it too. Money’s like water. If you have it, you pay it no attention. If you don’t, you’re in drought. We had nice cars, growing up, but they always had blacked-out windows. Dad told me my first assignment: ‘All you have to do is stand on a street corner. Literally, that’s all.’

It wasn’t all – I had to supply. Drugs. Stand there with my consignment, waiting for the dealers.

The first go, I pretended to myself that I had something else in the lining of our car: documents, gold bars. Anything but what it was.

The second time was easier.

Then the third.

Cam, engrossed, writes in the margin:Right: so this is the descent into drugs of a young man? Bold!

Her phone trills. Once, twice. Insistent, the same way itwas all those years ago, like no time has passed at all. Message after message after message.

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