Page 66 of Famous Last Words

Frustrated, Cam puts the manuscript on the table, then flicks around on her phone uselessly, trying to stop them. Acquaintances, school-gate mums. Libby again. She wants to bury the phone deep in the manicured flower beds and run far away. She’salwaysbeen able to use fiction to drown out the real world … but not today.

The school gate is worse the following Monday, after a weekend spent in paranoia about the article. Hundreds of pairs of eyes on Cam, it feels like, a torch shone into the woods at night illuminating every creature. It reminds her of the weeks after the siege. The weeks the papers speculated on Luke’s note to her.

She stares down at her Kindle, even though it is being splattered by summer raindrops, reading a submission from an unpublished author, blocking it out, telling herself she’s imagining it anyway. Her phone beeps, making her jump, but she’s not checking it today, can’t deal with the prying WhatsApps, the new Facebook friend requests. She will just throw her phone away. She doesn’t need it. She doesn’t. She’ll bin it, live off-grid.

Just as she’s thinking these irrational thoughts, a woman approaches her. Older than Cam, early fifties, maybe. The first thing that Cam thinks is that this woman doesn’t want to be seen. A baseball cap, nondescript clothes, furtive body language. Maybe because of the rain, maybe not. Cam flicks her eyes to her, then back down to her Kindle, but the woman’s gaze pierces through the air towards Cam, like arrows hitting her back, one after the other after the other.

‘Excuse me?’ comes the voice, and Cam isn’t surprised.It’ll be a voyeur. It’ll be about the article, that stupid, stupid fucking article. ‘Camilla?’

‘Not interested,’ Camilla says, eyes still down at the Kindle.

‘No – I … Camilla.’ She steps closer to her. Cam inches away, goosebumps rising over her arms. ‘Please.’

‘What?’

‘I need to talk to you. You know me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I am the wife,’ she says. ‘Was. Of one of the hostages.’

Cam’s head snaps up and, at the too warm school gate, their eyes meet. Cam can’t stop looking at her, this stranger.

‘You were …?’

The woman nods quickly, mouth a tight line, eyes wet. ‘Yes.’

And Cam sees now that this visitor is a golden ticket. A key. A clue in the mystery. This woman means that Cam will now know who one of the hostages was.

‘What’s your name?’ Cam says, turning to her.

To Cam’s surprise, the woman steps backwards, perhaps panicked. ‘Can you meet? Somewhere not here?’ she says. ‘Somewhere you don’t regularly go?’ Her eyes flick left and right, and then she takes another step, moving away from Cam, tucking her grey hair further underneath her cap. Clearly, she’s compromised her safety to come here, today, to see Cam. But why?

‘Yes. OK.’

They pause, the woman clearly wanting to get away, but Cam steps towards her once again. ‘Wait,’ she says. ‘Who was your husband? What was his name?’

‘They told us,’ the woman says, voice hoarse. ‘They told us not to report them as missing. As dead.’

‘Who?’

She says nothing.

‘When? Shall we meet?’ Cam asks, desperate for information.

‘Tomorrow?’ she says. ‘Meet at Shadwell station. Nine o’clock in the morning. That isn’t on your commute or anything?’

Cam nods quickly, thinking, Oh my God, this woman is a widow because of Luke, but thinking, most of all, that she saidSomewhere you don’t regularly go, which must mean that Cam is being followed.

31

Anonymous Reporting on Camilla

‘She met Madison Smith at the school gate,’ I say in a low voice in the laundrette. ‘I saw the whole thing.’

My brother’s eyes meet mine. Today, it’s raining, long summer rains, and the laundrette is cool and dim. It smells of damp clothes and damp weather.

‘Noted,’ he says. A pause, then he adds, ‘Good work.’

---