Out from edom book i of.., p.30
Famous Last Words, page 30
She tells the driver to speed, pays using her phone and reaches the quiet of what she is sure is her husband’s hiding place. The book said it. All along, the book revealed it to her.
A simple tap on a simple door. It opens just a crack, and she’s brought inside, willingly so, by hands as familiar to her as her own, as their daughter’s.
He takes her into the darkness, closes the wooden door behind her.
And—
And—
It’s him. It’s Luke. She has reached him before everyone.
Her husband.
The missing love of her life. Her mouth parts, and her body stops all functions, or so it feels, and she’s right in front of him—real, warm-bodied him—and everything has slowed way down like it did that first day, the day it all began.
Luke’s eyes meet hers.
She holds his gaze for two seconds, three. His hair is darker than it was and he’s so thin and she cannot, cannot stop looking at him. Here he is. Returned to her.
He stares back at her and he makes a gesture, bringing his hands together across his body as if in prayer. He holds them there for several seconds, palms on his heart, just looking at her, and that’s how she knows it.
She knows everything she needs to: that he’s been wanting, needing, all this time, to come back to her, trying as hard as he can, but because of these people surrounding him, could not. He wrote to her instead. A one-hundred-thousand-word love letter. An explanation.
She breaks eye contact, casts her eyes downward. Thinking, Thank God. Thank God he’s good. For her, and for Polly.
Their fingertips meet, and then their hands, and then, finally, their foreheads touch together, just once, their eyes locking together, reunited.
Later, five minutes, ten, Cam doesn’t know, he speaks.
“I owe you—an explanation,” Luke says.
“You wrote me a book.”
“I know. I . . .” He leans back. They’re in a tiny, wooden room. Inside is a dirty old pillow, a sleeping bag, and a gun. There’s no natural light, only what filters in from the streetlights outside. A slice catches Luke’s blue eyes that sheen gray. His eyes. There they are. She’d forgotten the precise shape of them. They had been lost to time, like everything. Photographs couldn’t conjure them. Nor could her imagination.
“I’ve been living here since I sent the book. Hoping you’d figure it out.”
“I did.”
“Does anyone know we’re here?” she says, glancing behind her to the door. “I—Someone knows about that book, I think. Your enemies.”
Luke’s entire face turns white. “Do they?” he says.
“They . . .” She doesn’t know where to begin to explain about Charlie. “They have the book.”
Luke’s head sinks to his chest, a condemned man.
“But we can help you,” she says. “Please . . . if you explain. We can help you.” She doesn’t elaborate on who, not yet.
He grabs the pillow and passes it to Cam, who sits on it in the tiny wooden cubbyhole. She strains to listen, but she can’t hear anything. Nobody approaching: they’re alone. For now.
“Talk. Fast,” she tells him.
“I took Polly out,” Luke tells her. “A night in April. She wouldn’t sleep. It took so long, I ended up in the middle of London.”
“Yes. I got this from the book.” She scoots her body close to him. And somehow, although the truth is about to unspool in front of her, she feels deep within her that their time is borrowed. His body looks fragile, too thin. But there’s something else too. The hard wood of the room they’re in. The metal gun. And that body, soft and vulnerable. He’s made it this far, she tells herself, but it can’t stop the feeling of foreboding.
“I saw two kids, youths. I later found out they were enemies from rival families. One shot the other, right there in front of me. I vaulted out of the car without thinking and pulled him off, shoved him roughly to the ground. He hit his head on a bollard I didn’t see. He was out cold. I took his pulse after a few seconds—and . . . nothing. I mean . . . I just stood over them. Two bodies. One bleeding from a gunshot to the chest. The other with a head injury. And I thought . . .”
“God, Luke,” Cam says, stunned. The pieces of the book tessellate with his story, and here it is. The answer she has craved for so long. And it’s nothing buried in his work or deep in his past. It’s just a chance encounter on one night that changed his life forever.
“I just stood there and—Cam, I just didn’t know what to do.”
“I bet.”
“I thought: No one will believe me. Who do you believe killed the two dead people? The alive one. Right?” he says, and, even now, seven years on, his voice catches on the words, like somebody losing their footing.
“I left the scene, but then went back.”
And Cam is pleased about this. The reasons are so deep and murky she can’t tell why, but she is, even though it caused everybody seven years of pain. His conscience, there in the past, in good working order.
“And I thought about phoning the police . . . handing myself in. But then someone saw me. The father of one of the victims. He just looked bad. Powerful, clearly concealing a weapon. We locked eyes, and I fled. Just left. Later, he said he only knew his son had died when the police knocked on the door, but it wasn’t true. How awful, to leave your son’s body to stage your surprise, to leave him to go home: to ensure that you could go after the perpetrator yourself, lawlessly. Later, I found out on the dark web that Alexander had been asked to kill a dealer by his father.”
Luke’s book is springing to life, right there in front of Cam. She can’t believe she ever thought it was Adam’s. No one can write like Luke.
“And then I looked them up, and they’re all over the dark web. Two warring, awful families. Two heavies for fathers. I thought I had managed to get away with it, for a while. Couldn’t sleep with the guilt, but no one yet had found me. But then I did something awful. I had this dream that I went to hell. The devil was next to me, saying I was a murderer. A killer. His skin was blood-red, he had a pitchfork—it was . . . I woke up in a panic. I had to atone. I found out it was the funeral. So I went. I spent the day in turmoil, then went hours after it had finished. I thought I’d just visit the grave, afterward. Like an idiot. But he was still there. And he saw me.
“He must have followed me home. A few days later, he, or someone he sent, broke into ours, to check it was me, looked at my ID. Later, a note through the door: the warehouse address. They were toying with me, these mafia. The warehouse, the date and time: I knew it was my death warrant.”
“Go on,” Cam says, but Luke stops for just a few moments, perhaps overcome. He slows his breathing in a deliberate way Cam doesn’t remember him doing before.
“Do you know the maddest thing?” he says. “I can count on one hand the number of conversations I’ve had these past seven years. I hardly use my voice.”
Cam closes her eyes in sadness. Her husband the extrovert. The man who couldn’t stop chatting at work, sent away to live alone because of something he did that was right.
She thinks of that morning, the day of the siege, when she woke up alone. Far worse happened to Luke that day.
“I had no choice but to go. I left you the note to . . . I didn’t know what would happen. I wanted to say . . . it had been so lovely with you both.”
“It had,” Cam says sadly, thinking of the lemon-drop summer morning, her ignorance, that she had no idea what was to come. That there wouldn’t be another normal morning for seven years. She hesitates on that thought.
Maybe tomorrow will be the first.
“I knew your note meant something.”
“I started to say if anything, but I didn’t want to incriminate you. I didn’t want there to be any risk it appeared you might know what I was doing, and could have stopped it if it should end badly. So I left it. I’m sorry. My head was . . . in a scramble.”
“I know.” The note. The note that, in the end, meant nothing.
“But in the end,” he says, his voice brighter, “it was a good phrase to put in the book—I knew, years on, you’d pick it out.” He smiles a wan smile. “My agent.”
“Your wife,” she says, thinking really of his final note to her: his book.
“I turned up. Knowing it was over, really. An arrest was the best I could hope for. Inside was the kingpin’s wife, Isabella, and two heavies with their faces covered. After a few minutes, they put her in a balaclava too. I knew it was over, then, for me. All I could think about was survival, and you and Polly. I watched and waited. I was late. Eventually, the hit man put his weapon on a table, and I used the opportunity. Sprung in. Took the gun. Directed them into chairs. Didn’t know about the CCTV. Or that it would only capture part of the room. How it would look . . . I tied them up. Was going to call the police myself and confess.”
“And then—the hostage negotiator.”
“Right. The phone goes. Isabella says to me if I let her answer it, and let her go, she will tell me how to get out of there without the police or the hit men catching me. It was—I was so scared, Cam. My system was in overdrive. I took her up on it. Only, when I released her fully, she untied the hostages, so quick, ordered them to wait, then overpower and kill me once she’d left. They came for me. I had no choice but to shoot. The first then the second, quickly, close range, had them in a headlock.” He holds Cam’s gaze. “In self-defense.” He pauses, eyes glazed. “I was surprised by how small the holes were. I kept thinking about it, years later.”
And—it’s the way it ought to be—only Cam knows how he truly feels, and what really happened. Once more, she knows her husband’s innermost thoughts. The world watched the siege, the police tried their best to solve it, and Cam read the BBC live feeds and felt humiliated. But here, only she knows the full truth of it, thanks to his book, thanks to his last words, just for her. The way it should be: intimate communication between husband and wife restored.
“Then?”
“Then I left. A fugitive.”
“And you never came back,” she says.
“I had enemies everywhere. The police. The Louises. The Hales. I was a dead man walking.”
“I know.”
“But I did come back. I tried to come back. That night. I waited and waited in the Lewisham house. Did the police tell you about Harry?”
“Yes. Rightmove. They found it on your phone.”
“Ah. He lists it on there perpetually but never sells it. Uses it as a location for clients. Anyway, that night, the police were on your tail. I had to tell Harry to deny he had me. He let me out of the bathroom window, right before they came in and searched the house. You were right there, out on the street, and I couldn’t get to you.”
“Oh, Luke. You were there.”
“I was. And you came for me.”
“Tried to,” Cam says, thinking of all of their missed chances, missed connections. How close they were, really, all this time. He in the warehouse; she outside it. He in Harry’s house; she waiting on the street below.
“I know. I know you did,” he says.
“I lived in Kent for a while, working for cash in hand, living virtually off-grid. Each month, I swore I’d sort it out. I was on the dark web all the time, trying to find other enemies of this family, people who might help me bring them down. The Lancasters, even, but I was too scared to involve other criminals. Trying to pluck up the nerve to go to the police. To tell my side of it. And then . . .”
“And then what?”
“You started to enquire about moving house. Months ago. You asked for a new mortgage valuation, the bank sent it to my email too. I had to log in at internet cafés, using shields to block it, so no one would know. But I got addicted to it. To knowing what you were doing. There were only ever emails about joint things, but it was like . . . a connection to you. Out there in the ether,” he says with a self-conscious little laugh. “So I came back. One night. But someone in a hood saw me. A shit coincidence, I think, though my enemies are criminals, and have footmen everywhere. He followed me a little, until I ran, and I was too scared to try to physically return. So I started to think about other ways I could tell you.”
And Cam closes her eyes in such exquisite pleasure. All this time, all the time she thought she saw him on the Tube and at the school gate, those times she wished for him at parties, the moments when she looked into the sky and thought of him, he was doing the same about her.
59
Niall
Dungeness. A jut of land at the very bottom of England, sticking out like the crest of a tiny wave. The A-road turns coastal.
Niall’s speed slows even more. A bleak, postapocalyptic tarmac road cuts through desert-flat headlands dotted with occasional huts and shops and pubs and lighthouses.
The car slows to a stop in front of an abandoned-looking hut, the nuclear power station in the background, lit up and blinking like a spaceship.
The air is warm and dark and the sea rushes elsewhere somewhere. Otherwise, all is quiet, the power station a sentient being in the background, the cars abandoned.
Is Luke in there? Niall stares at where the Hales and the Louises are heading. They can see Niall now, and they’re running. They know he’s about to act.
They head to a lighthouse; Niall follows them. They must know his precise location. It must be in that book, the book that they have taken. After a second, Isabella turns around and looks at him for just a moment. Their eyes meet and, suddenly, he wonders if she is the enemy after all, or just forced into crime by George.
The lighthouse is tall and striped black and white, windows boarded up, illuminated only at the top, throwing light and shadow onto the surrounding pavement. The windows of the hut are shut up, dark, nothing happening.
The Hales start to try to break into the lighthouse, pulling the wood away from the door. And it makes sense: the police never checked it. It looked boarded up, uninhabitable. Niall shakes his head.
Noise breaks out all around him. “You killed our boy!” somebody yells. It’s Janet Hale.
“Come out,” George Louis commands. He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a gun. A small pistol that he handles as easily and as familiarly as a mobile phone.
He cocks it, and Niall touches his own weapon and thinks of Luke, in there, alone and waiting.
George hasn’t turned around to acknowledge Niall yet.
“Police!” Niall barks.
George moves his body slowly, head fixed, to stare at Niall.
“Put your hands in the air,” Niall says, and his instruction goes ignored. Immediately, George whips back around and begins to try the door of the lighthouse, but it doesn’t budge.
Niall thinks of Cam. And he thinks of these people, who will never listen. Who will never accept their role in their child’s murder. Some people cannot be negotiated with. The truth is too painful for them.
George shoots at the mechanism of the door. The noise reverberates all around the quiet coast. Niall flinches with it. He didn’t know it would escalate so quickly. The second time he’s been surprised by gunshots.
“Deschamps!” George shouts. “Open up!”
“Stop!” Niall yells, and George whips around, the gun still trained. In his entire career, Niall’s never once looked into the barrel of a gun aimed at him. The round metal seems to fill his vision, a circle of menace.
“No,” Niall says, knowing it might be one of the last things he says. “You’ve got to stop this—Deschamps is—”
“He would still be here without Deschamps,” George says, and pain constricts his words like tight laces.
“No, he wouldn’t,” Niall says. “You can’t bring someone into crime and not pay the consequences . . .” but his voice trails off. George is not listening. “What do you want to achieve?” Niall says, but this is no negotiation. It’s not a two-way street. “You’ve killed, haven’t you? To try and avenge?”
“She was going to break confidence,” George replies.
“What do you want?”
“Revenge,” George replies simply, and he’s turned away from Niall, and he’s got the door open.
The world becomes silent and distant as Niall realizes what is about to happen. He holds his own weapon close to his body and seems to rise up above and outside himself. As he surveys his body language, he realizes, with all of his training and knowledge, that he is about to shoot: he has the agitated posture, he is aiming.
George Louis finally heads into the lighthouse and points his gun. And Niall gets there first. He pulls the trigger, and sound explodes all around him. And that’s when he realizes it: the dreams weren’t the gunshots from the past; they were from the future. From now.
Afterward, after everybody is maimed, tied up, his hostages, Niall opens the door to the lighthouse while he waits for the police. But it’s empty: no one there. He was protecting no one.
60
Cam
The book has taken everybody to Dungeness, but only Cam could read between the lines of what her husband wrote to her in his secret manuscript, in what he felt might be his last words to her, the explanation from one lover to another. That if anything . . . if anyone ever wanted to escape the family business, the weapon I always used was buried in the garden. That important items were in a lockup under my name.
Cam remembered it. A lockup under my name. She took a chance that he meant St. Luke’s, came here, and it paid off. They’re alone. They’ve got some time. They hope.
“What made you send the book?” Cam asks.
“I thought if you sold the house, I’d lose you forever. I don’t know. It’s so symbolic, isn’t it? It wasn’t that I couldn’t find you. It was, to me, evidence that maybe you’d moved. On.” He holds her gaze here, and she decides not to mention Charlie. Not yet: there’s time for that.
