Out from edom book i of.., p.5
Famous Last Words, page 5
Or is it sleep deprivation, and everything else?
“Can I see your phone?”
More invasions of privacy. She numbly unlocks her phone and hands it over, reminded—perversely—of childbirth, where after the first examination, all inhibitions were lost. Look at anything, she thinks despondently. Go through it all. I no longer care.
Lambert scrolls, pen poised in his hand. Cam lets out a sigh. Luke’s jacket is on the chair and she has a bizarre urge to go and fold herself inside it, the zip done right up to the top. She’s had enough of the questioning. She is peopled out, if nothing else, feels the way she does at the end of a working day, at parties. Sometimes, too, after an evening with her chatty husband.
Lambert is studying her message chain with Luke. They’re the ones from yesterday. They’d gone to a café and texted while Luke sat at the table with Polly and Cam had ordered at the counter. A last outing before Cam went back to work.
Luke: Chicken salad with mayo or similar? Can’t see the menu!
Luke: Unless they have a car quiche? lol
Cam: Let me see what they’ve got.
Cam: I’m afraid no quiche!! I can do chicken salad. Caesar dressing?
Luke: DEFINITELY.
Cam: Coming up. Coffee?
Luke: Obviously.
“Car quiche.” One of the many in-jokes they have made up. Perhaps due to their occupations, Cam and Luke are more prone than most couples to adopting their own lexicon. Car quiche refers to a quiche they once ate from a service station that they both deemed the best of their life, only afterward they couldn’t remember where it was from. They have spent several years trying to track it down.
Cam and Luke have dozens of these words, some of them made up entirely. “Slabbidon,” an invented word for when you’re feeling jaded and under the weather for no reason. A “Ford Focus moment”—named after a time Cam worked out a problem with her client’s manuscript in the car: breakthroughs of any kind were thus called this. “Ordering the fillet steak,” that time a friend of theirs checked they were splitting the bill and then ordered the most expensive item on the menu, now a sobriquet for chancers everywhere.
And “sweepy,” perhaps their favorite expression, coined by Luke. “I feel a bit woe-is-me,” he had said one day, not long after they’d first got together and he still worked in journalism. They were eating out somewhere, the sort of place they went to before kids. Cam can’t remember the name, only that they’d sat outside and it had rained unexpectedly, rivulets running off awnings like tassels. They had stayed out there—Oh, fuck it, I’m not moving now, said Luke—the night still warm, their arms and ankles occasionally getting splashed.
“How so?” Cam had said.
Luke had gestured with a slim hand, holding his drink. “A bit down on myself. Captain Pete”—how he referred to his boss—“wants me to try and bring advertisers in for the paper.”
“And?”
“He wants me to just cold call sponsors up, like a pathetic little . . . I don’t know. A chimney sweep, begging people to let me in.”
Cam had laughed so loudly it had echoed on the rainy, empty terrace. “Are you now a Victorian? Fancy yourself the new Dickens?”
“The metaphor stands.”
And so feeling sweepy became a term used for when one is feeling disheartened, down, or small. Cam felt sweepy when the baby cried too much, when she ran out of day and didn’t get to do anything she really wanted to. Luke felt sweepy when, years after his first book came out, his publisher sent him sixty-three pence in royalties, and even sweepier when Cam took her commission off.
“And that was yesterday. So this morning you . . .” Lambert continues, putting her phone down.
“Took my daughter to nursery.”
“There someone who can pick her up?” he says, and Cam’s heart snaps in two right there like a fortune cookie.
“It’s her first day. No, I . . .” Cam says, panicked. Polly will think she’s abandoned her. Died.
“You will be needed throughout today, Camilla.” And his ominous tone is enough to make her do it.
He gestures to her phone, and Cam scrabbles for it, calling Libby. It connects immediately. Despite their near-constant texts, Cam and Libby do not ever call each other—they both hate the phone—which is why Libby answers with a panicked “You OK?”
“I need you to collect Polly,” Cam says woodenly. “From nursery.”
“What? Why?” Libby says. This is not something Cam would ordinarily ask: Libby has been trying to have a baby herself for five years. Two years of trying, two failed rounds of IUI, she and her husband Si are now about to embark on their first round of IVF. Cam supposes that the relationship with Polly might be a step too close for Libby, who always looks slightly wounded when she sees her, who once said on text, I sometimes think she looks like me. It had been so unexpected, and so loaded for her caustic sister, who only ever deflects pain with humor, that Cam hadn’t known what to say back.
“Well, if you think I’m the best person to ask, then . . .” Libby says.
And Libby doesn’t know it, but she is. There are friends, there are colleagues, but when the police are standing over you, you really only want your family.
Cam breathes down the line. “Luke is—The police are . . .” She dry gulps on the words. “They’re investigating something they say he’s done.”
Cam sees Lambert’s facial expression flicker at her careful wording.
Libby heeds the family emergency and snaps into pragmatism, the way she always does. “What do I need to do?” she asks, and Cam closes her eyes in gratefulness. A heart of gold sits in her sister’s chest.
“You need to get to the nursery for five. It’s—it’s the one on my road. You need a code word. I set it up—hang on . . .” Cam puts her hand to her forehead, trying to think. What was that word? God, Libby will be so triggered by this. She should have asked someone else. “It’s ‘upside-down,’” she says. “The phrase you need to say.” She puts Libby on speaker, then fiddles with the app for the nursery, clicking the button to say someone else will be collecting Polly.
“OK.” Libby hesitates, the pause tinny in Cam’s living room, and she leans into it, this sisterly, supportive silence that travels down the line to her. “You OK?” she says. Cam takes her off speaker, embarrassed.
“Yeah,” Cam lies. “Yeah.”
“OK. Stay in touch—if you can,” she says, and Cam is so, so thankful Libby doesn’t ask what Luke’s been said to have done.
Smith walks into the room and picks up Luke’s laptop. She’s put her hair in a bun on the top of her head, looks slightly exerted from searching, flushed. She is holding several items in clear plastic bags. Cam squints at them. His toothbrush. Two notebooks. But it’s the toothbrush that really gets to her: DNA. A private, intimate ablution, swabbed.
Two more officers thunder past her, one of them holding Luke’s wallet and passport. He didn’t even take his wallet . . . surely that must mean that he didn’t intend to leave for long? Or go far?
Or that he didn’t intend to go to work for the day at all . . .
Cam suddenly wants to take off and hide everything. Grab their things and go. Keep his secrets for him. This morning, she had a happy marriage. Now she’s supposed to hand him over to the police, together with everything she knows about him.
“There,” Cam says, pointing to the armchair where his laptop sits. Smith heads to it, but picks up his coat first, searches the pockets. She brings out a clutch of receipts and a letter. She scrutinizes them for a few seconds, then looks at Cam, who immediately stands up and looks at them. Smith doesn’t stop her doing so, but she doesn’t acknowledge it at all, leaving Cam feeling like a creep at a party.
RECEIPT 21/04
***TESCO CLUBCARD FUELSAVE***
PENCE PER LITRE DIESEL: 120
POINTS THIS VISIT: 148
SUNDRIES: CADBURY STARBAR
PAID BY CARD ENDING: 4592
RECEIPT 23/04
***TESCO CLUBCARD FUELSAVE***
PENCE PER LITRE DIESEL: 123
POINTS THIS VISIT: 172
SUNDRIES: CADBURY TWIRL
PAID BY CARD ENDING: 4592
Cam stares at the receipts. And it isn’t their contents that makes her suspicious: it’s the frequency. Fuel twice in two days, and they live in London. Hardly drive. She tries to anchor the dates in her mind, but can’t. Where had he been in order to fill up twice in the spring?
A crumpled-up letter unfurls in Smith’s hand. Luke’s bank statement.
Cam’s gaze skims the withdrawals. The two petrol fill-ups are there. Way more than normal. Cash too. But these could mean anything.
Smith’s gaze is on her. “Anything jump out?” she says lightly, and Cam suddenly thinks how foolish they are, how stupid to think that Cam might be honest about something like this, something nebulous, where her concerns can hide between the lines of the itemized bank statements.
“Nothing,” Cam lies. They’d been driving around to get Polly to sleep, but only for twenty minutes here and there . . .
Smith bags the papers. “Does he have any other computers or assets?”
“No—I . . . No. Just his phone and his laptop.”
“Social media?”
“He’s not bothered by it.”
“Right, Cam,” Lambert says, while Smith takes the laptop away. “Anything else unusual happen recently? Anything you can think of other than the burglary? However small.”
Cam closes her eyes and sees Polly on a swing in her mind, Luke laughing as she kicks her little legs and windmills her arms. That is real. That is what matters. They stay there for a few seconds in her imagination, sun in their yellow hair.
Cam opens her eyes.
Immediately, she remembers the onions. It was sometime recently, perhaps a month or slightly more ago: she can’t find anything to fix it on, and time moves both fast and slow since having Polly. Maybe April: it had been colder, dark after Polly’s bedtime.
Cam had been in the bath upstairs, had come down to the smell of dinner cooking. Luke hadn’t heard her footsteps. His back was to her, lit by the kitchen spotlights. He was chopping something, chicken sizzling noisily in a wok.
“It was so nice to have a bath and read,” she’d said. Polly had suddenly started going to bed. Previously, they’d have to drive her around sometimes to get her to sleep. The difference a few hours to themselves made had been life-changing. A drop of expensive bath oil, a crime thriller, and, most nights, Cam was away somewhere else. Rural Scotland playing detective. Or 1960s Paris. Or just London, but a different London to her own.
“Huh?” Luke had replied jumpily. He’d spun and looked directly at her.
And it was his eyes.
His expression was carefully, deliberately open. Studied. But his eyes. Red-rimmed, bloodshot. And his jaw was set, too, his lower lip tense in that way it is when you’re crying but pretending not to.
“Are you OK?” she said.
“Yes?” he’d said, an edge to it.
“You look like you’ve been crying?”
“No,” he’d said, and then, like it just occurred to him, he’d gestured to the chopping board. “Onions.”
Cam had thought about it a few times since. In the storm of the baby days, she had told herself that they were normal for feeling frazzled, for grieving an old life, unable to get anything done, competitively tired, but this had been maybe seven months afterward. Unexplained crying. Or perhaps just onions. Who’s to say?
But last night . . . hadn’t he seemed fine? I’m chatting to you and eating Jaffa Cakes. The truth is, the good days with a baby are better than the greatest days in your pre-baby life. They had been a family. A unit. Memories flit through Cam’s mind like an old projector movie. Polly’s first laugh, like liquid bubble gum. That time she recognized them in the mirror and her eyes went round with shock. The key-in-lock feeling you get when you hold them close to your chest . . .
But had he been somewhere? Been out burning fuel? That night he’d hardly slept? The one she can only just remember, can’t place the date of?
Her reverie is interrupted by Smith’s appearance in the doorway, and Cam somehow knows from a place deep inside her that she’s about to tell her something significant.
“Camilla?” she says. She’s holding the laptop. And is there just something slightly triumphant about her expression? Maybe, Cam thinks warily, wanting to shrink away from her like an injured animal.
“What?” Cam says.
Smith pauses. Their eyes lock. “Do you have any idea why this laptop was wiped at just before five o’clock this morning?”
Cam’s cheeks get hot. Smith turns, her face catching a slice of sunlight, obscuring her expression momentarily, one side light, one shaded, a Phantom of the Opera.
“No . . . I . . . No. I don’t know why.”
Her husband is a writer. All of his materials are on there. He’d only delete everything if he intended to . . . Cam can’t let herself finish the sentence, not even in her mind. The sentence that ends with something like premeditation, with malice aforethought, with intent.
“We’ll take it in,” Smith says, her words mundane but the tone serious. “See if we can restore it.”
She disappears again, and Cam can hear her rustling forensic bags.
Lambert meets her eyes and there’s an uncomfortable beat. An awkward silence. Cam thinks it is because of the laptop, but it’s actually to do with a revelation of his own.
“Right,” he says. “Camilla, there’s another piece of evidence missing.”
8
“What’s that?”
“Your husband has a gun,” he says flatly. “I assume he bought it and kept it here. But no paraphernalia has been found. No receipt, no box, no spare cartridges. Did you ever see that gun? It would help us enormously to know more about it, and where it came from.”
Cam realizes instantly that this is an accusation. “He can’t have a gun,” she says. “He wouldn’t.”
A gun. A gun. A gun. She didn’t see that on the footage. It was hidden. Had he concealed it?
“I haven’t seen a gun,” she adds.
“He does have one. If you felt it was best to turn a blind eye until now, that’s fine, Cam,” he says, misunderstanding her: he thinks she means in the house.
Cam looks at Lambert, and then at the recording device, and wonders if actually this has been the point of the interview all along. Perhaps she hasn’t been the only one withholding information.
And then the thought body-slams her: poor, poor Polly. She didn’t ask for this. Sieges and guns kept in houses and police ransacking her nursery. Cam can hardly stand it. Twinned with this comes anger, maternal anger burning bright. How could he do this? How could he leave Cam to deal with the fallout? To implicate her in it, or at least not exonerate her? To not explain a thing to Cam, to leave his baby daughter?
“Is it OK?” she says, incredulous. “To turn a blind eye to a gun? Besides, I haven’t. If I saw a gun in my house, the one my baby lives in, I’d . . . I’d . . .” She flounders, can’t finish the sentence.
“OK,” Lambert says. “Has he been buying anything else unusual?”
“Like what?”
“Hydrogen peroxide, bags of nails . . .”
“No,” Cam says, and she almost laughs with the mad absurdity of it. “You think he’s made a bomb.”
“I have no idea,” Lambert says, as though Cam is the one asking insane questions. “But we have to have as much information as possible about what might await us in that warehouse.”
Await us. Cam deals in words for a living, and these are not lost on her. They’re going to go in. Isn’t that what happens? The police go in and shoot? The suspect dies, makes the news, maybe the hostages are rescued, maybe not, and, the next week, everyone’s forgotten all of them.
“Who are they?” Cam asks, her voice faltering and hoarse, shame lacing it that she didn’t ask earlier. Only cared about the perpetrator. “The hostages?”
Lambert’s green eyes connect with hers, then he looks away. “No names yet.”
He pauses, seeming to hesitate, but doesn’t add anything else. “Deschamps was easier to identify. But he bagged the hostages almost immediately. Hoods make it kind of difficult.”
Bagged.
“Are you going to go in?” she asks.
“No firm plans to at the moment,” he says. “So long as your husband cooperates.”
“OK,” Cam says in a small voice, thinking, Please cooperate, oh please, whatever it takes. Whatever cooperation is.
“I’ll need contact details for all of his friends and family that you can think of,” Lambert says. “As part of the profiling, we need to talk to everybody.”
Cam mutely starts to write them down on a plain pad with a pen he provides her with. The pen isn’t police-issue, has the name of a rock band on the side of it that Cam’s vaguely heard of. Her handwriting is strange and jagged, the plastic pen slick with sweat, her phone hot in her hand.
And Cam doesn’t know where the thought comes from, only that it arises: there won’t be a second child. Not unless there is an amazingly credible explanation for all of this. She almost doubles over in shock from the strength of this revelation. What else won’t there be? Won’t Luke go to prison, even once the siege is done?
Poor, poor Polly. A criminal for a father.
Cam will be a single parent.
She thinks she might be sick.
She stares at her feet, lost. As lost as if she has landed on the moon, alone. She’s still wearing the shoes she put on to take Polly to nursery, when Luke was merely missing.
Lambert’s phone rings again, making Cam jump, and he takes the call, uttering only one-word sentences.
“Camilla,” Smith says, arriving back in the room. “We’ve restored a few apps, but most are deleted even from the servers. Anything relevant to you in here? Anything you want to flag?” she says lightly, and Cam is suddenly struck by the thought that perhaps the police are not merely fact-finding, here. Perhaps this is Cam’s only opportunity to confess about anything suspicious—or run the risk of being implicated herself . . .
