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Cam

Form N208

Fee: ￡628

Status: Submission failed

Cam is at work the next day and – to add insult to injury – the form has already come back, its submission failed. We found some areas where we needed more information , the government email attaching it says. Cam reads it, her eyes immediately wet, steeling herself against the impersonal questions. She is not surprised to find it’s failed. Cam is dashed through with a jaded kind of pessimism these days that has spread and imbued her personality, like a single drop of ink running into water. Just last night, she paused the television during a scene where a man left a woman, and said, ‘Figures,’ to an empty room.

Luckily, two junior agents drift by outside her office, distracting her. ‘Oh, Cam,’ one of them, Lily, says, stopping. Cam smiles warmly, standing up and slipping into character. Bubbly, happy Camilla Fletcher, formerly Deschamps to people who’ve been around long enough, who nobody truly notices actually keeps everyone, these days, at arm’s length.

‘Look look look,’ Lily says, holding out her left hand.

‘Aaah, oh! Look indeed ,’ Cam says, holding Lily’s fingers gently and admiring the engagement ring. It’s a princess-cut diamond. Just like Cam’s, which lies in the bottom of Luke’s bedside drawer.

‘Took him fifteen years,’ Lily says. ‘Fifteen. Years.’

‘Worth the wait?’ Cam says with a grin that is – she is ashamed to admit – somewhat fake. Behind her, sun hits her desk. Her coffee pipes out delicious smells. And the email about the form looms like a spectre, open on her computer.

‘Oh, maybe,’ Lily says, admiring the ring. ‘We needed to save up, anyway.’

Cam closes her eyes. She remembers this phase of life. Engagements and excitement and the delicious notion that you are stepping into adulthood, finally, after all this time. Marriage and houses and kids. So much fun, it felt like pretend-play.

‘And will it be literary-themed?’ the other agent asks.

‘Ha. Maybe. Who knows?’ Lily says, smiling at nothing in the way that people in love do.

‘Sure you can get some book proofs for the party favours,’ Cam says drily.

‘That’s such a good idea!’ Lily says with a squeal.

This is enough for Cam. Too much, in fact. She congratulates her again, then retreats to her office, waits ten seconds for them to pass, and puts her head on its side on the desk, blinking, looking at her computer mouse, thinking about how her marriage ended: with the newspapers speculating endlessly on the note he left her. Suicide warning or love note? one said.

Fuck him. Fuck him.

It’s time to move from the upside-down house. That is what started this process, four months ago. Libby and her husband, Si, both say that she can’t sell up without removing Luke from the title. And she can’t do that without a declaration that he is dead.

And she couldn’t do that until seven years had elapsed. But seven years is too long to have remained there in stasis, her bedroom divided in two: her side, books everywhere. And his: neat as a pin. Preserved. The only change she’s made is that, when his bedside lamp broke, she threw it out and didn’t replace it.

She opens the form, and it’s overwhelming. Their questions, her answers, and now their comments on her answers.

Question one: please outline the circumstances in which Luke Deschamps disappeared . His name is written like that, in a different font. An impersonal insertion, one missing man in a sea of a million.

Cam rereads her answer, covering the siege, the bodies, clearly stating no one ever found out who the hostages were.

Nobody could ever identify the hostages. No DNA match, no DVLA hit, no missing relatives coming forward, no dental records. Nothing. It remains one of the great mysteries of the siege. Cam was told, by Lambert and Smith, that they searched and searched for these people, but never found them.

Stuart ambles past her office, his clothes straining slightly at their seams, gym clothes thrown away years back. She glances at him, then hides her screen.

Question two: please indicate the steps the authorities have taken to find Luke Deschamps .

Answer: Full homicide investigation – case reference LD36550. Regular contact from police chasing up all of Luke’s friends and family, anywhere we spent time together that he might seek refuge in, anywhere at all that he could have been hiding. Not a single sighting. No bank cards used, didn’t take wallet or passport. Last police visit was three years ago, except occasional calls from hostage negotiator, Niall Thompson, who said he will let me know if anything significant happens .

There are no comments on either question. Evidently, Cam passed the test.

For those first few years, Cam searched, on and off, for answers. Found the district judge whose book Luke had worked on, asked him if there was anything unusual he had exposed. He’d been baffled, said there was nothing controversial whatsoever. He had worked only civil cases, nothing criminal. She’d visited the Rightmove house again – owned by a man called Harry, a tradesman who’d never met her husband in his life. When she asked him why the house had appeared on Rightmove, he said it had been put up for sale but he had changed his mind. Maybe her lie to the police had been the truth, after all.

She’d tried to restore Luke’s laptop, once she got it back from the police in a ziplock bag. She’d hired a PI to search for him the following summer, who didn’t turn up a thing. ‘He’s either very dead, or really knows how to hide,’ he told Cam – rather insensitively, she thought. That night, she couldn’t sleep for thinking about it: Luke wouldn’t be good at hiding. He was too flippant, scatty. Liked people too much.

She finds the comments underneath the questions.

Please provide: passport and driving licence for Luke Deschamps .

We also need: names, addresses and contacts details of Luke Deschamps ’ : children, siblings, parents, first cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and any half-siblings, step-parents, second cousins, aunts and uncles by marriage .

Contact details of Polly. This form is foolish and generic. What is Polly going to say about it all? Cam’s heart wrenches for her daughter, who drew the short straw and barely even knows it. She is so like Luke. Painfully so. Gregarious, fun – and funny, too. Happy to go anywhere, to do anything, regards a trip to Sainsbury’s as a cool afternoon out. Cam used to envisage reading books with her child, but, when she suggested this recently, Polly said, ‘ Or , we could have a fashion show?’ and so they had.

She skips to the parts with more missing information.

Please also provide details of: Luke Deschamps ’ GP.

Please also provide: last-seen location. Private CCTV not acceptable.

Please also provide: evidence of Luke Deschamps ’ unused credit cards, bank cards, his final mobile phone contract.

Cam gulps at the last one: she’s continued to pay it, all these years, for reasons she’s too ashamed to go into on a form. It was easy to allow the payment to continue to leave his account and, when the money ran out of that, to transfer it to their joint one.

Their requests are overwhelming. She can’t possibly … she blows air out of her mouth, then dials the number on the bottom of the form.

‘Probate department,’ a crisp female voice says after twenty minutes’ muzak and assurances about calls being important.

‘Hi,’ Cam says, her voice stilted. ‘I’m – struggling with your form. I have received some comments back asking for extra documents, but there are so many – and most don’t apply.’

‘Please give us the form number.’

‘N208,’ Cam says, and there’s a silence on the end of the line.

‘Oh… I haven’t dealt with that one before,’ the call centre worker says, surprise in her voice. ‘Let me … yes, OK, wow. So it’s a declaration of presumed death you’re looking for,’ she says. ‘Without a death certificate?’

‘Right, yes,’ Cam says, thinking that she doesn’t want to be doing this this morning in her sunny office.

Cam gives her reference. ‘The thing is – there are a lot of unusual parts to my husband’s case,’ she says, the words well-worn trauma.

‘Okey-dokey,’ she says. ‘You will need a designated handler on this one, who can look into the facts for you, but I think you will need to make a separate rider statement about – the events.’

‘OK.’

Cam swallows. It has been her new year’s resolution, the last seven Januarys, to stop going over and over what Luke left behind. His papers and books and old computers. She’s almost stuck to it, this year, and it’s now June. Only had one slip-up after a bad day in February when she began the process of selling the house. She had a dream Luke came back for her, was shouting on the street, then disappeared.

But, nevertheless, a part of Cam – the whole of her, really – knows that, one day, she is going to get the answer.

It’s why she hasn’t told Polly the full truth. When Polly was two, Cam told her she had a daddy, but he was away. When Polly was four, Cam said he was pretty far away, but that he loved her very much. When Polly was six, Cam told her he may never come back, that he didn’t want to be away, but some people said he’d done a bad thing. Just recently, they’d had the same conversation, but, this time, Polly had sat up in bed and asked, ‘What bad thing did he do?’

Cam had puffed air into her cheeks, thinking, This is it. You never get any warning as a parent. Years of He’s had to go away and He’d never willingly leave you had led them here. And what was she supposed to say?

Cam had stared into the middle distance. ‘Well, the police think that he harmed two men, but I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No. Your father was …’ Cam struggled on the tense, her voice treacled around the tough words. ‘He was a good person. The truth is, I don’t know what happened. But I know what he was like.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Fun. Loyal. Loved you.’

‘Doesn’t sound like someone that would do bad things.’

‘No,’ and this seemed to be enough for Polly, right then. She’d rolled on to her side, pulled towards her the Jellycat Plushie she’d been dressing up in different outfits – Polly loves clothes – each morning, and shut her eyes, leaving Cam to think that she was on borrowed time. Soon, Polly would be able to google him. Someone would surely tell her his name, even though Polly now has Cam’s surname. Playground gossip would make itself known. The details would come out, somehow, probably this year or next, but Cam couldn’t bring herself to force it.

As she’d finished a more traumatic solo bedtime than usual, she passed her own room and stared in at the bed, at the single lamp. ‘I hate you,’ she said to Luke, to Luke’s absence, to Luke’s total lack of explanation. ‘I fucking hate you,’ she said again.

Cam had decided to end that day prematurely. She headed downstairs. She moved a three-feet-high stack of books out of the way of her bed, deposited them in two piles on her bedside table, and got under the duvet, looking up at the underside of it, eyes wide.

She didn’t hate him. Not at all.

She reached for her phone, found him, and called. It was why she continued to pay the bill. No rings, but his voicemail. That sweet, sweet voicemail.

‘This is Luke Deschamps. Please leave me a message.’

She’d called it twice that night. Just to know that he might be out there somewhere, somehow, listening to her.

She finds her own voice is shaking now.

‘And was there an inquest for the …’ the call handler says.

‘Yes, but nobody knows who they are.’

Cam attended the inquest, all in black, sitting in the public gallery. Listening as the facts repeated themselves like demolitions. Out of character. No explanation for it. A bullet wound in each temple. Two men, aged forty to forty-three. No ID on them. No one reported them missing, or identified their bodies.

The day after the inquest had finished, she’d applied to change her and Polly’s surname.

‘All right, I am going to assign you a handler. She’s called Daisy. She will call you back. Are you OK to make the ￡628 payment on the website?’

‘Yes,’ Cam says, thinking, What’s six hundred quid, given everything else that’s been taken from her?

Cam and Polly walk through the front door that afternoon, hot sunlight behind them. ‘How long, exactly, until the holidays?’ Polly asks Cam, breaking away from holding her hand and running up the stairs without waiting for the answer.

‘Almost a whole term!’ Cam calls after her.

‘I just want to laze around,’ Polly calls down, and Cam admires her upfrontness.

Cam flicks through the post. And – ah. As if her emails with his publisher yesterday have conjured it, here it is, in true Adam style. A Jiffy bag in her hands, addressed to her.

Inside, a bound manuscript. There’s no note. It’s the same font he delivered Out of Sight in: Baskerville, 12. Cam would recognize it anywhere. No title. Just his words.

Finally! Almost seven years later, but here it is. And just as the publisher was getting irritated, too. Cam holds it close to her chest, hoping it’s good, hoping it’s the one, glad one good thing has happened today, thinking she will read it tonight. When Polly is in bed and the world is quiet, she will sink into fiction, the way she always has.

She takes it into the bedroom, her bedroom, which is still divided in two. Her side and Luke’s, his possessions now seven years out of date, but nevertheless still there, waiting.