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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 lock-up under my name.

Cam remembered it. A lock-up 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 for ever. 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.

‘Then you filled the form in, to declare me dead: I got an alert on my email as part of their automatic procedure. And it was the final thing. I sent the coordinates here almost immediately. They went wrong – I was here, in this lock-up, the entire time. I had been researching the Hales on the dark web, and I began writing when you started to try and sell the house, typing day and night on a beat-up old laptop I bought for cash. I finished it that night.’

‘I see,’ Cam says softly, thinking of all of the years past, how many times they had just missed each other, the danger he was in, how if Luke hadn’t been out that night, if Polly hadn’t been awake, if, if, if … ‘And you put the story in the book. Their story. And the clues for me to find you.’

‘You were always good at reading me,’ he says simply. ‘And my words.’

He looks at Cam, his eyes full of love. ‘What is she like?’ he asks, and Cam knows just who he means: their daughter, Polly, the only witness to Luke’s crime. The person who, all along, knew the score, but didn’t know it, too.