Page 87 of Famous Last Words

But perhaps for more than one crime.

‘I’m very sorry,’ Cam says, ten minutes later. The tea Charlie made her has cooled, and Cam knows she’s been rude, sitting there in the living room, silent and alone. ‘I had to take that.’

‘Everything OK?’ he asks. He’s finished his tea, is looking at her with an open expression, the way you might after somebody has embarrassed themselves. Been sick from too much wine on a first date, or called you by the wrong name.

‘Sort of …’ she says. She sips her tea and then swallows, deliberating. ‘I think I probably need to fill you in on something.’

‘Well,’ Charlie says, turning away from her, ‘I enjoyed my tea so much I’m going to make a second. So I’m all yours.’

And it’s that sentence that does it. He’s been so patient. Four months of sporadic dates and closed-off conversations and abandonments in Côte Brasserie.

She thinks about what Libby said in Gordon’s, and about what Niall might be telling her tomorrow about a woman, shot at point-blank range on her own doorstep, then looks at Charlie’s open face, those sweetly folded tea towels, and takes a tentative step towards him. She could tell him. She could just confide in him, and see what happens. She could use anear, anyway, if nothing else, tonight, while she waits for bad news once again, once more.

‘It reallyisa long story,’ she prevaricates.

‘Always best told over tea,’ Charlie says, raising the mug in a kind of apologetic gesture. ‘Shall we go out? It’s so warm now …’

Cam nods. ‘Yes.’

Together, they head down and out into the garden, through Cam’s bedroom, one half stuffed full of books, one half empty that Charlie glances at in surprise. It’s awkward; they ignore it.

Outside is warmer than the house, and humid, too, and they sit down at the table together. Charlie’s face is slightly expectant in the last of the evening sun.

‘I mean – you really wouldn’t believe it,’ Cam says.

‘Try me.’

‘Do you remember,’ she says, hesitating, the shame of it still weighing on her like the close air, set to storm again, ‘a siege in central London in 2017, where the hostages were found dead?’

Charlie’s brow furrows, lowering, then clears in understanding. Cam is used to this sequence as people try to recall what to them was a news story they may or may not have read that took up less than two minutes of their life. ‘Maybe – yes. I don’t know. What happened?’

‘One was released. Two died. And the kidnapper disappeared.’

‘Oh,’ Charlie says. ‘Yes. Idoremember. I had a very boring job at the time. Even more so than now,’ he adds, his tone gentle, aware that the conversational topic is difficult. ‘I remember refreshing the news.’

‘Well, I’m the wife.’

He holds her gaze, saying nothing.

‘… Of the kidnapper. Of Luke,’ she adds. ‘Deschamps.’ She hesitates. ‘It’s my married name.’

Charlie blows a breath out of the side of his mouth. ‘Right. I see.’ His eyes flick this way and that. Cam waits patiently, lets it land.

He pauses for a beat, working it out. Then his eyes meet hers. ‘Fucking hell,’ he says. She isn’t sure she’s ever heard him swear like that.

She explains the full story. The siege, the aftermath, the coordinates just recently, the phone call from Niall, while Charlie listens, his expression concerned. The only things she leaves out are Alexander Hale, James Lancaster and Madison. The darker, weirder things that she doesn’t want to – and can’t – explain. The things more closely associated with present-day criminality.

‘Put off yet?’ she ventures when she’s finished. ‘I mean – there’s baggage and then there’sbaggage.’

‘No, not put off – never put off.’ Charlie’s voice is soft and serious on those syllables, and Cam sets her tea down on the table, still unfinished, and looks at him.

‘It’s – I … I’ve …’ she says, tired now. ‘It’s been a hard seven years.’

‘I get that. So, you’re not CF, but CD.’

‘Sort of. It was easier to go back,’ she says.

‘I see.’