Page 93 of Famous Last Words

‘Why did someone want him dead?’

‘I don’t know that, Camilla. But I’m working on it.’

‘And why would he go on the run? He’d face the police if it was only the police who wanted him. I know he would,’ Cam says. He’d come back and serve his time. We’d visit him. ‘The people who want him dead – they killed Madison. They’re still at large.’

‘I know.’

‘How did you know? To contact Harry?’

‘Look – the Met have been surveilling your phone,’ Niall says softly, slowly. ‘They wanted to be sure Deschamps wasn’t using you to hide. I shouldn’t be telling you that. I could be sacked.’

‘You’ve been looking at – at my communications?’ Cam says, reeling. Seven years on, and she still is under suspicion.

‘The Met were surveilling you after you were sent the coordinates. Briefly. It enabled them to try and get some answers.’

‘Right,’ Cam says, trying to digest this, trying to work out how she feels. ‘I didn’t know you knew about those.’

‘Sadly,’ he says, sympathetically, ‘it yielded nothing.’

She pauses. ‘I don’t care about the Met,’ she says. ‘I care about the truth.’

The truth. ‘I know. Me too.’ Niall kicks his trainer against the old carpet. It’s cold in the room, and Cam is beginning to shiver in her wet clothes. ‘They don’t know I’m here. Theywere not interested in what I found out. They want only to catch your husband.’

Cam nods in understanding. ‘I see,’ she says, grateful for a copper who will go out on a limb.

Cam walks over to the windowsill and joins Niall. She closes her eyes. London disappears, replaced momentarily by blackness. She opens them again and there it is, still shimmering below. ‘Do you think he’s alive?’ Cam says, looking at the cityscape beneath them.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, and Cam is again grateful – for his honesty.

Thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance.

A beat. Lightning brightens overhead like a flashbulb.

‘I don’t know,’ Niall says again.

‘I can feel it,’ Cam says. ‘I can feel it.’ She looks at Niall, hoping she can trust him. Hoping that this is the beginning of the end. That two heads are better than one and, eventually, they can find out what happened, once and for all.

Niall seems to hesitate, just slightly. The information begins to freefall, as fast as the rain outside. ‘The man on the dark web – Harry. He told Deschamps he could hide him, if necessary – way back when.’

London tilts beneath Cam, as though she is in a lift. ‘You think he could still be hiding.’

‘Maybe.’

She puts a palm to the glass, for a second pretending Luke is just beyond it, his palm against the other side, looking in at her, waiting for her.

‘I’m going to keep working on this. Off record.’ He looks directly at her.

This opens the floodgates for Cam. As the rain whirls around outside, she tells Niall everything she knows. Thefuneral, Alexander Hale and James Lancaster. Alexander’s father and the frosty reception she got at their flat. Luke going out that night in April. His outbursts in the weeks before the siege. The things she’s never told anybody. This man who is betraying the police must be on her side.

She pauses, then says: ‘When Madison asked to meet me – she saidsomewhere you don’t regularly go.’

These words seem to have an effect on Niall, who clenches his jaw. ‘And she was still killed,’ he says softly. ‘Even though, clearly, it was you who she thought may be followed.’

Cam looks at him, thinking. ‘Right,’ she says eventually.

‘I think whatever Luke was caught up in clearly wasn’t something he felt he could report,’ Niall says, looking at her directly. He leaves a pause.

‘And he hasn’t killed his enemies, after all. He killed their heavies,’ she fills in.