Page 97 of Famous Last Words

‘What’s that?’

‘Well,’ Cam says, and she shifts Polly on her hip. She hasn’t held her like this for months, maybe even years. ‘Two men didn’t like your dad. They tried to hurt him, so he hurt them back. He had no choice. And he left and we don’t know where he is. But’, Cam says thickly, her throat closing up with emotion, ‘here’s what I know. He loved you so much. And he never wanted to do anything bad, at all. I know that.’

‘That’s nice,’ Polly says, a tired smile crossing her features. ‘I didn’t know all that. That he – that he had to go away to escape the men who didn’t like him?’

‘Yes, exactly,’ Cam says, though really, who knows?

‘So he didn’t want to leave.’

‘No.’

‘I like hearing that.’

‘I like saying it,’ Cam says.

‘Sometimes people do bad things for good reasons. We learnt in school,’ Polly says, sounding about twenty years old. ‘So is he one of those people?’

‘Yes,’ Cam says thickly. ‘He didn’t ever want to do anything bad.’

‘Sounds nice. My dad.’

‘I think so,’ Cam murmurs, and they rest their heads together for a few seconds, both silent. And she’s so glad. She’s so glad she held out for the truth, or a piece of it, anyway, so that she could tell it to her daughter. Tell the truth about Luke’s legacy, and who Polly is a part of.

‘We need to go home, but go back to sleep, I’ll carry you,’ she says to Polly, and Polly looks at her, blinks once, then slides a little bit down Cam’s body in her sleeping bag, comedically, cartoon-style, and closes her eyes. And that’s that.

As she walks down the stairs, she hears the conversation explode with laughter, hears her husband’s name. Surely not, not with Charlie there?

She stops, unconsciously, not wanting to go any further. Drunk people and their gossiping. Her sister and her opinions that Cam ought to move on. She is tired of it all.

‘No, he was so rich, we are quids in on the commission,’ Si says. ‘Despite his weird habits.’

Ah. Just gossip about their estate-agenting business. Cam’s shoulders relax. She will go home, later, to Adam’s wonderfully dark gem of a book – the protagonist has just told the reader that somebody does know the identity of his killer – and then sleep. Maybe this life isn’t so terrible.

‘I don’t know it – is it a wealthy area?’

‘Yeah – near Islington.’

‘Is it?’

‘Look – let me show you,’ Si says, his voice loud and exuberant. Cam is in the hallway, now, and can hear everything. ‘It’s a tiny borough, hang on …’ He speaks as he types it in. ‘St Luke’s.’ Ah. That is why she thought they were discussing her husband.

But … St Luke’s, near Islington. And Cam knows before she gets her phone out, before she googles it, what she’s going to find. She knows she’s just glimpsed a truth, like a prism that shines the light in the exact right place, just for a second, until it disappears again to darkness.

She types the coordinates in, then zooms out and out again. And sure enough, there it is: those coordinates she was sent were in the St Luke’s Borough of London.

Surely, they can only have been sent by one person.

Her husband: he chose them because they contain his name: it was a clue.

46

Niall

‘Oh, it’s you,’ Viv says to Niall as she opens her door. As she says this, her face drops, and the evening sun scorches the back of Niall’s neck like a blush of shame. He’s calling in on his way to a little reconnaissance mission in Whitechapel, just to watch and wait. Swung by Viv’s on a whim.

Viv is in full off-duty mode. Bare feet, two toe rings on. The hammered silver catches and fragments the sun into thrown diamonds across the front path. He can’t stop looking at those bare feet. Pink polish. She’s wearing an oversized white something – he doesn’t know the term, but it’s the kind of thing you’d throw on over a swimming costume on holiday. It comes to her slender mid-thighs. She has what he knows will be a Chablis in her left hand. She stands on one foot, the other rubbing her ankle, as she looks up, perplexed, at him.

‘I’m on my way somewhere,’ he explains. ‘Thought I’d call in.’