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He’s a ghostwriter, for MPs and celebrities,
Cam is her literary agent.
The second Cam met Luke, he made her laugh, and, just like that, she was utterly beguiled despite everything: that he, a writer, was her client, and she his agent.
In every couple, Cam thinks, there is a calm one and an anxious wreck, and Cam is most definitely the latter to Luke’s former.
If anything is written on one side. Huh? If anything? And crossed out? Cam holds the piece of paper up to the light. She turns it over. It’s been so lovely with you both. Lx.
Suicide Note? Final goodbye before he lands in prison?
Motherhood, for introverts, is a special kind of difficult, the usual escape routes not available, a thought Cam regularly feels guilty about, but is nevertheless true.
she thinks about that first statement. Everyone needs a break. It contained a darkness within it, didn’t it? Is this Luke getting his break?
She likes language in all its forms, and a well-timed swearword is the best.
Two officers, one wearing a white shirt and black stab vest, one in a suit, no caps in hands but otherwise just the way she imagined, striding into her workplace. And Cam knows, somehow, in some deep, dark place inside her, that they’re here for her.
“Your husband hasn’t been taken.” “Oh! Good!” “We believe that he is the person who has taken the hostages,” he finishes quietly.
He squints, trying to work out how the perpetrator has power over the individuals in their hoods, and then he sees it: the handgun tucked into his dark sleeve. A Beretta, a pistol.
Policing is antisocial. Everybody knows it.
that it’s not actually about talking. In major terrorism jobs you have two negotiators in: one to talk, and one to merely listen.
every person, every single human on Earth, desperately wants something, and it is Niall’s only job to work out what.
“Isabella Louis. Forty-two. Her husband, George Louis, has phoned her in.” “George Louis?” Maidstone says immediately—sharp as a tack: George Louis is in the police.
The rendezvous point: the place they will gather, assess intelligence, be briefed, and, more important, think and strategize.
The week before that, he’d received a letter in the post, turned around, and looked at Cam, expression low and furious. “The car was due its MOT three weeks ago,” he’d said, but his tone wasn’t rueful, or even slightly irritated: it was ice cold.
Her husband is the main character in her life, and what he goes by matters to her in this out-of-control environment.
perhaps, in hindsight, had he seemed more rattled than she would expect?
The truth is that Luke’s been tetchy for a good few weeks, exploding sometimes over undone household admin, nappies, the MOT.
these things, these intangible but damning things, Cam is not willing to give to him. There are some lines she cannot cross, and here they are. Because, despite everything—everything—she believes her husband to be good.
He didn’t even take his wallet . . . surely that must mean that he didn’t intend to leave for long? Or go far? Or that he didn’t intend to go to work for the day at all .
And it was his eyes. His expression was carefully, deliberately open. Studied. But his eyes. Red-rimmed, bloodshot. And his jaw was set, too, his lower lip tense in that way it is when you’re crying but pretending not to.
The truth is, the good days with a baby are better than the greatest days in your pre-baby life.
“Do you have any idea why this laptop was wiped at just before five o’clock this morning?”
Cam doesn’t know where the thought comes from, only that it arises: there won’t be a second child.
she tumbles across an invisible line, drawn somewhere between her and Smith, made of loyalty and love for her husband.
“Your husband didn’t report the burglary,” he says, voice low: the tone of a man aware a woman’s husband has lied to her.
She stays there for a few minutes, scarf held to her chest, just trying to slow her breathing against his scent. It’s funny, she thinks: it hasn’t been coat weather for months. She looks up, startled, as Smith arrives with Libby.
“Do you think she’s covering for him?” “No.” Lambert places his drink on Niall’s table, then puts his hands on his hips, which somehow makes his forearms and biceps look even larger. “But I think that she would.” “Why?” “Loves him,” Lambert—terminally single, on all the dating apps—says softly. “It’s kind of sad, actually.”
A guy has taken three hostages in a warehouse. However, the news outlets say nobody knows the identity of the hostages. And I’m just thinking—isn’t that really creepy?!
Haha what if it turned out to be an elaborate advertising campaign for some book with hired actors? Just an insane crack theory
This looks like a person who wants to shoot: he can’t deny
Niall gets occasional glimpses at Deschamps’s features, and he looks . . . well, scared. That’s it. He has got scared body language. Furtive and somehow quite meek.
They learned about pacing and leading, about priming the suspect to start to agree with you.
“Above all else, reciprocity: never give up something without getting something in return.”
Reg plates got covered in mud, it seems. Stopped pinging the ANPR on the way home. You can see where the mud has crusted off when he starts pinging them again in May. “At the same time he turned off his location data.”
you have all these instincts and ideas about what to do for the best, and they’re culled and culled by red tape and processes.
Tell my wife that I love her. Her and Polly.”
“He said he loves his wife.” Maidstone looks incredulous. “Like a final parting shot? A goodbye? A suicide note?” Niall appraises Maidstone. How can two people read the same set of circumstances so completely differently? “I took it as a gesture of submission,”
The thing is, Deschamps doesn’t want to be there. The body language, the sobbing. All of it. That’s what it is. That’s what his instincts say.
“There are four human beings in there, not three.”
Cam stares at it, this building with no windows, thinking only one singular thought: that this was planned. Look at it. No glass in the door. No possibility of a witness. Her eyes drift upward to the layers of brick after brick after brick: and no escape.
But all she is thinking about is that something happened to her husband on April 21. Something that made him drive a long way, and cover things up . . . that later made him cry. But what?
“That’s my wife!” he bellows at full volume. “If you’re listening, hostage-taker, we’re going to come in and we’re going to fucking kill you!” Every single hair on Niall’s back and neck rises up. He stays on the line but turns to stare at the warehouse. There is no way Deschamps didn’t hear that down the line.
Oh lord
Niall forgets this, sometimes, at the height of negotiations, but at the end of every siege he remembers there is always damage done, even to the living. Especially to the living.
“He let me go,” she says, eyes wet. “He said he would let me go. He knew I was just caught up in it . . . accidentally, because we own the building.”
And just as he’s thinking that they will be OK, he hears them. Two gunshots. The ones that, ultimately, will end his career.
And here it is, a wave of awful closure, of fear. The question of whether he was the shooter or the victim.
