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“Confirmed hostages’ bodies found. Two of them—one bullet wound each to their temples. He’d attempted to quickly hide them—back of the warehouse, behind some shelves, under some tarpaulin.”
She saved herself, knowing it might damn the others, and escaped.
he feels their eyes lock, and he thinks, I am going to find your husband. And I am going to bring him to justice. And make him pay.
Viv has packed and taken two suitcases, left him a note, saying she can’t do it anymore, can’t be married to him, to somebody who always puts work first. PS, the note goes on. It was my birthday today.
Oh wow talk about a bad day
But she can’t deny she’s relieved: criminal or not, her husband is alive, and Cam feels a weird kind of shameful relief at this.
But why was this stranger so easy to wake? Was he waiting?
Funny how some people have a way of pulling a version out of you that isn’t really you.
She filled in a form last night, to officially declare Luke dead so that she can sell the house, finally, and move on.
That baby who laughed at everything and threw balls with abandon is now an almost-eight-year-old who laughs at everything and throws balls with abandon. Funny how sometimes everything changes and sometimes nothing does. Polly was Polly from day one.
Cam is consistent: she pretends to believe he is dead or bad, while the real, true her believes he is alive and good. That’s the truth of it.
She was so sure it was him, she never considered that it might be somebody else. Somebody sinister. Somebody dangerous.
And then the bodies. The round bullet holes in their skulls. Their DNA flagged nothing on the police database. Their teeth matched no known dental records nor any on international databases either. No relatives ever, ever came forward for them, despite extensive appeals. It’s a mystery with no solution, no ending.
The truth is, you really can see too much. Until seeing something like this—two people, shot to death—becomes just another bit of admin.
The Met had put covert surveillance back on her phone after the sighting. It does no harm and, once in a while, those on the run slip up.
he sends Camilla a new message, anonymous, identical text, changing the time from eight to nine o’clock tonight: It will be interesting to see if she attends, and what she will do when she thinks her husband might want to meet her. And it will be even more interesting to go in her place and see who wants to contact her so covertly.
Niall has dealt with murder cases where the body was never found. He’s never dealt with murder cases where the victims did not appear to exist. It’s a clue. He just doesn’t know what it means.
“Why do you think Deschamps took his other hostages?” “I have no idea,” she said after a pause. “There was no talk between them.” “Why do you think he killed them?” “I don’t know that either. But I feel like perhaps he was always going to.” “Why?” “He didn’t negotiate with them. He didn’t say anything to them. It was like there was nothing anybody could’ve done.”
She didn’t hate him. Not at all.
“Sometimes, solving a case stops the demons,” Tim says. “Sometimes, looking for a solution is the problem,”
“For a hostage negotiator, you are a terrible communicator in marriage.”
Keep them going. Keep them talking. Never let them know she’s weird, and lonely, and fragile. Act natural, so natural, no one ever gets too close.
Anything that grips her she requests: that’s her rule. As simple as that.
The thing people don’t realize is if they ignore Luke, Cam feels bad. But if they mention him, she feels blindsided. They can’t win.
“I wish I’d got to see him again. He canceled our last meeting for that funeral.” “What? What funeral?” Cam says, her voice too sharp.
he still feels self-conscious about this case. In the end, nobody moved him off it but himself, but still, failure is failure, to Niall.
Luke canceled seeing Adrienne because of a funeral on the same day. The sixteenth. That was Alexander’s funeral. But . . . April 21 was the date Luke turned off his location data, wasn’t it? Didn’t Niall say that? Here is a date that matches when Luke attended a funeral, and a date that matches him obscuring his location data.
The thing about grief is that, when it happens to you, you go through the looking glass. Suddenly, everyone else lives one kind of life, with one set of problems, and you another.
“I am the wife,” she says. “Was. Of one of the hostages.”
So they did exist normally in society ? Was starting to think they were international spies or covert hitman
“They told us,” the woman says, voice hoarse. “They told us not to report them as missing. As dead.”
I wondered—would you mind telling me . . .” She lets her voice trail off in the silence. “The circumstances in which he was in touch with you?” He pauses. Cam can hear his breathing. “I wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss that,” he says. “Sorry.” “Why?” she asks. “Sorry—you’re Mr. Grace . . . ?” “Harry.” Something begins to percolate in Cam’s brain. Harry . . . Harry. “Why can’t you discuss it?” “Business,” he answers.
Half of the Met is preoccupied with a murder. Single woman shot dead on her doorstep in north London. No suspects yet.
Madison Smith
Harry Grace. He’s a heavy. A criminal. Fancy popping by tomorrow?” “For sure,” Niall says. “He lives at 22 Grove Avenue in Lewisham. The house from Rightmove.”
And just the name, that distinctive name, it evokes raw emotion on Harry’s face. It isn’t anger or guilt, or any of the usual criminal fare: it’s fear. Something Niall sees often in hostage negotiation, more rarely elsewhere. Harry is afraid of that name, and what it might mean for him.
Human interaction is twenty percent words, eighty percent other. Body language and tone.
“He bought protection.” Protection. An ancient commodity. Purchased by criminals and desperate people. From personal security all the way up to—well, worse, and mostly at prices you can never pay. Things you can never part with. “Why?” “He came to me for help. He was in hot water. I can’t say more than that.”
And clearly, Harry doesn’t think he is saving himself from the police by escaping—he’s no stranger to police interviewing suites—but from somebody else, instead. Somebody more important. Somebody more dangerous.
Somebody knows something about me. They want me to meet at a warehouse, in Bermondsey. I don’t know if they want to talk, or . . . I have to meet them though. They’ll come to my house if I don’t. They’ve been once already.
The hostages are the perpetrators. The hostage-taker acting in defense. Deschamps didn’t start the siege: they came for him. And nobody saw how it began, so nobody knew. All Deschamps knew was that he was going to be murdered. He tried to arm himself in readiness.
Funny how things look different depending on what you know to be true.
The identityless hostages have no ID because they are experienced hired criminals. Had only cash on them and Oyster cards registered to nobody. They didn’t have a personal vendetta against Deschamps. They were on a job, sent to kill him on behalf of someone else.
Guess I was on the right track when I said they must've been hit men earlier
The police are only ever interested in toeing the line. If something doesn’t fit with their narrative, they’re not complying.
This is what Niall’s struggled with all along. The due process, the red tape, the by-the-book attitudes. If he complies, it sentences Deschamps to life.
Cam gazes at him, thinking that she doesn’t like him as much as Luke, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t like him at all.
