More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Even if he’s out there,” he says, “even if he didn’t mean to do it, he never came back to you.” “That’s it,” Cam says. “Really, I can never forgive him. There can’t be an excuse for what he did. For staying away so long.”
“Will you tell the Met I withheld information from them?” He almost laughs. “Not if you don’t,” he says, thinking of the secrets he’s keeping from the Met.
“He was good,” she says, tilting her face upward. The rain lands on it, illuminating her in silver. Niall doesn’t answer. She says it again, almost to herself. “He was good.”
They both know the implication of this, though they don’t say it. Whoever wanted Luke dead is still out there somewhere. They have killed Madison Smith. They may even have killed Luke. And they might want Cam dead too.
Sometimes, you have to put aside your own feelings when someone else’s are worse, that’s all.
Libby and Polly wouldn’t be so close if Luke hadn’t gone, thinking about how Libby feels as if Polly is her own in a way she might not otherwise,
“You posted me your book?” she says. “Your crime novel . . .” “No, I didn’t,” Adam says. “Oh,” Charlie says awkwardly. “Someone else, maybe? Something unsolicited?” he says, clearly trying to smooth things over.
He didn’t write that anonymous book. Somebody else did. And they wanted her, and only her, to see it.
how funny it is that for his entire career, he’s been trying to make people open up, and now it’s him. It’s him who’s got to do it, and Jess, his negotiator, is sitting in front of him.
Someone took it off. That must be it: the double murder wasn’t on the system. The hostages had no identities on the system.”
“The only person who was connected both to the hostages and to the police,” he says. “A man called George Louis, Isabella’s husband. They weren’t victims: they were perpetrators.”
The man who killed the narrator’s killer accidentally, in trying to help. The good Samaritan returns to the scene and is spotted. Luke, driving that night to Whitechapel. Using more fuel than she expected. Covering up his locations. Crying over onions. Attending a funeral. The family of one of the dead teenagers finds out who he is.
It could be about him. It could be from him.
“Entry deleted by George Louis, on twenty-first June 2017,” she says. “The records show he deleted a second, too, for a man called Pete Arbuthnot. The other hostage, I am guessing. This is why they never flagged anything on the system: they were no longer there. He also deleted the Alexander Hale and James Lancaster murders, but reinstated them a few days later.”
“So the accidental hostage . . .” Claire says, and Niall suddenly and vividly recalls Isabella’s vulnerability, her shock, that she wet herself in fear. All made up. That article in the Mail Niall read years ago about her inner trauma. Obviously sold to them. A clever bluff.
And there it is. They’re siblings. George Louis and Janet Hale. No surname in common, thanks to her marriage. A pact made between family, who will do anything to help each other out. The Hales, whose child was killed, with a vendetta against Deschamps. And the Louises, who arranged his murder.
Thanks, Charlie. Knew you’d crack it when we dispatched you in.
Darn it I wad hoping Charlie wasnt a spie
Charlie’s face betrays some strong emotion Cam hasn’t seen in his eyes before. A flash, like the lightning just after the thunder. Blink and you’d miss it.
The Lancasters’ child was murdered by Alexander Hale. But Hale was then killed by Deschamps: making him the enemy. And to a copper too. No wonder. No wonder he had to disappear once he had killed their lackeys. He’d had no chance.
She wonders if he fell in love, even just slightly. She wonders if she meant anything at all to him.
The same phrase he used on his final note to her. If anything. Was this his final clue to her? That, if anything . . . if anyone ever wanted to escape the family business, the weapon I always used was buried in the garden. Luke’s book isn’t only an explanation: it is a series of instructions, encoded just for her.
And that’s what makes Cam do it. Not the danger she’s in. Not how he lunges at her as she cocks the gun, but because of how coldly he said that. That her husband, alive and well, was going to come back for her. That he tried to. And as though it was always, always going to end this way, consequences be damned, Cam shoots, just once. Her aim is true.
Cam and Luke love each other and deserve to be together. And so Niall does it for the humanity of it: he does it for love.
How awful, to leave your son’s body to stage your surprise, to leave him to go home: to ensure that you could go after the perpetrator yourself, lawlessly.
“I started to say if anything, but I didn’t want to incriminate you. I didn’t want there to be any risk it appeared you might know what I was doing, and could have stopped it if it should end badly. So I left it.
“it was a good phrase to put in the book—I knew, years on, you’d pick it out.” He smiles a wan smile. “My agent.” “Your wife,” she says, thinking really of his final note to her: his book.
she untied the hostages, so quick, ordered them to wait, then overpower and kill me once she’d left. They came for me. I had no choice but to shoot. The first then the second, quickly, close range, had them in a headlock.”
And that’s when he realizes it: the dreams weren’t the gunshots from the past; they were from the future. From now.
Cam remembered it. A lockup under my name. She took a chance that he meant St. Luke’s, came here, and it paid off. They’re alone. They’ve got some time.
their daughter, Polly, the only witness to Luke’s crime. The person who, all along, knew the score, but didn’t know it too.
Deschamps and Camilla had come to Dungeness that night when he’d asked them to and had lied for him. Said they’d seen the shooting, that he had needed to do it. That it would have saved them, hiding in the lighthouse. Niall had got away without being charged, but he’d lost his job for withholding information. For acting alone. The Hales and the Louises he’d wounded had gone to prison.
Viv comes first, work second, and that’s the natural order it has to be.
Charlie survived—and Cam wasn’t charged: his account of events matched hers, and the CPS said she’d acted in self-defense. He’d gone to prison for harassment. She wonders if he’d backed up her story out of kindness, guilt, or something else. She hasn’t ever quite told Luke how close she’d come to falling in love with somebody else: he doesn’t need to know.
Sometimes, you pay a price for happiness. It’s worth it, but you still pay it.
