Nothing unexpected there. Gather intelligence, assess the risk. Eliza’s listening while she checks the phone system. Four shots fired and at least one casualty. Robert Lacey could be bleeding to death at this very moment, just down the street. Multiple hostages, including two children and a pregnant woman. She has a fair idea of the tactical team’s contingency plans: overwhelming firepower, snipers, maybe chemical agents. They’ll be getting into position right now. She needs to make contact as soon as possible.
‘Do we have a phone number?’
Ashwin slides a photocopied A4 sheet in her direction. It’s covered in handwritten notes, with a floor plan of the café.
‘The number at the top is the café phone, used when people text in their orders. The barista reckons it’s your best bet for making contact. It’s got a very annoying ringtone apparently, and it’s always kept on full volume so they can hear it above the coffee machine and things. Some old pop song, she says.’
‘Okay.’ Eliza reaches for a headset, sliding it over her ears. ‘Let’s give ’em a call.’
NINE
Neil
We’re stuffed, he thinks, tugging his hat off his head. This is it. This is how it ends. He’s a gambling man—that’s an understatement—but he wouldn’t put a fiver on his chances of surviving this day.
It’s been an hour. He and Overcoat Girl—Abi—haven’t dared to stir an inch from their refuge behind the counter. Not that it’s much of a refuge, because they’re a pair of sitting ducks. She’s taken off her shoes and is trying to hide beneath the coffee machine, knees tucked up by her chin. The milk frother hisses gently every few minutes, letting off steam. The barista abandoned her post mid-latte.
They can hear the nutter roaming and muttering, sometimes sobbing. Maybe he’s getting up the courage to top himself and take them all with him, even those two little kids. He might have other weapons hidden on him somewhere. There might be a suicide vest under that baggy grey jumper. He might be ISIS, he might be a common-or-garden psychopath, he might have just escaped from some secure institution and think he’s Al Capone. The street outside Tuckbox will become a shrine, paved with flowers and teddy bears and messages from strangers who suddenly love their fellow man. The hostages will all be saints for a week, the dead children will be angels. Media pundits and politicians will talk about the Mental Health Act, demanding to know why a killer was at large in the community.
The combination of silence and terror has a weirdly mesmeric effect. Flies keep arriving and strutting purposefully around the misshapen lump under its cashmere shroud. Flies, in midwinter? Bloody opportunists. Neil leans across to brush them away. His foot slides on a patch of blood, painting another streak on the floor.
Abi’s about to cough. She jams an elegant hand over her mouth, her body racked by shudders as her gaze meets Neil’s. It’s getting the better of her. Her cheeks are bulging, her eyes streaming. Any moment now she’ll explode, and God knows what the nutter will do then.
Just as she begins to cough, a blast of noise erupts from Robert’s body. Fright makes Neil spin around, his heart thudding. It’s a human voice, and it’s coming from somewhere near the dead man’s crotch. For one truly bizarre moment, Robert seems to have been resurrected.
It’s Elton John, belting out ‘Rocket Man’.
Abi
Jesus Christ, ‘Rocket Man’?
This is a nightmare. It has to be. A zombie nightmare with an Elton John soundtrack. A bubble of hysterical laughter is filling her throat, even as she coughs.
‘What the fuck?’ yells the gunman.
‘I think it’s his phone,’ replies Neil, his voice cracking with the strain. ‘The café guy. His phone. In his pocket.’
The music blares on. And on. Abi desperately hopes that whoever is on the other end of that line isn’t calling to order three lattes and a skinny mochaccino. Please, God, let them have a magic wand.
Eliza
The café phone rings eight, nine, ten times.
She isn’t alone—Ashwin has gone to speak to witnesses, but Paul is listening in through his own headset—and yet she feels profoundly isolated. She always does during this first call. She’s trying to contact an armed man whose stress level will be right off the scale. It’s her voice he will hear. It’s she who must build rapport. It’s she who will be haunted if people die. Two terrified children are depending on her for their lives.
In crisis negotiation there’s a chance to reach into the tragedy and change its course. That’s the buzz. That’s why she will never give it up, despite the grief it adds to her family life. She has sat alongside people as they balance on the parapets of bridges and multi-storey car parks. She’s waded up to her waist in the Thames, listening to a mother who planned to drown herself and her baby. She’s talked through a window to a man holding his boss hostage with a nail gun. They’re all still alive today, so far as she knows. But occasionally things go wrong. Horribly wrong.
For a dizzying moment it seems the call has been answered. There’s a click—another click—a long moment of silence. Eliza feels a surge of adrenaline as she prepares her first words. She forces herself to breathe steadily, to pitch her voice in a low register. She’s intensely alert. Every word counts. Every nuance counts. There’s no room for mistakes.
Voicemail.
Lacey’s voice is an affable bass. He sounds caring.
Hello! This is Robert at Tuckbox. Thanks for your call. You can text us your order, or if you want to leave a message, go ahead. I promise I’ll call you back.
I doubt it, thinks Eliza grimly.
‘Hi. My name’s DI Eliza McClean. Eliza. I’m a negotiator with the police. I’m here to help. You can reach me on this number.’
Paul’s calmly noting the time, the outcome of the call and their plan to try again in fifteen minutes. As secondary negotiator his role is to keep a log, to be a sounding board, even to take over the negotiation if necessary. The roles are interchangeable. Sometimes it’s he who does the talking, she who supports.
Two children, a wounded man.
‘I’ll keep calling,’ she promises Robert Lacey’s voicemail. ‘Let’s work this out.’
TEN
Abi
Elton cuts off abruptly, in mid-yell. No magic wand. The silence is crushing. It sounds like abandonment.
A migraine is beginning to flash in the periphery of her vision; at least, she hopes it’s a migraine, not concussion from bashing her head on that bloody radiator. There’s no pain yet, just the familiar white stars, pulsating through unnerving patches of blindness. She’s used to suffering migraines, especially since she started pumping herself full of hormones for IVF, but no matter how bad it gets she has never missed a single day of work. It’s an obsession with her. She’s got some hefty drugs which generally stop a migraine in its tracks. They’re in her case—which she last saw somewhere near the street door—along with her robes, her laptop and a load of books and briefs, including Bradshaw.
She covers her eyes with her hands, but the flashing carries on behind her lids. Poor Kelly Bradshaw will be arriving at court soon, dressed in her tidiest clothes, sheet-white with terror and mourning for her baby—who may never walk or even eat unaided, and who she’ll probably never see again. This is one of the worst days of Kelly Bradshaw’s life. She’s relying on Abi. She’ll be looking for her.
When Abi uncovers her eyes, she sees that Neil has pulled his beanie off his head and is holding it between his hands. Matted hair, a grizzled beard, vertical lines down thin cheeks. His eyelids look raw with some sort of eczema. He doesn’t smell great: stale sweat, grease of some kind. She has a suspicion he’s homeless. His anorak and jeans definitely haven’t been near a washing machine for many a long day, and now he has Robert’s blood splattered all over him too. His walking boots have seen some action. The laces have broken and been knotted many times, the soles are peeling right off. She can see his feet inside them. He catches her eye and smiles, raising both his thumbs. It’
s not a convincing thumbs-up—she suspects he’s at least as frightened as she is—but she’s grateful to him for trying. She smiles back. His eyes are blue. Creased and bloodshot, but still blue.
The other hostages sit horrified in the booth as the gunman paces up and down. After a while the small boy tugs on his mother’s jacket, murmuring, I need the toilet. Abi’s heart melts. Poor little chap, with his wide eyes. He shouldn’t be caught up in this. Neither should the tiny girl, who is kissing her Roo in a determined, motherly way, telling him not to be scared. Something has to be done! Abi loathes passivity—sitting here like a helpless pudding while children suffer. This is a kitchen, for God’s sake. There must be a whole arsenal of weapons. Surely they can overpower one person if they all act together? Where are the chef’s knives? She looks around. There—black handles arrayed in a steel block. Or maybe she could cosh the prick with a frying pan? Right! It’s time to take action.
She levers herself to her feet, blinking at the flashing lights that have expanded to fill her vision.
He’s close by—much closer than she expected. He looks and moves as though he’s fit, twitching, taut with furious energy. Several days’ stubble, and reddish-brown hair in a curling tangle over his collar. There’s some kind of injury on his forehead: a swelling bruise, a gash, dried blood in his eyebrow. He never lets go of that loaded gun. He could use it in a split second.
Suddenly he spins around to stare straight at her. His eyes are shining, but not in a good way. He stares with shocked intensity, as though he’s ardently in love—or murderously angry. He takes a step closer. Abi hits the deck, and fast.
Her dad would laugh himself hoarse if he could see her now, cringing behind a counter. Her father has no time for humankind. According to him there’s no such thing as loyalty or honour or even love.
‘Love? What the hell does that mean?’ he asked once, during an especially bitter rant over Christmas dinner. Red-faced. ‘All these beautiful ideas are fantasy. When the chips are down, they melt away like a snowman in hell. People would murder their grandmothers to save themselves.’
Abi was a teenager at the time and had long ago decided that her father was an utter jerk and her mother a fool for sticking with him. She got up and walked out of the room. Nobody bothered to follow her.
She can’t remember when she’s sat so still, for so long, with nothing to do but wait. Her fingers itch for her phone. The clinic must have called by now. And she needs to ring her chambers, get her clerks to sort out the St Albans disaster. She longs to surf the news sites and find out what the police are doing. She could even tweet: Trapped in Tuckbox! Help! But her phone is in pieces, scattered across the concrete floor. No communication, no information. Blind, deaf and dumb.
Exactly fifteen minutes after the first call, Elton sings again. And again, fifteen minutes after that. And again, fifteen minutes after that. ‘Rocket Man’ is their only lifeline. Abi has begun checking the time, waiting for the next call. Counting on it.
Eliza
It’s a knife-edge. She urgently needs to make contact, but call too often and she risks driving this man over the edge. The early moments of a siege are the most dangerous. Attackers panic. The lizard brain takes over: the primeval fight-or-flight response, smothering rational thought. They can’t run, so they lash out. They do appalling things: things that their friends and family can’t believe of them; things they can’t believe of themselves when they look back later.
For a fifth time she dials, waits, holds her breath: Come on, come on. A scene of tragedy is lurking at the back of her mind, bodies strewn around a café. Two of them are very small.
Hello! This is Robert at Tuckbox. Thanks for your call.
‘We’ve been trying for an hour,’ she frets, standing up.
Paul checks his watch. ‘He’ll answer eventually.’
She hates this; she hates the waiting. Digging her binoculars out of her bag, she leans against the windowsill. Wilton Street is a ghost road. A grocery delivery truck stands with its back doors wide open, presumably just as it was when the driver legged it. Pallets and boxes lie scattered on the pavement. She can make out the door to the café, a couple of small tables with chairs, the jaunty tuckbox sign. There’s a Christmas tree under the awning, twinkling with fairy lights, and tinsel looped around the windows.
Ah, and those poor dogs. A pair with tartan jackets lie close together, sheltering in the lee of an A-frame blackboard—perhaps with the day’s menu scribbled on it. They seem a privileged duo, in their matching attire. They’ll be the ones whose mistress is demanding their release. The grey, scruffy one is the largest of the three. He ignores his well-heeled companions. He’s sitting up, never taking his eyes off the café’s door, as though expecting someone to come out at any moment.
A movement further down the street has Eliza swinging the binoculars around. Five specialist firearms officers are making their way towards Tuckbox, holding shields, their faces hidden by helmets with visors. They move with surprising grace as they hug the fronts of buildings, staying well out of line-of-fire of the café. As she watches, the group ducks into the recessed doorway of a drycleaner’s shop two doors down from Tuckbox.
The grey dog has seen them too. He’s on his feet, tension in every line of his body, watching intently. His tail is slowly waving: hopeful, suspicious.
‘Hey.’ Eliza lowers the binoculars. ‘If those dogs start barking there’s going to be a problem.’
‘Why would they do that?’ asks Paul, without looking up from his notes.
‘SCO19 are trying to find a nice spot for a picnic.’
The grey dog’s tail has stopped moving. Eventually he sits again. Now he has two things to keep his eye on: the door of the café as well as the strange marauders nearby.
Those five officers won’t be the only ones. She’d guess that others have been deployed around the back of the café, perhaps in the courtyard she can see marked on the plan. Marksmen will be looking for vantage points. They’ll be prepared to wait for as long as it takes. Just in case.
Just in case I fail. No pressure then.
They might be about to storm the place. She’d be the last to know. As number three negotiator, Ashwin might be aware that the tactical team is ready to do something drastic but the chances are he wouldn’t tell her. Keeping the principal negotiator in the dark avoids the risk of her accidentally giving the game away. The boundaries are clearly marked: Negotiators negotiate, runs the mantra; commanders command.
The Christmas tree lights are flashing. Tuckbox looks jolly and welcoming, a nice place to go for coffee and a mince pie, a good old-fashioned London café. Behind those blinds are ordinary folk who dropped by on their way to work or school this morning, maybe meeting old friends. Doing normal things, living normal lives. Until today.
ELEVEN
Rosie
It’s like playing sardines, but you’re hiding from death.
She’s been in here for … how long? Feels like hours. She hasn’t moved an inch in the hellishly cramped space. Even breathing feels loud and dangerous. She’s not had an easy life, but she’s never, ever been terrified like this before.
The sirens have stopped. Perhaps everyone has escaped except her. She could be alone with him and his gun. Her hiding place is dark, apart from a faint gleam from around the cupboard door. It smells of rotting wood, bleach—and there’s something really disgusting coming from the pipes. Liquid from the U-bend of the sink is dripping gently onto her jeans. She’s curled on her side among the cleaning products, knees bent, her neck held at a painful angle. Her right arm is shaking with the stress of holding the door closed; her left is pinned under her body, which is compressing her bruises. They’re aching. Something hard—maybe a scrubbing brush?—keeps jabbing into the back of her head. She’s desperate to yank at whatever it is, but that might set bottles and cans and God-knows-what cascading out of the cupboard. It might lead to disaster.
She spotted that madman pelting back into the
café with his gun. It was the most terrifying sight she’d ever seen. Even before the first shot was fired she’d turned around and sprinted in here. She stood in the dim light, shaking and gasping at the sound of shots, and screams, and Sofia’s loud yells—Get out, this way! Get out! But there is no way out from the back kitchen, not without passing right through the main area of the café. She was caught, a rat in a trap. Her only chance was to hide. The staff toilet is in here, through the alcove with the freezers, but it’s the first place he’d look, and even with the door locked it would not be a sanctuary. One good kick would break the door down. So, in her panic, she pulled a couple of boxes and bottles out of the cupboard under the sink and crawled in. Once she’d jammed herself onto the lower shelf she pulled the door behind her, and held her breath, and waited. And waited.
She can’t stop thinking about her daughter. Poor little girl, she didn’t want to be left at nursery today. She never does. She worries all the time. She’s afraid of being abandoned—and who can blame her, after all the upheaval and loss in her life? This morning she sobbed and clung and wouldn’t let go. I want to come with you, Mummy!
‘They won’t let me bring you to work, angel. Hey, will you paint me a picture for when I come to get you?’
‘When will you get me?’
‘Four o’clock. And then you and me will go home and make spaghetti.’
‘Promise you won’t be late?’
‘Promise. Four o’clock. See the little hand on the clock? See where the four is? Well, when that hand points to four, and that bigger hand points to twelve, I’ll be there.’
The Secrets of Strangers Page 5
