About the Author

Brooke Robinson grew up in Sydney and, as a playwright, has had numerous plays commissioned and produced in her native Australia. In the UK, her work has been shown at the Old Vic theatre and London’s VAULT Festival. She studied drama at RADA and City, University of London. Her debut novel, The Interpreter, was published in 2023. The Negotiator is her second novel.

Follow Brooke on Twitter/X @Brookewrote and on Instagram @brooke_robinson_author.

ALSO BY BROOKE ROBINSON

The Interpreter

Brooke Robinson

THE NEGOTIATOR

Prologue

The bullet enters Tia’s thigh close to where her brother will look for the star-shaped mole when asked to identify her body.

The green carpet is moving towards her. Flung onto her side, Tia lands hard on her left arm. Pop pop pop sounds bounce between her ears. Flashbangs. The force of the grenades is knocking artwork to the floor. The heavy frames could be falling onto someone but it’s too dark, or too bright, to see properly, and there’s probably nothing she can do to help them. On the ground, Tia feels her way to the wall, any wall. A palm goes to each thigh: no wound. That was her own thumb which drove into her skin. The firearms team are in the room now, but the bullet was her imagination. She will not bleed out, and these aren’t her final breaths. Relief comes, but it isn’t much, because she has been thinking about dying all day. Death no longer frightens her. Fear requires energy and Tia is too tired for it now. They all must be.

Her hand finally hits something solid. She’s made it to the side of the room. Tia stands and leans against the plaster, making herself as flat as she can. She’s safe here, and now she has some sense of direction: the windows out onto the road are to her right, and the doors to the rest of the museum to her left. That’s where the specialist officers are coming from. Through the smoke in front of her, human shapes start to take form. There are bodies on the carpet. Alive? She cannot just wait here for it to be over and help to collect the dead. Back on all fours, Tia leaves the wall and crawls to the nearest hostage. Broken glass crunches underneath her knees. The noise of the police boots, the guns, the shields, everything, is so intense, her teeth gnaw into her cheeks.

Tia reaches someone – there’s a pulse. They’re shaking but they’re okay. She sees more human shadows. There is no real furniture in here and nowhere to shelter. When the police burst in, everyone dropped in place, and the unlucky were stood near the doors, or in the centre of the room, exposed. The white haze meant to disorient the gunman is stopping Tia from working out who is who. But it’s those hostages in the middle of the room who are most in need. Tia rises to her feet. Keeping as low as possible, she moves quickly. She sees two bodies lying in the path of the entering police. She’ll go to them.

Are they hurt? She won’t drag them out of the danger zone in case it makes their injuries worse. The pop, pops continue. The two hostages are about ten yards apart. She can’t get to them both. Suddenly it’s obvious who they are, and she must choose. Pick one hostage, shield them. The only thing she can give now is herself. Tia’s last chance today to get something right. It’s not a matter of who most deserves to live, but who needs her more, and what her instinct is saying. The decision is made somewhere deep inside her body and she is running the last few steps. She finds them breathing. No blood: they’re alright. She lies down, covers them, becoming the barrier between them and all this chaos which she couldn’t prevent. Tia will stay like this, stretched across the hostage, until she gets a gentle tap from one of the police officers telling her it’s done.

A powerful heat explodes in her calf, suddenly wet and sticky. Blood. Now she’s shot for real. It’s only the lower leg. A stray bullet, probably just a graze. The shock is the issue. She’s read this. Don’t give in to it, she tells herself. Forget it. Pressure is building behind her left eye, her neck twisted, face squashed against the floor, a sleeping position her optometrist once told her is very bad for the glands. What a thing to think right now, but she knows this thought arrived because the outside world is close. In a moment, police will be in control and the siege and this whole day will be over. Her life – with optometrists and health advice, her boyfriend, her friends and her Tuesday-morning swim – is almost within touching distance, but Tia won’t get back to it, she realises, not properly. Even if she survives these next few minutes, she will never leave this museum.

1.

Asher

Now

Most prisoners are released automatically into the community at the halfway point of their sentence, but Asher is told he must appear before the parole board. It is the beginning of year four of his six-year term. He represents himself and he does not prepare. He just says the words that begin to pile up in his mind. This way, he does not allow himself to feel hope. He is protected from disappointment. The lack of preparation wasn’t a strategy so he might come across as hopelessly sincere, but that seems to be what happens. Asher Russell is not a threat, it is decided. He is rehabilitated. They let him out on licence.

His mother agrees to collect him. He continues pushing every flicker of hope downwards until it leaves his body. Hope tries to catch Asher off guard when he is walking to his cell, or swallowing a cup of tea, or daydreaming, but he is there, ready to snuff it out. He imagines those arcade games from his childhood, the one where alligators bob up trying to snap at you, but you smack them first with the oversized squishy hammer on a string.

It’s time, but Yvette isn’t here. Even if she doesn’t come at all he will not let himself be crushed. Asher stands by the door with his possessions in a transparent bag feeling embarrassed for the broken gel pens that have slipped to the bottom, their inky guts there for all to see. He tries to look casual and, most of all, not too eager, as though he’s waiting for a ride to the airport to fly home, reluctantly checking out of a fun hotel. The reality of the day begins to sink in. He is Asher, not prisoner B3846HK. A free person again.

He doesn’t see her approach but suddenly his mother is right in front of him. She apologises for being late and talks rapidly about the traffic. She hugs him and Asher can feel the sharpness of her arm bones, the lack of cushion when his chest presses against hers. But she is cosy and her warmth transmits to him and he realises he has been shivering, in a permanent state of near-freezing for the past three years. His mother came to visit him when she could and he appreciated it. Her shift pattern at the hospital didn’t always coincide with visiting hours, plus the prison is a ninety-minute drive from the house so he would insist she shouldn’t inconvenience herself too much. Now he curls his fingers around the handle of the see-through bag and takes his first step.

They walk across the carpark and Asher’s mother grabs his hand. ‘I’m happy today,’ she says, meeting his eye. ‘Really happy.’ She takes hold of his shoulder. He smiles back as best he can. The blood in his veins is stiff, solid. Yvette unlocks the car and, when she reaches the driver’s side door, her hand strokes the length of the roof, attention snatched by the distance. She is in a trance. Is she thinking of her brother? Asher stands there for a few seconds, lets the guilt turn him to stone, and waits for her to snap out of it. Then he gently opens the passenger’s side door and sits.

His mother does not switch on the radio, because she’s talking in a circle. Words explode and crash into one another and he remembers she does this sometimes in excitement. He looks at her and tries to smile again, but his gaze is drawn back to the view outside the car window, like a dog. The world is strange but also a bit of a let-down. Asher hasn’t seen trees, road signs, cars or houses in over three years, but the ones now rushing past are underwhelming. He is glad to be sealed inside this vehicle. It’s a cliché that prisoners are afraid to re-emerge into society and he wasn’t even inside that long, relative to other inmates, but he can feel it already, the closed-off nature of everything, the coarseness of the world, trying to reach him through the windscreen. The recent winter was brutal and he can tell the harsh temperatures battered the plant life around here. He sees a quaking aspen, one of the only trees he can reliably recognise while whizzing by at this speed. They tremble at the slightest breeze, that species, so long and thin, weak and afraid, they wobble even when there is no wind.

It’s April, graduation season at his old university. His classmates will be applying for their first office jobs. University feels like an impossibility now. An achievement out of reach and also something he has grown out of. He has moved on, or given up, or probably both.

‘Let’s go out for lunch,’ his mother says, bright. ‘Where would you like to go?’ He is still vegan. He was surprised to learn staying vegan while incarcerated is a possibility these days, although his meals were essentially the same three options on rotation. The prison shop also stocked plant-based snacks, bars with nuts and sweets without gelatine, which he looked forward to several times a week.

‘Pizza would be nice,’ he says to his mother. Pizza is her favourite.

On the way home, they stop at a chain restaurant and he orders the only vegan option on the menu. There is so much to say and yet nothing to say, all at the same time. His mother drinks lemonade through a straw which should be banned as it is single-use and will choke sea life once tossed away, something he would have pestered her about three years ago. He winces at the memory, so many memories, of lecturing her about disposable forks, and vegetables wrapped in unnecessary plastic and countless other petty things. She is still beaming at him. Asher never asked outright if it was okay he come back to his childhood bedroom and live with her, so Yvette had no real chance to refuse him. He knows – he thinks, he hopes – she would be devastated if he went somewhere else. Anyway, now it’s the address on all his parole forms and the rule is he must reside permanently at this approved location. Even if he wanted to, and had the money, Asher couldn’t move or even go on holiday. While he’s on licence, he must obtain prior permission from his supervising officer for even a single overnight stay at a different address.

Vegan pizza. This he never got in jail. A steaming “margherita” is placed in front of him and Asher consumes it in what feels like only a few bites.

‘You were hungry.’ His mother is looking at him with real pity. ‘I bet they didn’t feed you properly in there.’ Across the table, she strokes his arm. He flinches. She notices, and he hates himself for it. No one has touched him in three years: another prison cliché.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m jumpy.’ She looks as though she might cry.

‘Pudding!’ She turns and raises her hand to flag a waiter. ‘They must be able to do something vegan.’

The waiter cheerily informs them the restaurant can do a vegan coconut lemon posset. ‘That sounds delicious,’ Yvette says. ‘We’ll have two.’ Dessert arrives and it tastes cold and soothing. It slides easily down and goes somewhere, but his stomach feels empty.

‘Mmmm.’ She drops her spoon to the table. ‘I could demolish two of those.’

‘Do you want to order another?’ Asher asks, with a couple of spoonfuls still left.

‘No,’ she laughs. ‘I don’t need it.’ He should join in her laughter, or at least say she deserves all the puddings, but he says nothing because that is safer, with no chance of making a mistake. ‘So,’ his mother says. ‘Don’t rush, but I have a shift later this afternoon.’

‘Okay.’

‘I’ll drop you home. Let you get settled back in. There’s plenty of food, vegan food, in the fridge. You can help yourself for tea tonight. I’ll be home about midnight. I’ll sneak in and try not to wake you.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ Asher says.

‘I was going to get someone to cover for me when I learnt you were coming home today, but then I thought you might actually want the time alone. Sort out your room without me there looking over your shoulder.’ She reaches across the table to him again. This time, he does not flinch. ‘You’re a man now.’

‘Yes, thank you, that’s okay.’

His room. Asher hasn’t given any real thought to the state of his bedroom. He supposes it might be exactly how he left it that day of the museum. Maybe there’s a wet towel balled up in a corner gone black with mould, university books piled on the floor. He wonders if his mother closed the door and hasn’t been in there since.

‘You can relax in front of the telly,’ she’s saying now. ‘Watch whatever you want. I finally signed up to Netflix. And some other streamers. Enjoy having your own space for the evening.’

Now his mother is talking about the upcoming weekend and all the things they might like to do together. It occurs to Asher she’s nervous too. Her speech is rehearsed, he’s sure of it. Some of these lines are pre-prepared and she’s forcing herself to say them. He wonders if she still has her friends, the same social life as before. Asher knows he is quite famous now, and his mother would be too by extension, which makes him want to throw up his lemon posset.

‘Or we can have a quiet one at home,’ she says when he doesn’t respond to any of her suggestions. Just how recognisable is he? No one in this restaurant has paid him any attention, but tomorrow will be the test. He will go to the supermarket near their house and get some of his favourite snacks: gelatine-free jellybeans and those protein balls with birds on the packet. It will be interesting to see if the staff remember him. Terrifying.

At home, it only takes a couple of minutes to unpack his carry bag from jail. Asher did not want to bring his prison clothes with him. He finds his mother has kept his room very clean these past three years and, judging from the fresh chemical smell, she recently laundered and changed the sheets. Inside the wardrobe are his teenage clothes. He had a growth spurt last year and doubts any of this still fits. There is no hurry for new stuff, he thinks to himself; he won’t be leaving the house much anyway, and certainly won’t be going any place where nice things are required.

Asher examines his room, seeing all the objects he forgot he owned. Tiny possessions – a glossy souvenir coaster his mother’s friend gave him from Heidelberg in Germany, a mobile phone stand from the pound shop – all give him a thrill to rediscover, gifts from his former self. Shame pierces him in the chest as he recalls how he left his room the day of the museum, so much worse than a wet towel. His poor mother. People should always leave their bedrooms knowing they might be hit by a car, or have a fatal seizure, and someone will have to go in there and deal with their dirty pants. He won’t make that mistake again.

In prison, he realised he could live without all this stuff, with practically nothing, but still he’s happy to find a pencil case with five different types of blue pen, and a pair of scissors that fit even more snugly in his hand than they used to. Asher tries not to think about the police touching everything. Them sniggering at how worthless it all is, how childish. Moving through his drawers, he realises a couple of things are missing: the shark drink bottle he used to take to school, and his brown notebook. He has a novelty comb from a gift shop which he was going to give Uncle Harrison for Christmas. On the leather pouch a silhouette of Boris Johnson is imprinted with the words: ‘Property of Boris Johnson’s hairdresser’. He got it in October and, by December, his uncle had a buzzcut so Asher kept the comb for himself and bought a better present. He should message Harrison about it: he’ll think it’s hilarious. Asher reaches for the phone stand but his mobile isn’t there, and his uncle is no longer in his life. His arm falls back to his side and hangs, useless.

When his mother leaves for work, Asher sits in front of the TV but can’t concentrate so he goes to bed early, the same time as he would in jail. Lying star-fished on the mattress, he can’t quite believe all this space is just for him. The silence is heavy and the night brings a swirly chocolate kind of darkness. Asher forgot the world can be this serene. He wishes his mother was home.

Not able to sleep, or not wanting to, he gets up, changes out of his pyjamas, and puts on some shoes. Asher opens the back door to go for a walk across the park until he remembers it is now after ten o’clock and he would be in breach of his curfew. After re-locking the door, he goes around the side of the house to the front garden where he lowers himself to the grass. Everything is damp. There must have been a soaking rain last night. He lies back even though he feels his clothes getting wet, and looks up to the stars, but it’s overcast. Nothing twinkles. Not a single star gleams down at him. On the ground all around Asher are piles of dirt the size of grapefruits, like little volcanoes. He sits up to get a closer look. They’re molehills. There must be moles tunnelling underneath him. The beautiful little creatures looking for food, living their lives. He could do that. That’s how Asher could live the rest of his days: in the pure blackness underneath the earth. Free of people and their noise, their stale energy, their rubbish. Only mud and bugs and darkness. He lets it rise up within him now. Hope and just a general niceness and a list of things he might like to happen. I am a mole, he thinks to himself, underground is where I breathe. One, two long breaths enter and exit his nose. The action softens him. This is how he got through Fresher’s Week at university: one then two slow breaths as he walked the busy corridors, faces, mouths and hard eyes coming at him from every direction. Asher told himself to just keep breathing. Fresher’s Week. When everything went wrong.

2.

Asher

Then

From underneath the WELCOME FRESHERS banner, Asher looks up to a staircase leading to another staircase. Both are bursting with young people, stopping to chat, blocking the thoroughfare, others pushing, taking two steps at a time. Just how big is this university? He needs to get up to the second floor. This is where the politically and socially aware student societies have set up. He has already walked past the crochet society, the doughnut society, the group dedicated to Krishna Consciousness and one for the promotion of ancient languages and contemporary Japanese puppetry. His engineering branded tote bag over his shoulder, Asher sucks in a deep breath and weaves his way between the bodies. At the top of the second-floor stairs, trestle tables with shouty signs, plates of free sweets and towers of chocolate biscuits compete for his attention. He passes Young Labour, the Marxist and the Conservative Society. Though the corridor is wide, he has to turn himself sideways to fit among the clusters of students bunched up everywhere, rucksacks on their backs like turtles. It is ten o’clock on the second day of Fresher’s. How is it that they all seem to know one another already? He could have waited until his classes began, until attendance was compulsory. But Asher forced himself to come to the fair to meet people, to try to get involved before the cliques form, before the friendship groups establish and close off to new members. Why does everything suggest he is starting from behind?

Asher thinks of his bedroom. Quiet, his graphic novel open on page fifty on his bedside table, waiting for him. He will sign up to one group and then he can go. Then he can tell himself he’s made an effort. Finally, towards the end of the row of tables, Asher sees “green”. Here they are. The three eco/environmental activist groups advertised on the student union website. He should speak to all of them and choose the one that most aligns with his values. His uncle Harrison says this is how Asher should make friends: find people who share his worries, his fire for protecting the planet. That’s what makes you special, his uncle said yesterday when he called to wish him good luck for his first day of university. You really, deeply care. You’ll find your people. I know you will. Which one of these three groups is Asher’s people? He’ll walk all the way down the row, start at the end and make his way back. He readies himself to initiate conversation with the two students stationed at the very last table. Their logo is green; he supposes they all are. Someone is partly blocking the sign and he can’t see what they’re actually called. Stepping closer, he can feel his cheeks go red. Just say hello, he tells himself. All he has to do is ask one quick question about their goals and their vision. He looks to the nearest trestle table. The broad smile on the girl extending a tablet computer for him to enter his details. She is beaming as she speaks to him, and this is much easier than he imagined, her doing all the work. Now, on the screen, he is typing his name and student email address, just like she instructs. This isn’t the action of someone making an informed decision but the group has thirty-six members, the young woman is saying. Thirty-six potential friends and Asher hasn’t had to say a thing. She is still talking and this is a very friendly group, clearly; he knows he’s not giving much back to her, his face frozen in nervous fright. Maybe this is better than him deciding which group he wants to belong to: them choosing him. This eco society can be his people. This girl and her friends. She will be in touch, she tells Asher. By the end of this week he will receive details of their next group meeting. He thanks her – finally, he speaks! – and nods goodbye. As he turns to head back down the staircase, he looks, briefly, along the corridor at the two other green groups he never got to.

They gather in the student union building at four o’clock on Wednesdays. Asher has a seminar finishing at four so he sits near the door, leaves a few minutes early, and runs to get to the meeting in time. As he enters, he sees the girl who managed the table during Fresher’s and she smiles in recognition. There are ten people in the room altogether including Asher, a mix of genders and ages. The meeting is chaired by a woman whose dark hair is interrupted by an inch-thick silvery-grey streak which she regularly tucks behind her ear. She introduces herself as a third-year sociology student called Storm. Around the handle of his tote bag, Asher’s palm starts to sweat. He hopes he’s not called upon to say anything. Speaking in front of other first-years is bad enough, but there’s no way he can talk without stuttering in front of final-year students.

Although it’s only two minutes past four, Asher has the sense of having already missed a heated discussion. ‘Let’s keep it constructive, is all I’m saying.’ Storm is speaking to a man standing outside the circle of chairs. He looks a bit older than the others, in his mid-twenties, Asher thinks. ‘So are you going to stay?’ she’s asking him. He bounces on the balls of his feet in trainers covered with Pokémon characters. One hand runs through his hair.

‘Yes, okay, constructive, I’m staying.’ The man drops to the vacant seat next to Asher. ‘Hey,’ he says, tossing his bag to the floor. ‘Alright?’

‘Hi,’ Asher says back. As he settles, Asher notices the other man adjust his chair, change the angle so that it tilts towards Asher, opening up the circle to him just that little bit more. It’s such a small gesture. He probably doesn’t even realise he did it, and it’s possible Asher imagined the whole thing. But it’s enough to reassure him he chose the right group at Fresher’s. Asher looks around at the other nine faces. This is a place where he could be accepted just the way he is.

The group has been running for two full years, but it is agreed a new strategy is needed for this academic season. ‘I think all of us would like to make a bigger impact this year,’ the man in the Pokémons is saying. He addresses the circle but it’s clear he’s directing his comment at Storm. This is what they must have been talking about when Asher entered.

‘Today,’ Storm says, ‘let’s reflect on what we’ve done, and what we haven’t tried. What we’d like to achieve by next summer.’ A man in flip-flops is passing around a bag of gelatine-free jelly snakes.

‘I still think we need to focus on differentiating ourselves from Extinction Rebellion,’ a woman says, red snake between her teeth.

‘And Just Stop Oil,’ adds the student sat next to her.

‘We’re all non-violent civil resistance groups but that doesn’t mean we’re the same.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Just Stop Oil demands the UK government stop licensing all new oil, gas and coal projects,’ says red snake. ‘Extinction Rebellion are focussed on net zero, aren’t they? I thought we were aiming for real net zero. No emissions at all. That’s our difference.’

‘Okay,’ Storm says, eyes spreading around the circle. ‘What does everyone think?’ Asher agrees with real net zero. Carbon offsetting and other schemes only serve to mask the true damage being done to the planet.

‘Real net zero. Let’s work towards that this year,’ someone says. There is a chorus of agreement. The man in the Pokémons next to Asher says nothing. Everyone looks to Storm.

‘So: how do we get there? Let’s start this year off with a really effective action,’ she says.

‘I think we need to put more pressure on our university’s leaders,’ red snake says. ‘Really try and get a sit-down meeting with the principal this term. Open up a dialogue about this becoming the country’s first net-zero university.’

‘Real net zero,’ someone says.

‘Yes. A real net-zero university.’

‘We tried that last year,’ a man in a beanie says. ‘He refuses to meet with us. We had two thousand student signatures on a petition.’

‘I’m so sick of petitions,’ someone groans. Pokémons snorts with laughter but then muffles it with his fist.

Another woman raises her hand before she speaks. ‘We’re all in this room because we’ve been going on marches and signing petitions since primary school! And what’s changed? I’m sure everyone here has been a member of at least one other eco activist group in their lifetime. Has any of them actually achieved anything tangible?’ She leans forward in her chair, stuffing her hands underneath her knees.

‘We still haven’t got university management to agree to an entirely meat-free campus,’ someone says across from Asher. ‘Meat-free Friday isn’t enough. We need to keep pushing.’ Asher smiles at this student because she is facing him, but he’s underwhelmed by the prospect of a vegan student cafeteria. He’s here to make friends, but he also wants to make a difference. Really feel like he’s doing something worthwhile. He’s not sure what he was expecting of this group, but it wasn’t something as small as this.

Now two students are chatting about their last interaction with the head of the university procurement and whether or not he’ll be sympathetic to meet again.

‘Who wants to speak?’ Storm says. Asher notices one of the women in the circle is wearing a T-shirt from the 2019 climate marches. He thinks of the first march he went on, three years ago, when he was fifteen. His uncle took him. He was too shy to speak to anyone, to hand out flyers to passers-by or to join in the chanting, so Asher and Harrison just walked at the back of the group as they made their way to the local town hall where the mayor was holding an environmental planning meeting. The meeting concerned an application by developers to extend a newly built housing development, putting at risk the local bird population who lived in the neighbouring wetlands. Fifty locals attended the protest. The application was approved.

‘So, if we’re going to do an audit of the most effective awareness-raising activities in recent years,’ red snake says, ‘interrupting the big snooker game and Wimbledon in 2023 would be one.’

‘I think it’s called a tournament,’ beanie says.

‘Whatever. Sports matches, throwing soup on paintings in the big art galleries, activists gluing themselves to artworks, pouring out cow’s milk in some of the supermarkets – these all got significant global media attention.’ For a brief moment they did, Asher thinks. Until the news cycle moved on and focussed on something else the very next day.

‘Is that what we want?’ Storm asks. ‘Global media attention?’

‘I think it’s what we need,’ red snake says.

‘So what are we going to do that’s different to what’s already been done?’

‘Those kind of stunts are losing their power because everyone knows now that the artworks, the buildings or whatever, are protected. Nobody gets hurt, no permanent damage is done. The pictures are back on the gallery wall by the next morning. The protest gets on the news but everyone rolls their eyes because nothing actually changes,’ Pokémons says. There are low murmurs of approval.

‘Are you saying we need to do serious property damage?’ the man in flip-flops says.

‘I guess I am, yeah.’

‘Like what?’

‘Something destructive, but a bit random,’ Pokémons says. ‘Unpredictable. Because that’s what climate disaster feels like. No one knows when or where the next big fire, tsunami or heatwave is going to happen. We shouldn’t throw soup at a painting – we should take the painting.’

‘Steal it?’ Storm asks.

‘Yeah.’

‘What, like, hold it hostage?’

‘Yes.’ The man in the beanie laughs. ‘No, no, wait,’ Pokémons adds, scratching at his scalp. ‘Not hold it hostage. Actually destroy it.’

‘Burn it?’

‘What about water damage. The floods up North at the moment are the worst in thirty-five years. Nobody’s worried because it isn’t in London. So let’s bring some water damage down here and show people what’s coming if we don’t prevent climate disaster.’

Asher has been worried about the floods. He read that one market town has been completely cut off and is now practically an island. He donated fifty quid to a charity raising funds for disaster recovery yesterday, but he feels foolish thinking about that now. What good is a few bank notes to a community which has lost everything?

‘How would we actually do that?’ the woman in the climate T-shirt asks. ‘It would be impossible to sneak in enough water to a major art gallery to do any significant damage.’

‘Go into the toilets and leave all the taps on?’ flip-flops laughs.

‘Not water damage like that. Not in the gallery,’ Pokémons says. ‘We take the painting from the gallery and destroy it outside.’

‘So now we’re back to stealing a painting?’ beanie says.

‘Steal it for just the time it takes for us to throw it into a river or something.’

‘I think that’s stupid,’ a woman says. Pokémons snorts, but he doesn’t respond any further.

‘It’s a bit bizarre,’ Storm says. ‘A bit funny, even. But that’s the point. It will get on the news. It’s an escalation – this time property is actually destroyed.’

Asher tries but fails to catch the eye of the man next to him to show he supports his idea. Asher smiles in his direction anyway. Nobody speaks until the woman who ate the red snake raises her hand. ‘I don’t mind it as an idea,’ she says.

‘I think it’s really stupid,’ says a man speaking for the first time.

‘It’s like a Fresher’s Week prank,’ agrees the woman next to him. ‘It will get attention.’

Storm claps her hands in front of her: ‘We’re talking theft. Destruction of artworks. This is an altogether different action.’ Now she’s looking directly at Pokémons. ‘We’re talking potential jail time.’

‘I can’t go to jail, I just enrolled in my master’s and my student loan is out of control,’ flip-flops says.

‘I don’t think it would get jail time,’ beanie says. ‘Those two guys, the bridge climbers, got a two-year sentence for causing public nuisance but they blocked a very busy road for over a day. Plus I think they had prior cautions. I say we’d get a suspended sentence.’

‘Are you volunteering then?’ flip-flops asks. Beanie stares into the centre of the group. Red snake looks at her knees.

Asher has not even had a parking ticket before, but he has given thought to the idea of being arrested. Everyone who’s been on one of those peaceful climate marches through London has: sometimes the police arrest hundreds of people to try and clear the roads and the march organisers warn everyone to prepare in case they’re taken in. But the expectation is you’re always released by the end of the day. Prison time. An actual sentence. This is not something that’s ever really crossed his mind.

No one in the room speaks for a full minute. Asher hopes none of them have noticed he’s the only person here who hasn’t said anything at all.

‘So,’ Storm says. ‘If we’re going down this line of thinking, then what do we target?’ The packet of jelly snakes makes its way to Asher for the second time. He takes a yellow sweet and passes the bag on.

‘I have an idea,’ beanie says. ‘Does anyone know the Bennett Museum in Holland Park?’ No one seems to, but several people pull out their phones and search. Asher does the same.

‘Wait,’ a woman says, nose against her screen. ‘Yes, I’ve been there!’

‘It’s a house, essentially,’ beanie says. ‘Three floors, if you include the ground. Private museum. Minimum security. It was the home of Lord Bennett, a prominent industrialist.’

‘The seeds of climate change were sown with the industrial revolution,’ flip-flops says, his tone of voice mimicking someone, but Asher doesn’t know who.

‘Yeah, exactly,’ beanie says. ‘I think he was involved in the slave trade too. Anyway, his favourite painting is on the top floor. A famous oil painting of some moors.’

‘Are we willing to actually destroy this picture?’ Storm says.

‘Why not?’ a man says. A few others around the circle shrug.

‘There’s usually one member of staff in the ground floor café,’ beanie says. ‘And one or two selling entry tickets and merchandise in the gift shop. That’s it. No security guards on the top two floors with the artworks. My housemate used to work there.’

‘They’ll have CCTV,’ flip-flops says.

‘Of course,’ beanie says. ‘My point is no one will stop us from grabbing the painting and running out the door. By the time they realise, we’ll be outside and on our way to the Serpentine if we want to throw it into a river.’

‘Alright,’ Storm says. ‘We hurl it into the water and wait there in the park to be arrested?’ Pokémons is silent now, but in the corner of his eye, Asher can see him smiling to himself.

‘It’s always busy along the Serpentine,’ beanie says. ‘There will be plenty of people in the park. They see us running from the museum and tossing a painting into the water, they’ll start filming for social media. We’ll post it to our own channels. It won’t take long for word to get out.’

‘Look,’ Storm says, glancing at the wall clock. ‘It’s almost five o’clock. I’m aware that people have classes and jobs and lives to go to.’ Classes and jobs. Lives. Full lives. Asher has three books on loan from the library and a TikTok account he’s logged into twice. It’s only week one of term, but he’s impatient for his life to change now he’s finally at university. ‘Let’s carry on this conversation on Telegram.’ Telegram. Of course this group would use Telegram. He will get it tonight. He’s such an amateur, assuming they’d use WhatsApp, which is so easily hacked.

The room fills with the sounds of chairs scraping along the floor and tables being pushed back into place. ‘Thanks, everyone,’ Storm says. ‘And thanks for those sweets whoever brought them.’ Asher doesn’t want to get in the way or put a piece of furniture in the wrong place, so he simply stands there and waits for the shuffling to be over.

‘What do you think?’ Pokémons is smiling at him. Because Asher didn’t say anything all meeting, they’ve decided he’s weird and a drag on the group. They want him gone, but they’ll do it nicely. ‘I’m Dom.’ Dominic, Asher presumes. He locks the name away in his memory. Now he needs to say something.

‘I’m Asher.’

‘Hi, Asher, welcome.’

‘Thank you.’

Dom swings his bag over his shoulder and indicates for Asher to walk beside him as they head out of the room. ‘Your body language in there. You didn’t seem too impressed.’

Asher swallows a lump of concrete. ‘I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry,’ he croaks. ‘Really sorry. I am impressed. I think you’re all so brilliant, I just want to—’

Dom’s laugh interrupts him. ‘Relax. You shouldn’t be impressed. This group hasn’t achieved anything in two years. It needs a shake-up. Storm’s okay as a leader, but she’s limited.’

‘Oh,’ Asher says. His heart rate returns to normal.

‘Meat-free Friday in one London university isn’t going to save the world,’ Dom laughs.

‘Yes, I’d like to do more than that,’ Asher says. ‘I thought, I don’t know, this group might be, actually …’ he struggles to find a word which agrees with Dom’s position but isn’t offensive, isn’t wrong.

‘Effectual?’ Dom offers.

‘I guess, yeah,’ Asher says, and now they’re both laughing. ‘I mean, I am vegan though, so I do support campus going meat-free.’

‘Of course.’

As they walk through the corridor side-by-side, Asher likes how Dom leans into him. The way he seems to be concentrating hard to hear what Asher says next.

‘My mum used to be an animal activist in the nineties. Fully vegan, when almost no one else was. I didn’t eat any meat until I was ten. We never kept pets, because animals should never be controlled, or went to a zoo, or bought cut flowers, or anything like that.’

‘Impressive. Want to swap mothers?’ Dom laughs.

‘She’s lapsed now, though. But she supports me being vegan.’

They reach the exit and Dom guides Asher to the side of the building, out of the way of passing students. ‘Have you heard of the South American cannibal ants?’ Dom asks. Asher shakes his head. ‘They feed on soft-bodied mites and other smaller insects. Well, that’s what they used to feed on. Because of biodiversity loss, the ants’ natural predators have declined in numbers and so their own population has risen exponentially.’ Dom seems to be watching Asher for a reaction and so he smiles wider as he nods along. ‘The ants’ numbers have gone off the scale,’ Dom continues. ‘They aren’t the largest in the animal kingdom, they’re not the smartest, the strongest, the most agile, and yet they started to dominate their eco system. Do you know what these ants did about that? When their own population exploded and started to over-burden their area, they stopped eating soft mites. They stopped eating any other insects. Now they feed on each other. To get things back in balance, they sacrifice members of their own species. They know what needs to be done. The cannibal ants.’

‘Wow,’ Asher says. ‘I haven’t heard of that.’

‘I don’t talk like this in front of Storm and the others,’ Dom says. ‘But I can see you’re different. I don’t have to censor myself in front of you.’ Asher’s face goes strawberry.

‘No,’ Asher says, still blushing. ‘You don’t. Veganism isn’t enough because the problem is much bigger than just consumption. Although that’s important.’

‘Really what we need to do is get the birth rate down,’ Dom says. ‘Right down. Human babies are the biggest source of carbon emissions. The planet cannot sustain them. It cannot even cope with the current population.’ Humans have been replicating at an unsustainable level for generations, Asher knows this. ‘Earth is full. We need to stop, before it’s too late.’ When he first got into climate activism, Asher was fixated on population, but now he tries to focus more on pollution, on policy. But he knows Dom has a point.

‘The planet needs ten years to recover,’ Dom says. ‘To reset. Humans should be banned from reproducing for a decade. Full stop. Forced abortions. Why not? China did it.’ Asher understands sometimes you need to think in extremes, purely as an exercise. Shoot for the moon and maybe you’ll reach the stars.

‘Once, I saw a scientific graph mapping human population growth since caveman times,’ Asher says. ‘The annotation said the steep curve is disturbing and unique in the animal kingdom. It dwarfs the curve of every other animal and insect on this planet. It doesn’t look like a graph belonging to an animal at all. The reproduction rate of humans, the way we’ve spread and replicated and taken over the earth, looks like bacteria as it doubles and redoubles, smothering a Petri dish in a lab. If any scientist saw the graph and didn’t read the label, they’d assume they were looking at pathogens, not people.’

‘Exactly. In the ecological sense, humans are a deadly, invasive growth,’ Dom says, cupping Asher’s shoulder. ‘Society, the economy – it’s a human Ponzi scheme. Each year we need more and more people to pay taxes, to keep the whole system propped up. Infinite growth to keep things nice for the humans. And it’s the planet that suffers. It’s time people are made to suffer. Who says we deserve any living standards? Let alone the luxury standards to which most of us have become accustomed.’

‘You should be in charge of this group,’ Asher says, and he hates that it comes out as a nervous giggle.

Dom laughs. ‘I’m trying!’

‘What are you studying?’

‘Nothing right now.’ Dom’s eyes dart away for a second and he scans the footpath. ‘Look. I’ve got to go. Great talking to you, Asher.’ He touches Asher’s shoulder again and grins.

‘See you next week,’ Asher says.

‘I hope so.’ Dom gives him a big wave as he walks away.

He did move the seat. That was real. When Dom sat down beside Asher, his back was turned to him ever so slightly and so he adjusted the chair to make sure Asher was fully included.

3.

Tia

Now

There’s that advert on Tia’s phone again. The corpse flower on display at the botanical gardens, blooming and smelling like rotting flesh for only one night a year. Stop searching for flowers online and drive to the shops, she tells herself. She changes and leaves the aquatic centre with chlorine still in the cracks of her palms. It’s mid-morning by the time Tia gets to the supermarket and there’s only a few bunches left in the black buckets by the door, all drooping, ashamed. Inside, she’s reminded of daffodil season. Trimmed bundles are everywhere, stems and buds held taut by rubber bands. Some have already opened into piercing yellow shapes. Daffodils are a neat, clean choice of flower, Tia thinks, but too cheery. She wants to get this exactly right. She’ll go to a proper flower shop. There, Tia passes bunches of expensive roses, sparse, artistic arrangements of dried things and mini pineapples on sticks. She asks for peonies. These are also in season, for only a matter of weeks. Elegant, precious. That seems appropriate. She avoids the flowers gathered into wedding-ish bouquets and chooses a bunch where the petals are loose, forming cream and soft pink bowls.

At noon, Tia pulls up directly in front of the house and sees curtains sway in the window. There’s no need to ring the bell. ‘Hi, Mrs Ward,’ Tia says, as Andrew Ward’s widow opens the door.

‘Come in. Call me Stella.’ She’s in her early fifties but dresses much younger. Over the past year, during the siege inquest and the review hearings, Tia has admired Stella’s clothes from across the court room. Today, her outfit is a jumble of colours and too many patterns. It reminds her of a bereaved mother she once came into contact with when she was still with the Metropolitan Police. After her child’s death, the woman couldn’t function; she simply couldn’t operate the washing machine. Down to the last few clean items in her wardrobe, she wore a hot pink shirt when Tia went to visit her, mismatched with red and gold trousers. One of the many small indignities of maddening grief.

‘Tia. Is that short for anything?’ Stella asks.

Often she makes a joke about her parents drinking a lot of Tia Maria in the eighties. Not today. ‘No, just Tia.’

‘You didn’t seem surprised when I called.’ They are still walking down Stella’s lengthy hall, in single file, so Tia can’t read her face.

‘I knew your husband had passed away. I saw his obituary. I’m so very sorry for your loss.’ They come to a stop in what appears to be one of several sitting rooms in this tastefully restored Victorian house. Tia hands over the peonies.

‘They’re beautiful, thank you.’ Stella drops onto a suede sofa and gestures for Tia to do the same. A coffee table between them has a plain white teapot and two empty cups on saucers. Usually white crockery makes Tia feel she’s in a Travelodge, but here it’s sophisticated. Too sophisticated for her. She should have offered to remove her shoes at the door but now the moment’s passed. ‘Lovely,’ Stella says, raising a flower to her nose. It looks as though she hasn’t slept for weeks, which Tia supposes is probably accurate.

‘I don’t know the details,’ Tia says. ‘Only what was in the paper.’ Andrew Ward, 57, passed away four weeks ago. The week after the siege inquest concluded.

‘You would have guessed from the media’s euphemism. “No suspicious circumstances”.’

Tia nods. Her colleague phoned and thankfully she didn’t pick up until the end of her shift because she had to go straight home once she knew, sit very still in her dark living room. Andrew deserved to go peacefully in old age after a long illness, or a short illness, or swiftly of a heart attack. Not now. And anything but suicide.

Stella pours them both a cup of tea and nudges the milk and sugar cubes to within Tia’s reach. ‘Thank you,’ Tia says.

She recalls the first death message she had to do after joining the police. A sixty-something man had died in a car accident and she went to inform the wife. When she opened the door and saw Tia in her uniform, the woman knew, because they all do. Tia identified herself. The corners of the wife’s mouth reached up into a proximation of a smile; a watery, hopeless expression. As though, if only she was nice to this police officer on her doorstep, then Tia wouldn’t want to hurt her and wouldn’t go through with the awful thing she had come to say.

Stella is staring into her untouched teacup. Three days ago she called and asked Tia to visit. It isn’t clear what she’s expecting. Her husband survived the siege, and then killed himself a week after the inquest finally concluded, three years later. When closure was finally supposed to come.

‘Our cleaner found him. Can you believe it?’ She breaks the silence so suddenly it makes Tia jump. ‘A lovely lady from Ecuador. She stopped working in hotels because she’d seen this before – dead bodies, I mean. All the things you walk in on when you work in those places,’ she shudders. ‘So she cleans houses now and this is what she gets.’

‘I really am terribly sorry,’ Tia says. Did something happen at the inquest? It was coroner-only, without a jury, and the purpose was fact-finding. It was not about apportioning blame or civil or criminal liability. The coroner would arrive at a ‘narrative conclusion’ and release a report, any day now, on ‘preventing further deaths’ for when something like the siege happens again. Tia had planned to attend each day, but once the hearings got going, she found she needed a regular break from it, and she felt bad asking for so much time off work, anyway.

‘Andrew was being stalked before he died,’ Stella says.

‘Stalked?’ Tia thinks back to the inquest days she did attend, and how many times she saw Andrew there too. At least a dozen occasions. Why didn’t he say anything?

‘A sustained campaign of harassment,’ Stella continues. ‘I’ve done some reading, and I think it could be prosecuted as a criminal offence: “Pressuring, encouraging or assisting suicide”. They changed the law, fairly recently. There have been a couple of prosecutions, here and in America. Young people persuading each other to kill themselves, that sort of thing.’

‘I had no idea this was happening to him,’ Tia says. During the inquest, she never sat near the surviving hostages. They blame her for how the siege ended. They must do. She never wanted to force herself on them, put them in a position where they’d feel compelled to be nice for the sake of appearances and keep a lid on their anger. So, in court, she smiled whenever she met one of the hostages’ eyes, asked how they were and then left them be. Each day she sat separate. Alone. None of them made an effort with her. Even so, maybe there was something she could have done? ‘I wish I’d known,’ Tia says. ‘You’ve spoken to police about this?’

‘They said it would be very difficult to prosecute. I know they’re not doing anything about it. They already said they found no real evidence of stalking. The case is essentially done with.’

‘Would you like me to ask around? See if I can find out who is assigned to the case? I’m so sorry, Stella, about everything.’ Tia still has a few friendly contacts in the Met. She’d rather not owe Al a return favour, but if she were to ask him, she knows he’d try to help.

Stella shakes her head. ‘I don’t want you to ask around. I want you to be assigned to the case.’

That’s what this is. She thinks Tia is still police. ‘I’m afraid I left the Metropolitan Police immediately after the siege.’

‘Exactly. I thought because you’re with that private policing company now, you’d have some spare capacity. You could look into it yourself.’ Stella’s hands are pressing hard against her knees.

‘Oh.’ Now Tia’s winded. She can’t refuse, but she can’t possibly do this. Tia can’t imagine anything worse for herself than investigating Andrew Ward’s sudden death.

‘I hope that’s not offensive. I know you’re still busy, I don’t mean to diminish your job.’

‘I know what you mean.’ Tia tries to smile but produces nothing more than a twitch. ‘It isn’t that I’m too busy. I’m not a detective. I never was.’

‘I know technically you’re not a real police officer anymore but … now I’m being even more offensive about your job.’

‘You’re alright,’ Tia says. ‘I don’t have a warrant card anymore but I do have the power to arrest people and can launch my own investigations … though it isn’t meant for this kind of thing,’ she tries to say it nicely. No longer a “real” police officer, Tia works for a private company called Brilliant Bobbies. Founded by ex-police officers, it employs those who have left the service, for whatever reason, and seeks to fills the gaps in London where the Metropolitan force simply don’t have the funds and resources to police. It means when she does arrest people, and when she has launched her own investigations, it’s been for Rolexes stolen from wrists in Hampstead, and Birkin handbags lifted from shops on Kings Road. Not for stalking or encouraging suicide. Nothing like this.

‘But that’s why you can do this, surely,’ Stella says. ‘Because you’re not an official police officer. I’ll pay you, of course. I’m not asking you to work for free.’

‘I wouldn’t take your money.’ It’s the green carpet Tia thinks of first. Does the museum still have that thick verdant carpet, she wonders? No, of course not. They would have ripped it up after the siege. But it’s always the flooring she goes to first when dragged back to that day. Mercifully, the carpet disappears for her, but now she can smell the vanilla of antique furniture and blood mixed together.

‘You could look into it, though?’ The question snatches Tia back to the present.

‘Stella …’ Finally, the inquest and all of the post-siege investigations are over. It was only a few weeks ago that Tia first allowed herself to imagine a future where she doesn’t think about the museum a hundred times a day.

‘I don’t know who else to ask,’ she says. ‘And I need to know who was harassing my husband.’

She can’t say no to this woman. Tia can’t go through with this, but now she’s aware of what happened to Andrew, she needs to know too. ‘When did it start?’

‘Right towards the end of the inquest. About eight weeks ago. He’d finished being a witness at that point. We were still going in some days to listen, but there was no requirement for Andrew to speak.’ Tia attended almost every day at the beginning. She remembers those mornings when Andrew was behind the microphone. Nothing unexpected came up. He was shaken, emotional at times – they all were. He told the truth and he answered their questions. Compared to some of the others, he actually seemed quite calm.

‘Someone approached him there in court?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Andrew said it started with notes. Suddenly he was being sent postcards from the museum, available in their gift shop, you know the ones? With images of various artworks currently on display.’

‘Sent here, to your home?’

‘Yes. He said the only thing written in the address field was his name. They were all hand-delivered overnight. No stamp.’

‘He didn’t recognise the handwriting?’ Stella shakes her head. ‘Did Andrew speak to anyone, a manager from the museum?’

‘He tried. Then he was repeatedly sent gift vouchers for their gift shop. Pencils with their branding. Pens clearly bought from their shop. All sorts of stupid things. Innocuous to someone else, but chilling to Andrew. It was as though the museum itself was stalking him.’

Now Tia feels the scratch of that green carpet against her skin, kneeling on the floor, trying to stem the hostage’s bleeding. She coughs and shakes her head, hoping the memory will fall out. She takes a black biro and pad from her bag and starts making notes. This doesn’t mean she’s going to properly investigate this.

‘I know it sounds like a sick joke but this was the location of the worst thing that ever happened to my husband. He never wanted to set foot in that museum ever again. He never wanted to think about that place. Someone knew that and they used it to torture him.’

‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ Tia has no plans to ever go back there. In the year after the siege, she read about the museum’s financial problems because attendance was right down. No one wanted to go there, the same way no one is looking to buy a house where a murder took place. Eventually people forget, move on, and it managed to stay open. Even now, three years later, she still finds herself avoiding the area whenever she has to work in Holland Park.

‘Then small prints started arriving in the post. Nothing valuable, just copies printed on cheap paper of various artworks which aren’t on display at that museum, and never have been. Copies of Rothko paintings. Do you know Mark Rothko? The series “Black on Grays”?’

‘I don’t really know anything about art,’ Tia says, apologetic.

‘He’s a very famous American painter. He killed himself. That series of paintings is considered to be his suicide note.’

‘Oh.’ Tia is grateful for the notebook on her lap. The clean white page is a spot to focus on while she digests this. She tries to think back to the pool this morning, to her third lap, the point at which she’s usually relaxed and out of her head.

‘Andrew was sent copies of Diane Arbus’s work. And paintings, cheap posters of paintings by Van Gogh.’

‘What’s the connection?’

‘All suicides.’ There is a pause, then: ‘Excuse me.’ Her words come out cracked and chipped. Before Tia has a chance to respond, the woman has disappeared into another room. A minute passes, and then another. After five minutes, there’s still no sign of her, and Tia can’t hear any sounds coming from elsewhere in the house. Should she just get up and quietly leave? Stella is obviously upset talking about this and doesn’t want to cry in front of Tia, a virtual stranger. She should go. Before she can stand, the other woman reappears. She’s running a hand through her hair, not tousling, but clinging to it. Tia crunches her own too-tight bun.

Stella sits and Tia waits for her to speak again.

‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘Don’t apologise.’

‘What was I saying? Oh, I remember. Then Andrew was sent razor blades. That’s how Rothko killed himself.’

Tia winces. ‘That’s truly awful.’

‘Sometimes just loose blades rattling around an envelope. You’d cut yourself opening it if you weren’t careful. He said one morning he went outside to find blades just scattered in the front garden, sprinkled everywhere as though they were autumn leaves in the grass. Like some kind of horror movie.’

‘My God,’ Tia says.

‘It’s childish, really. I know you’re thinking this wouldn’t push a grown man into killing himself, but it wears you down, when it’s day after day. It makes your skin crawl. And Andrew already had a type of undiagnosed PTSD after the siege, I’m sure of it.’

‘Poor Andrew. Did he say who he thought was doing it?’

‘No, but it was unspoken between us that it was because of what he did that day, to survive the siege.’ She kneads one shoulder with her right hand.

‘I’m not sure what you mean?’

‘He refused to see a therapist afterwards. Can you imagine – going through that and not getting help? Because he was worried they’d make him feel better about something which he thought he should feel bad about. He thought he deserved a level of torment.’

‘Oh.’ Tia didn’t expect this. Andrew Ward didn’t participate in the post-siege media opportunities but Tia never really stopped to think about why – she was too busy trying to avoid the coverage altogether. Some of the surviving hostages did glossy magazine features and prime time TV interviews. Many of them paid, some of them very well remunerated. There’s a book coming out soon too, written by one of the hostages. Tia was approached a few times by journalists, but she said no to everything. She tries not to judge the others’ choices because her situation is different. It would not be right for her to court media opportunities or take money. It didn’t occur to her that Andrew would be so regretful about his own actions that day. She thought his resentment about how the siege ended would be directed towards her. She was the police officer. She’s the one who couldn’t get everybody out. ‘These postcards and pens and things, do you have any of these items for me to take a look at?’ Tia asks.

‘Andrew destroyed them all. He was embarrassed. He wanted to hide it from me.’

‘He wouldn’t have made copies? Taken a photo with his phone?’

‘I don’t think so. I only discovered this was all happening by accident, really. See, Andrew was always against having security cameras. He thought visible security measures are self-defeating by signalling to the world that you have something inside worth stealing. So, when suddenly I come home and see him putting multiple cameras on our house, it was obvious something was wrong.’

‘He was trying to catch the person hand delivering the items,’ Tia says.

‘He said they were because of a robbery that had occurred on our street, but the house directly across the road was burgled the year before and he’d made a point of telling another neighbour that cameras aren’t a deterrent. Then, the day after he installed them, he ran out of the room during dinner and vomited. He’d never done anything like that before. I demanded Andrew tell me what was going on and it all came out.’ Stella rests back on the sofa and hugs her arms across her chest.

‘What happened with the cameras?’

‘They never got anything useful. I guess they were too obvious. Whoever was doing it presumably drove up to the house and when they saw the new hardware they changed their tactics.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘They stopped the deliveries and began meddling online instead. Andrew’s personal and work email addresses were continually subscribed to the museum’s e-newsletter. He’d get himself taken off the mailing list but whoever was doing it would just re-subscribe him over and over again. He was also sent tickets for the museum, to paid exhibitions. He’d get emails about attending, and text reminders to his phone.’ Tia imagines how she’d handle it if someone did this to her. The museum itself stalking her. She wouldn’t cope.

‘Was Andrew in contact with any of the other survivors?’ Tia asks. ‘Outside of running into people at the inquest?’

‘He stayed in touch with Enoch Black. He came to the funeral.’

‘No one else?’

‘No. They were all strangers before the siege, so they went back to being strangers.’

‘Did he attempt to speak to any of the individuals in prison?’ Tia asks.

‘I strongly doubt it.’ It seems unlikely one of the hostage-takers would suddenly begin harassing Andrew three years later. Although it wouldn’t be the first time an inmate hounded someone from inside. Tia stops writing and rests her pen and notepad on her lap.

‘And he was never bothered by anyone before the inquest?’ Tia asks. ‘Nothing immediately after the siege?’

‘Nothing until eight weeks ago. Not that I’m aware.’ The inquest starting did push the siege back into the national news, and media attention always attracts the unhinged. ‘The police said in order to have a case we’d need to prove the person behind it intended for Andrew to kill himself,’ Stella continues. ‘“You should have died in there” – he said that was the kind of stuff written on the final postcards right before he installed the cameras. How much clearer can you be?’

‘It isn’t that I don’t want to help you with this – if I could, I would.’

‘I won’t get some random private investigator involved. You’re the only person I’m asking. You knew him. You were there.’

‘I was just another hostage,’ Tia says. ‘In the end.’ At the time of the siege, Tia was only in her fifth year with the Metropolitan Police. The year before she’d finally been allowed to take the Hostage and Crisis Negotiator national course. After she crashed out, she was floundering in her policing career but she hadn’t given up and was obsessed with who she had to meet and what work she should volunteer for in order to be given another chance. Then, the siege happened, and it was clear being a negotiator was never going to be possible for her, so she quit the Met Police entirely. She didn’t help Andrew that day, and she doubts her ability to help him here.

Stella stands. ‘Come into Andrew’s study. I don’t suppose you’ll find anything, but just in case.’

She walks down the hall and Tia follows. ‘Have you lived in this house a long time?’ she asks.

‘Since we were married. Twenty-seven years ago. It was an inheritance from Andrew’s side of the family. Neither of us ever earned quite enough to buy a house like this ourselves.’

Picture hooks rest along the walls, holding up bland paintings made from thick oil paints and framed university diplomas. They come to a stop outside a closed door. Stella pauses then turns the antique knob. She stands aside for Tia to enter first. Andrew’s study is dark with navy-blue curtains blocking out any attempt at sunlight. Stella moves to the windows and ties them with a sash.

‘Andrew was in the museum that day entertaining a client,’ she says, facing the window. ‘Even though it was the weekend, he felt he should spend the day with this man who was over from America and didn’t know anyone in London. That’s what Andrew was like – always friendly, always thinking of others. Andrew asked him what he wanted to do on Saturday and the client said he was interested in visiting this particular museum. So they arranged to meet in the morning. Andrew got there first. By the time the American arrived, the doors had been locked, and the siege was in progress so he went back to his home country with a story about his near-death experience and Andrew got … well, everything that followed.’

Tia’s hand is on Andrew’s closed desk drawer. ‘May I?’ She doesn’t know why she’s opening this, or what she’s looking for, but now she’s in motion it seems impossible to stop.

‘Go ahead.’ Tia pulls on the handle and sifts through a stack of papers. Underneath, she sees wires. Tia freezes. Five, six are tangled together, attached to some kind of device which she’ll see if she lifts out the drawer. She blinks a few times. Looks again. It’s a ball of rubber bands. That’s all. Harmless. Tia exhales and closes the drawer. ‘I can’t decide if I want to sell this house immediately or stay here forever,’ Stella continues.

‘It’s a beautiful house. But people often sell after a tragedy like this. Painful memories tend to linger on objects, and locations. Sometimes a fresh start can help.’ At the bookshelf, Tia mentally catalogues what she sees. Lamp. A discarded fountain pen. Notebook. A skim suggests nothing remarkable written inside. More pens. Digital clock. Old-fashioned address book with half of the pages stuck together with mildew. A set of keys. On Andrew’s desk is a fun paperweight, actually it’s more of a novelty snow globe, with a cat figurine trapped inside. Does this jokey desk item represent who he was before the siege, or who he turned into? Really, she knows practically nothing about Andrew Ward. Tia goes to the last of the shelves and fingers a miniature golf ball and tee.

‘The siege made him less work-obsessed,’ his wife says. ‘He did some volunteering. He took up golf.’ Tia carefully returns the golf trinkets to where she found them. None of this is really helping.

‘Remind me exactly what your husband did for work?’ It was covered, briefly, at the inquest.

‘He ran a small company. Ten employees. They provide software solutions for businesses. I never really understood it, to be honest, at least not fully. Basically he made computer programs. But not even full programs. Just the missing pieces between one business’s program and another’s.’

Tia’s eyes linger on a vase on his desk, or maybe it’s a sculpture. She doubts it has ever been used for flowers. She thinks it looks like the thin steel sculpture on display in the museum entrance that day. She forces her eyes to move away from it and comes to a photo frame: a picture from their wedding. In this image, Andrew Ward’s port wine birthmark is prominent. On the edge of his chin, it’s as though he’s taken a sip of red wine and missed his mouth. It must be obvious to his wife what she’s looking at. ‘It’s easy to get those lasered off these days,’ Stella says. ‘But Andrew said he grew to love his birthmark. It became part of him and he thought it made him distinctive. I certainly liked it. He said it was good for business. It made him stand out. Showed he was confident in himself, by choosing to not have it removed, and proved he wasn’t to be messed with. He didn’t talk like that after the siege, of course.’ She sighs, long and slow.

Tia returns the photo frame to the desk but apparently doesn’t do so correctly and it immediately collapses. She scrambles to straighten it up and notices a slight twitch in the flesh of her right hand. She tucks the hand behind her back.

‘Stella, I can’t see anything in here which would help the investigation. Are you sure your husband destroyed all the evidence of his harassment? What about his computer? Mobile phone?’

‘The police recovered some emails but they couldn’t find who or even where they came from. The IP address was fake. Somewhere in Bulgaria. Same with the text messages.’ Tia has no technical expertise and if the police didn’t find anything, it’s unlikely she will. Though she knows this case wouldn’t have been a priority for them. It shouldn’t be a priority for you either, says a voice inside her head. It’s Delia. Delia whispers the truth: this is a job for someone who doesn’t have a track record of neglecting to prevent suicides. Stella should hire a person who hasn’t already failed Andrew once before, she says.

‘I’m sorry, I really don’t think I can help you. As much as I wish I could.’ Stella attended the inquest. Andrew would have talked to her in detail about what happened that day. Shouldn’t Tia be the last person she’d want to trust with her husband’s investigation?

‘How much would it cost?’

‘It isn’t about the money,’ Tia says.

‘I know your rates with the private security company must be very high, and I’m open to meeting them. We can negotiate something, I’m sure.’

Negotiate. She means it in a throwaway sense, but for Tia, the word stays hanging in the air. She can’t negotiate anything effectively. She’s proven that. Tia opens one of the desk drawers again and moves around some papers. She’s trying to buy herself some thinking time. She wanted to become a negotiator to prevent suicides. People think it’s all sieges and hostage-taking, but actually most of the work is sad people on bridges. Now here’s a suicide right here on Tia’s plate. If she doesn’t look into this, perhaps no one else will. Certainly no one else will try as hard as her, and maybe that’s enough. She’ll do everything she can for Andrew, and for his family. She owes him that. Tia owes this woman everything she can give.

‘I can’t guarantee I’ll find anything.’ Tia slides the drawer closed.

‘It would mean a lot if you could just try.’

‘I’ll absolutely do my best,’ Tia says, as her face is pressed against the museum’s green carpet, again. The loops in the fabric imprint her cheek while the pop, pop of the firearms go past her ears and explode right in the centre of her head. ‘I promise.’

4.

Tia

Then

The Bennett Museum is a ten-minute walk from Holland Park tube station, past embassies and sandy-coloured Victorian townhouses, and by the time Tia reaches the top of the street, she has seen two BMWs, one Rolls-Royce and half a dozen squirrels. The spring pollen is fierce today, white fluff is actually visible in the air. She can feel that bits of the deciduous trees have fallen and settled into the bun of her hair like a nest. Her phone’s GPS tells her to turn right. In front of Tia now is a house. Is this it? She checks her phone again because this feels less like visiting a museum and more breaking and entering. The house looks as though it dates from the 1800s. There are neat shrubs marking the entrance as well as a gleaming steel sculpture which might be a bird, or a teardrop, or neither of these things. Then she sees the plaque. Opening hours are Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm. She’s in the right place. This is the former home of Lord Bennett, who made his money owning factories and building a new kind of sewing machine. The house and its contents are now in the custody of English Heritage. The website says Bennett liked to spend his wealth on art and antiques, and this museum is well worth a visit despite, or precisely because of, its location away from London’s main tourist trail.

Tia doesn’t enjoy art. She went to the Tate Modern once but it felt like a fun park, a bad one, where you can’t find the exits or the toilets and spend most of your time bumping into people and wishing you’d gone to the cinema instead. She is here for work. Kind of. There’s a position going in the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police, investigating the thefts of rare books and artworks, and she’s thinking of applying, although her heart’s not really in it. She probably won’t bother, if she’s honest with herself, unless she sees some amazing painting or sculpture today which changes her mind.

As Tia enters the building, she sees that it is very quiet. Normal for first thing on a Saturday morning, she supposes. She scratches her nose and her eyes, probably only rubbing the pollen in further and making things worse. Both eyes are starting to water and she is certain they are red. Maybe people will think she’s moved by the art. Immediately inside the museum is a gift shop and already Tia has something shiny in her hand; now she’s smelling the fancy soaps and trying out the testers of hand cream and this isn’t cultural at all; only a philistine starts in the gift shop. That’s why they put it right at the door; it’s a trap and she fell right into it. The silk scarfs and the candles and the handmade Cornish ceramic cups would make such nice gifts for people but it’s miles from Christmas, so that is no excuse. She doesn’t need any of this stuff, but does anyone? Tonight Tia is going out for dinner with friends and she’ll spend more than enough there; she doesn’t need to get out the credit card in here too. At least the restaurant is BYO and her boyfriend, Al, is bringing the wine. She really hopes he remembers and that he doesn’t get Shiraz. Tia returns a museum-branded fridge magnet to its display. Her fridge at home is already covered in magnets. There is a young woman behind the ticket desk and Tia pays for one adult entry. Twenty-two pounds! She tries not to grimace.

‘We recommend about forty-five minutes to an hour to explore all of the displays,’ the woman says. Forty-five minutes. Brilliant. She can find a Starbucks within the hour.

‘That’s great, thank you,’ Tia says.

‘Stairs are there to your right. There’s also a lift, and if you have any access requirements, just let me know.’ She hands Tia a booklet with a map.

‘Stairs are fine, thank you.’

Past the gift shop, Tia can see a small café which looks out onto a very carefully manicured garden. There’s only one man inside, a steaming metal teapot and cup and saucer in front of him. On the counter is a round chocolate cake, untouched, and a tray of panini sandwiches. She can’t see anyone working behind the coffee machine and wonders if the woman who sold her the entry ticket doubles as the barista. The cake looks good. But first: the art.

Tia takes the stairs to the first floor. She arrives at a narrow hallway which opens to one rectangular-shaped room. You can tell the building was originally a residential house, and they’ve knocked down walls so that this floor is now essentially a single room with a door at either end. Tia does a lap, clockwise. There are busts of men she’s never heard of, a glass cabinet of marble and bronze vases, more busts, a shelf of silver trinkets, bowls, and a wall covered in miniature paintings, no larger than a few inches across. The carpet is nice. It’s a very thick, lush green and Tia imagines she’s walking on a layer of damp moss. She passes the second door but avoids the temptation to walk through it and continues on until she has done a complete loop. There. That wasn’t so bad. But she has no idea what she would say about any of this if she was working with other police who actually knew what they were talking about.

Tia goes back to the hallway and climbs the stairs to the top floor. The layout of the room is the same, but the artworks look more promising. The space is full of oil paintings. Most of the pictures are landscapes of hills and lakes and moors. This is something she can appreciate. She supposes she has old-fashioned tastes when it comes to art, if she has any artistic taste at all. Tia steps closer to a painting of a vista and thinks this is the kind of art anyone can admire: the clear technical skill, the choice of colours and the brushwork which she imagines is fiendishly difficult to achieve. The paintings in here are solemn and melancholic. The scenes don’t feel recognisable as any part of England she knows today and maybe that’s why she finds that she is actually enjoying looking at them, because they feel like looking back in time.

Tia can hear someone on the stairs. A couple walk in, and then a man with a striking birthmark on his chin comes through the second set of doors. She was beginning to think she had this whole place to herself. Tia spends a few minutes taking in the paintings on the far side of the room, by which time three more people enter. She checks the time: it’s almost ten thirty. Perhaps she came just before it tends to get busy. Tia continues through the space and stops before an oversized painting of a tree. She can’t identify the species but the image is truly beautiful. There is such fine detail captured in the leaves, and the tree’s canopy stretches across the width of the canvas as though it is trying to shade the whole world. She wants to take a picture on her phone, but she isn’t sure if this is allowed. Tia looks around and sees there is no staff up here or any apparent security. She pulls her phone from the back pocket of her jeans and takes a quick snap. Nobody says anything.

Once her phone is out, Tia loses five minutes checking her emails and replying to one from her landlord. More people are coming in. It looks like she’s seen everything, so maybe she’ll head back downstairs, check out the garden and then she can go. As she turns to leave, Tia sees someone touch one of the paintings. A young man is lifting one of the oil works clean off the wall. She knows that’s not allowed. Does he work here? There’s a woman standing with this man and he’s so brazen about it, she thinks they must be staff re-arranging the space. Tia tries to remember what the woman downstairs on the ticket desk was wearing. She had on a uniform, Tia is sure of it. These two are in casual clothes. Nothing identifies them as staff. The painting is still in the man’s hands. She sees something now in the web of his right hand. A dark red stain. Paint? Blood? He’s speaking to his friend. They’re arguing. It really doesn’t seem as though they work here. Are they stealing it? Surely not in the middle of the day, in front of people, but she knows that sort of thing happens, more frequently than you’d expect. Tia’s probably just getting overexcited about the job vacancy, suddenly seeing art crimes everywhere, but she should go over and make sure.

She walks towards them, pretending to be drawn by a painting on the wall. There’s about a dozen people in the room now and everyone is staring at this pair. ‘What are you doing?’ a young man asks them. He has a lanyard around his neck: he works here. Not the others. This is a robbery. She’s going to have to intervene, call it in and probably arrest them herself. Then, the man drops the painting to the floor and there is something else in his hand. Tia’s arms fall to her sides and freeze in place. He must have taken it from one of the displays, she tells herself. It’s an antique. That is surely what it is. She tells her arms and legs to move. Tia steps closer, closer still, and finds her stomach won’t allow her to pretend any longer. What is in this man’s hand is not an antique. The way he’s holding it now, the expression on the face of the woman next to him, tells Tia everything she needs to know. Even before the first scream, before he lifts it above his head and starts to shout, Tia knows she is looking at a gun.

5.

Asher

Now

It is six o’clock on Asher’s first morning of freedom and he has already been awake for an hour. The electronic monitoring tag around his ankle is not uncomfortable but it is annoying, like a half-lifted scab you can’t help but pick. During the night, after finally getting to sleep around one o’clock, he woke every hour kicking at the device with his other foot, and then panicking it might count as tampering, enough to have him hauled back inside. The tag is made out of some kind of very durable plastic, a blue-grey colour, the same shade as the bedclothes in his cell, now he thinks about it. Asher rolls onto his left side and drops his feet to the floor. The gentle tickle of the carpet against his bare skin overwhelms him with a sense of good fortune, and he has never before thought of himself as lucky. Asher was convicted of assisting an offender and some other smaller charges, but not full-blown manslaughter. He is somehow still here, alive in this body. Not the one killed that day. Not the one still in prison. He is home with his mum and a soft floor, and he can stay in bed all day if he wants to.

‘Morning, love.’ Asher emerges from his bedroom to find his mother tying purple trainers on her feet. ‘Sorry it’s so early – did I wake you?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘I was already up.’

She frowns. ‘You’ll sleep better tonight. I’m sorry, but I got called in to work an hour ago. Did I explain I’m a bank nurse now?’ He shakes his head. ‘It’s a much a higher rate of pay but it means I move around to whichever hospital needs me, and I often get calls before dawn.’

‘You must be tired,’ he says. ‘Don’t they know you worked last night?’

‘I’m alright, tonight I’ll finish at seven. Then we can have a meal, does that sound okay?’

‘Great.’ He tries to smile and does his best not to claw at the tag with his toenails.

Still crouched, she checks the clock on the wall. ‘It’s 6:22, I’ll have to drive. Some days when I have more time I take public transport to save on parking. So, if you wake up in the mornings and the keys are in the red fruit bowl, I’ve taken the bus and you can help yourself to the car.’ Upright now, Yvette moves towards him and kisses him on the cheek. ‘Take care, okay?’

‘Okay.’ His mother has definitely lost weight. She has always been tall and lean, but now she is wiry like him. A person loose, awkward in their skin.

‘Be kind to yourself. It’s only day one! Relax. Ring me if you need anything. I probably won’t be able to answer, but I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Text me if you want to eat anything particular tonight and I’ll pick it up on my way.’

She is through the door before Asher manages to stammer out, ‘Have a good day.’

He is alone. But not really alone. The device around his ankle tracks his whereabouts at all times and if it detects he is not at home between the hours of 7pm and 7am, he will get a visit from his probation officer. There is three months of this. Asher supposes he has nowhere to go, anyway. Not once in his life has he been out at 2am.

Already Asher senses that today will be long. In the kitchen he toasts two slices of white bread on the lowest heat setting and spreads across both a thin film of apricot jam. He eats the toast over the sink and watches the crumbs fall into the drain. Then he drinks a glass of orange juice and lets the pulp clog his teeth. Asher’s mother has a coffee machine: that’s new. She evidently moved up from instant while he was in jail. He opens the metallic tin next to the machine and sniffs the heady beans. He uses the scoop to transport some into the right compartment in the machine. After he presses the Espresso button, the tiny cup under the spout fills with coffee. It tastes good. It’s been so long since he’s had a decent coffee, he barely knows how to judge it, but he is sure this is better than average. Asher walks around the house drinking from his miniature cup and thinks about what to do with his day.

Asher’s mother has a drinks cabinet: this is also new. In the living room next to the bookshelf is a cabinet with a glass door, and inside are three tall bottles. He pulls on the door handle and inspects the labels. One is port, one is an unopened bottle of red wine, and the other is a half-drunk amber-coloured whisky. Asher is twenty-one years old but he has never really had a proper alcoholic drink. At school, he wasn’t invited to house parties where he knew other students got drunk for the very first time. He didn’t have a chance to make friends at university before he was imprisoned so he never really went out at the weekends in the months after he turned eighteen. He should have ordered a beer one time at the pub when the eco group meetings retired there. He wanted to keep a clear head during those sessions and was afraid it would be obvious to the others that he had never bought a pint before. A fellow inmate told him in Italy prisoners are given a weekly ration of table wine, and he thinks that sounds very sophisticated.

One of his mother’s bottles is out of the cabinet now and Asher is reading the label. Is alcohol vegan? He’s heard people say wine is filtered through fish bladders. He finishes his espresso and pours a few splashes of scotch into his cup. It smells awful. But he drinks it in one go and retches. The alcohol has little effect. He takes another swig and ignores the fire in his mouth. Then the whisky goes back to where he found it. Did his mother drink the top half of the bottle here in this room, alone? Sitting in front of the television of an evening after a long day at work, thinking about her only child in prison? Or did she have company? Did she have a new boyfriend while he was locked up? Perhaps she missed her son at first but then realised there was a silver lining to the whole thing: she was free of him; for at least a little while, she was childless again. Asher doesn’t want any of those things for his own life: a job, a girlfriend, a house, people to drink with. What’s the purpose? There isn’t one. People know this, deep, deep down, but most are afraid to ask themselves the honest questions. But he knows it isn’t good to think of everything as pointless. He scolds himself as he walks into the kitchen to wash his cup in the sink. Back in the front room, Asher looks through the window to the garden, the piles of dirt, the molehills. Dark tunnels, quiet, no people: he could breathe under there. It soothes him knowing those animals, free and alive, are so close.

The people who approved Asher’s parole expect him to look for a job. Who is going to employ a notorious twenty-one-year-old criminal with no qualifications or experience? He had a Saturday job during secondary school, working at the local Chinese takeaway, but they’re hardly going to re-hire him now. Besides, he can’t work with animal products, around raw chicken and bloody cuts of beef, he just can’t. He is forbidden from contacting anyone who was involved in the activist group. That accounts for all of the friends he had in university and adulthood, and even they weren’t actual friends by any kind of reasonable measure. Should he try and get in touch with some of the people he went to school with, see who still lives around here? Later. Some of the whisky has worked its way to his head and the room tilts slightly to the left. Asher moves his head to compensate, causing everything to spin sharply to the right. He could go outside and lie on the grass again and try to communicate with the moles. Not now, he’ll wait for the alcohol to wear off. Asher sits and puts his head between his knees and sees the tag around his ankle. That’s what he can do; he’s supposed to charge it for at least an hour each day, so there’s sixty minutes killed right there. He was given a portable charger as well but Asher connects to the mains and curls up on the carpet, and watches the device, and waits.

Asher thinks about his bank account. His discharge grant of £76 will be there. His prisoner account also has about a thousand pounds in wages from his laundry job. The probation officer is already encouraging him to try and get another job in a laundry, a real non-jail laundry. There is a private company, established by an ex-prisoner, that cleans, steams and folds the washing of clients including a premier league football team and a London Michelin-star restaurant. Is that what he’ll do for the rest of his life? Won’t this kind of work be automated soon? He was doing an engineering degree; he should be the one building the robots for the automation. None of this is what Asher had planned. It is seven thirty-four in the morning. What is he supposed to do with his time?

Once the tag is charged, he walks into the study. Yvette sometimes goes days without entering this room, at least she used to, and he sees on the desk a photograph of his mother and uncle as children. It stops him in his tracks, but then he feels some power surge within as the whisky burns in his chest, and he takes another step. He sits on the chair behind the desk. Yvette’s desktop computer. Asher’s laptop was seized by police after he was arrested, so now he does not have a computer of any kind. Her machine is in standby mode and Asher jiggles the mouse, coaxing it to life. She’s never been very good with online security and just as he remembers it, there is no password required to unlock the screen. He opens the internet search and sees the last website she visited was Facebook. Navigating to the page, he discovers his mother is still logged in.

Asher scrolls down and sees what she has been posting while he was in jail. Nothing much: just her usual assortment of inspirational messages which she hears from other people and likes to pass on. He opens her Messenger to see if she has been talking to anyone about him. She hasn’t. No sign of any boyfriend either. Asher is about to close Facebook when the name comes to him. The first name, and the last name, of one of the women in the museum that day. He shuts his eyes and builds a picture of her face. Asher’s hand is on the computer mouse again and now his fingers are typing her name into the search. There is a list of people with her exact name, but he spots her quickly, recognises her nose and her hair, in the miniature profile photograph. He rears back so fast that the wireless mouse falls from the desk and bounces along the floor. What was he thinking? He will never do that again. Logging out of his mother’s Facebook, Asher clears the search history and cookies before closing the browser.

Something on the desktop catches his eye. A folder titled: ASHER SAVINGS. He double clicks. It’s all PDFs, bank statements going back three years. A couple of months after he was arrested, his mother opened a new account for him. She’s been funding it regularly the whole time he was inside. The current balance is £26,789. Five figures. That’s why she’s taking all of these extra shifts. The reason she’s a bank nurse now with an antisocial shift pattern in return for a higher rate of pay. It’s all for him. She’s been working herself half to death while Asher was in jail. The sadness just about melts him into the chair. His mother hasn’t asked him if he knew what Dom was planning that day. Not once has she challenged him about the gun, or asked a question about taking hostages – nothing. There is not one shred of doubt inside her. Asher has never felt unloved for even one second that he’s been alive. She deserves so much more than him, he can’t even quantify it.

He should get dressed. Prison is centred around routine. Comb your hair even if it doesn’t matter. Wash your face even if no one cares. He pulls off his pyjamas – a new pair, Primark, folded and waiting on his bed when his mother brought him home – and opens his wardrobe. Asher finds the largest pair of jeans on the hangers and the biggest hoodie. The hem of the jeans now comes up to his ankles but they cover the electronic tag, only just. The hoodie is not as loose on him as it once was but it’s still roomy enough and in the mirror, when he models it with the fabric pulled up and over his forehead, his face is obscured. He will go outside. That’s what his probation officer advised: Go for a walk! Don’t stay inside all day. Go to the shops, buy something small, anything. Make eye contact with staff in the shop and smile – you’ll feel good. But he won’t feel good if he’s recognised. The hoodie is not enough. He needs another disguise. Glasses. He saw a pair somewhere. Walking back through the living room, he checks the surfaces for a resting pair of glasses. On the coffee table? No. On the hall table? Nothing there. His mother’s study. Next to the framed photo on the desk is a folded pair of his uncle’s brown reading glasses. Asher carefully lifts them to his face. The world goes fuzzy but he can still function with them on. His uncle loses reading glasses so often that he started buying multiple cheap pairs and leaving them in all of his usual places: one for his house, one for the car, one for his work, and one here. Hope flares up again, and Asher must think of the bobbing alligators in the games arcade, the oversized squishy hammer. He closes the study door behind him, and in the living room practises walking around with the spectacles on. He can do it. Inspecting his appearance in the bathroom, he decides the glasses look a bit odd paired with a hoodie, but the frames are chunky enough to change the overall impression of his face, and this is what he wants.

Before he sets off for the supermarket, Asher opens his mother’s drinks cabinet and takes two gulping mouthfuls of the hideous scotch. He finds a green apple in the fridge and eats it standing in the hallway, looking out onto the street through the peephole. The house is very quiet during the day, and this is something he doesn’t remember from before. Although, he is aware prison changed his idea of noise and silence; his idea of lots of things. In the fridge he finds a sealed bag of almonds and eats a fistful, three at a time. It’s now almost nine o’clock. In a few hours, in his prison, it will be lunch time and his absence will be a topic of conversation. He wonders what will be said about him. He closes his eyes and imagines his ears growing red and hot. Asher Russell is a terrible person, he hears. He caused his mother to lose a great deal of weight. It’s his fault Uncle Harrison is out of their lives. Asher should have been one of the people shot that day. He is a mole. He is only fit to live in the ground. He should only be allowed oxygen from the dirt. Asher pushes his uncle’s spectacles further up the bridge of his nose and leaves the house, water pooling behind the lenses.

6.

Asher

Then

Asher has to ask his uncle for a lift to the Bennett Museum because the train drivers are striking this weekend. Most of the group seem to be based in London. One of them, a girl, lives close by, but she isn’t taking part in this particular action. Anyway, there was no possibility of him asking her or any of them to pick him up. He doesn’t want them to see where he lives because he’s certain they’re all in house-shares which are one long party, or warehouses where they project Danish films directly onto the walls and maybe even squats; he had heard them mention squats at previous meetings. Asher’s street has one rose garden, three Tory election posters and two SUVs. He still lives with his mum.

So he asks for a lift in a car, not an electric vehicle, the very worst type of personal transport. It is Saturday. He wakes up far too early. Asher’s mother is at work so he paces the house, running through the group’s plan for the day. Half an hour before his uncle is due to collect him, Asher sits on the floor in the front room and looks through the window, waiting. He checks his phone for any messages from Dom, but there’s none. Asher tells himself to relax. He bets the others aren’t this nervous. He knows how he gets when he is too jittery – clumsy and embarrassing – and this reminder only makes things worse.

Asher must distract himself. While searching outside for his uncle’s car, he thinks of the statistics he’s accidentally memorised. There are one million people in this country with type 2 diabetes who don’t know about it. Each week there are two thousand new people with an undiagnosed cancer, and these are only the figures for his little pocket of the world. The way Asher sees it, death is either very swift, like dropping of a heart attack or collapsing under a massive stroke randomly, when you’ve not had a chance to brush your teeth or put on clean socks – or, in the only alternative, death is awfully slow, like when people are told they have leukaemia and a few years to live, and then most of that time is spent forgetting which pills they’ve already taken and waiting around hospitals. The benefit of this type of death is that you can tie things up, say goodbye to people and drain your bank account. He doesn’t know which option he prefers for himself: the sudden or the slow. But he is eighteen years old and he thinks about it daily.

Asher looks at the time. His uncle is due in five minutes. He checks Telegram again, but there’s nothing there. Harrison’s car pulls up three minutes early and Asher breathes out. There was no need to worry. He can always count on his uncle. Before Harrison has even turned off the engine, Asher is bounding out the door.

‘How’s your week been?’ his uncle says. ‘How’s it all going?’

‘Good, yeah. Thanks again for the ride.’ Asher quickly gets into the passenger seat to indicate he’s in a rush.

‘No trouble. Thought I’d visit a mate in North London while I’m down there.’

‘Sounds good,’ Asher says. As the car starts and his uncle performs a U turn, Asher thinks to himself that this, here, right now, is his last chance to change his mind.

‘So where are we going again – to your university?’ His uncle shifts his eyes from the road for just a second while he smiles at Asher.

‘The library. It’s in another building. Different area. I’ll type it into your GPS.’ Asher will have his uncle drop him at a public library, a mile from the Bennett Museum.

‘Bit rough having to study on a Saturday?’ Harrison didn’t go to university, nor did most of his friends. Asher knows he can say pretty much anything about his degree and his uncle will believe it.

‘Big assignment due on Monday,’ Asher says, patting the textbook on his lap. It’s only week four of his first term, but Harrison won’t question it. ‘I need to do some last-minute research.’

‘Workload okay? I was hoping you’d have some fun at university!’ Harrison turns to look at his nephew again, this time with concern. Asher coughs. A ball of dry guilt in his throat.

‘It’s not too bad. I’ll finish this assessment today and it will be alright.’ He will be dropped at the library and from there, Asher will walk. He can’t ask Harrison to drive him to a random eighteenth-century museum on a Saturday without him asking why. Asher does realise his uncle will most likely find out he lied about today, but he’s trying not to think about that right now. He’s never lied to him before. Not really, not like this. If Asher is arrested, or if he’s seen on the news – all week he’s been avoiding thinking about that. Dom told him there’s no point worrying about it. If he is taken into police custody, then his uncle is who he plans to call. There’s no question of it being anyone else. Asher is pinning all of his wishes on the possibility of the group’s action making the news without his face being included.

Three of them are doing this today: Storm as the group leader and Dom. The third person was supposed to be the one who suggested the Bennett Museum, but their grandmother died on Monday, so a message went out on Telegram for a replacement and before he really had a chance to think everything through, Asher volunteered. Dom immediately sent Asher a private message consisting of a dancing woman and a hands-clapping emoji. Storm thanked him sincerely for stepping in at the last moment in her usual professional and serious way. She’s like a politician from the TV, but a good one, and he wonders if he’ll ever have the courage to ask about her impossibly brilliant name. At least Asher has the easiest role of the three. His job is to stay on the ground floor of the museum, close to the main entrance, where the employees are usually stationed in the café and the gift shop. If a member of staff goes upstairs to where the artworks are, he’s to create a distraction, to try and divert them with a stupid customer question. Keep them away. Storm’s job as leader is to open the doors and navigate to the painting and then afterwards lead the way outside to the river. Dom will actually take the painting off the wall and run. Asher wonders, the more he thinks about it, if he’s kind of superfluous to the whole thing and might just end up standing around watching and not get arrested, or noticed at all. Then, his uncle will never know he lied to him.

‘Need me to pick you up when you’re finished?’ Uncle Harrison says.

‘No, I’m fine,’ Asher tries to keep his voice light. ‘The train strike ends at six o’clock, so I’ll be okay getting home.’

‘If you get stuck, call me.’

Guilt scratches at the back of Asher’s throat again. ‘Thanks, I will.’

For the rest of the car journey, they talk about a comedy panel show they both watched on TV last night and his uncle tells Asher about his plans for Sunday (a quiet pint in front of the football with his girlfriend and then early to bed). When they pull up in front of the library, Asher’s heart is beating hard.

‘Have a good day,’ Harrison says. ‘Don’t stress yourself out.’

‘Thanks again.’ Asher falls out of the car and rushes inside the library. He checks the clock on his phone: he’s ahead of schedule. There is more than enough time to walk to the museum at a leisurely pace. He waits inside the library foyer for a full five minutes in case his uncle is still parked out the front. When he’s certain he would have driven off, Asher exits the building and goes to Holland Park.

The idea is Storm, Dom and Asher will enter the museum separately and not speak until the job is done. As he walks, Asher looks at his phone: 10:18. He’s almost there. He’s going to be early, so he slows his speed. The Bennett Museum opens at ten and it was decided they would arrive at half past, early enough for there to be few members of the public inside, but not right on time so that the staff notice them. Asher reaches the museum’s street and loiters. He looks on Telegram. Nothing from Dom. A message from Storm: Confirming I’ve arrived. It’s 10:27. In he goes. Asher puts his phone on silent and approaches the automatic doors.

Asher enters the gift shop, telling himself to keep breathing, to tuck his trembling hands inside his pockets. He can’t walk around a gift shop like this, he realises. It’s normal to pick up things and inspect them. Asher lets his right hand go free and touches soaps and museum-branded pens. He turns over postcards and key rings and prods pieces of jewellery. He feigns as much interest in each object as he can. Asher spots a member of staff on the museum reception, which also serves as a cash desk for the gift shop. Through the internal glass door, he can see through to the small café which looks out onto the garden. By the coffee machine is another member of staff. There is only one person in the café, a man seated alone, sipping on something hot. A large clock shows 10:33. Asher heard the doors opening behind him a moment ago, and the footsteps of someone entering. That must have been Dom. He and Storm will be on the top floor by now, grabbing the painting. Apart from the single member of staff, Asher is alone in the gift shop. He has no way of knowing but surely it’s possible this early that there are no members of the public upstairs at all. Then, a young man emerges from behind a door and nods to the woman on reception. There’s a lanyard around his neck. He works here. It’s okay, Asher tells himself, they were expecting there to be up to three staff and this man is down here and out of the way. Perfectly fine. As soon as he thinks this, the young man steps out from behind the reception desk and heads to the stairs. Wait. Stop. He can’t go up there. This is Asher’s one job: to distract him, prevent him from going to the top floor.

‘Excuse me!’ Asher moves closer to the stairs and calls up. The man turns around. ‘Where’s the toilets?’

‘They’re down here,’ the staffer points through the glass internal door. ‘Inside the café.’

‘Thanks,’ Asher says. A dead-end conversation. No. No. The man continues walking up the stairs. Another step. Asher follows him. He’s meant to stop him. They discussed this. They role-played. Why can’t he remember? The man has passed the first floor now and he’s still climbing. Oh God. He’s going up there, isn’t he? To exactly where he’s not supposed to be. Asher can’t let that happen. He can hear himself panting, as though walking up two simple flights of stairs is too much for him. Think!

‘I’m going to go to the toilet later,’ Asher says, but it achieves nothing. The man doesn’t turn around; he doesn’t even realise Asher is speaking to him. ‘Hello!’ he tries again, louder. The man is going right up to the top floor and he’s going to see Storm and Dom take the painting off the wall. This is precisely what they have to avoid: any kind of confrontation between group members and museum staff. He might try to protect the artwork and wrestle it from Dom’s hands and someone could get hurt. ‘Excuse me!’ Asher calls, but the man keeps going. He needs to run up and tap him on the shoulder, but when he turns around, what will Asher do? Dom is going to be so angry with him, and Storm will be silent but her face will say everything. His one simple job today. He’ll be kicked out of the group, that’s a given. Dom won’t invite him out for coffee anymore. If he can’t stop the man from walking up there, Asher at least needs to send a message to warn them. He pulls his phone from his back pocket. On the screen is a missed call from Harrison. Three. Has something happened in the half an hour it took him to walk here – a car accident? Is his mother alright? This is a disaster. This whole day is a catastrophe. He needs to leave. He has to go and check in with his uncle. There is no time to send Storm or a Dom message because the man in front of him is now two steps away from the top floor. Asher can hear people talking up there. Members of the public. How many? He cannot deal with this.

The museum staffer turns off the staircase and opens one of the doors to the top floor of the gallery. Asher rushes behind him. They are just in time to see Dom’s two hands around a frame, the painting coming easily off the wall. Asher realises now he was hoping it was somehow magically superglued, impossible to lift and they’d all have to walk out of here empty-handed. But the painting is already in Dom’s hands and he and Storm are about to run. Asher will be arrested, won’t he? He won’t finish university, he won’t get a job. Breathe. Is he breathing? He doesn’t need a job. He doesn’t need a job because he doesn’t need money. He doesn’t need money because he doesn’t need to buy things. He doesn’t need to buy things because he doesn’t need to live like the rat-people Dom talks about, the ones who populate this earth. He doesn’t need to live like the rat-people because he will live purely. Like Dom, he will be pure and a good example and he will help to change things. He will close the lid on this planet and shake it up like a sauce bottle, tip it upside down and shake it, keep shaking it sideways, every which way, shake, shake, until it all comes loose.

Now Asher is standing next to the staff member, close enough to read his nametag: Ben. Ben is here and he sees what’s going on.

‘What are you doing?’ Ben asks, staring at Dom. Asher sees the response on Dom’s face and he knows something is seriously, disastrously wrong. Asher doesn’t hear whether or not Dom answers Ben’s question because he is listening to someone else, a familiar male voice from over his shoulder. Turning toward it, he cannot believe what he is looking at. His uncle. He is panicked and his eyes are playing tricks. This has to be it. But no. His actual uncle is inside the museum. The missed calls. Then Asher remembers he has not disabled Find My Friends. Harrison tried to call him and when he didn’t answer, he used the app to trace his location as the two of them often do. It did not even occur to Asher to turn off Find my Friends today. He is completely useless.

There is something in Uncle Harrison’s hand: his textbook. Asher brought it along as proof of his important assignment and forgot it in the car. His uncle, his lovely, caring uncle found the book on the floor after driving away and when he couldn’t get through on the phone, tracked down his nephew and brought it to him. Asher is appalling. The worst nephew who has ever existed.

‘What are you doing?’ Ben asks again. There are about a dozen people in the room and every one of them is looking at Dom and Storm. She turns to Asher, and it is clear to all that he is with them, and part of this. The painting is heavy in Dom’s hands. Instead of trying to run, he tosses it to the ground. Then he puts his hand underneath his shirt and grabs something. This isn’t right. Is it? This is not how it’s supposed to go.

‘Asher?’ his uncle says it so gently, so innocently. The two men look at each other and Asher wishes he could teleport back to first thing this morning.

‘Asher,’ says another voice, this one thrilled. ‘Come over here.’ Asher follows the sound and walks to Dom.

7.

Tia

Now

She needs to go back to the Bennett Museum. If she’s going to investigate this properly for Andrew Ward’s family, she has to ensure she’s fully capable. Tia realises there’s nothing stopping her from going there right at this moment, so she gets dressed and is in the car in under fifteen minutes. This way, there isn’t time to build it up into something too big for her to handle.

When she enters the museum, the staff do not recognise her. Of course they wouldn’t. They weren’t working here at the time of the siege and her face means nothing to them. Still, her shirt goes damp as she holds her bank card to the payment machine. Paper ticket rumpled in her pocket, Tia takes the stairs and walks around the first-floor exhibition space. No one bothers her. She looks at the old paintings, antique tea pots and the silver, but she absorbs nothing. The same way she reads books now, her eyes travelling from line to line, recognising words, but her mind refusing to comprehend any of the meaning. Stepping out of the room, she goes back to the staircase and up to the second floor where it happened. Every cell of her body screams.

Delia tells her she should have known what Andrew was going to do. It’s so good to hear Delia’s voice even if it is like this. Andrew killed himself, she continues, because Tia wasn’t looking out for him, the same way she took her eye off Delia. The muscles across Tia’s neck and shoulders turn to concrete and her joints seize, making her feel double her age. A quick walk around. That’s all she needs to do. A harmless little stroll, and the place is empty, she has the whole space to herself. She lurches around the room in a circle, her eyes skipping over everything. One foot, and then the other. Tia makes it back to her starting position. A complete lap achieved. It’s done. Her shoulders relax. She can come in here; she is capable. Satisfied, Tia lets herself leave.

On the ground floor, at the reception desk, a head snaps up, noticing she’s going so soon. Tia is out the door before the staff member can say anything. She remembers what Stella said about the museum itself stalking her husband. Maybe she’ll come back another day and take a look at the gift shop and speak to the manager. For now, she’s pleased with what she managed to do. Tia drives back to West London, hoping to catch her friend Pat in the Brilliant Bobbies kitchen before the start of her shift.

‘Where is the nearest shooting range?’ Pat asks, dropping his teaspoon into the sink.

‘Probably Wimbledon Park Rifle Club,’ Tia says. ‘Not that I’ve ever been.’

‘You fancy joining me?’

She shakes her head. ‘You’re serious about going?’ Tia reaches into the high cupboard for a clean mug. The one she pulls down is thick porcelain with red and white candy stripes. No chips. Immaculate inside. You do not get this working with the Metropolitan Police.

‘I’ll have to if I’m going to stay here,’ her colleague says. ‘I’ll forget how to shoot at this rate.’ Pat is entering his second month in private policing.

‘Had plenty of target practice with the Met did you?’ Tia grins. ‘Shooting members of the public daily?’ In only a few weeks of working together, the pair have already found their friendship groove with daily banter in the break room.

‘I had a good eye,’ Pat winks.

Tia’s laugh falls away. ‘Wait. Are you saying you were a firearms officer, for real?’

‘Fifteen years,’ he says.

‘What made you want to go private?’ It’s impolite to ask too soon after someone joins Brilliant Bobbies. Everyone has a reason for leaving the Met, and sometimes it’s very sensitive. She finally feels as though they know each other well enough to ask.

‘My kids are in secondary school, the fees are off the scale,’ he says. ‘I needed a pay rise.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘And for that I needed to come here and deal with stolen flower pots. Public indecency and urination on Gucci doormats.’

‘I don’t think Gucci make doormats.’ With her hand holding the coffee cup, Tia makes a circle in the air. ‘Even for around here.’

Pat laughs and drains the rest of his drink. ‘Right, the mean streets beckon. I’ll see you later.’

‘Have a good day.’

He leaves without asking Tia why she herself resigned from the police and he probably never will. Because of the siege, she’s famous, and everyone in their organisation thinks they know her and why she quit. It’s not unheard of for an officer who experiences a highly traumatic incident to leave for the safer pastures of private security, and no one begrudges them for wanting a more straightforward job. It annoys Tia though, that everyone thinks this applies to her. They assume she couldn’t deal with it, but Tia was always prepared for people to die in front of her. Even the very best negotiators can’t talk everyone back from the ledge. What she couldn’t handle was her own performance in the museum that day. She screwed up. That’s the bit she can’t live with. Had she done a better job during the siege, she would have stayed with the police and tried again to pass the Hostage and Crisis Negotiator national course. She never wanted to avoid sieges and those kinds of incidents: that’s what she hoped to do fulltime. From the other side of the cordon, of course, not as a hostage. That’s a role she never wants to play again.

Today at Brilliant Bobbies, Tia is working with a more senior officer to plan an undercover operation targeting high-street shoplifting in the lead-up to Christmas. No one wants to think about Christmas at this time of year, but the company prides itself on being well organised and theft is a growing problem in the area. Yesterday one of the Bobbies caught a woman nicking goods to the value of £70, and when they followed her outside, discovered her car was a £200,000 Bentley. Crime is almost always more complicated than it appears. This isn’t what she imagined she’d be doing when she joined the police, but Tia maintains it’s still a worthy profession. Yes, the individuals and organisations who hire her are wealthy, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only people she helps. The presence of Tia and her colleagues in the poshest parts of London is a deterrent, also reducing crimes against the local homeless population, the delivery drivers, cleaners and everyone else who comes to these areas for work. There’s none of the internal politics and unpaid overtime that comes with working for the “real” police. Some of the crimes they police might seem trivial, but Tia’s personal belief is her job, and her work, is important, because crime is always meaningful to the person it happens to. On days when she has her doubts, Tia reminds herself it’s irrelevant if her clients are rich because everyone deserves to feel safe.

During the meeting, Tia can’t stop thinking about why anyone would suddenly start to harass Andrew Ward three years after the siege. She needs help from someone in the Met. Who can she ask for a favour without having to get back in contact with Al?

Zac. They were friendly, and she heard he now works freelance in forensic IT services. She knows he’s built software for the intelligence services to scan the impossibly vast internet, highlighting chatter which might indicate an imminent terrorist threat. When she gets back to her desk, she emails Zac asking if he can do the same for mentions of Andrew Ward. He can look for any eco activists who might seem particularly preoccupied with the siege or the inquest. Under the table, Tia jiggles her right leg and takes two painkillers to get her through the rest of the afternoon. The nerves in her lower leg start to burn by this stage in the day. She puts her hand underneath the bottom of her trousers and feels where the flesh in her calf muscle hardens and twists, trying to fill every crevice of her bullet wound.

Just before six, Zac replies. An initial squiz shows a lot of talk about the siege being a false flag op to discredit the climate movement, which was finally getting momentum, apparently … Could be a disgruntled climate activist going after your hostage? Speak again when I have a chance to look further.

Tia wonders if it might be one of the activists involved in the siege. Two are still alive. Asher Russell has just been released from prison. One lunchtime during the inquest, she got talking to a senior police officer who told her he was coming out with an ankle tag and a twelve-hour curfew. Andrew’s wife said his materials arrived at the house overnight, so that would rule him out. Plus, they started arriving while he was still inside, so if he is part of it, he’s not working alone. Tia needs to speak to the surviving hostages and see if anyone else is being harassed too. During the investigation, and the endless streams of legal paperwork that followed, Tia ended up with contact details for all the other survivors. Except for one. They disappeared almost immediately after the siege and as far as she knows, have never been heard from since. She’ll come back to them. Tia will start with Enoch Black. Stella says he was in touch with her husband and went to the funeral. Tia wants to know if Andrew said anything to him about the harassment before he died. Later, at home, she sends Enoch a text message asking to meet without saying why.

Enoch Black lives in a genteel part of Kent with mock Tudor houses and pubs drowning in flower boxes. He answers the door after only one knock.

‘Lovely to see you,’ Enoch says. Tia is surprised to believe him. They hug – it’s stilted, but it’s more than she was expecting. ‘You look the same,’ he says.

It’s the bun. During a training exercise when she first joined the police, a male officer grabbed her long ponytail. Since then, she does her hair like a ballerina. ‘Same haircut.’ Tia follows him inside a chaotic house. Shoes – adult and children – are heaped on the floor, and coats and satchels are abandoned at the bottom of stairs. They walk through to the kitchen where commercial radio is blaring and a puddle of milk has spilt, and partly solidified, on the island.

‘Pull up a chair,’ he smiles.

‘Thanks for having me over.’ She thought he’d be professional and behave the same way he likely treated the other police and solicitors after the siege: cold, potentially angry. Genuine warmth is something Tia did not anticipate.

‘I work from here most of the time. Don’t see anyone all day until the kids get home,’ Enoch says. ‘So it’s nice to have a visitor.’

‘Are you still in gardening?’ She remembers this fact about him from the inquest, although she didn’t see him there much, and always from a distance.

‘Yes, landscape gardener. Although my back’s been shot for years now, so I mostly run the business, do the designs and the paperwork and send the younger lads out there to do the grunt work.’

‘That sounds sensible to me.’

‘Don’t need any work done, do you?’ He’s even being cheeky. Downright friendly.

She smiles. ‘My place is too small, plus I’m renting. I’d love to have a proper garden one day.’ Maybe Enoch doesn’t blame her for how the siege ended? She supposes he has his own guilt to deal with for what he did that day.

‘Business is better than ever. All the siege stuff gave us some great free publicity. I’ve so many new clients now, I can’t keep up,’ Enoch laughs. Is this his nature, Tia wonders, to always be in a good mood? She knows what he’s like under pressure, how he behaved during the worst day of his life, but she has no idea who Enoch Black is the rest of the time. ‘We’ve run out of Yorkshire,’ he says. ‘But the wife has all this jazzy tea – rosehip, dandelion-picked-on-the-side-of-a-mountain-during-a-full-moon kind of stuff that’s £15 a box. Can I make you a cup?’

‘Only if you’re doing one for yourself. Anything you’re having is fine with me,’ Tia says.

He gets to his feet and fills the kettle. Over the roar of the tap, he keeps talking. ‘To tell you the truth, I have a taste for the liquorice tea she gets. It coats the back of your throat like an oil slick. And I’ve always loved the smell of petrol.’

With a mug in each hand, Enoch Black indicates for Tia to follow him into the sunroom. The table is covered with his work and he fells a tower of papers with a single chop of his hand. She decides to get straight to why she’s here. ‘Andrew Ward’s widow has asked me to investigate his suicide,’ she says. ‘In an unofficial capacity. She believes he was being stalked before he died. Harassed. Sent threatening, distressing material.’

There is a pause while he sips at his tea. When he gets up to turn off the radio, Enoch’s smile has dropped. ‘I had wondered. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask her at the funeral.’

‘So you know what I’m talking about?’

He nods. ‘You better follow me.’

He leads her upstairs where they enter a room which appears to be used as a study. When Tia walks in, Enoch is standing very still, staring at one spot. She moves closer. The Bennett Museum branding. On the wall are postcards from the museum gift shop. A museum-branded pen and pencil are stuck with clumps of Blu-tack. ‘Is this the sort of thing that Andrew was getting?’ Enoch says. Tia didn’t want to say anything in front of Stella, but she figured her husband couldn’t be the only recipient.

‘It looks exactly the same.’ Tia stands right up against the wall, as close as she can without actually touching the postcards.

‘Initially I thought I was the only one getting them,’ Enoch says. ‘I don’t know why. They seem so personal.’

‘When did they start arriving?’

‘A couple of months ago.’ Towards the end of the inquest. The same time as Andrew’s.

‘Did Andrew say anything to you about what he was sent?’

Enoch is breathing awkwardly out of his mouth. ‘No.’

‘But the two of you stayed in touch?’ Tia asks.

‘We met up for a pint a few times.’

‘Did you talk about the siege?’

‘Of course, but not about this,’ Enoch says. Delia tells her they talked about Tia. When Andrew and Enoch met up for a pint, they spoke about the deaths she caused.

‘Did Andrew mention how he was getting on?’ Tia says.

‘Do you mean did he seem suicidal?’

‘I suppose that’s my question, yes. I’m sorry to have to ask.’

‘I don’t know. What does a suicidal person look like? I wish I’d known he was getting this stuff.’ Both hands scratch at his beard. He walks away from the wall and looks out the window to his back garden.

‘He didn’t tell his wife either,’ Tia says. ‘Only when she caught him putting up CCTV did she realise something was wrong and pressed him to tell her what was happening. I’m sorry. I know this is hard.’ She shouldn’t have come. Tia could have asked him what she needs to know about Andrew over the phone. Coming to Enoch’s home, she realises now, was for her own benefit. She owes Andrew Ward and she wants to repay that debt, but she also wants to see how the hostages react to her. It’s been three years and Tia has to know how the survivors feel about her. The pending inquest report will put quite a lot of the blame squarely on her, but she doesn’t care so much about the official summary. Tia was off duty the day of the siege; a hostage. Technically, a private citizen. But she can’t forgive herself for everything that happened unless the other hostages can too.

‘I’m not afraid of the whack job who’s sending this stuff,’ Enoch says, still staring out the window. ‘Some kind of eco, environmental nutter.’

‘That’s who you think it is?’ Tia asks.

‘It’s gotta be, hasn’t it? One of those extinction or road-blocking or ban-everything groups?’

‘Why do you think they’re sending this to you and Andrew?’

‘Did more harm than good for their cause, the siege, don’t you think? Lost them public support and all that. And I said that to the gunman in the museum, didn’t I?’ Tia resists the pull of that memory. She needs to stay focussed. ‘Maybe they blame us. In their twisted mind,’ Enoch says.

‘Have you gone to the police?’

He shakes his head.

Andrew Ward destroyed evidence of his harassment, hid it from his wife. Enoch has his displayed.

‘Why do you have them like this?’ she asks. ‘On the wall?’ Hung elsewhere in this room are “thank you for your donation” certificates from an animal shelter. It’s as though he’s proud. There’s no guilt here. Perhaps Enoch isn’t bothered by how Tia let down the other hostages, because he’s not made a judgement about anything that day. His own behaviour, or anyone else’s. Maybe that’s healthy. Enoch Black could be the one coping better than any of them.

‘I don’t have them downstairs ’cause some of the images, the Rothkos, are a bit grim and I don’t want to scare the kids. But I like having this here. It’s a reminder of what I did that day. I got out. I got myself out. If something like that ever happens again, I’ll do the same. I’ll stay alive for my family.’ Now he’s all puffed-up chest, bouncing on his toes. He did nothing wrong. He didn’t owe the others anything. She was the professional in the room. He was just a father. A husband. In the wrong place. Desperately unlucky.

‘Is this everything you received?’

‘No, there were other things. Razor blades, actually. Quite a lot of them left overnight in the letterbox. In envelopes without stamps. Sometimes thrown all over the front garden. I was supposed to kill myself with them, according to the taunts on one of the most recent postcards.’ The same as Andrew. Hand-delivered overnight. Not Asher Russell.

‘Do you still have any?’

‘Not those. I threw them out,’ Enoch says.

‘Could I borrow these?’ Tia indicates the material on the wall. ‘I’ll see what I can get in the way of fingerprints.’

He shrugs. ‘Do what you like.’

‘I’m going to find who’s doing this. I’ll make sure it stops.’

Enoch is still shrugging. He seems blasé, but he probably just doubts she’s capable. Couldn’t safely end the siege and she won’t be able to resolve this either. But she will.

Tia runs downstairs to her car and finds a pair of gloves in her first aid kit. Back in the study, she carefully peels the cards from the wall and drops them into a transparent bag. She’ll take them to the private lab Brilliant Bobbies uses and see what they can find. The DNA result is likely to be useless and the glossy paper surface won’t produce proper prints, but they might get some latent, at least partial fingermarks. The words on the postcards are in bubbly font, written using a childish lettering stencil. No use doing handwriting analysis.

‘Thanks,’ Tia says. ‘I’ll get these back to you as soon as I can. Do you have CCTV on your house?’

‘Not out the front.’

‘Do you park your car on the street? Any dashcam footage maybe of someone dropping it off?’

‘I looked,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t catch them on camera. Anyway, I’m not afraid of them.’ So he keeps saying.

‘Of course,’ Tia agrees. This point seems very important to him.

‘I wish I’d known Andrew was getting this stuff and that it bothered him so much,’ Enoch says with real sadness.

‘I suppose it creeps up on you. Sometimes you don’t realise how much something has affected you until you find yourself in a corner you don’t see a way out of.’ Enoch nods but doesn’t say anything. ‘Do you speak to any of the other survivors?’

He snorts. ‘Jess Anand sent me an invitation to her charity gala dinner thing recently. I tore it up.’ Tia didn’t get an invite. ‘That’s something Andrew and I discussed in the pub one time. What gives her permission to write about us in her book? She thinks she speaks for all of us. She was looking for something, that girl. Jess was a minor Instagram influencer before all this, did you know?’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Now look at her. Doing all this charity work. Her new boyfriend is some C-grade celebrity. The siege was her lucky day. Something for her to really hang her hat on.’

‘Have you spoken to her about the book?’ Tia asks. It’s a memoir, as far as she knows. Due to be published in a couple of months. Tia figures whatever Jess writes about her, she probably deserves.

‘No. She never approached me about it,’ Enoch says. ‘Did you see the interview she gave on ITV?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘She said “Andrew could have stopped the siege”. She said that on live TV. She tried to blame him. Andrew saw that interview. How do we know the anonymous harassment is why he killed himself? She has blood on her hands.’ Enoch’s palms have closed into fists. Now the inquest has concluded, some details of the siege that weren’t previously released to the public are being spoken about. The other hostages all know how everyone behaved that day and the choices they made, but it’s only now, three years later, that the wider public is being made aware of everything. Maybe Enoch’s right. Andrew could have been less bothered by the harassment than the prospect of everyone knowing what he did, and didn’t, do.

‘Apart from this, I’m glad to see you’re well?’ Tia says.

‘Yeah, I’m okay.’ He’s back to smiling. ‘I’m moving on. I’m not afraid of any of this.’ She hopes it’s true and not just bravado.

As she walks back to the front door, she indicates the postcards in her hand. ‘I’ll be in touch again soon. I will stop this.’ In her car, Tia takes a final glance through the plastic bag. One of the postcards appears to have more text on the back than the rest. She smooths the plastic and sees an ant. A hand-drawn picture of an ant. She thinks of Dominic’s rant about the rare species of ant that sabotages its own species when the population gets too high. A detail that was not mentioned in any of the live-streamed videos or later released to the media as it was considered part of the gunman’s dangerous manifesto. Whoever sent this postcard to Enoch knows the relevance of that insect. It’s not a random angry climate protestor. The person harassing Andrew Ward and Enoch was in the room that day.

8.

Tia

Then

The gun goes off, fired straight into the ceiling. A metallic cloud reaches Tia’s nose, the swirl of a just-struck match. The sound has the effect of a pause button, as bullets tend to do, freezing everyone in place. This is an armed robbery, and that was a warning shot. They can steal the painting. Maybe it’s very valuable. Tia isn’t going to stand in their way. No one is stopping them. The door is wide open. They can take what they want and flee. So why aren’t they doing it? The artwork is on the floor now, they’ve tossed it aside. It must not be the right one. They came looking for a different picture and that could be why they were arguing before. There’s three of them. Next to the man with the gun is a woman with a silvery-grey streak in her hair. She appears to be in her early twenties. The other one looks really young, like a teenager. Lanky and not sure what to do with his limbs. He doesn’t even know how to stand, much less pull off a robbery. Tia scans the gunman’s face. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old. A black rucksack on his back. Six foot-ish. Average build. On his feet is a pair of white trainers with hand-drawn images of Pokémon characters. She’s gotten a good look at their faces. She’ll be able to give a decent description for the police sketch.

Tia stays where she is but some people are moving. Running. The couple Tia noticed before – they’re gone, disappeared out the nearest door and down the staircase. The woman with the streak in her hair is also heading towards the exit. She’s leaving empty-handed? No, that isn’t right. The gun is pointed at her. The gunman pulls the lanyard from the male museum worker’s neck, and then the one from around the woman. He takes one of the cards and shoves it at his accomplice. Tia sees the black stripe. It’s a keycard. He barks instructions and now she’s using it to lock them in. Securing the first set of doors, and then the second.

‘Nobody is going anywhere,’ the gunman says. He swings his arm across the room and everyone feels the weapon at their chests. ‘If you try to leave, I will shoot you.’ This is not a robbery. He isn’t interested in the paintings. He wants people. Hostages.

Tia yanks at her shirt collar, suddenly feeling as though it is cutting into her windpipe. She won’t panic. Get a message out, now. Her phone is in the back pocket of her jeans. She discreetly drops it into her handbag. First, she puts it on silent. While the gunman is focussed on checking the doors, she writes a one-handed message to Al, using the bag as cover. Bennett Museum Holland Park is what she imagines she’s typing but she can’t see the screen to check. Always give your location first in case you’re cut off and that’s the only information you can get across. The gunman’s fingers are on the handle of the second door. He’s making sure it’s locked. Tia keeps typing. Thank goodness her phone has keys instead of a touchscreen. Critical incident. Armed subject. 3 tangos, 6 x-rays. Where is he looking now? The gunman’s eyes are on a man a few yards to her right. Shit. She can’t write any more without risking being seen. She presses send and then withdraws her hand from the bag over her shoulder, slowly. She doesn’t want to attract his attention, or for him to think she’s reaching for something to use as a weapon.

A heavy weight starts pressing into her chest. Tia wrote six x-rays. That isn’t correct. Her warrant card is in her bag but Tia has no equipment, no weapon. She’s in here but she’s off-duty. She’s hostage number seven.

‘All of you,’ the gunman shouts. He sweeps the gun through the air. ‘Against the wall. In a line. Go.’ Some run to where he indicates as though he might spare those who arrive first. Others move like molasses, closing their eyes and feeling their way forward like zombies, afraid to look in case he starts shooting again. In any given crisis situation, there will be someone occupying each point of the emotional spectrum, between hysteria and remarkable calm. There is sometimes a lag between when the human brain accumulates all of the sensory information available to it and when it allows the detail to come together to form a terrifying conclusion. Despite the gunman’s increasingly loud instructions for them to ‘Go! NOW!’ there is still one man who hasn’t moved at all. ‘Move,’ the gunman yells again. The female museum worker shrieks so loudly Tia is sure it takes a layer of pink from her throat. For some of these people, their emotions have already escaped the leash. Tia catches the curve of a smile on another woman’s lips. This woman moves to the wall unhurried, steadily walking to where the gunman instructs. She thinks this is a game; she’s not taking it seriously yet. But Tia can see the change coming to her face, beginning in the stomach and crawling upward, like a hot flush covering a neck. In a second, Tia knows the woman’s mild expression will be gone and she will accept with real horror this is not a prank. Tia follows the hostage and joins the line.

They’re all now positioned along the back wall. Tia gets a clear look at who is here. Three hostage takers: the gunman and two younger accomplices. Two museum staff members: a man and a woman. Three men: the oldest in his mid-fifties. A woman, about Tia’s age. Apart from the museum staff, none of the hostages seem to know one another. Are they hostages, or is this some sort of execution line? Tia thinks of her brother Rory, and her niece. Will they see her on the news tonight? She could be shot within the next few minutes and he wouldn’t even notice until their biannual phone call comes around and she doesn’t answer. Sometimes it’s longer until one of them reaches out. Once it was nine months and eleven days. She’s supposed to be on her way to a dinner party soon and Al has never met Rory; he’d have no means of contacting him, her only remaining family, to let him know his sister has been shot.

Tia looks at the gunman’s two accomplices. The younger man, the teenager, is staring at the gun, his eyes twice the normal size. The woman stands a few feet away from him, both hands wrapped around her mouth. Something’s gone wrong. They’re apparently with him, but a moment ago, she had the weapon pointed at her. Neither of them seem armed. That’s odd. ‘Nobody is going anywhere until we get the prime minister on the phone,’ the gunman says. ‘And he agrees to an immediate target of real net zero.’

So this is about climate change. There’s some big meeting on Monday, Tia heard it on the news. These eco groups throw soup, don’t they? Glitter and glue and milk. They’re a nuisance, but they don’t do this. They’re not violent. Tia exchanges a look with one of the male hostages and they search each other’s faces for help. She can’t do that again. She will have to be the help.

‘Bags on the floor in front of you. Empty your pockets. Wallets. Everything on the ground. Now,’ the gunman shouts. The hostages scramble to turn out their pockets. Bags are dropped as though they’re contaminated. ‘Collect up all the phones,’ the gunman says to his female accomplice. There’s no time for Tia to hide her warrant card. Tia places her bag and phone on the green carpet. She’ll tell him she’s off-duty. The weight on her chest presses harder. She’ll be a prize hostage, treated differently. Made an example of. She needs to be prepared for this.

The gunman starts at the other end of the line with one of the men. He kicks this hostage’s iPhone towards the female accomplice, and opens up the man’s wallet. ‘Andrew,’ he reads from inside. The man keeps his head down. Good. Meek and mild is how to survive. The gunman moves to the next person in line. In a minute, he’ll reach Tia and he’ll realise she’s police. She adjusts her shirt, but it’s impossible to dislodge the heavy mass. The imaginary cord cutting into her neck. Her whole body is hot, on fire from the inside. The gunman is now at the third person on the hostage line. A man in a scruffy concert t-shirt: Metallica: Death Magnetic.

‘I’m not giving you my phone. I have pictures of my kids in there,’ this man says. No, no, no. Don’t say that. Comply. Do not antagonise someone with a gun.

‘Put it on the floor,’ the gunman says. The man doesn’t move.

‘You’re pathetic,’ the hostage says right into the gunman’s face. Oh God. He’s making things worse for everyone. The gunman reaches into the man’s pocket and rips out a phone. He kicks it towards the woman. Then he picks up the man’s surrendered wallet, pulling out cards and throwing them on the floor. ‘Enoch,’ he reads from a driver’s licence. ‘Enoch Black.’ The gunman flicks the card to the carpet and keeps looking through Enoch’s wallet.

‘You think this is going to help the climate movement?’ Enoch says. The gunman’s eyes crawl up the hostage and land on his face. Enoch glares back, defiant. Shut up, Enoch, Tia thinks. He’s going to have someone killed. ‘Everyone already hates people like you. Every time they’re stopped from getting to work by a protest or an event is interrupted, they roll their eyes. Governments aren’t doing anything serious about climate change because ultimately, no one cares.’

Instantly the weapon is at Enoch’s forehead. Tia sees him close his eyes and disappear behind the lids. The woman next to him starts to cry. ‘No, no, please,’ Enoch murmurs, finally showing fear.

‘If you kill him, they won’t let you speak to the prime minister,’ Tia says. The gunman spins towards her and now she has the gun to her head. It’s warm against her skin, not cold. She thinks this as she tries to stay composed. Tia is aware of every tendon, bone and ligament in her spine. She tells herself to concentrate on not making any unnecessary movements. Don’t swallow. She mustn’t tilt her head. Anything could set him off to pull the trigger. ‘I’m only trying to help.’ He’ll either shoot her now, or after he goes through her things and sees she’s a police officer. Tia’s eyes are about to stream, she can feel it. He keeps the gun to her head while his free hand gropes inside her bag. Here he goes. Her purse is out and it’s there, right on top. Why did she leave her warrant card right at the front? It’s too late now. He looks down at it and she squeezes her eyes shut.

‘Police,’ he says. ‘Is this a joke?’ She opens her eyes to see him tap the plastic with his thumbnail. He doesn’t think it’s real. Tia is constantly being told that she doesn’t look like police. She’s shorter than average, smaller than average in every way, always with her hair up like a dancer. Can she get this past him?

Tia swallows.

‘It’s for a murder mystery party. Tonight.’ It’s Saturday. He might buy it.

The gunman looks down and reads her warrant card again. He tosses it aside and takes a step away from her. She can’t believe it worked. The gun is gone from her head. Her heart slows. She’s okay.

Delia tells her it is a joke. She’s barely a proper police officer. That’s why she failed the negotiator course. Imagine the bad luck of these hostages, Delia whispers. They have a cop here with them. Exactly who they need to negotiate their freedom from the inside. But it’s someone who’s already proven she can’t do it. It’s hopeless.

The gunman reaches the end of the hostage line, confiscating bags and phones from everyone. He’s looked at IDs and now he knows their names, and for many of them, where they live. ‘If you do anything stupid,’ the gunman is saying to the group, ‘I’ll shoot someone. I don’t want to, so I hope none of you will put me in that position.’ He turns around and does another lap of the line.

‘I’d rather not kill anyone else today.’

9.

Asher

Now

Nobody stares or points at Asher when he goes to the supermarket. He visits again early the following morning to make sure this isn’t an anomaly. This time he wears the hoodie but not his uncle’s glasses. He chooses a small banana, carefully snapping it free of a larger bunch, and heads to the self-service checkout. Nothing happens. Exiting the shop, he makes eye contact and smiles at the staff member stationed at the door, and the man tells Asher to have a nice day. It’s possible he might. Perhaps no one will recognise him. After a lengthy period on remand, Asher’s trial was eighteen months ago, and he supposes that’s a long time in people’s lives and there have been plenty of other incidents, worse crimes, which have happened since. He pushes the hoodie back from his forehead – he was starting to sweat underneath there anyway – and the spring air dances along his face and maybe, just maybe, everything will be alright.

He should read some newspapers. On the walk home, Asher decides to spend the rest of the morning scanning the media archives from the last three years. In prison, he avoided the news. At first he didn’t want to read anything about himself, and then it became easier to simply pretend there was no news, because there was no world outside of the jail, and nothing he was missing. Now, Asher is like a patient risen from a coma, eager to catch up on all he has missed. He won’t look for crime stories or anything about politics or war. He’ll hunt down the good things, scientific discoveries and people winning awards and new movies about to come out. When he arrives at the house, Asher realises he hasn’t thought about his electronic tag since waking. The probation officer was right: he got used to it quickly and it need not affect him getting on with his life. Asher eats the banana in the kitchen and makes himself an espresso from his mother’s new machine and thinks this coffee tastes better every day.

Yvette is at work for a few more hours, so he goes to the study for her computer. He reads about a moose entering a bank in Alaska last year, nosing up to the counter as though it wanted to make a deposit. Asher learns of a small plane that crashed into a Colombian mountain and the pilot, miraculously, who walked away with only a broken middle finger. Asher studies the moose story again, and then an article about a live snake discovered in a bagged salad six months ago, and a deer who snatched a whole three-tiered celebration cake from a birthday picnic. Using the new phone Yvette bought him yesterday, he texts her: Did you see this? with a row of laughing-crying emojis. His mother replies with a laughing-crying emoji of her own, and says she can’t wait to get home today. This is the happiest he’s been, this precise second, since he was a child. His eyes stray to the photo frame on the desk; to his uncle’s grin, the man’s hair, the same brown as Asher’s, and then to his reading glasses, the pair allocated to this house because he was here so often. Harrison bought those oversized frames as a kind of joke, and would shuffle around, mock-clutching his lower back, saying his knees would go next, the next step into middle-age. Asher opens the message to his mother about the deer and presses Forward. His uncle would get a real laugh out of this, he thinks, and he sends it on to Harrison knowing he won’t get a reply. Something presses into Asher’s middle, hard and thorny. He won’t start weeping. His mother might come home at any moment and he cannot let her find him like that. Only she has the right to cry about any of this.

The probation officer said Asher’s electronic monitoring tag would not stop him from moving on with his life, because he can have a life. Nobody recognises him, his mother does not hate him, maybe only a little, and all of this gives Asher the confidence to open his email. His best friend at school – not a close friend but the person who more than any other passed for a mate – was a boy called James. The pair sat next to one another in maths lessons and although they never really interacted outside of that classroom, they were friendly, passing answers and whispering about the teacher and sometimes the other students. Once or twice, they shared homework over email. He types ‘James’ into the search field and the address immediately displays. James would know, surely, what Asher has been doing these past three years. He doesn’t want to hear from his old schoolmate. But what harm can one email do? He can simply ignore it, which is most likely what will happen, assuming this address is even active. Asher spends twenty minutes brainstorming possible email subject lines. In the end, he goes with: Hello from Asher in maths class. A short message asks how James is, what he’s doing and whether he still lives close by. The send button is clicked before he loses the nerve.

Asher needs to distract himself from constantly refreshing his email for a reply. He’ll charge his tag, that’s what he’ll do. He is yet to use the portable charger, preferring to sit on the carpet plugged into the wall, like a robot in sleep mode, waiting for the humans to power him up. The full charge takes ninety minutes and Asher tries to forget about his message to James. Once the device flashes to indicate it’s done, he springs to his feet, imagining the electricity coursing through him, giving him life for another twenty-four hours. After packing away the charger, his gaze lands on his mother’s new drinks cabinet. Is it part of the reason she’s so thin now? He drove her to drink instead of eating?

Back in his mother’s study, he clicks on the web browser and opens a new private tab. He ignores the nerves flaring in his stomach. Asher types “Ben Wing”. He knew he could not resist this for long. Up pop images of men who do not look like the person in the museum that day, and at first, this is a relief. If he stops now, he hasn’t really done anything wrong. But Asher is already scrolling up to the search field and he adds the term “London”. That did it. Ben Wing from London, who previously worked in the Bennett Museum, smiles at him through the screen. Once he starts looking, he cannot stop. Asher’s been waiting for this for over three years. Thirty tabs are open on the computer and he must know absolutely everything about Ben Wing. He reads a fifteen-year-old article from a local newspaper showing a grinning little Ben sealing a time capsule at his primary school. He finds a long dormant LinkedIn page without any followers. Asher loses track of time until finally he forces himself to stop and close the browser. After wiping his history and clearing the cookies, now Asher lets himself check his email. There is something there. He clicks the refresh icon again to make sure it isn’t a mistake. A message at the top of the list in bold. Unread. It’s from James:

Hey!! Wow, it’s you! Do you want to meet up? I’m still living at home. I work in the city but I’m back by sevenish most evenings. Let me know, J

Asher looks down at his ankle to see that he isn’t still plugged into the wall – how else to explain the fizz moving through him? He can’t go out after seven, obviously, and he’ll need to explain to James about his curfew, but as he types a reply, Asher beams. Asher is not recognised on the street as a criminal, a maybe-terrorist, but instead, someone remembers the old him.

His mother’s car pulls up. ‘Love? I’m home.’ Asher meets her in the front room. He opens his mouth to speak but then he closes it again. He will not tell her about catching up with James just yet, in case the other man changes his mind or his email disappears, or maybe it never existed.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he says instead.

‘It’s almost twelve.’ She drops her work bag onto the sofa, exactly like she used to. ‘Should we make lunch?’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I could eat.’

They go into the kitchen where he boils a pot of pasta and his mother starts making a creamy sauce with pine nuts. ‘Is this a new recipe?’ he says. He knows it’s vegan. There’s no need to ask.

‘I’ve made it a few times,’ she says. ‘It’s nice and quick.’ Asher watches the bubbles in the pasta water while his mother scoops green flesh from an avocado. ‘You know,’ Yvette’s voice sounds like Asher’s when he would finally raise his hand at the end of a university tutorial, after forty-five minutes of preparation. ‘While you were away, I’d stand right here, first thing after getting up, and I’d ask myself what I did. I know what I did. But I’d make myself think about it. How I turned my beautiful, gentle, eccentric son into someone who ended up in jail.’

His appetite vanishes. Asher needs time to come up with a response. Why didn’t he practise what to say? Because he always knew she would blame herself. He understood this conversation would come. ‘I’d think of you waking up in your cell and I’d vomit right here into the sink. Always in the mornings, as though I was pregnant with you again.’

They never had any privacy when Yvette came to visit Asher in jail, and it was obvious she was putting on a sunny act for his benefit, radiating positivity from a lopsided prison chair. He always felt watched in the visitors’ room. Not by the prison officers, but the other inmates, because Asher was high-profile and so very different to the other men. Freaky to them and ill-fitting, just like at school.

‘Sorry,’ is all he thinks of now, even though he had three years to work out what to say. This makes Yvette gasp as though the house has collapsed around them. Still facing the stove, she grips him in a half-hug with the arm not holding the wooden spoon. She doesn’t realise how firmly she’s pulling on him, and his neck at this angle burns with discomfort but he doesn’t mention it.

‘To get myself together to go to work, I’d have to imagine you were away at university, still asleep in the halls of residence. Cheek lined from your pillow,’ she says, and he can hear her smile. Steam from the pasta water sweats against his face. Yvette has stopped stirring the sauce.

‘I might go back to uni.’ If she really wants him to, Asher will do it. ‘Hey, this smells good already,’ he says, indicating the hob. His words guide her back to the surface and his mother lets him go.

‘Sorry,’ a laugh that stops after a millisecond. She rubs her eyes quickly, trying not to let him see, but he does. ‘I fantasised about this so many times. Just you standing in the kitchen with me. Watching me cook. Eating. Now it’s happening, and I’m so happy.’

‘Me too.’ His mother drains the pasta and combines everything in a large mixing bowl. Asher rinses the chopping board and takes the avocado skin and the lemon seeds to the compost around the side of the house. In the front garden, there are more mounds of dirt. The moles have been tunnelling.

Mother and son sit down to eat at the kitchen table. It tastes zippy and tangy and perfect. Asher wants to become small, to shrink down to the size he was ten years ago and be a child sitting here at this table, across from his mum, on school holidays, with nothing in the world to worry about other than what’s on TV.

‘We didn’t spend enough time together those last couple of years. I was working too much trying to pay off the new mortgage, while you were doing your A-levels, and that’s my fault.’ Now it’s even more difficult for him not to tell her about James. It’s the only good news he has to share. Don’t get too excited, he reminds himself. Not yet. Don’t curse it. It’ll be so much worse if he later has to tell his mum he made a mistake. ‘I don’t want us to get stuck thinking about the past because you have your whole life ahead of you, and that’s the main thing.’ Her knife and fork are untouched on the table. ‘But I want you to know, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I didn’t see what was happening to you. I should have let you make your own choices when you were younger. The animal rights stuff, everything. It’s like I baptised you in a culty religion and then left you there to work it out for yourself while I went back to normal society. I made you vulnerable and I want you to be strong.’

‘It’s okay, Mum.’ Asher keeps eating because he thinks this demonstrates that he is fine. And he is, or, he could be. He should mention his uncle. What happened there is undeniably Asher’s fault. Surely she can’t blame herself for that. But what is there to say?

‘I have a million questions about the last three years, about that day, but I don’t want to interrogate you. God knows you had enough of that with the police and the trial,’ Yvette says.

If he makes prison sound decent, if those missing years come across as reasonably okay, it will lift some of this weight from her. ‘I did a creative writing class inside,’ Asher says, seeing the faces of the angry men, the ones not allowed to touch pens with any kind of metal component, but still somehow they’d get hold of sharp objects anyway. ‘It was good. I might do more of that sort of thing.’ Another smile. It worked. Now the fork is in her hand. One more minute of this conversation and then hopefully she’ll have heard enough and Asher can stop thinking about jail.

‘You should,’ she says. ‘We can find you a course.’

‘And I did a coffee workshop too,’ he ventures, watching her eat. It’s not government food, he reminds himself. He is not prisoner B3846HK, he is free. ‘There’s a chain of coffee shops in London which employs former prisoners and they start to train you up as a barista before your release. Maybe I could get a job there.’ Asher did apply last year, but the programme was oversubscribed. He did the coffee workshop for nothing.

‘You could,’ she says. ‘But you could do anything.’ Now she is tucking in to her plate as though she’s realised she’s starving. Then: ‘We need more lemon!’ Yvette gets up for the fridge and Asher thinks about James’s email again: I’m still living at home. I work in the city but I’m back by sevenish most evenings.

His former schoolmate lives in the area but he goes into Central London most days of the week for his job. Apart from his trial where Asher was ferried to court in a prison van, he hasn’t even seen a picture of Central London in over three years.

‘What’s the plan for this afternoon?’ his mother asks, dropping a pasta spiral into her mouth. He needs to prepare for his meeting with James. He should go into Central London.

‘I’m thinking of going into town,’ he says. ‘Are there still four trains an hour?’ He looks at the clock on the wall. ‘I could be in by two if I head off soon.’ When they meet up, James will talk about his job in the city and Asher will want to picture it. He should go into London even if it’s only to walk aimlessly in the rush. It will give him something to raise with James. He can say a sentence like: ‘Yes, the other day I went into Central London and saw …’

‘Still four trains an hour,’ his mother nods. ‘We could make the twelve fifty-five if we hurry. I’ll come with you.’

‘You’re tired. You just got off night shift.’ The last thing she must feel like doing is going into town.

‘I’ll stay up and sleep tonight.’

He wants her to come. He doesn’t think he can face the city alone. ‘That’d be great,’ Asher says.

‘Where do you have in mind?’ she asks, taking their empty plates.

What tube station does he want to get off at? He can’t wander around London for hours without any purpose; he has to have some sort of plan, especially if his mother is coming. His mind has been erased and Asher cannot think of a single thing in the city. Not one reason why anyone would ever go into Central London.

‘The London Eye,’ he blurts. Like a tourist who only knows the British Museum, Big Ben and the London Eye.

‘Sure,’ she grins. ‘The London Eye it is. We haven’t done that since you were small. Then we can have a meal in the West End. How about it? I’ll just get changed and we can make that train.’

‘See you at the front door in ten minutes.’ Asher dashes to his room to find his shoes, and they leave.

The train is reasonably quiet at this time of the day and they almost have a carriage to themselves. ‘Ash, there’s one more thing I want to say today, before we concentrate on having fun.’

‘Okay.’ They are seated across from one another and Asher walks his eyes from the window to his mother.

‘I don’t know how much you heard while you were away, but the siege inquest has recently concluded. It was mostly about the police side of things, the mistakes they made, the operation – nothing to do with you, really. But it has meant the siege has been in the news a lot lately. The final inquest report is about to be published and there will be even more media attention, most likely, with new details released to the public. I want you to know it’s coming. But then it will all go away, I promise you. We just have to get through this period.’

‘Okay.’ The supermarket. Twice he was unrecognised. Maybe it won’t be as bad as he fears.

‘I want you not to search for your name online, but I know you’ll probably be very tempted.’

‘I haven’t.’

‘There’s a book coming as well – I don’t want to lie to you. We might have journalists approach us. I think we probably will.’ She squeezes his knee. ‘But it’s a wave, okay? It will all wash away as quickly as it came.’ Asher did not know about the book. Who wrote it? He can’t ask. He must appear unfazed. ‘I’m going to sort us tickets for the Eye before we lose signal,’ she says, taking out her phone. The train pulls in to the next station and Asher imagines himself on one of the adverts presently visible through his window. He sees his face on the cover of a paperback, on billboards, on buses. People will graffiti it, scratch holes in his eyes with the ends of their keys. Everyone will know who Asher Russell is, and what he’s done. They will not let him forget it.

‘Brilliant,’ his mother says, looking up from her phone. ‘Tickets booked.’

They alight at Waterloo where hundreds of people move through the station, maybe even thousands. Their eyes wash over him. Someone knocks Asher at the ticket barriers and says “sorry” as they pass. He is in a crowd and he is anonymous. There is a real energy to the station and he is part of the frothy mass of people, but he is unremarkable. No one is taking notice; no one is afraid of him or thinks he’s weird. Maybe very few people will read the book.

Yvette and Asher walk to the river and queue at the London Eye. After half an hour, they are ushered into a pod and carried high above the water. Yvette’s nose is almost touching the glass as she looks down on London and he is so pleased he suggested this, because she’s clearly enjoying herself. A family of four shares their pod and Yvette asks them to take a photo so she doesn’t have to lean for a selfie. Asher puts his arm around his mother’s shoulder, and his hand flaps, relaxed, as though he poses for pictures all the time. He looks down at the tourists on the South Bank and doesn’t think of airmiles and the carbon it took to get them here. He no longer fixates on their empty homes in America and Finland and New Zealand, the lights left on, the energy-sucking appliances they didn’t unplug. His mother is content. None of it bothers him.

They return to the ground and Asher inspects the queue of people waiting to ride. He sees school children, adults and teenagers of every shape and colour and age. He picks out a grandfather, an au pair with a set of twins, a woman covered in dinosaur jewellery, a man dressed like the stereotype of an archaeologist. He could do a creative writing degree. Why shouldn’t he go and work in a café? Asher is only twenty-one years old and there is still time for him to become absolutely anyone.

10.

Asher

Then

He would rather not kill anyone else today. What does Dom mean? What seems to be happening is that Dom brought along a toy gun and he’s pretending to be a murderer. The plastic trigger, and pretend bullets, are making everyone panic. That’s why there is so much noise in the room, and why Asher can’t think, and can’t even remember what it is he is supposed to be thinking about. He tries to breath in from his diaphragm, the way his mother tells him sometimes. Don’t humiliate yourself, Asher thinks. He’s new to the group. A first-year undergraduate. A reserve called in at the last moment. Of course Storm and Dom wouldn’t trust him enough to share with him every detail of their strategy. There is no need to worry.

In the corner of his brain that hasn’t powered down and gone to sleep Asher goes over all of the preparation they did for this action, including yesterday’s rehearsal in the student union. They practised what he could say to distract any staff member from walking up the stairs. His one job. But the moment he saw Ben, Asher couldn’t remember any of it. Yesterday the three of them also looked at a map of the museum building, and familiarised themselves with the layout, particularly the location of the exits. They talked about being arrested and released later this evening. They discussed social media and agreed Asher and Storm should film Dom tossing the painting into the river, once they reached the park. On some level, Asher is mentally prepared for a criminal record. Last night, he told Dom if the police really throw the book at them, Asher is willing to accept those consequences. A minor conviction won’t affect his future because there isn’t going to be one unless people like them stand up and act.

At this very moment they’re supposed to be running outside with the painting, but instead it’s lying on the floor. It rained last night. When they do get to the river, the ground will be muddy, and it’s this detail Asher fixates on now. He’s wearing his new shoes and they are going to be ruined, and his mum will sigh and say “Oh, Ash” in her disappointed voice, and he hates it when she does that. But they’re not on their way outside because Dom made Storm lock the doors, and you cannot run through a closed door, he thinks to himself, not until you’re a ghost.

‘Asher,’ Dom is calling to him. ‘Take this.’ With the hand not holding the pretend gun, he tosses Asher a plastic shopping bag. It falls to his feet. ‘Use them to cover the cameras.’ Inside the bag are two cans of spray paint. Storm assumed there would be CCTV here and yesterday no one thought it was a problem. If the footage ends up on the news, they figured that would be fine, good in fact, helping them get the media exposure they’re aiming for. And surely the cameras already captured their faces as soon as they walked in? ‘Asher,’ Dom says. ‘Snap out of it. Come on. Climb up on the display cabinet or something and cover them up.’ Asher is so many paces behind what’s going on, it’s embarrassing.

The scent of wood polish and ancient dust gets into his nose. The smell of an antique shop. Now a new stench, less pleasant, is making its way into Asher’s nostrils. What is that? Asher turns his head to the right – so he isn’t completely frozen on the spot after all – and sees a wet patch expanding from the crotch of someone’s jeans, dripping onto the floor. People are afraid, Asher realises, properly scared. He thought they’d be annoyed. He expected anger from members of the public, hatred even, particularly once they made it to the park and a crowd gathered. But not fear. These people in the museum don’t realise today is a positive step. They’re not aware of today’s plans, and so they believe all of this is real. Asher will tell them soon, when his voice is back; he will explain what’s going on. They will understand the future is what is properly terrifying, and that’s what they should really be afraid of.

Asher reaches into the bag, takes one of the spray cans and covers the first camera in paint. His uncle is standing very still and his fists are curled tight, low by his sides. He’s upset because Asher lied about the library and made up a university assessment. Asher has to walk past him to get to the second camera. ‘Asher! Asher!’ Uncle Harrison hisses. Asher pretends he can’t hear and creates a distance between them. Dom won’t be happy if he thinks Asher brought along a family member. Today was meant to be a secret: plans and intentions for their group only. Asher tries to communicate this to his uncle with his eyes.

The camera lenses are covered. Dom is at the windows, looking for something out on the street, but Asher doesn’t know what. Dom is talking about the prime minister and his voice sends an ice cube down Asher’s spine. He doesn’t know why he is shaking. He’s letting his heart bubble in his chest all because of a stupid toy gun.

‘Asher!’ Now Dom wants him to do something else. Dom has already persuaded everyone in the room to line up along the back wall and give up their personal possessions. Asher has zoned out and realises he’s standing alone in the middle of the space. ‘ASHER.’ Dom’s losing patience with him. Asher wants to move, but his feet feel rooted to the spot. His brain has checked out, his voice deserted him. He is disgracing himself and letting the group down. Then shame seems to fire up his leg muscles and he is charging across the room to where Dom wants him to be.

‘… The prime minister …’ Dom’s words swim in and out of focus. At their last meeting, the group talked about the government climate meeting on Monday and how various organisations are planning protests in Trafalgar Square. Handwritten signs, school kids and grandparents. That’s why they chose today for the museum action: they had to do something and their group has had enough of demonstrations, so this weekend was the perfect time for a stunt uniquely their own. ‘Humans are just like antibiotic-resistant bacteria …’ Dom says, and Asher listens for clues about what is happening. ‘But in the ultimate clash of humans versus actual bacteria, people will not stand a chance. The only question is, how long will the planet have to wait for the real pathogens to wipe out the human menace.’

‘Yes,’ Asher says, because what Dom is saying is true. He is catching up. From across the room, Dom gives Asher a firm nod.

‘Oh my God,’ Storm’s voice in his ear. Asher looks at her face and sees pink blotches which aren’t usually there. Her eyes seem confused, even though she is in charge of today.

‘Dom, you can’t do this,’ she says.

‘Shut up,’ Dom says.

‘Dom, no.’

‘You have two seconds to decide if you’re with us or not,’ Dom says. They’re fighting. Their team of three. Is this because Asher failed to do his job? He let the museum worker, Ben, come up here and disrupt the plan and so maybe this is his fault. But Asher cannot make the connection yet. He is failing to work out how things got from there to here.

‘You have to stop!’ Storm shouts. Dom ignores her and gives his attention to his phone. He is down the far end of the room and holds it up high, with the hand not gripping the toy gun. He’s trying to make a video, Asher realises. With himself in the foreground and everyone else in the room lined up along the wall as background. He’ll post it to the group’s social media, Asher supposes.

‘I saw him before,’ someone whispers. It’s the man with the reddish birthmark on his face. ‘Downstairs in the bathroom, about fifteen minutes ago. There was blood. All over his hands and forearms. I thought he was a homeless person who’d wandered in. A nutter. I was going to call the police.’

Dom is speaking into his phone camera, repeating the facts about humans and bacteria. Asher doubts he can hear what this man is telling everyone about the blood.

‘The gunman?’ someone says. ‘That’s who you saw?’ Another voice gasps.

‘It was him,’ birthmark says.

‘Whose blood was on him?’ a woman asks. She works here with Ben. Her staff lanyard says “Hannah”.

‘I don’t know,’ birthmark says. ‘Not his.’

‘Oh my God,’ Hannah says.

‘You called the police?’ Ben says, hopeful. ‘They’re coming?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’ a man snarls.

‘I’m sorry,’ birthmark says.

‘He killed someone.’

‘He meant what he said, and now he’s going to kill us.’

‘You DIDN’T call the police!’

‘He murdered someone on the way here today,’ Storm says, and Asher isn’t sure if it’s a statement or a question.

Dom is still speaking into his phone camera. People on the line choke and sniffle. Did Dom get into a fight this morning? Someone could have attacked him on the way home last night, or maybe he saw something happening on the street, intervened, and didn’t manage to wash off all the blood?

Dom is not—

Asher can’t finish the thought. Dom wouldn’t. No, he couldn’t.

The word “toy” falls from Asher’s mind and he knows it’s gone for good.

None of this makes sense. Asher thinks through what he knows to be true. What is undeniable is that most things in this world are pointless, with the climate deteriorating the way it currently is. University, exams and assignments – it’s training for a world that isn’t going to exist for much longer. Today is his test. What side of the planet’s fight is Asher really on? Maybe this is what it takes.

‘Asher!’ A hissing sound. His uncle is speaking to him. Harrison has to stop doing this. Dom cannot realise they’re related. Certain Dom is focussed on his phone, Asher whispers back: ‘Pretend you don’t know me.’ Harrison is gaping at his nephew, like a fish. He can pretend. His expression says he won’t have to try too hard.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ Dom says to everyone, stalking back from the other end of the space. The room goes quiet. Storm is still by Asher’s side, and next to her is a woman. She looks absolutely terrified. She seems like she could be a nice person, is what Asher thinks, as her legs buckle and her long black hair pools on the floor.

11.

Tia

Now

Enoch Black’s postcards have come back from the lab. Numerous fingermarks and full fingerprints are detected, but no match is made to anyone on police databases. But it was someone in the museum that day. Tia needs to run the hostages’ names through the Police National Computer to see if any have prints recorded. She emails the list of survivors through to Zac and asks for his help. She really doesn’t want to ask Al. After the siege, he insisted he should meet her younger brother. He went on and on about her family and how she never spoke of them. He had to know why she and Rory were only in touch once or twice a year, especially after their father’s heart attack meaning both their parents were dead, and they only had each other. He accused her of compartmentalising everyone in her life and she really hated that because she knows it’s true. Since the siege, Rory has been in contact more, to his credit, but still their sporadic phone calls are brief because what is there to say? Tia has even less tolerance for emotional turmoil since that day. She rarely makes plans to see friends. All she wants is quiet and routine. Boredom, even. Everything steady and safe. She and Al drifted apart and he wasn’t happy, but she found she liked it there, out at sea. That’s where the expression must come from: “to drift apart”. Way out in the deep ocean, where your boat ends up if it comes untethered, is where the water is at its most calm, with scarcely a ripple. It all happened in slow motion until the siege’s first anniversary, when she and Al finally split. There wasn’t much to separate at that point. He said it was like a loose milk tooth finally dropping into a bowl of your cereal before school one morning, after being wiggly for ages. Tia thinks of her niece and feels sorry for her, not having any grandparents on her father’s side and her one living aunt practically a stranger. Tia really hopes her brother doesn’t find out about Andrew Ward. Not another suicide.

The following day Tia’s phone pings with an email from Zac. As far as he can see, none of the surviving hostages have a criminal record. That means, in theory, the prints on Enoch’s postcard could belong to any of them. Why would one of the hostages start harassing the others after all this time? Stella Ward might be right. It could be because of what Andrew and Enoch did together that day to survive. Tia decides Jess Anand will be the next survivor she speaks to. She rings her phone and leaves a voicemail. Then, she texts Stella letting her know Enoch Black is being targeted too. Stella confirms she’s not received anything new since her husband’s death. There’s still that one hostage who’s fallen off the grid since the siege. Tia writes back to Zac asking what he can find out about them.

Today, Tia and a Brilliant Bobbies colleague are based in Canary Wharf. She was hoping to be assigned to work with her friend Pat, but it wasn’t to be. Most of the office towers in this area are indistinguishable to her, skyscrapers that give off a dull blue shimmer. The bobbies go up to the tenth floor and introduce themselves to their contact. The office walls are a neutral colour, and the rest of the decor is also washed out. Armless chairs in pastel fabrics are positioned around the room with artificial cacti in squat white containers. She hasn’t paid too much attention to today’s job and expects it to be a mundane shift, but now Tia sees why this shareholder meeting needs security. The business in question is an oil company. They’ve done their best to keep the location a secret, but there is a fear climate protestors will attempt to disrupt the proceedings.

‘It’s no problem,’ Tia says to the office manager. ‘We’ll be ready for them.’ She smiles at the man in front of her while her gut plummets. This is simply a regular shift, Tia tells herself. If climate activists do attend, they’ll be ordinary protestors, the kind she’s dealt with as a police officer on a hundred other occasions. Normal people exercising their right to peacefully protest. They won’t be extremists. Nothing bad is going to happen. She looks at her colleague. A slim man in his early sixties recently retired from his career at the Metropolitan Police.

This morning’s coffee is now curdling in her stomach. Why have they only sent two officers? If something does kick off, they are going to immediately be on the defence. ‘Let’s start on the ground floor,’ her colleague says. ‘We should check the staircase access.’ She follows him, grasping the handrail until her knuckles go white.

They get to lunch time without any sign of protestors, but Tia knows not to relax. She sees the green carpet of the museum everywhere, and she has given up trying to blink it away. She goes to brush hair from her face but there’s nothing there: it’s the phantom carpet loops digging into her cheek as she lies face-down on the museum floor. Her Bobbies colleague is talking about his new grandchild, and his council tax bill, now his trip to Corfu, but all she can think of is the moment when she couldn’t manage to control the hostage’s bleeding. Delia tells her this torment is because of her choice at the very end of the siege. Her instinct revealed itself. A reflex clearly showed who she preferred to save. When the inquest report is made public, everyone will know.

At three o’clock, the board meeting ends without disruption. Tia excuses herself for the bathroom. She cups her hands and throws cold water on her face until her shirt is sodden. Then, there is the brace of the hand dryer, pulverising the cotton fabric and her skin underneath it. ‘This was one of the most boring days of my forty-five-year working life,’ Tia’s colleague complains.

‘So dull,’ she smiles back.

On her way home, she tries Jess Anand’s phone again. Voicemail. There is an email from Zac. He hasn’t found a trace of the missing hostage. His tone suggests he hasn’t tried terribly hard, and that she’s stretching their not-really-a-friendship with all of these requests. She thanks him, knowing she’ll have to do this on her own from now on.

It’s only four o’clock when she walks through her door. She pulls down her box with the siege paperwork. Here’s Jess’s address. Provided she hasn’t moved, Tia could go there, simply turn up at her house.

Tia’s satnav takes her to the basement flat of a large three-storey end-of-terrace house. The bell doesn’t seem to work. She knocks against the red wood of the door. She can’t hear anything on the other side. Curving her hands around her eyes, she peers through the window. There is a small living space with a two-seater dining table, a brown leather sofa and a coffee table stacked with thick art books. Tall pink candles rest in wax-stained wine bottles. If Jess does still live here, she’s not at home. There is one other window accessible from the street and Tia stands on tip-toes to see inside.

‘Oh.’ A face. She rears back. Not Jess, an older woman. Mid-forties. Angry.

Tia hears the front door open and she goes to it.

‘What do you want?’ The woman fills the space.

‘Sorry,’ Tia says. ‘I’m looking for someone called Jess. Wrong flat I guess.’

The woman takes in her Brilliant Bobbies uniform. People often mistake it for the Metropolitan Police.

‘What’s the last name?’ she says, warmer.

‘Anand.’

The woman raises her chin. ‘This is her flat.’

‘I’m sorry to bother you – Jess isn’t at home, I take it?’

‘I’m cleaning for her.’ The woman takes one step to the side and now Tia sees the hoover.

‘I’ll try her another time,’ Tia says, turning to leave.

‘I’m glad she finally called you.’ Tia stops. Finally called who – the police? She turns around. ‘You need to do something about this.’ The woman’s voice has flipped back to stern. ‘Every time I come there there’s a new one pushed under the door.’

‘Jess is being bothered by someone?’

‘The death threats,’ she says it like Tia is an idiot.

‘Right,’ Tia says. ‘Of course.’ Death threats. That sounds different to what Enoch and Andrew received. Substantially worse.

‘Are there any I could have a look at now?’ Tia asks. ‘So this isn’t a wasted trip?’

‘I told her to keep them,’ the cleaner says. ‘I knew you’d ask. I don’t know where she puts them.’

‘Can you remember what they said? Any of them at all?’

‘The ones I saw said pretty much the same thing. She has to cancel her book otherwise they’ll stab her in her sleep.’

‘Oh my God,’ Tia says, before reminding herself she’s supposed to be here as a neutral police officer, as far as this woman is concerned. She pushes down her shock. ‘This is the memoir about the siege?’ Coupled with her social media platform, her willingness to do copious media interviews has made Jess a minor celebrity. There is no doubt a ready audience for her survivor memoir.

The woman nods. ‘And they all had a creepy little drawing of an ant. Jess says to just ignore them. The book’s still coming.’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘What do I know?’ An ant. The reference to Dominic. It’s the same person who targeted Andrew and Enoch.

‘She’s at work now, I assume?’ Tia asks. The cleaner nods. ‘Thank you.’ Tia walks back to her car. She knows where Jess works from the inquest. It’s about a twenty-minute drive from here.

After the siege, Jess was hired by a small charity for survivors of trauma. They share an office with a children’s sports not-for-profit and an organisation dedicated to research into rare vascular diseases. It’s a short walk from the Hoxton overground in East London, down the road from a shop selling sourdough artisan doughnuts and a co-working space for start-ups in cryptocurrency trading. Tia enters the building and sees the logo on the sign: a green bow and arrow, hand-drawn in crayon by a chunky-fingered child.

‘Excuse me,’ Tia says to a young man occupying the front desk. ‘I’m looking for Jess Anand.’

‘Do you have an appointment?’

‘I don’t. But it’s important. She’s not answering her mobile.’

He appraises her uniform and lifts a black phone from its cradle. Behind his head is a poster of a gushing waterfall with the text: Work Hard. Manifest Harder.

‘She’s not at her desk.’ Tia decides against leaving a message. Jess already knows she’s looking for her from the voicemails.

‘I’ll try again, thank you.’

It occurs to Tia now she hasn’t eaten all day. She wanders into the doughnut place and sits in the window with a cinnamon scroll. Who of the hostages would most want Jess not to publish her book? Tia has no way of knowing, because she doesn’t know what’s in it yet. Surely none of them do, and they’re only guessing. She’ll ask Jess if she can read it, now, before its release. She can’t imagine Jess defaming anyone in it. Maybe it’s like Enoch said, and it’s a matter of principle: they’re angry Jess is publishing the book at all, telling a story which belongs to all of them. Through the shop window, Tia watches people on the footpath. She sees wires everywhere, now. A man walking past in a suit has wires tied in bows where his shoelaces should be. A woman carries a bunch of flowers, taut wires holding them up instead of stems. The man doesn’t really have an IED in his shoes. The woman isn’t carrying a bouquet of bombs down the street. Tia knows this. Her eyes love to play tricks these days.

‘How’s the scroll?’ a woman asks at the next table, sweeping crumbs from her last customer into a cloth.

‘It’s great, thanks,’ Tia says.

How’s the scroll out of 6.8953? Tia hears Delia say. Delia started really getting into maths and numbers when she was sixteen, the year Tia went away to university. She’d text her messages like: How are you finding your tutorials today out of 48.3629? It was always a precise number to four decimal places. It was a joke, but it made Tia feel as though Delia really wanted to hear the answer. It wasn’t the same as being asked how you were in a rhetorical sense several times a day. Her sister really cared.

Her attention back to the street outside, Tia notices a woman. Mid-thirties, tall, with long, straight dark hair. It’s her. Tia tosses the cinnamon scroll remains into a bin and runs out of the bakery. ‘Jess,’ she calls across the street. The other woman is walking fast and determined. ‘Jess!’ Tia’s voice gets nowhere against a series of passing buses. Jess reaches her office building, but she doesn’t turn to go inside. She’s still walking.

Tia slows her pace. She stops calling Jess’s name. Guilt arrives instantly but Tia keeps following. After a couple of minutes, Jess takes a set of stairs down to the canal. Maroon and blue narrowboats line the towpath and Tia drops back to stay out of sight. Whatever Jess is doing is probably not her concern, but she’s come this far, and she wouldn’t be here at all if Jess had answered her call. Jess walks confidently along the path, telling Tia this is somewhere she’s been before. But she is heading in the opposite direction to her flat. They pass much larger boats with barbecues on their top decks, dogs and a beehive. Jess comes to a stop. She’s boarding one of them. There’s a sign out the front, music playing from speakers. It’s a bookshop. There are a number of these floating stores around London. Perhaps this is something to do with Jess’s memoir.

Tia keeps walking. She heads up a set of stairs and watches from the footbridge above. Jess goes straight up to the boat’s top deck where a woman is watering pot plants. Jess hands her something. Not a book. Tia is too far away to tell what it is, but Jess didn’t pick it up from the shop below. Jess and the woman exchange a few words, and then she disembarks. Jess is back on the towpath and now she’s headed for the stairs. She’ll see her. Tia runs along the footbridge and down to the other side of the canal. Jess steps onto the bridge. She turns right. She’s coming this way. Tia ducks behind a narrowboat and waits. How will she explain this if Jess sees her? She’ll hardly cooperate with her investigation that’s not even a proper investigation. Tia peeks out from behind the boat and Jess has her back turned, about a dozen yards ahead. She walked past. She didn’t spot her. Tia climbs the stairs and goes back to the other side of the canal. She gets closer to the bookshop until she can see clearly the person working behind the counter. Her heels hook into the ground. Tia knows she should stop staring before she’s noticed.

She was right to pursue this. It is her business. So this is where Hannah Spector’s been hiding for the past three years.

12.

Tia

Then

A hostage collapses. The woman with long dark hair. The two museum staffers, Ben and Hannah, get to her first.

‘What’s your name?’ Tia moves hair from the woman’s face and puts a finger to her neck. A pulse.

‘Jess.’ Her mouth wobbles. She’s conscious. She looks like she’s about to be sick.

‘What happened, Jess?’

‘I have this thing, low blood sugar. I take medication.’

‘Like type 1 diabetes?’ Tia asks.

‘Yes, that’s it.’

‘Do you have something in your bag?’

She shakes her head. ‘It’s all outside in my car.’

Down the other end of the room, the gunman has stopped filming. He’s stalking back to where the hostages are. ‘Get away from her.’ He grips Jess by the upper arm and pulls her to standing. Forced to her feet, Jess cries out. She’s off-balance and her head flops like a ragdoll. She’s clearly still dizzy. The gun is in his non-dominant hand. Tia’s heart thumps hard against her chest. An opportunity to overpower him? But if she fails, someone could get shot. Maybe later. She’s hesitated, and now it’s too late. She tells herself she’ll have another chance. This won’t be something she lives to regret. If she lives through this at all.

‘Get in a line. All of you. Now,’ the gunman says. The hostages reshuffle into single file along the back wall.

Type 1 diabetes. Doesn’t that require insulin shots? Or sweets when blood sugar gets too low? The downstairs café would have soft drinks. Juices.

Jess’s arms shake. It could be many hours until they get out of here. She may not last that long. Tia has to do something now. The hostages are the gunman’s bargaining chips. It’s in his interest to keep everyone alive. She needs to make him see that.

Satisfied everyone is in line, the gunman walks backwards to the other end of the room, keeping his eyes fixed on them. ‘Jess has type 1 diabetes,’ Tia says. She’ll use the hostages’ names. Humanise them to him. ‘She could go into a diabetic coma.’ Tia can use this to open a dialogue with him. Ask for things for the hostages, and he can make his own requests to the police outside. This is how negotiations work. ‘If we could get some drinks from the museum café that would really help everyone in here,’ Tia says. The gunman stops.

‘I have what I need outside in my car,’ Jess says, and he walks forward. ‘If I could just go and get it.’

The gunman is hardly going to let Jess leave, but if he agrees to even bring drinks up from downstairs, it would be a sign he intends the hostages to live. It would keep the firearms team back and give everyone time to work this out.

He’s moving closer.

‘Or we could go through everyone’s bags,’ Tia looks at the hostages’ personal possessions, piled to the side of the room. ‘To see if there’s something Jess can eat.’ She isn’t going to let this woman go into a coma.

Instantly, he’s on top of her. The gun is back at her forehead. This time it’s cold. Knowing her role, she looks down at the green carpet. She submits. Delia whispers if he keeps doing this, eventually he’s going to pull the trigger. He said he’s already killed someone today.

‘Sorry,’ Tia says to the gunman. “Sorry” is a word a negotiator can never use enough. ‘I’m only trying to help.’ She speaks slow and gentle, keeping her tone free of emotion the way negotiators are supposed to do. His eyes sear her forehead. ‘Sorry.’ He lowers the gun to his side. Tia unclenches and lets out a breath.

‘She looks fine to me,’ he indicates Jess. Ben and Hannah are on either side of Jess, helping her to stand. She does not look fine. ‘If anybody moves out of line, I will shoot you.’ Tia needs another tactic.

The gunman returns to the far side of the room and speaks to his accomplice. Asher, he called him. He turns his back to the hostages while Asher faces him. They’re making another video. Using the hostages as background. Where’s this going – some kind of live feed? Al will be watching. Her colleagues. Everyone in the police. Her mind leaves her body and Tia sees herself from the outside. Flat and one-dimensional, pixels on an office computer, a tiny phone screen. A clip analysed by a detective. Submitted to evidence because she is a victim. That’s who she is now.

‘These people are being held hostage in London’s Bennett Museum. They’ll be here until I speak to the prime minister and he agrees to an immediate target of real net zero. At five o’clock, the government releases its communiqué about Monday’s climate meeting. If that press release comes out without real net zero included, these people will die.’

The man with the birthmark lets out a whimper. Jess screeches. Tia needs to get her help without provoking the gunman. She thinks of what the man with the birthmark said. Andrew. The gunman in the bathroom with blood up to his elbows. That doesn’t sound like a gun. He must have stabbed someone. She hasn’t seen a knife on him yet. Maybe he got rid of it. Or it’s in his bag.

He said five o’clock. It’s Saturday. Most government departments will be empty. But don’t they sometimes put out press releases today to deliberately miss being reported on by the weekend papers? She’s heard the chief superintendent say this. A strategy for when they want something to go unnoticed. If they’re releasing their climate statement this way, it’s probably because the targets fall short. Nothing like what the gunman wants to see. Tia isn’t wearing a watch. Right before he took their phones it was 10:45am. She guesses it would be closer to 11:30am now. She has to try and keep track. She needs to prepare for what might happen as they get closer to five.

The gunman continues speaking to the camera: ‘I’ll explain to you why this was necessary.’ Tia looks around the room. There are a couple of display cabinets. Not much in the way of furniture. Nothing to take shelter behind if tactical police enter. If there’s an immediate threat to life, firearms teams will come in. Hostages will likely get hurt. The only way to keep everyone safe is to negotiate a surrender. ‘The medium is the message. That’s Art 101.’ With his hand free of the gun, he gestures at the paintings on the walls around him.

From the hostage line, Tia can see through the window to the road outside the museum. Armed Response Vehicles have arrived, marked and unmarked police cars. Police will be working to identify the gunman. Building his psychological profile. They can’t use the CCTV cameras now they’re covered in paint, but she knows they’ll soon install covert audio equipment to hear what’s going on. She can’t communicate with them but at least she can try and send messages via the listening device. Tia scans the ceiling and skirting boards, looking for a drain or a hole of some kind where they’ll insert it from the outside. There’s a grate underneath the window. Maybe there.

‘Climate activism hasn’t worked so far because the medium always falls short of the message,’ the gunman is saying. ‘Petitions. Speeches. Marches. Nobody gets hurt doing these things and so they don’t work because climate change is mass destruction. It’s nearly 3 billion animals killed or injured in the Australian bushfires. You can’t communicate destruction on this scale by talking. By signing something, by walking or holding up a placard. Mass destruction means the communication itself must be lethal.’

Next to Tia, the female accomplice is taking ragged breaths. She’s on the hostage line, not with the other two, as though she really isn’t part of this. The gunman and Asher stop filming and crowd around their phone. Tia will use this moment.

‘What’s your name?’ Tia whispers to her. The woman is sobbing quietly, spreading tears around her face with her palm. ‘We don’t have much time,’ Tia says. Later she’ll tell the hostages she’s a police officer, when she needs them to trust her. But not yet.

‘Storm.’

‘Storm, okay. And he’s Asher,’ Tia says. ‘What’s the gunman called?’

‘Dom. Dominic.’

‘Do you know what he’s planning?’

Storm shakes her head.

‘How do you know each other?’ She has to find out as much as she can.

‘University.’ They’re students.

‘He looks a few years older than you?’

‘He was doing his PhD.’

‘Was?’ Tia keeps her eye on Dominic and Asher. They’re still focussed on the phone. Presumably uploading the videos to somewhere.

‘He dropped out. I don’t know.’ That could be something. When they looked at Delia’s laptop, they saw she’d been researching the university’s procedures for withdrawing from a degree.

‘What’s in his rucksack?’ Tia eyes the heavy-looking bag worn high on the gunman’s back.

‘I don’t know,’ Storm says.

‘Have you seen him with it before?’

‘No.’ Tia saw something peeking out of it earlier. Probably a zipper. Hopefully not wires.

Asher and Dominic separate. The phone camera is held up and they’re filming again.

‘Thanks,’ Tia whispers to Storm.

‘Climate movements have played nice for far too long,’ the gunman, Dominic, says. ‘The time for convincing the population that things are dire is over. The time for asking people to come along with us is over. There is no more time. Look around the world. Temperatures are breaking records. Floods are breaking records. I’m not here to ask you to pay attention. To beg you to care. I’m saying we don’t need you. You, the general population, have become irrelevant to the climate movement. In every revolution that’s taken place since human civilisation, only a tiny percentage of the population at the time actually participated. So it will be for the climate revolution. Don’t think we need an army. We don’t need you. You had your chance to be part of this. You did nothing. You surrendered. You made yourself into a sacrifice. The people behind me are waiting for the prime minister’s call.’

There’s no way they’ll allow the gunman to speak directly to the prime minister. If that’s what he’s demanding for their release, where does that leave them?

There’s a thud to Tia’s right. Jess is lying in a heap on the floor.

13.

Asher

Now

Despite his mother’s warning, in her study, he searches his name. The sheer number of Google results snatch him by the collar. He pulls the white computer cord from the wall like a lasso, as though that makes him safe, untraceable. But Asher is allowed to be doing this. Searching his own name does not put him in breach of his licence conditions or his curfew – he hasn’t even left the house since yesterday. This does not constitute making contact with anyone. All he wants to do is see, because he should know what the world is saying about him.

Asher plugs the machine back in and waits for it to reboot. One of the group is dead, the other is still in prison. He is the only one free, carrying all this media attention on his back. It isn’t necessary to read any of the articles in full. He gets the gist from the thumbnail images and the preview text that is sucked by the internet hoover to the top of the search engine. Page after page of why Asher is bad, into infinity. Most of the news outlets have re-used pictures of him from the trial, scraped from his mother’s Facebook at the time of his arrest and before she was advised to take them down. They name her, in the articles, for absolutely no reason he can think of. Just because they can.

Asher thinks of his mother, a bank nurse now, working in multiple hospitals, a different ward each day, a new department with strange people. How many times a week when she introduces herself is she recognised by a doctor, by a patient? Even if nothing is said, his mother would be alive to every little whisper happening around her, braced for pointed comments or simply unkind thoughts. He’ll never be able to take down these news stories. For the rest of their lives, when anyone searches his or Yvette’s name, they’ll see this flood of hatred towards him, and no one cares that none of it is fair. Asher keeps scrolling and now he notices the book his mother was talking about, written by one of the hostages. Their picture isn’t screenshotted from the bowels of social media: it’s taken in a professional studio and is shiny and smiley and brave. Courageous. Inspirational. Those and other syrupy words are mentioned in the book blurb. Asher tells himself to stop. He is not one of the angry men from prison and they would stay seated here feeding off the contempt, clicking on page thirty to three hundred of the search engine, gorging on more, more, more.

Asher has other things to focus on, like his meeting with James from secondary school maths class. On Friday morning, while his mother is still sleeping after her night shift, he goes to the shops to buy himself new clothes to wear. He wants to be careful with his limited funds but first impressions are important and if James has a full-time job in the city, he will have high standards. Asher takes Yvette’s car and drives for the first time in over three years, hands at ten and two, several miles under the speed limit. He chooses a faraway spot in the shopping centre carpark that is twenty yards from the nearest vehicle or shopping trolley obstacle. Inside H&M, he is approached by a young guy untangling hangers.

‘Do you need any help?’ Asher needs a whole new wardrobe. He wants to sort something this morning. To impress James, but also his mother. To show her he can take the car, drive to the shops, make a decision, and dress himself like any normal person.

‘Nothing I have fits anymore,’ he says to the man.

‘Well, what do you like?’ Asher doesn’t know. He’s not sure he ever did. So he lets the shop assistant choose a pair of jeans, a proper shirt, a t-shirt and a jumper, and after he tries it all on, he hands over his bank card and feels very adult, making a purchase in a real shop, and not one staffed by prisoners on life sentences.

At home, he is standing with his back against the kitchen wall. ‘Lift your chin a bit, love,’ his mother is saying. ‘Ready? One, two, three.’ He hears her phone camera click twice. ‘Lovely,’ she says at the screen. ‘You look so smart.’ He feels six years old. When he has finished modelling the H&M outfit for Yvette, Asher changes back into his old clothes and rests his new purchases on his chair, ready for the weekend.

On Saturday morning, Asher wakes very early, and he leaves the house with far too much time. He drives around the block three times, parks half a mile away, and still he gets to the café thirty minutes before they are due to meet. The new jeans are long in the leg and cover the electronic tag even when Asher sits down and the material rides up – he tests this in the car – giving him the confidence to choose a highly visible table in the middle of the room. Sun leans against the shop window and takes the chill out of his metal chair. It’s the warmest day of the year so far and everyone is happy about it. The café is full of children, dogs licking flakes of croissant from the floor, and shopping bags bursting with groceries. He feels grown-up, like a proper person who is part of things. Asher looks at the drinks menu. Pistachio Latte, Cherry Pistachio Latte, White Chocolate Pistachio Frappé. He clearly missed a trend while in prison. He is keeping watch on the door – he cannot act casual today, it’s not even worth trying – and right on time, James walks in. As Asher stands and waves, he sees the man’s blonde hair is a lot shorter than he remembers, but he is broader, much bulkier, and when he sits down, the centre of gravity in the room shifts. He offers his hand for James to shake. Too formal? He’s probably messed this up already. James takes it anyway. ‘Hey.’

‘Hi, James.’

‘Americano.’ James has ordered before Asher even has his thoughts together and now he is holding up the queue. Pistachio with almond milk, he’s got to try it. But not in front of James.

‘The same, please,’ he says. ‘With any kind of plant milk.’

His school friend is wearing gym clothes and though the logos are unfamiliar, Asher can tell the ensemble is expensive. After Asher explained in his email about the electronic tag and his curfew, James suggested coffee first thing after his usual Saturday morning run. That’s something Asher could do: take up running. In the prison gym, weights are popular but that kind of exercise doesn’t suit Asher’s frame, so he mostly used the treadmill. Maybe James will invite him to run next week. He can go back to H&M and get some appropriate clothes.

By the time their coffees reach the table it is ten past ten and Asher is thinking that they will talk for two hours, all the way through to lunch time. One of them will suggest they go across the road to the pasta restaurant to keep the conversation going. This is exactly how his small jobseeker payments should be spent: on building a new life, making friends and enjoying himself for the first time since he can remember.

‘It’s really great to see you.’ Asher wonders if he should offer to reimburse James for his drink, or just buy the next one.

‘Yeah,’ James says. ‘I mean, I was surprised, obviously, to get your email. Wow.’

‘Wow.’ Asher cringes at his repetition.

‘So how are you?’

‘Good!’ Now he’s too eager, he must pull it back. ‘How are you? How’s your job?’

‘It’s fine, yeah. It’s a graduate position. Decent starting salary. I’m planning to move on, either internally or elsewhere in the industry, within the year.’

Asher feels he is supposed to know what industry James is referring to. ‘That sounds very impressive.’

‘And you’re back living around here too,’ James says. Back. Released. It’s okay if he spells it out. ‘I ended up going to Durham. Returned after I graduated.’ Back from university; back from prison. James knows. It’s fine.

‘Yes,’ Asher says. ‘Living with my mum. In the same house as when I was at school.’ James nods despite not knowing anything about Asher’s childhood home.

Then he leans forward with a shimmer in his eye. ‘Can I see it?’ He lowers his voice. ‘The ankle tag I mean. I’ve never seen one. Only on the telly.’ His eyes jump under the table, thrilled.

The bit of soy milk Asher has ingested sours in his stomach. He didn’t anticipate this, but he can’t refuse him. He peers around the room and when satisfied that no one is looking, he raises the left leg of his jeans. James gapes at it. It’s only a bit of blue-grey plastic.

‘Right.’ James shuffles in his seat. ‘What happens if you aren’t home by curfew? Have you tried to take it off?’

‘No,’ Asher says, avoiding the glint in the other man’s eye. ‘It’s fine. It’s only on for three months in total. It’s part of being on licence.’

James nods and takes a big mouthful of his drink.

A silence settles. They used to talk about maths. The teacher, Mr Upton. The boy who always sat in front of them and the girl who always tried to nick one of their pens.

‘Do you see anyone else from school?’ Asher says. Ask questions. That’s what the facilitator said at his social skills workshop in prison. People always love to talk about themselves.

‘A few,’ James says. ‘Josh also went to Durham. And Vinay.’ Asher remembers them. Those boys never spoke to him. ‘What happens when the tag comes off?’

Asher’s cup is travelling through the air, halfway to his mouth. He moves it back down to the table, hand wobbling.

‘Um, I’m still on licence,’ Asher’s voice wavers but then he remembers what the end of curfew means and he sits up straighter. ‘Though I can go out at night,’ he says. ‘We could get that afterwork drink.’

James laughs. Asher is not sure what it means. He joins in but soon covers his face with his cup.

‘Yeah, Josh works in the city too,’ James is saying. ‘Vinay took a graduate position in Glasgow.’

‘That sounds good,’ Asher says. Ask another question, he tells himself. Think.

James gets there first. ‘Did you meet Travis Smith – the double murderer? You were in the same prison, right?’ Asher did not tell James which jail he was in.

‘I’m not sure who that is.’ It’s true, he isn’t. James is visibly disappointed.

‘Did you have a cellmate?’ he asks. ‘What were they in for? Like, what crimes?’

‘I had a few different ones,’ Asher says, ducking again behind his coffee. The faces of the angry prison men explode behind his eyes. He doesn’t want to look at them. They can’t hurt him now, he assures himself. Asher needs to steer this conversation somewhere else. Maybe James just doesn’t know what else to ask him. ‘What degree did you say you did?’

‘Economics.’

‘I was doing engineering,’ Asher says. ‘I’m not sure I’ll finish it now. I want to do something with the environment.’ It is quickly suppressed, but there is a discernible snigger from James. Asher keeps going. ‘Something in climate science. I need to do some research.’

‘You knew, yeah?’

Asher waits for James to explain his question but all he gets is a stare. ‘Sorry, knew what?’

‘In the museum – you knew what was going to happen with the gun and the hostages?’ And now all of the soy milk in Asher’s stomach pushes upwards and he has to concentrate not to be sick.

‘I said in court that I didn’t.’ He knocks his coffee over. Asher can feel eyes on him from the next table as he struggles to sop up the liquid before it gets onto his jeans. ‘Are you going away over summer? Overseas maybe?’ He is smiling so hard his cheeks hurt.

‘Spain, yeah,’ James answers quickly as though the question is irritating.

‘That sounds nice. Whereabouts?’ Keep smiling, Asher tells himself. Don’t change your face. James gets to his feet.

‘It was good to see you,’ James says. ‘I need to get going. A family thing with the girlfriend. I didn’t notice the time. Sorry.’ It is twenty past ten. They haven’t even been here for half an hour.

‘Oh,’ Asher stands up too because it feels strange not to. ‘Sure. Yes, it was nice to see you. We could do it again next week if you’re going running?’

‘I’ll WhatsApp you.’ James is already making his way to the door.

‘Bye!’ Asher has to raise his voice for it to reach him. James doesn’t have his number, and he doesn’t have his. Now Asher realises some of his coffee did splash onto his jeans, his brand-new jeans, which James didn’t notice, and wouldn’t be interested in, because he does not care about Asher at all. Asher should have prepared things for them to talk about. Why didn’t he memorise a list of conversation topics that might have glued James to his chair for just a little bit longer? He could have at least mentioned the funny moose in the bank. But it is clear James came out of curiosity, and he only wanted to hear about prison. Asher feels his face swell. He is a fool. He hardly even knew James at school. They probably spoke a couple of hundred words to each other their whole lives. Why else would James have agreed to come? Asher rushes out of the shop with his chin down. ‘Sorry!’ He’s bumping into people. He wishes he had his hoodie on right now and his uncle’s spectacles. Asher jogs to the car and this time doesn’t drive home carefully because he wants to get inside as quickly as possible. He almost goes through a red light and visualises his car being smacked by a lorry.

James thinks he knows the real Asher, but he’s basing his assumptions on a few shared conversations about integers and fractions from six or seven years ago. As he drives, Asher looks at his hands and dissects them with his eyes, searching for the bacteria he knows is alive on his knuckles. The flesh of every human and animal is covered in bugs and microbes not visible to the naked eye. He should stop washing, help the pathogens to grow. They belong on this planet. They deserve a place more than he does. Asher is a human and humans are nothing more than a host for other, more worthwhile life.

‘Home already, love?’ his mother hears the car and greets him at the front door.

‘James’s phone rang, and he had to go. A family emergency.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ He cannot meet her eye. She will see right through him, notice the lying, loser blood swishing through his veins.

‘I’m going to read for a while.’ Asher hurries into his room, closing the door. If he tells her about James, her disappointment will be too much for him today. He drops onto his bed, face-first into the duvet, tired and ashamed. He wants to read about Ben Wing. There must be more about him online which Asher hasn’t seen. He can’t search for the hostages while his mother is home, and he shouldn’t be doing this from her computer anyway. It’s too risky. Tomorrow, he’ll go to the local library and use one of their machines. Now, he hears a soft knock at the door. ‘You okay, Ash? Do you need anything? I’m making a tea.’ Yvette’s voice is so tender, she must know he’s not telling her the truth about James.

‘No thanks,’ he says it as happily as possible, twisting his head towards the door. He can sense her stood there, breathing behind the wood.

‘Oh, by the way, Steve really wants to meet you. When you feel like it, we’ll ask him over for a cup of tea.’

‘Okay,’ he says, knowing exactly what she’s doing.

‘I’ve mentioned Steve, haven’t I?’ Yvette continues. ‘The new neighbour across the road? Lovely older gent. Moved in last year. He’s retired and he fancies himself a bit of a handyman and he loves to help people out. He hung the new TV for me. Installed smoke detectors for the Baileys next door. He keeps asking when he can meet you.’

Whenever Asher had a particularly bad day at school, was teased or excluded from something by the other students, Yvette would make a point of saying a colleague at the hospital had asked after him. As though the social approval of one of his mother’s friends could make up for the constant rejection from his peers at school. It breaks his heart that she does this for him.

‘Well,’ his mother says, still behind his bedroom door. ‘Sing out if I can get you something.’ He hears her walk away. An hour goes by, and then another. Yvette returns twice more and he sends her away, claiming to still be reading. He should go outside and check on the moles. They can’t survive if the ground is too dry. They might need help with the hosepipe, but he cannot move at the moment, not even for them. Asher lies on his bed staring upward. Faces of the angry men in jail stalk across the ceiling.

14.

Asher

Then

‘Asher,’ Dom turns to him. ‘You go downstairs to the café. This is the only time anyone will be leaving, so bring what you can carry.’

He’s waiting for Asher to respond. ‘Okay.’

‘You have three minutes. If you don’t come back, I shoot someone.’

‘Yes.’ Something strangles in his throat.

‘Anyone attempts to leave, I will shoot you in the back.’ Dom glares at all of the hostages. ‘If you try anything, someone will die, and it will be on you.’ He spins to Storm. ‘Let Asher out through that door,’ he points to the set nearest the stairs and passes her the keycard. ‘Lock it behind him.’ Dom moves closer to the hostages, the gun at waist-height.

At the exit, Storm works the lock panel. Dom seemed to know the doors could be secured like this from the inside. He knew Ben and the other staff would have lanyards and a keycard around their neck. They did not discuss locks at rehearsal: Dom must have researched it on his own.

Storm whispers to Asher under the beep of the door: ‘They would have knives in the café. Grab the sharpest ones you can.’

‘Three minutes,’ Dom reminds him.

Asher’s arms windmill as he rushes out. Three minutes. He’s missed the starting gun. He needs to stop thinking about guns. Asher is not wearing a watch. How will he know when the time is up? When he hears shots fired, a voice inside says. He’ll count. Ten, eleven, twelve … He needs to keep a seconds hand ticking in the back of his mind. On the stairwell now, Asher takes two at a time, holding onto the handrail because his legs are flopping all over the place. What was that look he caught on his uncle’s face right before he left the room? Don’t leave me, please come back?

Or was it: Run, save yourself?

Asher reaches the ground floor and pushes through the gift shop to the café. The fridge. A huge silver thing. He’s actually really thirsty. He was too nervous this morning for breakfast and hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since early last night. Wait. Think. How long has it been? Sixty seconds. There’s time. Asher grabs the first bottle he sees, a heavy, two-pint milk, and pours it into his open mouth. It’s cow’s milk. He’s drinking non-vegan milk for the first time in years. He swallows and pours more, as the milk rains down his shirt. It’s going to smell, but in this moment he doesn’t care. Asher stops drinking, gasping for breath. There must be less than a minute left.

Abandoning the milk on the countertop, Asher turns to his left and sees the glass doors, the museum entrance. Dom is two floors up. Nothing is stopping him from running straight out to the road. He calculates the yards. How many steps until he is outside, safe? As he counts, Asher’s internal seconds clock, the one keeping the hostages safe, stops ticking. Twenty yards. Asher could be away and free in thirty seconds. Won’t it be beneficial for the police to have him out there, someone who can provide intelligence on today’s protest action and explain what’s happened? Isn’t he more use out there than in here? He can tell the police everything he knows about Dom and what he might be planning. Plus, his mother will be so worried, and he can comfort her, because she shouldn’t have to suffer this because of him. She might already be out there, on the other side of the road, pressing against the police tape he expects is there. Asher doesn’t think of his father too often, but now the man’s face starts to form in his mind. He moved to Thailand and married again, eight years ago. The last time Asher saw him, he was ten. His parents separated when he was five years old, and from that point Asher scarcely saw him, at most once or twice a year. Asher pushes the man’s image out of his thoughts.

The fridge is chirping, reminding Asher of the open door. He can leave it. All of this. Go. Run. Twenty yards. Right now.

His uncle upstairs is his real father. Harrison is only in this situation because of Asher. He can’t leave him. Coke. That’s his uncle’s favourite. Asher takes two bottles and stuffs them under his arm. He reaches for sparkling water and elderflower and other sugary drinks, balancing them all against his chest. Three minutes. He has to go back.

As he spins he remembers what Storm said. A knife. There are drawers and cupboards and plastic containers everywhere, and nothing telling him which one he should open. On the other side of the fridge is a chopping board. A paring knife. One will have to do. He slides it into the back of his jeans and runs.

Asher climbs the stairs as quickly as he can without dropping any of the drinks. At the top, he shouts through the door: ‘I’m here!’

Storm opens it and Asher’s eyes go straight to Dom.

‘Give her something,’ he says, indicating Jess. ‘Then hand out the rest.’ Asher gives Jess one of the Cokes and he passes around the remaining drinks. Some of the hostages thank him very sincerely as their hands close around a bottle. They thought he wouldn’t come back upstairs, he realises. He can see it in their posture.

‘Thank you,’ Ben says, as Asher offers him an elderflower. Coming back up here, willingly, could be the stupidest thing he’s ever done. Maybe he wouldn’t have if not for his uncle. He doesn’t know if these strangers alone would have been enough to keep him here, but he does know that he is not brave. Asher hands a Coke to Harrison without eye contact, as though the choice is completely random. The spilt milk on Asher’s shirt is emitting a gross sour smell and everyone must know what he did: that he wasted precious time in the café helping himself to bottles of dairy. Some climate activist he is.

Storm takes a few sips of sparkling water before replacing the cap. She watches Asher. He notices Dom isn’t drinking.

Asher offers him an unopened bottle. ‘No,’ Dom says.

He can feel Storm trying to get his attention. He won’t look at her yet. He needs a second to think because once their eyes meet he’ll have to decide.

Asher can find an opportunity to pass her the knife. Dom hasn’t been watching him too closely. Storm must be planning to overpower Dom somehow, or perhaps she thinks she and Asher should each have a knife on them just in case he …

Storm is still glaring at Asher and the question mark hangs in the air. Dom’s words pass between them: This is the only time anyone will be leaving.

Asher looks at her and shakes his head. He mouths “sorry”. Disappointment smothers her face. Her mouth looks small, afraid.

As he steps away from Storm the knife presses cool into his back.

Once more he holds out a bottle of water for Dom. ‘Are you sure you don’t want some?’

‘No.’ Asher cannot help but frown at the rejection. Dom is not pleased with him. He is not at all impressed by Asher’s successful trip to the café and his swift return. Yesterday in their rehearsal, he thought Dom was about to say “good job” at the end, but then he asked about the train strike instead and it was Storm who told Asher he had done well. Sometimes he gets this brushed-off feeling from Dom. Worse than the sting of being ignored, because it is also jealousy. Dom doesn’t need approval from anyone.

Now Asher turns everything over and sees things from underneath. Of course Dom’s not surprised he came back up: he never doubted him. He sent Asher on the drinks mission, not Storm. Dom trusts him implicitly.

15.

Tia

Now

From the footbridge, Tia watches the floating bookshop. She waits ten minutes, making sure Jess isn’t about to return, and walks down the stairs. Tia needs to speak to Hannah. It’ll be obvious Tia must have been following Jess, but she figures it doesn’t matter. They’re going to have to be honest with one another. She wonders if Jess believes Hannah is the one sending her the death threats? That could be why Jess didn’t go to the police and still plans to release her book. She might think she can deal with Hannah herself.

As Tia nears the boat, she sees a small piece of paper in the window: Cash Only. At the door is a display of worn paperbacks by Sue Grafton, all from the mystery series A to Z. When she enters, Hannah has come down from the deck and is fiddling with something behind the counter.

‘Hello, Hannah, it’s—’

She glances up. Just as Tia thinks she isn’t recognised, Hannah cuts her off. ‘Tia.’

‘How are you?’ Hannah looks a lot older than she remembers. She would be about twenty-three now, no longer a student. Her hair is much longer, almost reaching to her waist. The centre parting is so severe, as though drawn with the tip of a knife.

‘What are you doing here?’ Hannah says. ‘How are you even here?’ Tia hasn’t decided if she should start with questions about Jess specifically or the harassment of all three hostages.

‘I was in the area and I happened to see Jess Anand.’ Tia watches for a reaction.

‘Oh.’ Hannah looks rattled.

‘Is this your boat?’ Hannah nods. ‘It’s everyone’s dream, isn’t it?’ Tia runs a finger down the spine of a leather-bound dictionary. ‘Owning a second-hand book shop? And a boat? You’ve got two in one.’

‘You ran into Jess and she told you I was here?’ Hannah is playing with the cash register, which must be at least fifty years old.

‘I didn’t get to speak to her,’ Tia says. ‘Are you going to sell her book?’

‘No,’ she says it with real disgust.

‘But the two of you have obviously stayed in touch?’ The dust in here is thick and Tia can taste it, almost chew it.

‘You clearly know something,’ Hannah says. ‘So I’ll just come out and tell you the rest.’

‘Okay.’ Tia remembers her as caring and sweet during the siege, all things considered. The woman in front of her sounds bitter; like someone who doesn’t trust.

‘Jess is making money off my story. Off yours too. All of ours. So she comes in sometimes and gives me a small slice from her book’s advance.’

‘Does she pay all of the hostages?’ Tia asks.

Hannah runs a hand through her hair, messing up her perfect parting. ‘I don’t know.’

‘She offers to pay you?’ Tia asks. ‘She approached you when she started writing it?’

‘No, she didn’t approach me.’ There’s that bitter tone again.

‘Is there some kind of legal issue? Were you going to sue?’

Hannah shakes her head. ‘I’m not going to sue her.’

‘So you get money from Jess,’ Tia says. ‘But you never participated in any of the paid interviews alongside the other survivors?’

‘Did you participate in them?’

‘I was the police officer. I couldn’t.’

‘Yeah, well, I couldn’t either,’ Hannah says. She looks through one of the windows to the towpath and her eyes follow a man walking a bicycle.

‘Do you mean it conflicts with your values?’ Tia asks. ‘Taking money for talking about the siege?’

Hannah’s still watching the cyclist and doesn’t immediately answer. ‘There’s people walking around with all sorts of things living in their heads,’ she says eventually. She moves out from behind the counter and stands close to Tia. ‘What happened to us wasn’t even that bad compared to what’s out there.’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ve got books on people who have survived plane crashes, who had limbs torn from their bodies, who saw their whole family massacred in front of them in the middle of a war. I read a memoir from someone who was thrown, alive, into a pit of the dead in Rwanda. We’re not special.’

‘Only to each other.’ Tia doesn’t know this woman at all, not really. But she feels more connected to the hostages than she does to her own brother, and friends she’s had for decades.

‘I didn’t want any part of the media exposure but I did watch those interviews. Right from the beginning, Jess said she never thought about saving herself. Not once. She claimed what was going through her head was that we needed to stick together. Everyone is saved, or no one is saved. Her book. The charity work. Her whole persona – she based it on this rubbish about not leaving anyone behind. About her being courageous and brave and none of it is true.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Tia says.

‘Years ago, she read about a kidnapping of school children somewhere, and the kidnappers released a particular child because they had type 1 diabetes and were worried about them going into a coma. She remembered it. This idea that even hostage-takers might have some level of empathy and if you pretend to be really sick, they might let you out.’ Hannah is standing so close the tips of their shoes are almost touching. ‘Jess told me this on the night. After we finished getting checked out by the paramedics. She was embarrassed the next day, though. Ashamed. She asked me not to repeat it.’

‘You’re saying Jess was faking her fainting episodes?’

‘I’m saying she faked having diabetes entirely. The way she was in the museum was an act. She was performing. Healthwise, she’s fine.’ Tia never expected anything like this. Jess is some kind of patron for a diabetes charity now. She feels disgusted, but she can’t judge. That isn’t her right.

‘You’re blackmailing her.’ Tia thinks of the moment Jess passed out. If Tia hadn’t believed Jess was in danger of going into a diabetic coma, she wouldn’t have persuaded Dom to give the hostages access to drinks, at least not at that moment. Tia works through the chain of events from Asher Russell returning from downstairs. If he hadn’t gone down to the café for something sugary for Jess, then maybe no one had to die.

‘If I came out and contradicted her story,’ Hannah says, ‘Jess’s new career would fall apart.’

‘It’s human to want to save yourself in that situation,’ Tia says. ‘She tried something. It didn’t work.’ If Tia doesn’t want the hostages to blame her for what she did, and what she failed to do, then she can’t very well resent them.

‘Jess decided her life was worth more than ours but she’s making money off her supposed heroism.’

‘I can see how you’d be upset about her charity work.’ Tia can hardly believe Jess has kept up the diabetes thing for over three years.

‘Jess isn’t the only one who’s shameless,’ Hannah says. ‘Most of us working at the museum were art students. I found out one of them, for their graduation major work, handed in a series of installations about “the transformative experience of being held hostage”. She wasn’t even on the rota that day.’ Police do this too. At the pub, you’ll hear them say they were part of the major incident team for that infamous tragedy; they were there when that notorious killer was arrested. The truth is, they were doing routine traffic stops that day, listening on their radio from the other side of the city. Whatever the nature of the group: humans can’t bear to be excluded.

‘Look,’ Tia says. ‘Someone is sending Jess death threats about the book. I think it’s the same person who also sent harassing materials to Enoch Black and Andrew Ward.’

‘That’s why you’re here.’ Tia sees a twist in the centre of Hannah’s forehead. ‘You think it’s me. It isn’t,’ Hannah says. ‘Jess never said anything about death threats. I wouldn’t have taken her money if I’d known. That’s horrible.’

‘I don’t think it’s you,’ Tia says. It’s true. Now she’s here in front of her, it’s not Hannah. Blackmail’s one thing, but she wouldn’t threaten to kill anyone. She’s certain she’s too moral for that. ‘Actually, I was going to ask if you’d received anything similar yourself.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Hannah says. ‘What kind of “harassing materials” did Andrew and Enoch get?’

‘Mostly stuff from the museum gift shop.’

‘Maybe that’s deserved. For what Andrew and Enoch did. They weren’t saints either.’

‘The harassment is worse than it sounds. And Andrew Ward actually passed away,’ Tia says. ‘He killed himself.’ As soon as the words are out, Tia wishes she hadn’t said it so bluntly.

‘Oh no,’ Hannah says. ‘Jesus. I didn’t mean that. When?’

‘About a month ago. The harassment started towards the end of the inquest.’

‘Now I feel like an arsehole. I am. I know I am.’ Hannah sighs, and her voice loses all strength. ‘I never planned to hold this over Jess forever. I was just upset about the book and it went too far.’

‘You make a living?’ Tia asks, looking around. ‘Running the shop?’

‘Barely. I couldn’t go back to university. I never finished my degree. Obviously I wasn’t going to work at the museum anymore.’

‘Of course,’ Tia says.

Hannah rubs both eyes with her knuckles and Tia thinks of a version of events where Delia simply dropped out of her degree. When Delia joined her on campus, Tia was now the one to ask: How are you enjoying Fresher’s Week out of 39.0274? ‘Fine,’ Delia would say, no longer interested in their game, or maths, or anything much at all. She thought it was the culture shock of leaving school. That it would pass.

‘My university felt sorry for me,’ Hannah is saying. ‘So they offered me work in the campus bookshop. That’s how I got the idea for this place. I did a few shifts and realised the only way forward was for me to hide. Go off the grid. Because people kept asking me. And even when they weren’t, they were thinking it. That’s why I could never do the interviews even though the cash would have been nice to pay for therapy and set me up. There’s only one question everyone wants to know and I can’t answer it. Why me? Do you know, why me? Because I don’t.’

Without thinking, Tia reaches for Hannah. Maybe she doesn’t want to be touched, she thinks, but it’s okay because Hannah’s hugging back. Survivors’ guilt is a cliché because it’s real.

They break apart and Tia sees Hannah’s eyes are bloodshot. ‘Do you work around here?’ she says, trying to shake off Tia’s attention.

‘No, this uniform is for a private security company where I am now.’

‘Not the police?’

‘I resigned after the siege. It was obvious I’d never get to be a negotiator, which is all I ever wanted to do. If I went back to being a police constable, I knew there’d be times when I was working at an incident, maybe helping to establish a cordon, behind which a police negotiator would be doing their thing. I didn’t think I could live with that. Going through my career hovering so close to where I wanted to be, but always being denied access. Private policing is in a different universe, so it doesn’t hurt so much.’

‘Out of sight, out of mind.’

‘Exactly.’ Tia wanted to be a negotiator to make up for Delia. The siege was her first chance to do exactly that, and she ended up causing even more deaths. Surely this is what the inquest report will say: If Tia West wasn’t in the museum that day, firearms police would have entered sooner, and it’s possible more hostages would have died in that crossfire, but maybe it would have been fewer. Maybe, in the version of the story where Tia isn’t there, nobody died.

‘What’s so good about being a negotiator anyway?’ Hannah says it kindly. ‘The negotiator outside didn’t help us.’ Delia reminds her that is Tia’s fault. Because Tia was there, Delia whispers, she stood in the way of the real negotiator.

‘I never wanted to be a detective or anything like that,’ Tia says. ‘Negotiating is different to other police jobs because there’s really no suspects or persons of interest. It’s about listening and having empathy and helping everyone in that situation, including, especially, the person with the gun, the person in crisis. You’re not gathering evidence to have someone convicted. You’re just trying to help. Doing what you can to save everyone. Save someone from themselves.’ When Delia died, Tia signed up as a volunteer with the Samaritans. After months of training, she was finally allowed her first trial shift as a Call Responder. Ten o’clock at night and a young man called from a payphone on a train station platform. Her supervisor said to keep him talking while they waited for the local police to arrive. Tia was worried this meant the young man was in trouble but the other volunteer assured her he was alright because the negotiator was with him now, and that’s who would save his life. From then, that was what she wanted to do.

‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ Hannah says. ‘In the long term.’

‘Do you own this boat?’

Hannah nods. ‘I have one of those licences where you have to keep moving, and can’t stay in one area for too long. It helps me stay invisible. Nobody bothers me. Rarely does anyone recognise me.’ Tia looks around the boat for evidence of another person. Hannah’s sounds like a lonely life, particularly for someone so young. Everything in here looks made for one. ‘I want to be forgotten,’ Hannah says.

‘Don’t say that.’ Tia can understand Hannah feeling as though she needs to live like this right now. They’re so similar, in a way. But Tia won’t be like this forever. Her desire for change, for life, will eventually come back. This first. She’ll find out what’s going on between the hostages and then she’ll have another look at herself.

‘I do find it hard to sleep. All the moving around. Apparently it’s evolutionary. Your caveman brain telling you not to sleep too deeply, to stay alert in this foreign place because it might be dangerous. You have to listen out for every little sound throughout the night in case it’s a lion or something coming to eat you.’ Hannah laughs, but it’s hollow.

Tia smiles, and fishes in her jacket pocket for a card. ‘I’d best get going,’ she says, passing one to Hannah. ‘Do stay in touch. I won’t tell anyone where you are, if you don’t want me to. But it’d be good to talk.’

‘Special only to each other.’ Hannah looks at the business card and folds it into her palm. ‘Maybe you’re right. I’m glad you came here. I want to stay in touch.’

‘Call me anytime,’ Tia says.

‘I want to know who did this to Andrew.’

16.

Tia

Then

Jess looks as though she’s improved. A sugary drink seems to have done the trick for now. It isn’t the Coke that’s made Tia feel better but the fact Asher was allowed to get drinks at all. It shows the gunman is willing to negotiate. She can get everyone safely out of here.

While Asher was handing out the drinks, Tia noticed that a male hostage, the one whose name she hasn’t caught, seems familiar with him. Like he and Asher have seen each other before. She’s keeping an eye on them, but first she needs to ask Dominic his name. Until she hears it from him, she can’t use it. And she can’t negotiate their way out of here without first building up a rapport with the gunman.

A couple of yards away, Ben and Hannah look into Dominic’s phone camera, repeating what he instructs them to say. He chose them for the visual of their uniforms, she thinks, and because they’re the youngest. They exchange worried looks as soon as the gunman stops filming. He’s changed his strategy, no longer stepping back, trying to get the whole room and all of the hostages head-to-toe in the shot. Now, he’s aiming the camera for only shoulders up. Standing close.

‘Get back on the line,’ he tells Hannah and Ben. He nudges Ben’s shoulder with the tip of the gun and they slot into place. Then Hannah whispers something to her colleague. Ben looks away from her and his face changes into an angry knot. Tia doesn’t know what that’s about. The gunman’s fingers are sliding all over the phone screen. She strains to see what he’s doing with this new video and catches a glimpse of the background on the home screen. A photograph. He has a different haircut, and he looks almost ten years younger, but it’s definitely Dominic. The gunman as a teenager with a child. This must be his personal phone. He didn’t buy a burner. There’s something about the way his arm slings over the little girl’s shoulder that tells Tia who the child is. She needs to build up to talking to him about his family.

‘Thank you for the drinks,’ Tia says. On either side of her, she can feel Jess and Storm’s eyes, afraid Tia’s going to provoke him with this. ‘It really helped.’

Dominic doesn’t glance up. He doesn’t react at all, but she knows he heard her. She makes eye contact with Asher standing next to him. He quickly looks away.

‘I’m Tia.’ The gunman already knows but she makes it sound friendly. ‘What can I call you?’ This from the negotiator course. Don’t ask outright for their name. That’s too confrontational. Give them the option of telling you something false if they want to protect their identity. The gunman puts the phone in his trouser pocket and steps closer to the windows facing the street. He walks on a diagonal, not approaching straight-on. He’s worried about being shot by police outside, she realises. The glass looks reinforced. They probably did that when the building was renovated and turned into a museum. They’re certainly not the original Victorian single-glazed windows. Even if a specialist rifle officer could take a shot at him, it would take many bullets to penetrate the glass. Dominic would realise what they were doing and have plenty of time to start firing at hostages. They could also be hurt or injured by broken glass or other shrapnel. It isn’t easy for police to incapacitate him from out there. More difficult than he probably thinks. Tia needs to stop things from getting that far.

Dominic squats underneath the window frame before jumping up quickly. He peers out, ducks to the side, and presses himself up against the wall. ‘Tia,’ he says. ‘Get over here.’ She takes careful steps to him. ‘Not to me, to the window.’ She veers her path, stopping when she’s a foot from the glass. ‘Tell me what you can see out there.’

‘There are cars. I guess they’re police cars. And there’s people.’

‘How many?’

‘About twenty, some are sitting in cars and—’

‘Not people,’ he says. ‘How many cars. How many big police vehicles. Vans.’

‘I can see six,’ Tia says. ‘No, eight.’

‘Is there anyone who looks like media?’

There isn’t. They’ve no doubt tried to approach the museum by now but police won’t let them get near. This probably isn’t the answer he wants, though.

‘Yes, I think so,’ she says. ‘There’s a couple of white vans. I’ve seen those on the news before.’

‘Stay there and tell me if anything changes.’

‘Okay.’ She stands straight-on at the window. Dominic settles into his spot. Safely out of the window frame, leaning flat against the wall, he wouldn’t be visible from the outside. If the police haven’t already managed to identify Tia yet, at least they’re getting a good look at her now.

‘Are they talking?’ the gunman says.

‘Sorry?’

‘Groups of people standing down there around their cars – are they talking?’ He’s irritated.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Some of them are definitely talking in groups.’ He wants to know they’re talking about him.

Dominic’s phone comes out of his pocket. With his hand free of the gun, he scrolls for a beat then darkens the screen.

‘They can easily get my number,’ he says. ‘I know about their facial recognition. Aren’t they the mighty police? The phone contract is in my name. How fucking stupid are these people?’

His name. Another opportunity.

‘What name; I mean, what can I call you?’ Tia says.

‘Dominic.’ He frowns into his phone.

Progress. Okay. Police would have heard that on the audio equipment. It’s a very small step, but it’s something.

‘Are they looking at their phones out there?’ he says. ‘I know they’ve seen the videos.’

‘I think so,’ she says. ‘It’s a bit far away to tell but some of them are definitely looking down.’ Why isn’t he making Asher be his lookout? Because he’s an accomplice, she decides. So police might try to shoot him too. Why not Storm? He must not trust her. Tia will make the gunman trust her. She has to show him that she’s on his side.

‘The prime minister is not going to call you.’ Enoch’s voice.

Now Dominic’s eyes snap upward and he’s moving away from the wall. ‘What did you just say?’ Not again, Enoch. Shut up. He’s going to get himself killed.

Enoch looks down at the carpet, immediately regretting his outburst. There’s something about the way he’s pulling on the untucked ends of his t-shirt that makes Tia realise everything about him is a front: the heavy metal band, the aggression. He’s the most vulnerable hostage in here. He’s petrified. Fear accumulates in some people. It gets trapped in the body like heat does during a week of scorching temperatures. Without means for escape, some people reach their fill of it and their hearts simply give out.

‘I said,’ Dominic’s shouting now, heading straight for Enoch. ‘What did you just say?’

‘We can do another video if you want.’ It’s Ben, trying to distract him. ‘Hannah and I.’ He’s so brave. Tia has to get over there. She steps away from the window, ready to run.

Next to Enoch, Andrew’s leg is jiggling uncontrollably.

A buzzing sound.

There’s a light in Dominic’s trouser pocket.

His phone is ringing.

He stops one step shy of Enoch and puts it to his ear.

It’s the negotiator outside. It has to be.

‘Real net zero now,’ the gunman says into the phone. ‘I’ll talk to the prime minister. The prime minister only. Climate change is not up for negotiation and neither is this situation.’ He hangs up. The phone is jammed in his pocket and his eyes are on Tia. ‘Get back to the window. Look at what they’re doing.’

She does. Behind her back, the phone rings again.

‘I won’t speak to a negotiator,’ Dominic says. ‘You cannot bargain your way out of the climate emergency. Fucking clowns.’ She turns to see him throwing the phone to the carpet. It lands soft. It’s not broken. Better he be angry with the negotiator than Enoch.

Tia has his name. She’s his lookout. He’s beginning to trust her on some small level. Now she has to get Dominic talking about his family, the little girl on his phone, what happened at university. She needs to dig into all of it.

‘It looks the same out there,’ she says. Get him talking about what’s important to him, she tells herself. Before he remembers he was about to hit Enoch, or worse.

‘Real net zero,’ Tia says. ‘Can you tell me more about what that means?’ Get the hostage-taker, the person in crisis, to speak about their concerns. What they really want, why anyone does something like this, is to feel listened to.

‘The net zero that governments talk about is just semantics,’ he says. ‘Words to mask the truth, the real damage being done to the earth. True zero is the only way to save the planet. Where no emissions are created or released. No offsetting or trying to cancel them out on paper. A climate revolution where we stop waste and stop burning fuels and everything we can get from the ground.’

‘Did you study climate and the environment at university?’ Tia asks.

‘You do not need a degree to understand.’ She’s angered him. Alarm flares in Tia’s stomach. ‘I have educated myself. I know the facts.’ His neck juts out, spraying words into the air.

‘I’m sorry. I mean that you clearly know a lot about this.’ “I mean”: the words of interpersonal repair. They did this on day two of the course. A frequent phrase of the negotiator. ‘Sorry,’ she says again.

‘These are the scientific facts, but nobody cares to know them.’

The mention of what he studies was a trigger. She’ll be careful going there again. There’s obviously something around dropping out of his PhD, as Storm says. Tia will need to circle it without setting him off. Tease it out of him, like pulling on a loose thread, carefully, so that the whole garment doesn’t unravel.

‘Looking after the planet is clearly important to you,’ she says.

She pictures the real negotiator outside listening via the covert device. Judging Tia, despairing at her choice of words. It could be someone she knows. They don’t run the negotiator course that often. It might be someone who was there at the same time as her. Until you failed, Delia says. Until you were sent home because you’re incapable. Told: Thanks, but your services are not required. She has to get the image out of her mind. Dominic says he won’t speak to the real negotiator, so she has to do it. Tia must show them that she can. Otherwise, tactical enters and people will die.

The photo on his phone. She’s sure that’s a sister. Tia has to get him talking about her.

On the floor, the gunman’s phone is ringing and he lifts it up. Dominic moves back to his position beside the window, out of police sight. When he touches the screen to reject the call she gets another glimpse of the background.

‘Is that your sister?’

No response. Appropriate personal disclosures, they called it on the negotiator course: ‘I have a younger sibling myself,’ Tia says. ‘A brother.’

‘Maybe someone should die to speed things up with the prime minister,’ Dominic’s voice is soft and so matter-of-fact, her blood runs cold. ‘Maybe now everyone should just die. This whole room. And that’s how I get the prime minister’s attention.’

Nerves fizz down the length of her body. Tia can feel her pulse everywhere: in her fingers, arms, her nose. ‘There’s more people out there now,’ she says. ‘More cars. More TV vans, I think that’s what they are.’ Isn’t that what he wants? Dominic leans forward from the wall, inches from Tia now, and looks out of the window.

‘That car’s the news,’ he says, pleased.

A loud bang from behind.

Dominic spins around first.

One of the doors is open.

It’s the one closest to the staircase.

The hostage line.

Two people are gone.

17.

Asher

Now

The facilitator is walking Asher back to the train station. She is talking about the miserly sun and how unexpectedly cold it was overnight and he is murmuring his agreement. Asher is setting the pace with his small, reluctant steps. His mother is at work. He told her to go ahead and do a normal shift today and he would be alright without her, but he doesn’t want to go home to an empty house. ‘This happens sometimes,’ the facilitator says, checking her phone again for a message. He can tell from her expression there’s nothing on the screen. ‘People wake up on the day and find they’re feeling too emotional.’ Her smile is apologetic. ‘Or something came up. Their car broke down. It could be a million things.’

‘It’s okay,’ Asher says. He doesn’t want her to pity him. Already he feels humiliated, like he’s been stood up for his school prom, and he didn’t go to his prom for this very reason. ‘You go on ahead,’ he says, coming to a stop. ‘I haven’t been in this area for so long, I think I’m going to walk around for a bit.’ They are in the suburban outskirts of London – not a place to sightsee. But he can’t bring himself to get on a train just yet.

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Alright.’ He is on licence, but no longer in prison. She cannot stop him from going where he wants. ‘It’s still good you came,’ she is nodding towards the meeting room they just left. ‘I’ll speak to your probation officer. If there’s a chance we can organise an alternative session, I’ll be in touch.’ He nods, docile. He is a good listener. These are some of the key qualities he was planning to use during the restorative justice session. Listen to the victim. The survivor, whatever they prefer to be called. His job today, primarily, was to hear them, and fully absorb their words. He also wanted to make a good visual impression. Asher fixed his hair carefully this morning, lining up his parting. It was cut only two days earlier, the appointment made by his mother, who offered to pay. He is wearing his best shirt from his teenaged years, pale green, and brown trousers, even though they are too small. It’s a look, he thinks, unlike clothes too big for you, that elicits sympathy. He is like innocent Alice in Wonderland, ballooning after she consumes the cake marked EAT ME. He wants people to remember he is a victim in all of this too.

‘I would like that,’ Asher says to the facilitator, ‘if it would help,’ he adds, because restorative justice isn’t meant to be about him. Technically, the surviving hostages aren’t his victims, but he is the only group member presently free. He is sorry for how the siege unfolded, and does wish he could take it all back. The facilitator waves goodbye and gives Asher one last smile. It’s the first look of genuine warmth he’s had from someone who isn’t his mother in so many years. This woman must be used to working with people much worse than him: cold-blooded killers and gang members and people who commit senseless murders. Perhaps today was, by comparison, a pleasure for her, and Asher one of her favourites. He holds her glow in his chest and traps it there. He has never been a favourite for anything before.

The surviving hostage who was due to meet Asher today is called Enoch. The session was Enoch’s idea so it is disappointing he decided not to come. Suddenly it occurs to him maybe this man did turn up today, but dashed off after catching sight of Asher cross the road or climbing the stairs to the meeting room. Maybe he was disturbed somehow by what he saw. Asher is scrawny from a distance, like a praying mantis with too many unpredictable limbs. If Enoch got closer, if he spoke to Asher, he would see he is sincere and agree the two men should talk. The more he thinks about it, the more this seems likely. Enoch didn’t go into the meeting room as arranged but he did come here. He turned around at the last moment and he can’t have gone far. Asher must go to the high street and find him.

He goes back the way he came and breaks into a jog. His too-small trousers squeak around the knees. As he runs, he tries to remember what Enoch looks like. Tall, with thick black hair. The man would still be in his forties and can’t have changed too much in the last three years. As Asher reaches the high street, his eyes scan the footpath for a person in a nice suit because this is what he imagines Enoch wearing this morning. A person dressed, come to think of it, like the lovely moles in his front garden. If Asher can find him, he will smile and put him at ease, and the man will change his mind about wanting to talk.

Asher peers into the windows of each café and shop. He waits at the traffic lights for the opportunity to cross, then he does the same with the businesses on the other side of the road. Scanning each face, he is desperate for one to match Enoch’s description. No mid-forties man with dark hair. He does one more walk past both sides of the street. The hostage isn’t here. Asher needs to accept today isn’t going to happen. He stops in his tracks and thinks of his house, lifeless for another six hours until his mother returns from work. He is so hungry for someone to talk to, he considers ringing James and answering all of his questions about prison life and the fellow inmates. What other option does he have? Realising he is now stood in front of a chain café, on impulse, Asher goes inside. He will get a hot drink and think and stare, like that elderly man is doing right now in the window. He will empty his mind, encourage his insides to swirl and go down the drain. Then Asher will head home and wait for his mum.

He goes straight up to the counter. Extracting the one bank card in his wallet, Asher orders the smallest, cheapest coffee on the board. ‘I’ll sit in please,’ he tells the barista.

‘What name?’

Oh God. He should have predicted this question. Now the barista is waiting and he is completely blank and cannot think of a man’s name to say. Enoch. He can’t say that. ‘Asher Russell,’ he says to his shoes. He said “Russell” too. What kind of idiot gives their full name to order coffee?

‘We’ll bring it over to you,’ the barista says. They don’t react, neither to him stupidly giving his full name, nor because they recognise it from the news. The barista’s employee badge says “Jay”. Next time he’ll use that.

The café is noisy with young children squawking like birds and there is irritating background music, but Asher is happy to be here. He does a lap and there is an agonising second where he thinks he will not be able to find a vacant table. ‘You can sit here if you like,’ an older man says by Asher’s elbow. ‘I’m going in a minute.’

Asher hesitates, but the man points to an available chair at his table. ‘If you don’t mind. Thank you.’ He perches, tentative, on the very edge of the seat. It’s uncomfortable. He is Alice in Wonderland in too-small clothes, on a too-small chair.

‘Asher?’ A waiter puts his coffee down in front of him and some of the liquid sloshes over the sides. It is too hot to drink so Asher watches the steam curl and rise. It is mesmerising while it lasts. He wants to speak to the stranger across from him. He can feel the press of the gun against his temple, and Dom’s sticky breath on his cheek. Asher must talk to someone here, now, in the real world, to keep the siege memories back.

The tension across the shared table is becoming intense and Asher is not sure he can stand it for much longer. Empty mug in front of him, the man is reading a newspaper, an actual printed newspaper, and seems oblivious to the strain. Be docile and quiet, Asher thinks to himself, a good listener. On “three” he will speak. One. Two. ‘What are you reading?’ Asher can tell it’s a news story of some kind. An article about a crime, a conviction, a release – about him? Asher thinks of the calls. All week Yvette’s phone has been ringing much more frequently than usual, and each time his mother answers and almost immediately hangs up. She walks out of the room, hand worrying at her mouth, but he can always hear enough to tell who it is. Because the siege inquest is about to release its final report, some of the hostages have been talking about him in interviews again. He supposes the journalists are contacting his mother for an opportunity to respond. His own phone number is brand new and apart from the Probation Service, Yvette is the only person who has it, so they call her. Yesterday, page seventy-eight deep into Google, he was still finding himself mentioned, because the disgust people want to express about Asher seems to have no limit. He will never be anonymous again. When his mother comes back into the room after one of these calls, she always looks as though her eyes have slid a little further down her face. For Yvette’s sake, he pretends to be oblivious to it all. She makes him promise not to answer the front door while she’s out, and he plays along as though it’s couriers and mail delivery people she means to protect him from. Now inside the café, the man across from Asher meets his gaze.

‘There was an earthquake. In Indonesia.’ The man lets the newspaper fall to the table. ‘Two and a half thousand people died.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Asher says, trying not to appear relieved. The story isn’t about him.

‘I used to work there. Not right near the quake, but in that country.’

‘What did you do there?’ Ask follow-up questions. People love to talk about themselves.

‘I spoke to people. I brought them clarity.’ It isn’t clear to Asher what this is supposed to mean, which he supposes is ironic.

‘What was it like? Living there?’

‘It’s a beautiful country. Have you lived overseas?’ the man asks, folding the paper into a rough square.

‘No, not yet.’

‘You’re young. Plenty of time. Are you a student?’

‘I was. Engineering.’ What will he say if the man asks why he discontinued his degree? ‘I’m not sure what to do now,’ he keeps talking. ‘Not certain I want to go back to it.’

‘Sometimes in life we need to step back and re-assess the path we’re on. Ask ourselves if it’s the direction fate truly intends for us.’

‘Yes.’ This is going well. Asher takes a sip of his drink. A reward for his bravery.

‘You dropped out?’ the man asks.

‘I did.’

He nods. ‘Don’t think of it as quitting. Think of it as a stage of growth. A rebirth.’

‘I like that,’ Asher says. This man is right. That’s his whole life now: growth and rebirth. He should see everything as opportunity. Asher is reborn and starting again. ‘Thank you for saying that.’ His mother has said similar things, but it means more coming from this man, the way strangers can sometimes be the ones to see right inside of you. This man is looking into Asher and he doesn’t see dirt, or rot; he recognises possibility.

‘Have you been back to Indonesia?’ Asher asks. ‘Since you finished working there?’

‘No, I haven’t. After my time there I did a year in the Philippines and one in Laos, and just last month I moved back here, where I’m originally from.’ It sounds as though he was overseas at the time of the siege. Possibly he doesn’t know anything about it, much less recognise Asher. He relaxes back in his chair. This man is more than double his age, but Asher can’t help but imagine them becoming friends.

‘You’re very well-travelled,’ he says. ‘Which country do you like the best?’

‘Everywhere has something to offer,’ he says. ‘Something unique about its people and the landscape. I’d love to work in Laos again.’

‘I’d like to go there.’

‘You should! The food is delicious. The forests are stunning.’

‘Did you learn the language?’

‘Lao, it’s called. A little. It’s tough because they have so many different dialects.’

Asher nods. ‘I really want to learn a different language.’

‘You must!’ And now the man is digging through a tote bag which Asher didn’t realise was under the table. He pulls out a flyer and reaches across.

‘Do you believe in God, Asher?’ He doesn’t, of course, because he knows how two human beings treat one another when one is locked inside a cage and the other has the key. He sees the way people, who were once monkeys, and before that amoeba, disrespect the earth. But he senses no is the wrong answer.

‘I’m not sure.’ Asher has to lean back because the man’s nose is now only inches away.

‘We meet on Thursdays. Come along. You need to hear the good news. Your salvation depends on it,’ he jabs a finger at the paper. The man swings his tote bag over his shoulder and exits the café, leaving his rumpled newspaper on the seat. The flyer has details about a local evangelical congregation. On the reverse side are specifics about their church services and the name and photograph of the minister. It’s him. Everything inside Asher shrivels. The man never saw Asher as a potential friend. He was a mark, simply a recruit, someone in need of saving. For the second time today Asher is deeply disappointed. How stupid he was to have hope. Everyone wants something from you: his schoolmate James, this man collecting disciples for Jesus, and Enoch this morning decided Asher wasn’t even worth the effort. When will he learn?

Then something starts to tug on his leg. A vibration is travelling from his foot and up through his body. Asher looks down and sees a red light flash. The ankle tag. In the excitement about the restorative justice session, he forgot to charge it this morning. Now it’s running out of battery: a breach of his conditions. So soon – he’s still only in his first month of release. No. This can’t happen. He hurls himself up from the table and runs from the café. It is only midday – well before curfew – but he cannot have the tag drop its GPS signal or else he risks a visit from his probation officer. A return to jail. He sprints down the high street, losing valuable seconds because he cannot run at full speed in these uncomfortable clothes. ‘Excuse me, I’m sorry!’ he shouts. Nobody seems to understand his urgency. They block his path into the train station, clogging up the barriers as their tickets fail to swipe. ‘I’m in a hurry!’ He almost pushes a woman with a child out of the way.

He can no longer feel the too-small trousers against his skin because he has slipped back to the siege. Asher is not running through the train station, but up the stairs in the museum. How many minutes did Dom give him to make it back – three? He could have left them. When Dom sent him down to collect the drinks, Asher should have run outside and saved himself. Told the police he was completely ignorant of Dom’s plans and so he escaped, and isn’t that proof he wasn’t in on it? He may have got a shorter sentence; perhaps that would have convinced people he wasn’t part of things and he wouldn’t have gone to jail at all. Asher went back upstairs for them, the safety of the other hostages, and Enoch couldn’t even be bothered to show today. Asher sacrificed his own chance at freedom, and they plaster him all over the internet. They write a book. The tag shakes around Asher’s ankle. Underneath his trousers, the red warning light will be flashing. The electronic board says eleven minutes until the next train. He cannot go back to prison. The angry men. The sad men. He will not survive.

Sitting still on the platform is impossible, so Asher paces back and forth even when he begins to feel strangers’ eyes tracking him. He could be returned to his cell by lockup tonight. Strip searched before the evening meal if his probation officer is in a bad mood. He wishes the tag would stop its vibrations which now seem to be flowing through his whole body and rattling his chest.

On his fifth day in prison, Asher noticed someone seated on the floor of the landing. As he walked past, he saw a smear of red. Blood. A miniature pink set of lungs and heart. A mouse. He gasped and a shiny bald head turned. Eyes too far apart glared at him.

‘What?’ the man said. He was the first inmate who had spoken directly to Asher.

‘What are you doing?’ Asher asked. He crushed his eyes closed. He couldn’t bear to look down at the horror in this man’s hands.

‘Caught this in my cell. It needs to be made an example of for other rodents.’ Asher couldn’t help himself: he glanced down. There was a fluffy white mouse with a vicious cut along the length of its body. Two of the prisoner’s meaty fingers were inside, plucking out its organs.

‘You can’t do that!’ Asher shouted. ‘What kind of monster are you?’ The prisoner laughed and this made fire rise up to Asher’s throat. He kept looking at the tortured creature. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. ‘Mice have a right to be here. They’re native to the UK,’ Asher was shouting. ‘They were here before us. They have more of a right to live here than you do. This is their planet. You shouldn’t be here.’

The prisoner laid his two giant hands on the floor and pushed himself to standing. Asher knew instantly he’d made a mistake and something very bad was about to happen. But he hadn’t made a mistake. Every word he’d said was true and someone needed to say it to this brute, and he would say it again. The prisoner stepped closer until he was only inches away from Asher. He towered over him. He was twice as wide. On both hands were innocent animal guts and he laughed as he slowly wiped them down the front of Asher’s clothes. He dragged his swollen hands back and forth until the mouse was all over him. Asher pressed his eyelids together, and his lips, and he looped his hands behind his back and focussed on trying to escape this cage, on levitating and flying right up through the roof. Once his palms were clean, the man walked away. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he called back. When Asher looked around the landing, he saw that everyone had stopped what they were doing and were staring. He hurried to his cell.

‘Do you know who that is? It’s in the night when he’ll get you,’ his cellmate said, finally speaking to him.

In his bed, Asher rolled over to face the wall. He stayed awake all that night and the next, not allowing himself to doze off even for a second. He shuffled around the jail like a sleepless zombie, spending the long nights staring at blooms of mould in the paint and trying to listen for the friendly squeak of mice, but he heard nothing. After the third night, the man still hadn’t come for him, and he couldn’t fight it any longer; he fell asleep. As soon as Asher woke, he checked his body and saw he’d made it safely through to the morning. He’d slept for eight hours but he was even more exhausted than the previous day and his muscles were aching. He’d been trembling all night, he realised, the way the electronic tag is now shaking him by the ankle.

On the platform, when the train eventually comes, Asher cannot sit down. Up and down the aisles, he walks the length of his carriage and goes into the next one. He presses against the train doors as they open and makes sure he is first through the station gates. It isn’t worth looking for the next bus; he just runs. The tag continues to pull at him. But this is good, he realises; it means some battery is left and hopefully enough to detect his location. He is lightheaded and his mouth is as dry as dust. Both eyes sting in the wind. Asher squints like a rat. He rushes across the intersection without checking for oncoming traffic. He keeps running.

At his front door, there is a terrifying second while Asher’s fingers fail to find the keys in his pocket. The metal fumbles in his hand and drops to the doormat. He scoops them up, twists the lock and pushes all of his body weight against the door. He’s inside. Straight to the wireless base, he plugs himself in and slumps to the carpet. As his muscles unclench, he can feel an intense burn up his legs and across his shoulders and down his back. He hasn’t run so hard since the school athletics carnival. For the next ninety minutes while the device reaches full charge, he lies on the floor of his mother’s living room and lets his heart rate, his breath, gradually slow to normal as he looks at the ceiling. When the light on the tag changes colour, Asher crawls to his mother’s drinks cabinet and takes three big mouthfuls of the awful whisky. It burns, but in a different way to his calf muscles. It is obvious how people can become addicted to this. The bottle goes back into the cabinet. He made it. The probation officer won’t be alerted. He is not about to be towed back to prison. He collapses onto the sofa.

Now he is safe, Asher chastises himself for leaving the house this morning without doing a recharge, or taking the portable device. It won’t happen again. He will not look forward to a restorative justice session or any other human interaction, ever. People only let him down. James, Enoch – they are not worth going back to prison for. He walks to the front door and heads out to the garden. Asher counts the molehills: twelve. Two more than yesterday. He can rely on those creatures. They’re all he has. He looks down at his shoes and through the dirt, the layers of brown soil and worms and sand, and visualises them tunnelling. The planet should be saved not for humans but for moles. He thinks of his fellow group member still in prison. When Asher goes back to jail, it will be for helping the most deserving animals, not humans. It won’t be because the battery on his tag ran out. The next time Asher is incarcerated, it will be worth it.

The shark drink bottle he used to take to school is in a shoebox in his wardrobe. It’s been here the whole time. Asher rinses it out and fills it with fresh water before he packs it in his bag. He still hasn’t found his brown notebook, another thing to worry about. He puts on his hoodie and his uncle’s bulky glasses, the disguise he wore to the supermarket his first day free, and he walks to the library. A bubbly woman writes down a set of login instructions allowing Asher to access the internet anonymously, and it’s here where he does his research. He applies for jobs, as instructed by his probation officer. There’s a placement at a local charity shop and he can really see himself there, selling donated items for the cat protection society. He submits his application but immediately tells himself to forget it. They will not call him, and they probably won’t even see his email. He thinks of the minister who tried to recruit him to his church in the café. Asher supposes he looked weak to him. He goes around approaching people who are sitting on their own, and some fall for what he’s selling. Not Asher. He has his own version of God, a better church, and it’s nothing like that man’s.

When Asher feels sure the librarian isn’t paying him any attention, he opens a new tab and starts to look for a group. It takes a full morning of searching until he finds one potentially suitable. They hold regular information sessions in London in the late afternoons, and if he hurries, he should have no trouble getting home for curfew. He sends a message to RSVP for the day after tomorrow. He gives them the name James.

Asher wears his H&M jeans and shirt on the train, only putting on the hoodie and glasses as he approaches the community centre. He is running late as planned. The meeting will already have started, so he’ll be able to drop onto a spare seat in the back without risking anyone chatting to him while they wait. As he passes through the building entrance, he decides the outfit is too much, and unnecessary for his first session. He takes off his uncle’s spectacles and folds them into his pocket.

‘Welcome, take a seat.’ A woman with pink hair is addressing the room. Asher smiles and keeps his eyes to himself. A video is shown on a pull-down screen and someone switches off the lights. Drawn into the film, Asher leans back into his seat, in the dark, and he hasn’t felt this good, like he has a reason to breathe, since he got out of prison. The video stops playing and the pink-haired woman gets to her feet. ‘I hope I’ve convinced you that radical, dedicated, compassionate action is the only hope we have.’

Asher races home and arrives half an hour before curfew. Yvette has already cooked and they sit down to eat in the living room. ‘How was the therapy group, Ash?’ There is so much love in her eyes. He shovels rice into his mouth so that he can only manage ‘hmmm’ and a nod. Sounds instead of full words or a proper sentence: not really a lie.

‘It’s so good you’re doing this,’ she says. ‘It can’t be easy. But I think trauma gets you, in the long run, if it’s not dealt with out in the open.’

‘True,’ he says.

‘I see that with patients at work. If you want to talk about it more, you know I’m always here.’

‘I know.’ One day, he’ll tell her everything.

18.

Asher

Then

Enoch and Andrew are gone. They were stood on the very end of the hostage line closest to the door. As Asher walked to the window to see the news van Dom was talking about, he noticed them shuffling, but he didn’t think anything of it. Asher looked out through the glass, briefly scanned the street, and that’s when they ran. The door must have been unlocked. Dom has turned around. He’s seen what’s happened and now—

If you try to leave, I will shoot you … Someone will die.

His mouth is round with fury. Dom fires the gun once through the open doorway.

A deep boom. The bullet is in Asher’s brain. It ricochets between the walls of his skull. Dom’s hand is on the door handle and he’s staring down the stairs. He’s going to chase them. He’ll run after those two men and shoot them in the back, like he promised. But he isn’t doing that. He flies around. Looks at the other hostages in here. Dom closes the door and re-locks it with the keycard in his pocket. The same door Asher went through when he went down for drinks.

Dom roars in frustration and pushes over a statue. It thumps to the floor. Someone screams. Asher itches under the feel of his uncle’s eyes. Asher knows this is dangerous. He has to look at Uncle Harrison. Only he can stop Asher from dissolving into nothing.

‘It was your job to lock that door when Asher came back up,’ Dom says to Storm. He goes to her and she takes small, desperate steps back. ‘I told you you had to choose. To decide if you were with us or not. You let them out.’

‘I didn’t,’ Storm says. ‘I didn’t mean to. I locked it before I gave you back the keycard. I’m sure I did.’ The gun is now under her chin and it looks very uncomfortable. It makes Asher think of those old-fashioned sweets, Pez. You put your finger in the plastic neck and lift the head, where the American candy comes out.

Asher is blocking out the sounds of the hostages’ cries and shouts. There’s a creeping feeling this is his fault. Asher was the last person through that door. Maybe he distracted Storm. She could have forgotten to re-lock it because of him. Because he didn’t give her the knife? Asher thinks of the news van out the front of the museum and his mother watching live on the BBC. The sugary drink went too quickly to his head. His mind is buzzing. He can smell the disgusting spilt milk on his shirt.

‘I warned everyone that if anyone left, I’d have to kill someone.’

‘Dom, no, please,’ Storm says. ‘You know me. We’ve known each other for years.’ The pink blotches on her face have gone purple. Asher doesn’t want Storm to die.

He has never seen Dom so angry. He’s wearing his Pokémon shoes, his fun, happy trainers, and that’s the Dom he knows. But his gut tells him he’s going to kill her. And it might be Asher’s fault.

‘She’s a climate activist,’ Asher says. ‘No one will care if you kill her.’

Dom puts his lips together. Asher reminds himself not to look at his uncle. The knife tickles the skin on his back.

‘You’re right.’ Dom releases the gun. Storm’s Pez head falls back into place.

He did it. Asher’s shoulders relax. Storm’s okay for now and maybe she and Dom will even make up.

‘I’ll have to kill someone else, then,’ Dom says.

One of the women steps forward. Tia. He heard her name before. ‘You still have us,’ she says. ‘We’re here. See. Me. Jess. Ben. Hannah. And this man—’ Now she looks at his uncle.

‘Harrison,’ he says, sounding like a little boy.

‘And Harrison,’ Tia says. She doesn’t say Storm. He supposes she doesn’t want to draw attention back to her. ‘We’re all here with you,’ Tia says. ‘You still have plenty of hostages. Nothing has changed. Two fewer people makes no difference.’

Dom thinks about this. He looks at Asher and nods. Dom is so smart. He’s so articulate in front of the camera and he can think on his feet in a way Asher could never do. But Dom seems so different in these last few minutes. Asher doesn’t recognise him at all.

Asher shuts his eyes for a brief second and imagines he’s on the sofa at home next to his uncle.

‘The thing that breaks most movements,’ Dom is saying. ‘Revolutions, people’s armies, resistance groups – is a lack of discipline. Individual members not following orders.’ Looking at Storm, he swings the rucksack from his back. Is he going to open it and put the gun away? Maybe Dom is about to take everything back. Pack up and they can all go home. No. ‘It can’t be tolerated,’ he says. Asher sees what’s happening, and it’s so much worse. Dom has other things in his bag. He wants to kill Storm a different way. ‘The leader must always stamp it out.’

19.

Tia

Now

Tia calls Jess Anand a few more times, but she never picks up. She doesn’t blame her. Of course Jess wouldn’t want to speak to her. On a voicemail she mentions seeing Hannah. She leaves it at that.

The following morning, Jess phones back. She can meet at lunch time. Tia leaves the Brilliant Bobbies office at twelve and heads back to the trauma charity’s offices in East London.

Inside, the same receptionist is sitting at the front desk. Tia loiters in the foyer.

‘Hi, Tia.’ Jess appears in front of her, somehow taller than Tia remembers.

‘Nice to see you.’ Tia follows her to a coffee table and chairs by the window.

‘Sorry I didn’t get back to you at first,’ Jess says as they sit. ‘I’ve been getting your messages.’

‘Don’t apologise.’

‘Things are so busy with my work here and the other charities and my book’s about to come out.’

‘I heard,’ Tia says. This is the first time she’s seen Jess’s scar up close. The more she tells her eyes to look away, the closer they stare. It’s on Jess’s face, but it’s her scar. She did that. Tia should be the one carrying it around.

‘I was told Andrew Ward had died,’ Jess says. ‘I sent him an invitation to a gala dinner I’m helping to organise, and his wife wrote me back a short note.’

‘Andrew’s why I’m here.’

‘My book’s all signed off. I don’t know what to do. Really it’s too late to slot anything in, but he’s in it. Shouldn’t it say he’s no longer alive? It feels like it’s out of date before it’s even published.’ Jess peers around the foyer and then she looks back at Tia. ‘I realise how that sounded out loud. Making his death all about me.’

‘I get it, don’t worry,’ Tia says. ‘Did you know he killed himself?’

‘What? His wife didn’t say. Now I really feel awful.’ Jess rummages in her handbag. ‘Can we go outside?’ Tia follows her to the exit.

‘His wife has asked me to investigate his death,’ Tia says as they walk. She owes Stella an update, but she doesn’t know what to say.

‘I didn’t think you were a real police officer?’ Tia gets that comment several times a week, but it still smarts.

‘On her behalf. In a private capacity.’

‘She doesn’t agree it was suicide? Oh my God, did someone actually kill him?’ Now she’s gripping Tia’s forearm with real fear in her eyes.

‘Nothing like that,’ Tia says. ‘But he was being harassed by someone before he died. He and Enoch Black were being sent material basically goading them into suicide.’ Jess takes a vape from her pocket and breathes in deep. It smells like honey and saffron.

‘You’re who my cleaner was talking about, aren’t you? She said a police officer came to my flat.’

‘I wanted to see if you were being harassed too.’

‘She’s lovely, Julia. I thought she called the cops herself but didn’t want to say.’

‘She described what you’ve been receiving as death threats. That’s not the same as Enoch and Andrew. She said whoever is doing this to you wants your book to be stopped.’

Jess takes a long drag on her vape. ‘I have a public profile,’ she says. ‘It’s to be expected.’

‘Death threats shouldn’t be ignored, Jess. You need to go to the police.’

‘Once my book comes out, it’ll go away.’

‘Your cleaner said the ones she saw detailed specific threats. Threats of violence.’

‘I’m handling it. Don’t worry.’ She turns her head and Tia gets a full view of the scar. Does she think of Tia each morning? Brushing her teeth in the mirror, trying to cover it with make-up, reliving her hatred for Tia West.

‘Have you kept these materials?’ Tia asks. She owes this woman.

‘No. They’re awful, but I throw them out and then I forget about them.’

Tia readies a notepad and pen. ‘Okay, tell me what you remember. Start with the first one you received. Describe the text. Images. Handwriting. Everything.’

‘I don’t want to make a big deal of it,’ Jess says. ‘These kinds of non-fiction books attract this stuff all the time. People are trolled and threatened with lawsuits. It’s par for the course.’ The heady scent of the vape is turning sickly in Tia’s nose. ‘Anyway,’ Jess continues, ‘it looks like they’ve stopped. The last one was nearly two weeks ago now. Maybe they’ve moved on.’ Tia’s bullet scar shimmers under her trouser leg. A sudden reminder of its existence. She goes days, even a whole week, ignoring the nerve pain, forgetting it’s there. Now that Jess has woken it up, Tia knows it will throb all night.

‘Promise me,’ Tia says, ‘if you receive anything else you’ll call me straight away. Don’t throw it out. Don’t even touch it.’

Jess’s hand goes back into her pocket and this time she takes out her phone. ‘If you’re determined to investigate, all I can tell you is I’ve noticed a car out the front of my house and I got the last three figures of the licence plate.’ Jess reads from a note on her phone: ‘BAI.’ Tia copies it down.

‘A partial licence plate is better than nothing,’ Tia says. ‘If you see this car again, call me.’ Jess smiles, non-committal. Tia hasn’t seen most of the interviews she knows Jess has done. Maybe Jess really laid into her. Tia understands why she wouldn’t want her help now.

‘In your voicemail you mentioned Hannah.’

‘I’m checking who of the survivors has been targeted, as well as Andrew and Enoch. Whoever is threatening you seems to be the same person. Anyway, Hannah hasn’t been bothered.’

Jess nods. Tia fills the silence: ‘She admitted blackmailing you, but I don’t think she’s the one sending you the threats, do you?’

‘It’s not really blackmail,’ Jess says.

‘She shouldn’t be doing it.’

‘I’m happy to pay her.’

‘You could go to the police about that too.’

‘If I can handle someone sending death threats, I can handle a twenty-three-year-old operating out of a half-sunk boat.’

‘I won’t tell anyone about the blackmail or the reason for Hannah doing it,’ Tia says. ‘My only concern is stopping this person who’s threatening you. What you do with your charity work, and what you tell people about yourself, is your business.’

The sun has dipped behind a cloud and it’s a little too cold to be standing out here, but she expects Jess doesn’t want to have this conversation inside her workplace. ‘I’m so worried someone is going to find out,’ Jess says. ‘Once the book is out and I get the rest of the money, I’ll resign from these charity positions. Be like Hannah. Disappear. Obviously there are people in my life who know the diabetes thing is a lie. They won’t say anything. They think it’s part of my trauma. I’m so stupid, I should have nipped it in the bud as soon as the story came out. I think of my colleagues and acquaintances and the other hostages, and I would die if they found out now.’

Who is Tia most afraid of learning her secret? In those last few minutes of the siege, two people in danger in front of her, she could only try and shield one. The investigation and the inquest made some attempt to map everyone’s final positions and actions in the room, for the sake of future police training. Where exactly she was will be in the inquest report. She can’t stop it. No one would have been on the ground at all had she managed to talk the gunman out.

‘After we got out of the museum,’ Jess says, ‘when we were all taken into various rooms and interviewed by police – they asked me about you.’

‘Okay,’ Tia’s unsure where this is going.

‘All I wanted to do was go home and cuddle my dog. I told them you were just one of us, another hostage. It didn’t matter what you said or what you tried to do as a police officer, he was going to kill people. I knew that. To me it was obvious, that’s why I tried to convince him to let me out. I didn’t see what you could have done about it.’

Tia nods, remembering Dominic finally telling her his story; how hard she had worked to get him to that point. His eyes crawling the floor, ready to relinquish the gun. She knows he was so close, like a retriever looking for just the right place to drop their bone.

‘We were never going to come out of there alive,’ Jess continues. ‘All of us, I mean. It just didn’t seem like something you read in the news, some amateurish armed robbery where the weapon is only to scare people. He was always going to use it.’

Tia will find out who is harassing the hostages and stop it. This time, she will protect Jess. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to go back up to work,’ Jess says, pocketing her vape.

‘Remember,’ Tia says. ‘If you receive anything else, big or small – or see that car – call me. Any time of day or night.’

‘Thanks.’ Jess waves goodbye and heads back into her building.

Tia messages Enoch and Stella checking if they’ve received anything new. By the end of the day, both confirm they haven’t. Maybe everything has stopped and Jess is right.

Tia has a full twenty-four hours of believing this could be true, until close to midnight, her phone rings.

‘I just got home. I was speaking at an event tonight for my book.’ It’s Jess. She’s breathless.

‘Are you alright?’

‘They’ve broken in. My front door was open when I got here. Things have been moved about and there are ants everywhere.’

‘Ants?’

‘Like someone has bought a colony at a pet shop and released them. They’re crawling over everything in my flat.’ The “cannibal ants”. They both understand the significance.

‘Have you called the police?’ Tia asks.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

‘Who, Jess?’

She’s sobbing now. ‘Dominic.’

20.

Tia

Then

Dominic’s hand is on the zipper and for the third time Tia thinks she sees wires in the bag. Her bones go slack. She tries to stay in police mode. An unidentified device. That’s the official term, isn’t it? She can’t think. Can’t breathe. She won’t jump to conclusions. Stay in control and do not panic.

‘Dominic, my name’s Bill, I’m a negotiator,’ a male voice floats up from the ground outside. It’s the real hostage and crisis negotiator speaking with a loudhailer. If Dominic is about to kill Storm, police will have no choice but to immediately enter. Through the window, Tia can see black-clad firearms officers on the street, waiting for the order. They’ll try their best not to hurt the hostages who get in their way. Delia laughs: they’ll protect the hostages about as well as you managed to protect me. At the sound of Bill’s voice, Dominic closes his bag and sprints to the side of the room, out of view of the window. Storm’s face flushes with relief. But she’s not safe yet.

‘I’m going to ring your phone in two minutes,’ the negotiator says. ‘I’d really like to speak to you, Dominic, and learn how I can help.’

Bill has been listening to Tia via the device. He thinks she’s useless. She has to get the gunman talking about his family. The photograph on his phone. She must figure out what’s going on in his life. What was the last straw which led him to today?

Tia goes to him. ‘My brother is my next of kin. I think the police would have called him, and he’s probably out there somewhere. Would you like to speak to your family? I’m sure police could arrange it. You could ask Bill.’ She needs to present herself as a helper. He’s not going to get real net zero. But Tia can work out acceptable terms of a surrender where he can save face. Surrender needs to be dignified for the hostage-taker. They have to feel they’ve won. There must be something Dominic could agree to.

In his pocket, his phone glows yellow.

‘Real net zero now!’ he shouts. After eight rings, it stops.

Another look passes between Asher and Harrison. He’s been the most quiet of all the hostages. She’s starting to think she knows why. He’s with them. He’s also a climate activist. Asher and Harrison are not strangers to one another.

‘Okay, Dominic, it’s Bill,’ the negotiator’s voice is warm and open. ‘One more minute and I’ll try to ring your phone again.’ Negotiators expect it to take a while for the hostage-taker to agree to talk. They’ll wait a long time to open a dialogue, but they won’t wait forever.

Tia looks at the two sets of locked doors. X-rays them with her eyes. Both eventually lead to the staircase to the ground floor. The only way in and out of here. She listens for the sounds of police boots on the floor. Inside her chest, her heart has swollen. Knocking against her ribcage, it’s almost too big to be contained. As soon as police breach the entrance, she expects Dominic will start shooting. She cannot accept that anyone has to die today.

The phone rings again. Dominic doesn’t answer.

‘I have to kill someone,’ he says to the room. ‘I warned you. I told you all clearly. They ran. It’s on them. Don’t blame me. It’s Enoch and Andrew.’

‘What would happen if we got real net zero?’ Tia says. She’ll keep distracting him for as long as she can.

He taps the gun against his thigh and looks at her. ‘Have you seen those photos of what the world would look like if humans disappeared?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It doesn’t take long. A couple of decades after human extinction, the earth would recover. All signs of human beings would quickly evaporate. Skyscrapers would be swallowed by wisteria, stadiums covered in weeds, the grass would grow over everything as if we’d never existed. It would all go back to perfect.’

‘That makes you hopeful,’ she says. Emotion labelling, from the negotiator course. Show they’re being heard and understood.

‘It makes me hopeful about wiping out all humans, yeah,’ he says. Bill is silent on the loudhailer. Dominic’s weapon taps steadily against his leg. Why aren’t the police entering? Do they have faith she can talk him out of here? No. They’ve searched his house. That’s the first thing police would have done after identifying him. Gone through everything Dominic owns. Looking for clues for what he’s planning. Equipment and evidence of an IED. A wave of nausea hits her. They know there’s a bomb in his bag. That’s why Command hasn’t sent in firearms. Because it’s hopeless. Because they’d be sending the officers to their deaths.

Tia goes damp, everywhere. Sweaty and cold. She’s about to be exploded into a million pieces. She thought those were wires in his bag. She knew he had to have a bomb. But what if police haven’t managed to get inside his house and aren’t aware? She’s got to tell them. A bomb changes everything. There’s no way of getting a message to Command without saying it aloud for the audio device.

‘Dominic,’ Tia says. ‘Your bag, I saw – were those wires? Do you have a bomb?’

‘No one else is getting out of here. I don’t need to shoot you all individually. A bomb is more efficient.’

Ben drops to his knees and begins to hyperventilate. Jess flies to one of the doors. ‘Come on! Come on!’ She’s pulling at the handle.

Dominic launches himself from the wall. ‘Step back from the door,’ he warns her.

‘Open, open, it HAS to open.’ Jess has both hands around the doorknob. It doesn’t budge. She kicks it. Her right foot hits it again and again. ‘Open. Come on!’

Jess is so focussed on breaking the door, she doesn’t hear Dominic come up behind her. Tia sees his arm swing back. There isn’t time for her to get the words out. The gun smacks hard against Jess’s cheek.

A burst of red blood.

She falls to the carpet head first.

Jess lies there completely still.

21.

Asher

Now

Yvette and Asher leave the train at Holborn station and walk through Bloomsbury to the British Museum. The streets are less busy than he was expecting, but just as he goes to say this aloud to his mother, he sees a long line of people snaking out of the museum entrance. It takes them fifteen minutes to reach the front of the queue and go through security. Yvette’s bag is searched and they are both inspected with a hand-held metal detector. Asher does not breathe while the device passes over him. This is normal procedure for all visitors, he tells himself. This isn’t a rub down. His prison cell is not about to be searched.

‘Popular day?’ Yvette asks the security guard.

‘Lots of school groups. You wouldn’t believe it.’ The man waves them through.

‘I can’t even tell you the last time we came here.’ Head tipped back, Yvette is looking around the entrance space in a 360. ‘It would have been when you were in primary school.’

‘I remember that exhibition,’ Asher says. ‘Something about tigers in ancient China.’

‘But we must have seen the permanent collection a few times, mustn’t we?’ She is flicking through a paper brochure from the ticket desk. ‘Shall we see the temporary exhibition? About gold treasures and other shiny things?’

‘Sounds good.’

Yvette pays for two tickets and they follow the signs to the special exhibition space. The lights are dim and low music is piping through speakers. It takes Asher a moment to recognise the feeling this stirs: excitement. He hasn’t had a real sense of anticipation for anything in so long. ‘Let’s start here and go round,’ Yvette indicates clockwise as they pass through the door. On display are hundreds of gold treasures taken by Greek soldiers when they invaded ancient Persia around 400 BC. ‘It’s fitting. Everything in this place is looted,’ his mother whispers. ‘It’s nice for a change to see stuff that someone other than the British stole.’ They laugh as they inspect the beautiful goblets and cups and bowls made from pure glistening metal. ‘Ash, you’re having a good time?’

‘I am,’ he assures her, his eyes dancing over a golden crown dotted with rubies.

‘We could go to the V&A one day,’ she says. ‘Maybe next week?’

‘Or the Natural History Museum.’

‘Do you know how many mothers of twenty-one-year-olds would love to spend a day out like this with their children? But they only get to see them when their offspring need money or want a rent-free crash pad for the night. All the nurses at work say so about their own kids.’ She holds his shoulder. ‘I’m so lucky with you.’

‘Thanks for coming with me today,’ Asher says. It’s obvious she’s tired. She should spend her day off catching up on sleep.

They keep walking. The treasures in front of them now are bronze objects, and then silver. A poster explains the role of jewellers and ceramicists and other “jobs” in the ancient world. Yvette reads his mind. ‘You’re going to get a call soon,’ she says. ‘I know you will.’ Asher’s lost count of the number of positions he’s applied for. He’s been out of prison for eight weeks now. He never heard from the cat protection shop. ‘They don’t know how to place you, because what you have to offer is so unique. They just don’t have many people like you come across their desks.’

‘Yeah.’ Asher summons his most confident smile for her. Volunteer programmes, work experience initiatives and special placements for ex-prisoners – he’s applied for them all. Every opening is inundated with hopefuls and nobody wants him. While Yvette studies a plaque, Asher looks around at the staff in here: some scan tickets, others clean, some back in the entrance space were making coffees, selling snacks and guiding visitors and large groups. He could do that. Asher would be happy doing any one of those tasks. He takes out his phone, connects to the free Wi-Fi and looks for the careers page on the museum website.

‘Ash.’ He glances up to see his mother’s face twitch. What was that? Exhaustion, he supposes. Her work rota has been all over the place. ‘Let’s go through here.’ She’s indicating a side door. It looks like an emergency exit.

‘There’s still one more room to go,’ Asher says, consulting the map in his hand. ‘And I think we missed a bit at the beginning.’

‘Now, Ash.’ She never raises her voice. He cannot think of a single time in his whole life when she has shouted at him. ‘Let’s go.’ Her hand is on his forearm now and he sees what the trouble is. Someone is staring at him. A woman. About his mother’s age.

‘Sorry, we know each other, don’t we?’ Stepping closer, the woman peers at them both but she clearly means Asher. His pulse soars.

‘No,’ Yvette answers for him. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘You look so familiar.’

Yvette’s smile snaps like an elastic band. ‘Let’s go,’ she says to Asher.

‘I’m sure I know you from somewhere.’ The woman keeps glaring at him, trying to peel him with her eyes. She can’t place Asher’s face. Not yet. But soon she might.

‘I want to get out,’ he says to his mother. She takes his hand and they walk briskly to the exit. He’s so stupid. This is why Yvette seemed surprised yesterday when he suggested they come here. A museum. The site of the very last day of his former life. His mother’s and his uncle’s, too. After the siege, museums and art galleries in London would have had security briefings, extra training days in case something like that happened again. The security staff at all of the city’s major attractions must know Asher’s face.

‘We can’t go through here,’ Yvette says. ‘It’ll set off the alarm.’ She spins around. ‘This way.’ She guides her son through a sprawling school group. ‘Excuse me.’ They push against the flow of human traffic until they reach a corridor leading to a door. It’s locked: a dead end. ‘We need to go around.’ She’s still gripping his hand.

The building is roughly circular, with a dome-shaped roof, and they find themselves at the temporary exhibition space. Back where they started.

‘Shit.’ His mother never swears. ‘Where’s the goddamn exit?’ They are consumed by a tour group. Dozens of eyes come at him. There’s no sign of the woman from earlier, but someone else will recognise him. Asher has to leave before that happens. He cannot be seen inside a museum.

‘This way.’ Yvette tugs on his arm and he follows with plodding steps because he cannot breathe. Asher must get out of here. Hundreds of people pack the space, queuing for toilets, for tickets, lining the entrance of the gift shop, laughing and talking, and there is no exit. There is simply no way out. Asher is about to run out of oxygen and he’s going to die in the British Museum. He was supposed to be killed in the Bennett Museum, but the universe has decided this one will do. ‘Ash, come on.’ His mother pulls him, but his clammy hand slips from hers.

‘Excuse me.’ Asher is bumped by a man in uniform. Security.

He’s been seen.

Then, sky appears.

‘Oh thank God,’ Yvette exhales. They’re out. He’s free.

‘Sorry, Mum.’

‘You alright?’

He nods. ‘That was a really stupid idea coming here.’

‘I’m sorry. That woman—’ Yvette is out of breath. ‘I didn’t want her to bother you.’

‘We still got to see most of it.’

‘I thought you might have suggested this yesterday because you wanted to go somewhere similar and, you know, see what it was like, coming back for the first time,’ his mother says. ‘Exposure therapy. I figured someone suggested it at your trauma group?’

‘They did, yeah,’ Asher says, looking away.

She examines him. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Yep.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Let’s walk back through the park.’ Asher leads the way, seeing red now in his mind’s eye. Gold crowns and rubies from the exhibition vanish, and all he can think about is blood on his hands, soaking through the carpet, splashed on the museum wall. Yvette is talking about going to the cinema this weekend and Asher can’t look directly at her because there’s a bullet wound where her eye should be.

They choose an empty train carriage and Yvette sits across from him.

‘This will end,’ she says. ‘I promise you. It won’t be like this forever.’ Asher’s not sure if she’s talking about him being recognised in public, or the gun that’s floating like a mirage a few feet away, pointing directly at his chest.

When they get home, a man is collecting leaves on the footpath. ‘Oh that’s Steve I mentioned,’ Yvette says, giving him a wave.

‘You must be Asher.’ Maybe his mother was telling the truth. This man seems genuinely happy to shake his hand.

‘Hi, Steve,’ Asher says.

‘Really nice to meet you.’ He must know where Asher’s been these past years. Yvette doesn’t lie. Is it really possible this man doesn’t judge him?

‘You don’t have to do this,’ Yvette says, looking at the dead leaves their neighbour has gathered.

‘It’s no trouble. I was doing it for the Uptons and thought I may as well keep going down the street,’ Steve says.

‘Since you moved in, I’m sure our houses have gone up in value thanks to your maintenance,’ his mother laughs.

‘I had pest control around this morning,’ Steve says, tying the ends of the plastic bag. ‘For the moles in my back garden. And I remembered you saying they get into your place too.’

‘I still haven’t done anything about that,’ Yvette groans. ‘The garden needs so much attention. I let it go. It’s my own fault.’ It was a traditional English garden before Asher went into prison, the front and back full of foxgloves and lavender, herbs and primroses and hydrangeas. Neat and fragrant. Now there is a wildness creeping in. Plants crowd one another, weeds tangle in the grass. He likes it a lot. There are more birds who come to visit and sometimes caterpillars, too.

‘You’ve gotta do something about the moles now, in spring, before the females give birth,’ Steve says. ‘Otherwise you’ll be overrun when summer comes. You’ll come home one day and find a “for sale” sign out the front; the moles will be selling your house out from under you.’

‘Right,’ Yvette laughs.

‘I tried pesticides before. But the chemicals build up, and they can kill off the good insects which you do want in your garden. Plus, you don’t want that toxic stuff getting into the soil and going up into your fruit trees.’

‘Absolutely,’ Yvette says. From the footpath, Asher looks over the hedge and thinks something is different about their front garden. This man has removed all of the leaves, but that isn’t it. Asher takes a few steps closer.

‘So, I thought: this time, new house, I’ll stop them early. The only solution is traps,’ Steve says.

Asher’s blood freezes. He feels like he’s back in jail during one of the regular property searches of his cell. So afraid of what the prison officers would find as he watched their gloved hands run over everything, Asher would stand there solidified, braced for what was coming next. ‘The pest guy said the key is consistency and creativity,’ Steve is saying. ‘Moles are smart. Really clever. You have to place the traps directly in their active runways, otherwise you won’t get ’em.’ This man had moles living in his garden, and he had them killed. He murdered them.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Yvette says.

‘It’s humane,’ Steve says, and Asher cannot listen to this. ‘They assured me. You place them ten to twenty centimetres below ground level but not directly below the molehills. You have to set the trap then cover it. With a bucket or something that will stop sunlight from getting through. Some of them are harpoon traps and the others they call “scissor-jaw”. They do the job. Sort out the whole population. I’d already paid him and he had some left over, so I showed him over here to your front garden and he sorted it.’

Their front garden. ‘I don’t understand,’ Asher says, even though he does. This can’t be happening. He can see a black bucket. He’ll run to it. Kick it over right now. Put his hand into the tunnels, reach with his whole arm, and pull out the traps. Lose a finger if he has to. Cut off his whole hand.

‘It’s completely sorted,’ Steve says. ‘The pest guy could tell which runways were fresh. He flooded a couple of the tunnels with the hosepipe and says he got rid of the lot for you.’ Steve smiles. ‘At least in the front garden; I don’t know what you’ve got around the back of course.’ Everything inside Asher falls to his feet: his heart, lungs, stomach. Nothing has the strength to stay up where it should be. He’s too late.

‘Steve, you shouldn’t have worried,’ Yvette says. ‘That’s so kind of you.’ This man slaughtered the moles. Asher wasn’t here to protect them. Steve is a hunter, a vile human killer and his mother is thanking him.

‘You didn’t have nearly as many as me,’ Steve says. ‘Not enough to have pest control called out especially, so it’s easier just to do both of ours in the one go.’

‘We owe you,’ his mother says. ‘Thank you, Steve. You and Michelle must come over for a meal one evening.’

‘We’d love that.’

‘Isn’t that good, Ash?’ his mother looks to him. ‘Now we can use the garden. Properly do it up and get a bench seat or some gnomes or something fun, what do you think?’

Asher crushes his teeth together to keep the scream inside.

He must smile for his mother. ‘Thanks, Steve.’ He imagines human-sized traps. Metal apparatus positioned all over the world on high streets, in houses, at bus stops, to catch and kill the invasive human species. “Humane”. They wouldn’t feel a thing.

Steve waves goodbye and heads back into his own house.

‘Is it too early to order a takeaway?’ Yvette unlocks their door and turns back to him. ‘Coming?’ Asher is still standing on the footpath. He has to go inside, walk through their front garden where there are dead animals under the earth. ‘Do you feel like pizza?’

‘Okay.’ Asher drags his feet through the dirt. He never wants to eat again. His eyes don’t blink. He will not cry in front of her.

The vegan pizza arrives, the smell of peppers and dough turning his guts. Moles were on this planet before humans, he thinks to himself, and they’ll be here long after we’ve been eradicated. Asher considers this, and his group meeting tomorrow. He needs to stay strong and be physically capable of carrying out his plans. He eats.

22.

Asher

Then

The woman with long dark hair is unconscious on the floor. Asher’s own head feels as though it is about to switch off because he cannot keep staring, and he cannot look away. Jess is dead. He’s about to fall. He’ll pass out.

‘I said someone would have to die if anyone tried to leave,’ Dom is saying. ‘Didn’t I? Those two men did this.’ He jabs a finger at the door Jess was trying to open. Dom walks to his spot by the window. Safe from police view. He killed her. Asher just saw someone die before his very eyes.

Hannah and Tia crouch on either side of Jess’s splayed body. Asher wants to go over there, but he finds he cannot move. He notices a twitch. Something flickers. Jess’s foot. He’s watched videos of battery hens and baby chickens being murdered. He knows animals’ muscles can jiggle even after they’re dead. He didn’t realise humans did this too. Then Jess’s head shifts to the left. That isn’t an involuntary flinch. Now Asher is able to blink. His legs work again. His fingers let go of one another. She’s alive.

Tia puts a palm on Jess’s shoulder and whispers in her ear. Her eyes rove back to Dom and she takes off her jacket. It’s placed over Jess’s face. Tia gets to her feet and holds out a hand for Hannah to stand too. They both walk away. Jess is completely still. She’s faking. He understands. Tia told Jess to pretend to be dead so Dom doesn’t come back for her.

‘If the government sends the press release about Monday’s climate meeting without real net zero – these people will die.’ Dom speaks to his phone camera, inches from his face.

‘We need to play along.’ Storm is in Asher’s ear. ‘When he finishes doing this video, we have to get the gun.’

‘He doesn’t really have a bomb, does he?’ Asher murmurs. Maybe he does. Dom is very clever. Asher is sure Dom could make one if he wanted to. He could do anything.

‘I don’t know.’ Storm looks stricken. ‘I didn’t know he’d have a gun, either. I think he’s telling the truth. We have to get it and shoot him. There’s no other way.’ Asher is happy for her, for anyone, to tell him what it is he should do. But he can’t kill Dom. Storm takes his silence for agreement. ‘Have you noticed, whenever he needs his hands free for a second, he always jams the gun into the front left-hand side of his trousers?’

‘Yes.’ Asher hasn’t noticed.

‘Not in the pocket, but behind the band.’

‘Okay.’

‘We need to create a moment, a situation where it seems harmless for him to free both hands for a second. He’ll rest the gun in his waistband, use his hands to do something, and we can grab it.’

Asher’s fingers tingle. Dom is still talking into his phone camera. ‘How?’

‘Maybe he’s holding the phone with one hand and the gun with another, and we pass him something. He frees up a hand to reach for it and we have a tiny window to snatch it.’

Storm will take the lead. All Asher has to do is play along. But he can’t stand back while she kills Dom.

‘He’s going to kill us,’ Storm hisses, seeing the reluctance on his face. ‘He’s going to murder all these people!’ Harrison is too far away to hear, but Asher can feel his uncle’s eyes on him. His heart shrinks to the size of a raisin. Storm’s right. Asher got his uncle into this situation. He needs to get him out of it. He’ll help her. He doesn’t want to die slowly. Asher wants his own death to be quick, so fast he never even knows it’s happening. A bomb is quick. But Asher doesn’t want to die in here. Not taking his uncle with him.

Dom stops filming. Asher and Storm separate. She walks straight for him. Her arms are heavy at her sides, palms open. The way Harrison taught Asher to introduce himself to a dog so it doesn’t bite. ‘Is everything okay?’ she asks.

Asher sees his uncle’s eyebrows rise. He has to look away. He won’t be able to hold it together.

‘We’re having trouble getting the message out to the prime minister,’ Storm says. ‘But we think there’s news media out there, right? So why don’t we give them the message? Write something on the windows with the spray paint. It will make the mainstream news, and then he’ll see it.’

Asher’s heart is spinning in his chest. Storm nods at him. His turn to say something.

‘That could be powerful,’ Asher says. ‘The mainstream media won’t post your videos but they’ll want to show a picture of the museum.’

‘All of the great protests have one iconic image which comes out of them, don’t they?’ Storm says. ‘The one photograph that gets used over and over. This can be ours.’ Dom’s going to know something is up. Suddenly Storm has stopped crying and begging him to end this. Now she’s trying to help him.

Dom mulls over her suggestion. ‘Asher, what do you think?’

He thinks the knife tucked into his trousers is starting to slip. He needs an opportunity to readjust it without anyone noticing. ‘How about we simply write: real net zero now?’ Asher looks to Dom for approval.

‘Did you use all the paint before, covering up the cameras?’ Dom asks.

‘I don’t think so,’ Asher says.

‘Go on then.’ Is this it? Asher looks at Storm. They’re going through with this? They walk to the side of the room where the plastic shopping bag is. Asher catches her eye. Now what? Storm picks up both cans and they go to the window. Then, as if an afterthought: ‘Do you want to write it?’ She holds out one of the aerosols to Dom. Asher’s jaw locks.

‘Are you fucking stupid?’ Dom sneers. ‘Why do you think I’m standing here away from the window? They’ll shoot me.’

‘Of course, sorry,’ Storm says. Asher doesn’t want Storm to pass him the cans. He’ll mess this up. Asher will get this wrong because that’s what he did with Ben coming up here, and what he does with everything. If he reaches to write on the glass, his shirt will ride up at the back and someone might see the knife.

Asher needs to get in first. ‘My handwriting is bad,’ he says to Storm. ‘You should do it.’

Dom’s stare darts from them, to the hostages, and back again. How is Storm expecting to snatch the gun? They can’t reach Dom from where they’re standing. He may as well be miles away.

She shakes the first can and sprays a test patch onto the wall. Black paint fizzles from the nozzle. Most of what comes out is air. Asher thinks she isn’t pressing very hard on the trigger.

‘Is this right?’ She tries again and this time Asher definitely notices she is not pressing all the way down. She tries the other spray can. The same result.

‘I don’t know,’ Asher says.

‘Will you try, Dom?’ Before he has a chance to answer her, Storm tosses him a can. She looks at Asher and mouths: ‘Go!’ She throws the second one to Dom. Asher shuffles closer. Two cans. Dom will need both hands to catch. But he lets them land on the carpet.

Then, he’s doing it. Dom is putting the gun in the band of his trousers. It’s actually working. He bends. Scoops up one can. Peers into the nozzle. Storm is at least six yards away. Too far. Asher is closer. He has to do it. She’s done almost all of the work. All he needs to do is grab it.

Dom does a test spray onto the wall. Black paint comes out in a strong, inky stream. He will throw the cans back to her and go for the gun. Asher needs to move. Now! His hands are shivering. He must do this to stay alive. To save his uncle. Asher reaches for it. He hesitates. Dom senses it. The weapon is back in his fist.

Dom spins to face Asher square on. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing.’ There’s that dead creature in his throat again. ‘I was trying to help with the spray can.’ That was his moment. Their one chance. Asher failed. Dom looks at Storm. She’s grinning stupidly.

‘You were trying to take the gun.’

‘No, I, no.’

‘Let’s get that message written on the window,’ Storm offers.

‘The two of you,’ the firearm traces a loop in the air, from Asher to her. Asher’s clumsy arms will get him killed. His useless legs.

‘He’s just jumpy, Dom,’ Storm says. ‘We’re trying to get the spray cans to work. Asher wants to help you.’

‘I do,’ Asher says, because it is true.

‘The cans work perfectly well when I spray them.’ Dom is glaring at Asher. ‘You’re with her. You have been all along, haven’t you?’

‘No, Dom.’

‘Those two escaped because the door was unlocked after you went downstairs to get the drinks.’ Dom invades Asher’s space and presses the gun to his heart. Asher scrambles backwards. Dom keeps coming. ‘You betrayed me. You betrayed the planet.’ The gun is boring into his chest. This is how he will die. One shot. Close range. At least it will be quick.

‘I’m with you, Dom,’ Asher says.

‘Udkjdgbfjfgj,’ he hears, as the gun swings up and knocks into his forehead. It turns the world into soup. Dom says it again: ‘Udkjdgbfjfgj’.

‘GET AWAY FROM HIM.’ His uncle’s voice. Asher’s head feels like a tomato. The skin is broken where Dom is slamming the gun. He sees Harrison charging across the room. He’s going to make everything worse.

Now his uncle has his hands around Asher’s head. He’s saying something to Dom. Asher struggles to separate the words from the mush. ‘He needs medical attention,’ Harrison says. ‘I’m taking him outside now.’ He doesn’t sound afraid, Asher thinks. He is suddenly unfazed by Dom. Harrison’s hands are under Asher’s arms and he’s lifting him. Asher didn’t realise he’d fallen. ‘He might have a concussion.’

‘I’m fine,’ he can hear himself mumble.

‘He’s right,’ Tia says. ‘Asher needs a doctor. We can ask the police for one outside.’

Now his uncle is the one with the gun to his heart. ‘No, Dom,’ Asher says. ‘I’m with you.’ He can convince him. He knows he can.

‘Don’t do this, Dominic,’ Tia says. ‘Harrison is not trying to leave. He only wants to help his friend.’

The gun relaxes at his uncle’s chest but no one mistakes this for a good thing.

‘His friend?’ Dom says. Tia’s mouth opens in slow motion. If Dom realises who he is, that will really seal his fate. ‘That over there.’ Dom points to the pile of hostage possessions. ‘The book.’ Asher’s textbook. ‘You had it in your hand before,’ he says to Harrison. ‘Engineering.’ Dom looks to Asher. ‘That’s what you’re studying.’ Asher’s tomato head is about to split apart. ‘You know each other.’ The gun draws a line from Harrison to Asher.

‘NO!’ Asher says, too loud, too fast.

‘You told someone about today,’ Dom says. ‘Who is he?’ The gun makes a clicking sound. It’s pressing against a button on his uncle’s shirt. ‘ANSWER ME!’

Dom folds in half. Someone is pushing him sideways and away from his uncle. Storm. She charges into him. Lunging for the gun. Both of her hands are around it now. Dom lifts one leg and lands a kick to her knee. He’s much too strong. She falls back onto the carpet and cries out. Harrison is there. He reaches for it. Tia pulls at Dom’s forearm. She twists her leg. Her heel goes into his shin. Dom makes a low, guttural sound.

Two loud pops send everything quiet.

23.

Tia

Now

Tia sleeps through her alarm again. It’s because of the nightmare. Almost every night she has the same dream of being back inside the museum. In this version of events, it isn’t Andrew or Enoch who notice the opportunity to escape through the unlocked doors. It’s her. She flees without hesitation. Tia flies down the stairs to the ground floor and she is outside in the fresh air and the pale sunshine hugging her boyfriend Al, and even her brother is there, along with her niece. She’s safe. But then Tia picks up a gun – in the dream it’s never explained how it instantaneously comes into her possession – and she turns around and starts sprinting the way she came, going straight back into the siege. Tia tears up the stairs and she shoots Dominic and she saves everyone. Each time she wakes up, shaken and sweaty – a hero! Only to selfishly flee the next day in another nightmare, before she finds the courage to turn around and go back inside for the others. Every night she is tested, and every night she passes.

Running from the museum is Enoch’s sin. Or maybe what aggravated the harasser was his media interviews. Andrew had the opportunity to contact police about Dom but didn’t take it, and he ran too. Jess is publishing her book. Whoever is targeting these hostages was in the museum that day. They know what Tia did. She bungled the whole siege, so why haven’t they come after her?

Tia asks Jess to send through a copy of her book, and in the middle of a split shift with Brilliant Bobbies, she goes through it on her phone. Who would want to stop this from getting out? All she reads is Jess being kind towards the other hostages, and generous in her depiction of everyone, really. Except for the three hostage-takers. Maybe Tia hasn’t paid enough attention to the two surviving activists. Perhaps one of them did hire someone from prison to carry all of this out for them. It still seems unlikely to Tia, but she rings the jail anyway about the activist presently in custody. After namedropping enough superiors from her days at the Metropolitan Police, one of the governors agrees to call her back. He tells her they are the best-behaved inmate on the wing. He agrees to contact Tia again should he notice anything, like a new visitor suddenly turning up, but he’s convinced the harasser is not them. After they hang up, Tia goes into her siege paperwork and legal documents and looks for a mobile number for Yvette Russell. She has no idea if his mother is still supporting Asher now he’s released, but it can’t hurt to call.

‘Hi, Yvette, this is Tia West. I’m sorry to contact you, and I wouldn’t unless it was absolutely necessary. I’d like to ask—’

She hangs up. Tia tries twice more and each time the call is rejected. During Asher Russell’s trial, Tia testified that she did not believe he knew about Dominic’s plans that day. Naturally Tia wouldn’t be Yvette’s favourite person, but at least she didn’t help to convict her son for the higher charges. If anything Tia probably helped him to get a shorter sentence. Perhaps Yvette is estranged from Asher, then.

Tia contacts her former colleague Zac and begs for one last favour. Pat at Brilliant Bobbies might know someone in the police willing to help. She likes Pat and she can trust him, but she’d really rather not involve him in this for his own sake.

Nope, Enoch replies to her message from earlier. I’ve not received anything new.

Thanks, let me know, Tia writes back. Then she texts Jess checking if she’s okay.

Zac comes through and sends her the contact details for Asher Russell’s probation officer. Tia leaves a message. This all started near to Asher’s release from prison but nothing suggests it’s him. Andrew and Enoch haven’t received any new threats since he’s been freed. Anyone monitoring Jess would soon see her flat is empty most weekdays while she works from the office but it was broken into late at night – outside of Asher Russell’s curfew.

Since the break-in, Jess has abandoned her flat to stay with relatives outside of London until after her book is out. It didn’t take a criminal mastermind to get inside her home. When Tia went there, she saw all they needed to do was smash one of the single-glazed windows by the entrance and reach in to turn the doorknob. Tia spent a full day canvassing neighbours and asking to see Ring camera footage, but no one saw anything. She still has the partial licence plate from the car Jess spotted, but with only the final three figures, BAI, there’s no use running it through any database to get thousands of possible matches. Tia has to keep Jess safe. She can’t lose another one.

Tia takes out her phone and goes to dial Stella’s number before abandoning the call. She knows she should update her, but what’s the point in upsetting her with news of someone threatening to stab Jess Anand to death? Tia will tell her when it’s over. When she knows who hounded her husband to death. Delia says if anything happens to Jess, it’s on Tia. She doesn’t need reminding.

It’s after eleven by the time Tia finishes her shift, and she’s too wired to sleep. All week she’s been meaning to return Enoch Black’s postcards now the lab has finished extracting what prints they can. She may as well make the most of the light traffic and drive there now, quietly drop them in his letterbox. By one o’clock in the morning, she’s reached Enoch’s area but needs to pull over to use her phone and check the exact address. Now she remembers. It’s second on the left, and then she’ll turn right. She’s five minutes away. Through the driver’s side window, she sees several shapes cross the road and dart behind a parked car. Too large to be foxes. Too silent to be harmless drunks weaving their way home.

She keeps her engine switched off for another minute and watches. Now she’s sure there are three people over there. Tia opens her car door and steps out, staying low. They’re fiddling with the vehicle. Trying to steal that SUV. Tia takes a couple of steps closer. They look like teenagers. Her shoulders sink. Why couldn’t she have just gone home after work? Now she’s going to have to do something about this. Tia catches the edge of the third face and it looks like Enoch. Are those his children? No, she remembers the shoes and schoolbags in his house – his are much younger. Tia turns back to lock her car and then the trio has moved off. They’re not stealing it? Maybe they couldn’t manage to get inside. She jogs after them.

They’ve already reached the end of the street where it forks into two. It’s too dark for her to tell from here which way they went. She chooses the left-hand option but quickly sees this road is empty. She walks back to the intersection and heads down the street to the right. There they are. Three people hurry along the footpath before they vanish. She runs to catch up, her instinct telling her to cling to the houses to keep herself in darkness. Tia passes a white car parked out the front of a large house. An SUV, lopsided. It is sinking down a little to the left, enough to catch her eye. When Tia gets closer, it’s clear the problem is the two tyres on that side. They’ve been slashed. Now a piece of paper is visible, tucked between the wipers and the windscreen. Your car has been chosen by … she reads. It’s an eco-group. She’s heard of activists who go around deflating the tyres of these highly polluting vehicles. Was that Enoch? She pockets the flyer and continues running down the street.

There they are. Tia crouches behind a group of bins. There’s a second SUV up ahead. The three shadows are hovering by it. Emerging from her hiding place, she slowly walks to them. Two are definitely teenagers, or very young adults. When she’s close enough, she gives all of her attention to the older man. ‘Enoch,’ she calls. All three heads jerk upward and two bodies sprint down the street, out of range. ‘It is you,’ she says.

He doesn’t run.

‘What are you doing?’ Tia holds out the flyer.

He drags his feet over to her. ‘It’s harmless,’ Enoch says.

‘Who are those two?’

‘Just environmentalists.’

She crunches the paper in her pocket. ‘Someone will see you. On dashcam footage or street CCTV.’ Enoch says nothing. She’s still a police officer. She could have him arrested. ‘Explain yourself.’

‘Are you following me?’

‘I was working late. I came to drop off the postcard evidence,’ Tia says. ‘I’m trying to help you.’

‘It’s only a few tyres.’

‘You don’t want this getting out in the news. If you were arrested, imagine the headline.’

‘I’m washed up. I can’t get any more media attention. Believe me – I’ve tried. They’ve moved on from the siege survivors. No more cash for me.’

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Wait. For how long have you been doing this kind of thing?’

‘A while.’

‘Were you involved with an eco group before the siege?’’ Her voice is raised and she’s wondering if they missed something, the police investigation and the whole inquest: did Enoch run because he knew what the gunman was doing that day?

‘No, since then. Since! Okay?’

‘Then what’s going on?’ she lowers her voice.

‘I started doing it because they’re bloody right, aren’t they? Right about all of it. I am worried about the planet. For my kids.’

‘What happened to not approving of vandalism? Just a few weeks ago you were talking about how the siege damaged the climate movement and lost them public support.’

‘I pretend I still believe that. I pretend I’m the same person I was before the siege.’

Now she regrets her tone. ‘It’s criminal damage, Enoch.’

‘Are you going to arrest me?’

She sighs. ‘I didn’t see anything. But you have to stop. You could lose your business in legal fees if this got to court.’

‘I’ve already lost my business. I’m basically going under.’ He reads her confusion: ‘I put on a show for you the other day about my multitude of customers.’

‘Does your wife know you’re doing this?’

‘She lives somewhere else now,’ he says.

‘Oh.’

‘With my girls.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Tia thinks of that upstairs room in Enoch’s house. Supposedly his wall of pride.

‘Don’t you feel guilty that we helped the general public to turn against the climate movement?’ he asks. That isn’t what she feels guilty about when she thinks of that day.

‘It’s not our fault,’ Tia says. ‘My car’s back there. Come on, I’ll drive you home.’

They walk side-by-side in silence for a few minutes. ‘I like being out when it’s all black like this,’ he says. ‘The darkness hugs you, don’t you think?’ Now she sees him as he was during the siege. She’d forgotten about that moment when the gun was at his forehead and he finally stopped mouthing off at Dominic. He looked hollow to her. By antagonising Dominic, he’d made himself a target and now she wonders if this kind of self-destruction is part of him.

‘I liked the dark more before the siege,’ she says.

‘It wasn’t until about nine months after when I actually realised that things, for me, weren’t ever going to be the same.’

‘Were you in counselling?’

He shakes his head. ‘We were at this New Year’s Eve party, my wife and I. She was talking to someone in the kitchen and suddenly this woman bounds up to me saying I look familiar. She asks have we met. I say we haven’t, but she keeps pushing, asking if I was on MasterChef, if I’m an actor. Eventually, just to shut her up I say: “Yeah, you got me, you probably know me from TV. I was part of the Bennett Museum siege.” She was mortified. That only made her talk more and then she’s saying she watched the news that day, couldn’t tear herself away from the live feed. Said when she saw the doors open, and those two figures appear, me and Andrew, running for our lives, she cried. Fist pumping at the TV. Said I was “an inspiration!”.’ They reach Tia’s car and get inside. ‘So I said: “I wish I had died in there.” That shut her up.’

‘You don’t mean that,’ Tia says.

‘I could have gone down a hero. Been famous for the kids, in a good way. Kind of gone out on a high, fighting back, sticking up for everyone, not taking it from the gunman, you know?’

‘I’m glad you ran,’ Tia says. They both sit very still and then she starts the engine.

When they arrive at Enoch’s house, he doesn’t immediately get out.

‘At first my wife complained that I didn’t ever want to talk to her about the siege, then she said I never shut up about it. That I was always going on about climate change. She’d had enough.’ Unless he asks for them, Tia’s not going to give him back those postcards. Now she thinks the fewer he has in his house, around him, the better.

‘Is it too late for you to invite me in for a cup of tea?’

‘Come on.’ He gets out of the car first and goes to unlock his front door.

‘I’m glad you ran,’ she says again, even though he can’t hear, even though she still isn’t certain she means it.

The following afternoon, she hears from Asher Russell’s probation officer. ‘Look, maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. But there was a known issue with Russell’s ankle tag.’

‘What kind of issue?’ Tia asks.

‘We sorted it yesterday. But up until then, there were the usual technical things – intermittent problems with the GPS signal. Whole service needs to upgrade the tech. I’m always on about it. Response from management is always the same – “budget cuts”,’ he says.

‘So what does that mean for Asher Russell?’

‘It’s possible he was breaking curfew until yesterday and I wasn’t aware.’

24.

Tia

Then

Asher isn’t working with Dominic. She sees this now. He and Storm are innocent. The gunman planned today on his own.

Harrison is trying to snatch the weapon. He needs her help. Tia pulls at Dominic’s forearm. She twists her leg. Her heel drives into his shin as hard as she can. He sways left, overcorrects to the right. The rucksack is still firm on his back. But what happens if he falls onto it? She doesn’t know what kind of device is in there, or how it’s triggered.

She stops worrying about the bomb because two shots are fired.

They went into the carpet. Or the roof? Jess is on her feet. Was she hit? No. She jumped up out of fright. Her eyes are wide. Harrison’s shirt. A dark wet patch in the centre. It expands before her eyes. Reaching all the way up to his neck.

Thwack.

He drops like a stone.

Tia skids there.

Blood. Absolutely everywhere. She can’t tell where it’s coming from. She puts her hands all over him. There. Two wounds in his stomach. First aid. She passed those courses. Tia rips at his shirt. ‘Come on!’ She struggles to get a tear going. There. Tourniquet. ‘It’s okay, Harrison,’ she says, wishing the others would stop gasping into her ear. This won’t work, she realises. She isn’t trying to isolate a limb. He’s shot in his middle. It’s his whole body.

‘Everyone, help!’ she says to the hostages all gathered around. ‘We need pressure.’ Eight hands go to Harrison. Blood is up to Tia’s shoulders. She’s kneeling in it. Her own head feels dizzy, as though it’s leaking out of her. ‘We need an ambulance,’ she says. Police. Where are they? Dominic is the only person in the room standing. ‘Ambulance.’ She glares at him. Rucksack on his back. The bomb.

Tia spreads her fingers wider and pushes her hands deeper into Harrison’s wound. This isn’t helping. The blood won’t stop. She screwed up. Oh God. She did this. She thought Harrison must have known Dominic and Storm too – the four of them in this together. The gunman might have already been angry with Harrison, but she made it worse. She got him killed. He isn’t dead yet, Tia reminds herself. ‘Harrison?’ She needs to slow his bleeding and maybe he has a chance.

His eyes turn to glass. Too late.

There’s a tiny pulse in each of Tia’s fingertips. His blood on her arms is already turning brown at the edges. She doesn’t know what to say. Tia stands up slowly and keeps her focus down on the carpet.

Hannah reads her look. ‘No. NO!’ she yells.

Delia says: Look at what you’ve done. You have blood on your hands. Literally.

Asher is silent. He’s curled into a ball by Harrison’s head.

‘He came at me! I didn’t mean to pull the trigger. Who IS he?’ Dominic shouts at Asher, jabbing his shoulder with the gun. Asher doesn’t react. ‘You brought him here. You did this.’

‘He just followed me,’ Asher says. There are red fingerprints on his forehead. ‘He’s my uncle.’

His uncle.

Tia reels. Those looks she caught between them. She should have guessed they were family. ‘He thought he was following me to a museum to return my textbook. He knew nothing about today.’

‘Fuck, Asher,’ the gunman shouts. ‘It’s your fault.’ Dominic didn’t mean to pull the trigger. Maybe he was going to kill Harrison anyway, but Tia will never know.

Dominic sees Jess, risen from the dead. Knowing she’s been spotted, her face tightens. Dominic ignores her. She’s alright for now. He killed someone else instead.

‘Dominic,’ the negotiator booms from outside. ‘I’m going to ring your phone, okay? Can we talk?’

The gunman is back in his hiding spot by the window. He looks paralysed. Dazed. He doesn’t seem to register the loudhailer.

‘He ran into you,’ Bill says. ‘I know you didn’t mean for him to die. Can we talk? I can help you through this situation.’ Jess is alive. Dominic didn’t mean to kill Harrison. Earlier he did suggest that he killed someone else this morning, Andrew saw blood, and Tia can still see some on one hand, but he hasn’t deliberately caused any significant injuries to the hostages. Bill thinks this can end without a gun fight.

‘Dominic, can we talk? I’m calling you.’

The phone lights up Dominic’s pocket. The ringer is the only sound in the room. In shock, Asher is still tucked into himself on the floor.

She can’t give up.

Tia can get Dominic to surrender. She can see something in him. At least part of him knows this has gone too far. It’s not what he wanted.

The phone stops. Dominic rubs the gun against his temple and stares into the carpet. Jess. Hannah. Ben. Asher. Storm. They need her to focus.

She’ll go back to negotiation basics. Hooks and triggers. Dominic has to feel as though he’s regained control. She has no idea what time it is. Two? Three o’clock? She thinks of his five o’clock deadline and wonders if the climate press release has already gone out. Tia is pacing back and forth trying to contain her adrenalin. She has to get that bag off Dominic’s back.

Body language. From the negotiator course. She shakes out her arms, making herself look relaxed and open.

‘Why hasn’t the prime minister called?’ Dominic’s voice is calmer now. It chills her. She doesn’t want him to think he’s already lost. He can’t despair and consider an explosion the only way out.

‘Dominic, I’m calling your phone,’ Bill says from outside. The device vibrates in his pocket as he taps the gun against his temple. His free hand extracts the phone. He’s going to talk. Okay. This is good.

But then he hurls it into the side wall.

‘Dominic,’ Bill says. ‘I’m trying to call you. I only want to talk.’

‘Shut. UP!’

‘Is your phone broken?’ The negotiator heard the crash.

‘Fuck. OFF!’

This is making him more agitated. ‘I can tell him to stop talking to you through the loudhailer if you want?’ Tia says.

‘He won’t.’ Dominic launches himself from the wall.

‘If we tell him to stop,’ Tia says, ‘that it’s upsetting you – he will.’

‘None of this will stop.’ Dominic kicks one leg at the skirting board. He pushes over another bust statue. It lands close to Jess’s feet.

The phone goes again. ‘We can get it to stop, Dominic,’ Tia says. ‘We can.’ He’s frightened of himself. She can see this now. He might be willing to de-escalate.

‘How do you know?’ he snarls back.

What else does she have at this point? Everything is a risk. Anything could trigger him. He’s the one who is supposed to feel cornered, not Tia. Sweat snakes down her back. There is one thing she has still to try. ‘I’m a police officer.’

All eyes in the room are on her now. ‘The warrant card you saw in my bag is real. I’m just a police constable. I wanted to do what he’s doing,’ she gestures to the window. ‘Be a negotiator like Bill. But I failed the training course.’

Dominic faces her. This news might panic him. She takes a few steps to the side of the room. In case he goes for her, she’ll be standing apart from the others so no one else gets hurt.

‘Why did you fail the course?’ Outside, Bill goes silent.

Delia says: I’m listening. Tell him why you were sent home.

‘I choked,’ Tia says. ‘I knew the material, I understood what I had to do, but I just couldn’t do it.’

‘What did you have to do?’ Tia doesn’t blame the course trainers for using her own motivation against her. They knew her emotional weak spot. They tested it. She cracked.

‘It was a role-play scenario. I had to pretend to be called to a university campus, where a student was on the roof of a residential building, about to jump. My job was to talk them down.’

‘You couldn’t do it?’

‘I think the police trainer deliberately gave me that scenario,’ Tia says. ‘When I went for the interview to try and get a place on the raining course, they asked me why I wanted to be a hostage and crisis negotiator. I told them about my sister who killed herself in the middle of her first year at university. I was at the same university in my final year.’ She didn’t tell them her brother, her parents, all blamed her.

‘Did you drop out of your degree?’

‘Yes,’ Tia says. The answer he wants. Delia did repeated internet searches in the week before her death. Key words: “withdrawing from uni”. Tia doesn’t understand why Delia didn’t just do it if university was making her unhappy. What did she see online that made dropping out seem so hopeless? ‘A degree isn’t everything,’ she says to Dominic.

‘Shut up.’ She’ll stay away from the topic of his education for now and get back onto his family. The girl on his phone.

The hostages sit with their backs to the side wall. Asher is there on the floor by his uncle, limbs spilling everywhere. She notices Dominic watching him.

‘His uncle following him here reminds me of my younger brother,’ Tia says. ‘He used to do that kind of thing when we were teenagers. If he thought I was going somewhere interesting where he wasn’t invited.’ Dominic says nothing. She has to keep pushing him. They’re running out of time. ‘Do you have family?’

‘My sister,’ he says. She knew it. He has a much younger sister. A sibling he cares about enough to put as his phone background. A reason for him to peacefully walk out of here today. To prefer jail over a body bag. Motivation to not hurt any more of the hostages.

‘Is that her I saw on your phone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How old are you both in that picture?’

‘Sixteen and six,’ he says.

‘There’s a three-year age gap between my brother and me.’ She wants to ask for the girl’s name but she’s still a hostage to him and that could be too direct.

‘How long have you been a climate activist?’ Tia asks. ‘Is your younger sister one too?’ A reminder of why he should want to surrender today and not blow himself up.

‘She’ll never see a white rhino, a mountain gorilla, a komodo dragon, a Chinese river dolphin.’

‘Are they all extinct?’

‘Extinct or close to it.’

‘And that upsets you?’ she asks. ‘Saddens you?’ More emotion labelling. He needs to feel heard. For his concerns to be recognised and acknowledged. She pictures Bill listening through the audio equipment. See: she does know how to do this.

Dominic doesn’t immediately answer. Tia lets the silence drag, gives its molecules time to divide and replicate. Build up its army. People are social animals. We do not like silence. One of the first things you learn on the negotiator training course is to overcome the human urge to fill it. ‘If you’d like someone, maybe your sister, to come up here, we could ask them to—’

‘My sister is dead.’

Delia whispers: here we go. This will be just like the negotiator course. You’re not going to be able to do this. You’re too close. You’re already screwing it up. Look at that man on the carpet. Bled out in front of his nephew. He was so quiet the whole time, trying to protect Asher, and look what you did.

Delia’s right. Tia has nothing to say to this. She doesn’t know where to go from here.

‘And I’m going to get real net zero because of her,’ Dominic says. ‘Otherwise I’m going to blow up this museum and half the street.’

His phone starts ringing. How many more call attempts until they send in the firearms team? If Tia can’t talk him out, they will come in to kill him. If he manages to detonate the device first – then how many other deaths will she be responsible for?

‘We’re going to play a game,’ Dominic says. He strides across the room. All of the hostages get to their feet, as if there’s somewhere they might run to. Dominic picks up an empty drink bottle. Coke. ‘Who read that article in The Mail about the prime minister’s student days at Oxford University? He’s a big fan of spin the bottle. My rules are different. But this will get his attention.’

25.

Asher

Now

The doorbell rings and Yvette is straight there. ‘I’ll get it, Ash.’ He hears her exchange a few words with someone and then the sounds of the lock clicking into place. He meets her in the hallway. ‘They’re just checking the water meter,’ she says. Through the window, a shadow recedes.

‘Okay.’ Asher tries to look as though he believes her. As soon as he turned eighteen, he was excited to enrol himself on the open electoral register and be a citizen who votes. It was never hard for journalists to find out where they live.

‘Will you join me in the living room for a bit?’ she asks.

He follows his mother first into the kitchen where she makes tea, and then they sit side-by-side on the sofa.

On the coffee table is a black cube. He knows what this is. A hard mass of shame forms in his chest. During one of her prison visits, Yvette told him about Harrison’s funeral. She showed Asher the booklet from the church service and pointed out the passage she had read for him. A verse for her brother, recited on behalf of her son who couldn’t be present. Yvette would not have done that if she blamed him, he reminds himself. That’s why she’s giving him this precious thing.

‘Your uncle didn’t have a proper will, but I know he’d want you to have this,’ Yvette says, handing him the cube. Inside is a watch Harrison was gifted for his thirtieth birthday. Asher only ever saw him wear it a few times. ‘And he’d want you to use it,’ his mother says. ‘It’s so sad that people have nice things, watches and crystal flutes and expensive perfume and silverware. “Too good” to use in everyday life, as though being alive isn’t worthy enough. So we die having not enjoyed these objects, kept in boxes and drawers, waiting for special occasions that don’t come.’ He opens it and sees the gold-trimmed watch, closing it again as acid builds behind his eyes.

He holds it tight with both hands. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘I have something else. Wait here.’ She leaves the room and returns with a large stack of paper.

‘This is the siege inquest report that’s about to be made public. Two copies.’ She sits back down, turning her body to his. ‘I thought we should sit here together. Read as much or as little as we want. Not on a screen, but like this.’ His mother hands him a set. ‘It’s flimsy,’ she says, flapping an A4 sheet to demonstrate. ‘It’s only paper. It can’t hurt us. If we don’t like what it says, we can burn it, screw it up, do whatever. It’s a physical thing and we’re stronger. What do you think?’

Asher’s eyes are scanning the first page. He wants to read this. He’s been preoccupied with the hostages’ interviews and what they’ve said about him, but he wants to know what the judge thinks. The official account of what happened that day.

‘Okay,’ Asher says.

They read for the next hour. ‘This really happened to you?’ his mother says at one point, turning a page face-down in disgust. He gently takes the paper in her hand and sees which part she’s referring to.

‘Yeah but it’s okay,’ he says. She already knew that bit, but he understands. Sometimes Asher forgets parts of that day too, and when he re-remembers, it seems to hit him twice as hard.

‘I need a break,’ her voice trembles. ‘I’ll make some more tea.’

When Yvette returns they read a bit more. From the way her eyes float above the page, he realises she’s actually read the report already, and this exercise is purely for him. He’s grateful she suggested this, because with her here in the room, the words don’t collect in him as Asher thought they would. Some even pass through and exit the other side. Maybe moving on is still a possibility for him, after all? The thought is quashed almost as quickly as it arrives.

Asher reaches the section about Harrison’s death and he skips it. Skim-reading now, he gets to the end of the report and realises just how much Tia West is at fault. He didn’t fully comprehend this at the trial, focussed then on what was going to happen to him and his potentially long prison sentence. Now he sees the extent of the errors she made and how they led to the deaths that day – deaths that guaranteed he and the activists got prison sentences. What he doesn’t see is justice. Where’s her punishment? The sheet of paper in Asher’s lap introduces Tia West as a witness and outlines her former role with the Metropolitan Police. This whole page is her.

When Yvette gets up to start dinner, he tears a tiny corner from the paper, and drops it to the floor. It feels good. He makes another very small rip in the page, slicing her name in two. He rips again, and again. A mountain of snow grows on the carpet as Asher, drawing it out as much as he can, makes a thousand slow and painful cuts to Tia West.

‘We have to forgive,’ Yvette says later as they eat. ‘Ash, you should think about visiting.’ The other activist who’s alive but still in prison. ‘It will be good for you. Yeah? I’ll go with you.’ She pats his forearm.

‘Maybe,’ Asher says. Visiting is out of the question.

‘Just think about it.’

She scoots her chair across to hug him and he speaks through the softness of her hair. ‘I will.’

Somehow, three months have passed. Asher has been out of prison for ninety-two days. A man and a woman come to remove the electronic monitoring tag from his ankle. Underneath, his skin is as smooth as jelly. They take away the wireless base and the two chargers, leaving a bare patch of carpet in the living room. Asher is no longer under curfew. He is still on licence but his whereabouts are not monitored and he can basically go anywhere, and do anything. There is no requirement to sit waiting for the tag to charge each morning, but sometimes he sits on the floor for an hour anyway, imagining he’s still plugged in. He has nowhere to go, apart from his new group meetings. No one to see, and now, not even the moles to think about. Yvette is convinced visiting the prison will help to launch Asher into his future, better life. He’s run out of excuses, so he makes the necessary arrangements and lets Yvette drive.

‘We’re almost there,’ his mother says. ‘About ten more minutes.’ He has not changed his mind about going in. Asher doesn’t know how he’ll be received and he does not want to find out. When they arrive on prison grounds, he’ll tell Yvette he has cold feet. He’s too anxious to go in. She’ll understand.

His mother glances at Harrison’s special watch on his wrist. ‘It’s so nice to see you wearing that,’ she says. Asher keeps the velvet-lined box on his dresser, and it’s the first thing he sees when he wakes in the morning. It’s a warm early-summer’s day and the passenger’s side window is down, the fresh air keeping him calm.

They pull into the carpark and now he must disappoint her. He doesn’t see any other way. Although a safe distance from the jail perimeter, Asher is sure the building knows he’s here. B3846HK. He is familiar to prisons now. They have his scent, and they will know it forever. At any time they could clamp their jaws around his ankle and pull him back. Yvette switches off the radio and unbuckles her seatbelt.

‘Ash, before you go in.’ She checks the rear-view mirror even though they’ve already parked. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’

‘Okay.’

‘The day of the museum …’ She faces the front of the car, looking through the windscreen instead of at him. ‘The police didn’t explain to me what was going on, but I knew you were in trouble and that I needed to stay very sharp for you.’ She takes a considered breath. ‘The police were turning over everything, trashing the whole house. One of the officers suggested I sit down and as I did, I saw your new brown notebook poking out of your coat pocket.’

The brown notebook. Asher’s teeth crumble in his mouth.

‘I’d seen you write in it a few times,’ his mother says. ‘I took notice because I hadn’t seen you use a pocket notebook like that before and I thought maybe you’d taken up writing or drawing at university. Anyway, I grabbed it. I hid it in my coat before the police saw it. I don’t know why I thought to take it; it was pure instinct, I guess. Some kind of mother’s intuition.’ The notebook was never mentioned in court or when he was questioned, and Asher had initially wondered why. At first he thought it was because of some legal technicality, a reason it had to be excluded. Then he realised it must have still been in his bedroom. Hidden, where even the police couldn’t find it, and it would be there waiting for him to get out of prison.

‘I want you to know it was safe with me,’ she says. ‘It’s gone now, and no one will ever see it. So don’t worry.’ Police never saw it, but his mother did. It never occurred to him that she had it this whole time. ‘On some level, even before I looked inside, I knew what was in that notebook was because of me, and the way I brought you up. And it was. That’s the truth. What was in there isn’t who you really are, but it’s hard for other people to understand, so they could never see it.’

Yvette turns to look at him. Say something, Asher tells himself silently. Speak. His gums mash together and his voice comes out as a squeak. ‘Mum, I can explain what you saw.’

She holds up a hand to shush him. ‘Don’t say any more. That’s not why I mentioned it. I just don’t want you to worry. We’re never going to speak of it again. The notebook’s gone. I want you to have the life you deserve. Now go inside that prison and face that person who groomed and manipulated you, and you’ll come out feeling better. I know you will.’ Yvette is smiling and nodding and now he knows he has no choice. ‘I’m really proud of you, Ash,’ his mother says. ‘Your uncle is too.’

He must go in. What else can he do?

‘Thanks, Mum.’ All this time and she never questioned him. Her brother died that day, she saw the notebook, and still she never wavered in her support for her son. Asher hugs her as tightly as he can from the passenger’s seat and then he gets out of the car. Harrison’s watch is a comforting weight on his wrist. Though not enough to keep back the dizziness, which is getting worse with each step. Asher feels like a raw chunk of meat. He thinks of the sweet and sour pork he used to sell in the Chinese takeaway.

Security. The shallow clang of three different types of metal. The smell is the same as he remembers. Maybe the smell is him. Asher is told to wait and suddenly he is in a room, and here they come. The prisoner. They are about to be plonked right in front of him. Asher is free and they are not. There’s still time to get out of here. He can stand up now and run.

‘Hello, Asher,’ Storm speaks first. It glues him to his seat. ‘How are you?’

‘I’ve been released,’ he says. Obviously. He is so stupid, something she probably remembers about him.

She smiles. ‘I heard. I’m glad.’ She’s glad? That doesn’t make sense.

‘What about you?’ he asks.

‘I should be going on licence at the end of this year,’ she says.

‘Great. Good.’

This woman is practically a stranger. Asher only met her a few times before the day of the museum. He knows nothing about her.

‘What are you doing with yourself now?’ she asks.

‘I’m living with my mum.’ Asher’s nails scratch underneath his chair.

‘Will you go back to university?’ she asks. ‘You were only in your first year, weren’t you?’

‘I don’t know if I will. I don’t think so.’

There is a long beat of silence. ‘I never got the chance to say how sorry I was about your uncle.’ Storm and Asher were arrested at the siege, ushered to different police interview rooms and cells, and so the last time they spoke to one another was inside the museum, with Dom.

‘Thanks,’ he says, wondering if this is a trap.

‘You don’t have to say anything in response, but I want you to know I had no idea Dom was capable of what he did, and what he was planning.’ This is what she said in court. The police didn’t believe her. Asher knew by the end of the siege she was innocent. He’s always understood she was telling the truth. ‘Just to clarify any doubts you might still have,’ Storm adds. ‘I don’t know what you might be thinking. But I knew as much as you did. And I’m so sorry.’ She’s genuinely trying to convince him now.

‘Thanks,’ he says again, and smiles. He can give her that.

‘You were very close with your uncle.’ She learnt this in court, he supposes. Maybe she’s read the inquest report too, if she’s allowed.

They fall back into silence. Is she really not angry with him? Apologies and sympathy are not what he was expecting. He doesn’t know who might be listening and he must be very careful not to say the wrong thing.

‘What are you going to do once you’re on licence?’ he asks.

‘I’m thinking about retraining as a teacher.’

‘That’ll be good.’

‘I need to look into it more. There are obvious limitations with the whole criminal record situation.’ Her laugh gives him permission to join in. It disarms him, and releases something inside, a protective cover that’s been holding him in place.

‘Wait until you get out,’ Asher says. ‘The world is so much worse than you’ll remember.’

‘Yeah?’ Storm smiles at him just like she did at their first group meeting. Dom had moved his chair to properly include him, and Asher, for the first time in his life, had felt that he belonged.

‘No one cares about the environment,’ Asher says. ‘The only thing they’re worried about is living forever. That’s the new obsession coming out of Silicon Valley. Overpopulation not because of too many births, but because people are refusing to die. We need a regulator, the World Health Organisation, a new kind of world government, someone with the authority to ban medical research across the board. No more new medicines or treatments or clinical trials. Enough is enough. Make it illegal. We must stop extending lifespan and curing things and coming up with vaccines. We have to just let people die.’ It all slips out without him thinking and it’s too late for him to bite his tongue.

Storm shuffles in her chair.

‘I think maybe you should go,’ she says. Storm knows what he says is true. He can see a flash hidden deep behind her eyes, and that’s enough for him.

26.

Asher

Then

Asher could have taken the gun. He hesitated. It was within his reach. He balked and he had his uncle killed. How is he going to tell his mother? Ever look at her again? He is rocking back and forth on the carpet, staring at the blood on his shoes. The knife is cutting into his back. Why doesn’t it go right through and slice his liver, his kidneys? All of it. He doesn’t want to live through this. Just finish him off. Asher looks across the room at Dom. He could cut him up. Gut Dom like a butcher. This is not a museum, it’s an abattoir. But Dom didn’t really mean it. He knows that. This is Asher’s fault. He lured his uncle here. He may as well have pulled the trigger himself.

The jacket which was over Jess’s face is now covering Harrison. Jess. His eyes go to her on the other side of the room. Asher reminds himself that he once thought she was dead. But she was faking it. She’s actually perfectly alright. He flings the jacket off his uncle. Is he twitching? Asher scans his body for signs of movement. Was that – there? Asher scrambles down to Harrison’s feet. They flinched. He saw it. Didn’t he? But then he looks back at his uncle’s face, his eyes like marbles open to the ceiling. Asher did this to him. He has to accept he’s gone.

Dom is ignoring Asher. He’s busy moving the hostages into a circle. Making them sit cross-legged on the ground.

‘The prime minister was very fond of spin the bottle in his university days,’ Dom is saying. He throws an empty Coke container into the centre.

‘The South American cannibal ants. They save the ecosystem. They know what needs to be done. When their own population explodes and over-burdens the area, they make sacrifices. They eat each other.’ Dom jumps into the circle and twirls the plastic bottle with his free hand, testing it. Asher sees Hannah reach across and hold Ben’s hand. Storm is hugging her knees to her chest. ‘You’re all hungry. If the bottle lands on you, you get to eat. Choose your meal.’

‘Dominic, this isn’t going to help,’ Tia says. ‘If you answer the phone, speak to the negotiator, that’s how you’ll be heard. That’s how you can get across the importance of real net zero.’

‘We play this until the prime minister calls me. I’ll discuss it with him. I’ve made that clear.’

‘Bill wants to help you. But you have to speak to him.’

Dom shakes his head. He jumps out of the circle, leaving behind the empty bottle. ‘Spin it,’ he says to Tia.

‘Dominic.’ She doesn’t move.

‘Spin. IT.’

Tia reaches forward and grips the bottle. Asher stands so that he can see. The Coke does three revolutions. Passing Jess, Hannah, Storm, Ben, Tia, and back again. It slows. As the bottle comes to a stop, Asher moves closer for a better view. The mouth points to Ben.

‘Who are you eating, Ben?’ Dom says, walking the circle’s perimeter.

‘I don’t understand the game.’ Ben’s lips quiver.

‘There are too many people in this world. We need to get the population down to save the planet. The right thing to do is to make sacrifices. So: who do you choose?’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘I think you do,’ Dom says. He stops directly behind Ben. Ben’s neck goes stiff. He doesn’t turn around.

Then Dom crouches to be level with him. He talks into the side of Ben’s face. ‘Name someone or I’ll shoot you.’

‘Dominic, this won’t work,’ Tia says.

‘Choose someone,’ Dom breathes in Ben’s ear.

‘I can’t.’ There’s a tremor in his voice.

‘This won’t help anything, Dominic,’ Tia tries again.

‘NAME SOMEONE OR WE ALL BLOW UP.’

Ben flinches. His whole face scrunches. ‘Alright.’ He moves his eyes around the circle.

27.

Tia

Now

Asher Russell’s ankle tag malfunctioned. There’s no way to tell if he’s broken curfew. He could have gone anywhere and done anything. He may have broken into Jess’s flat. But that’s not evidence. Tia tries calling his mother, Yvette, again, but it rings out. If this harassment campaign is Asher’s doing, it means he started working with an accomplice shortly before the end of his prison sentence, waiting all that time to get revenge on the hostages? That doesn’t seem like the young man who was there at the siege, but she knows prison can change people, and she got so much wrong about that day. Tia remembers which of the survivors testified at his trial: Jess, Enoch and Andrew. Tia, though, was the most prominent witness. None of them said they believed Asher was an entirely willing accomplice, but she was the police officer in the room who did not protect his uncle. If this is Asher, why wouldn’t he have come after her? She still doesn’t think this is him. Among Tia’s documents from the trial, she has Yvette Russell’s address, where he was living at the time of his arrest. She can be there in half an hour if only to finally, completely, rule him out.

Orange geraniums grow in pots by the front door and weeds reach up between the gaps in the stonework, threatening to take over. Tia rings the buzzer and hears footsteps from within. ‘Hello?’ The blinds in the front room shudder. Tia moves closer to the window. ‘Hello?’ She tries the buzzer again. There’s movement behind the window. Someone’s there. ‘I’m sorry to disturb, I’ll only keep you a minute.’ She shouts to be heard, but her tone is friendly. Maybe wearing her Bobbies uniform was a mistake, but she feels vulnerable without it. They’re obviously not coming out.

Tia spots a recycling bin. She looks back at the house: no one seems to be watching. She reaches in and pushes aside empty yoghurt pots and cereal boxes. Tia keeps digging. There. Asher’s name. A package from Amazon. So he is living here. She reminds herself she’s doing this in a private capacity without any possibility of gaining a warrant. If the Russells decide she’s trespassing, Tia could be the one who ends up arrested. She gets back into her car and phones the probation officer again. Tia leaves him a message asking if there’s any way he could quietly help her get a few minutes face-to-face with Asher; an unofficial meeting, off the record. Maybe Asher is being harassed himself. She needs the chance to speak to him. He might know something that could help her investigation.

The person she’s looking for knows about the ants. They had to be in the museum. That means an activist or a hostage. Unless they’re a police officer or one of the solicitors, but what reason would they have for going after the survivors? Jess is adamant she’s still going ahead with publishing her book next month. Tia is running out of time to shut this down. She has to think. Swimming. That’s what she needs. It’s what she did when she was sent home from the negotiator course and needed to make a decision about her future.

Now it’s past seven and the local aquatic centre is closed. She’ll go to the swimming pond. Tia changes into her costume, puts a dress over it and walks there. It’s still light out. The council doesn’t encourage wild swimming here, but people do it. She lowers herself into the frigid water. The July air is quite warm, but the water is colder than it looks. The ends of her toes scrape the gravel pit below. With each step forward, the ground falls away, and the temperature seems to drop. There is an intense ache spreading up her legs and she cannot walk any further into the pond because her muscles knit together and go stiff. Tia’s breath is running away from her. There are knives in her lungs and her skin is prickling, and then it all seems to stop. She leans back. Her arms extend, and her feet spread. She floats. It’s freezing and feels both serene and like she might die at any moment. For a second it’s as though the siege never happened. She moves her arms, glides her legs through the water, and keeps her lungs full. Tia stays buoyed. She endures. She thinks of nothing except breathing. Eventually, the water guides her to the bank and releases her. There is no need to dry herself. The walk home will take care of that. She brushes loose grass from her beach towel and carries it along with her dress, dripping water through the back streets.

At the end of the siege, two people were on the ground. A decision had to made. She could only protect one. She owed him. Asher didn’t know about the gun, she was sure of it by then. Eighteen-year-old Asher Russell didn’t deserve to die in there. Firearms police might have gone for him. She couldn’t bear to cause two deaths in the one family. She had no choice. Delia says this isn’t an excuse. She whispers Tia should never have let things get that far. Dominic’s game should have been stopped. Delia says because Tia saved Asher that day, she’s been blind to the possibility of the harasser being him; she doesn’t want it to be him. Now Tia visualises the empty drink bottle in her mind’s eye, spinning against the green carpet, a slow circle coming to a stop. She could have jumped in. Why didn’t Tia put herself forward? The siege was her incident. She was the negotiator. The bottle was the moment she killed her second hostage. She was sent home from the negotiator course all those years ago because they somehow saw this within her. They knew a thing like this would happen if Tia West was on the job. She should not have let Ben Wing die.

She thinks of the inquest, and the days when she saw Ben’s parents, returning to the same seats, speaking only to each other. They heard testimony that if Tia had not been in the museum, and the gunman had still not engaged with the real negotiator outside, armed police would have entered much earlier. She closes her eyes, opens to the final minutes of the siege, then rewinds, erasing herself from every frame. There’s no way of knowing what would have happened if police had tried to shoot Dominic earlier in the day, but it’s another roll of the dice. An alternative world where their son may not have died.

The family of the dead hostages are the only other people who had privileged access to everything that was said inside the museum. Ben’s parents would have reason to loathe the survivors. They’d resent Jess for profiting from her book, wouldn’t they? Tia has to face the possibility that it is one of them. She can’t imagine what it must be like for the Wings to have lost their nineteen-year-old son. He wasn’t even supposed to be on the museum rota that day. There was a rumour, repeated in the courthouse corridors during the inquest, that his parents were planning to sue the Metropolitan Police for Ben’s unlawful death. If she finds evidence it is the Wings, how could Tia possibly hand them in after what they’ve been through? After what she did?

It still doesn’t make sense why they’ve not come after her. During her police interviews after the siege, Tia had to tell the truth: she was with Asher Russell at the very end. What she didn’t say was this was her choice. She was braced for it, but in the end no one questioned whether or not she realised then, in the smoke and the dark, that Ben was there too, close but not close enough. His family could read the full inquest report and join the dots. They might have already worked it out from what was said in court. Ben was killed by stray police shrapnel in the final chaotic minutes of the siege while she was protecting Asher, taking his bullet for him. Could she have got to Ben instead? Moved him out of the way? She knows the truth. If they ever ask, she doesn’t think she could lie to them.

It was mentioned during the inquest that Ben Wing has a younger sister and now it’s her own sibling Tia is thinking of. Her relationship with her brother never recovered after Delia died. Two months after they buried her, their mother’s death was ruled an accident, but everyone knew. Their mother walked to the top of that cliff because Tia destroyed their family. She simply couldn’t go on. Neither her brother nor father ever blamed Tia, not out loud, but so often she wished they would. She longed to hear their fury towards her, in their own voices. Instead, they kept it inside and they all grew further and further apart.

At the time, Tia was shocked when her mother leapt into the sea. She was desperately sad of course, grieving her daughter, but she seemed angry rather than depressed, and angry people have always seemed so alive to Tia. When she considers Ben’s family wanting to punish the surviving hostages, it’s his mother she’s really thinking of. There’s something special about the rage of a distraught mother.

Tia’s fifth day of the negotiator training course featured a role-play scenario set in a primary school. In that exercise, a woman had lost her child in a tragic school bus crash and in her frenzied grief she took a kitchen knife to the school and held a teacher and a classroom of children hostage. Most of the police officers on the course complained this practice scenario was unrealistic. The vast majority of incidents where hostage and crisis negotiators are called involve men, and it was thought course trainers had invented this situation out of some warped idea of gender parity. But Tia could see it. You don’t have to be a mother yourself to imagine how an otherwise perfectly reasonable and moral woman could be driven to do something like that out of grief for their child. She saw it on her own mother’s face when she left the house that day, though she was too young to properly understand it. She learnt to recognise it and all those years later Tia did well that particular day of the negotiator course. In the simulated siege, she talked the imaginary mother into surrendering after only four hours. Now, she can’t approach Ben Wing’s mother. There is no way she can look that woman in the eye.

There is one other dead hostage. Harrison Russell received less sympathy from the media, a distinct lack of public outpouring because of his connection to Asher. Harrison Russell’s parents are deceased but there was a girlfriend, and Tia recalls her attending the inquest over a few days. She would have been privy to the full police report had she requested it. She might know about Dominic’s cannibal ants. Could she be the person Tia is looking for? Tia locates the woman’s number in the siege paperwork and calls her first thing in the morning.

Paula lives alone in a top-floor flat in South London. She invited Tia straight over. ‘Come up.’ Paula sounds chirpy through the intercom buzzer and greets her at the door.

‘Thank you for your time,’ Tia says. Harrison’s former girlfriend is in her early forties with fashionably tousled red hair. She is in a long-sleeved cream business shirt but barefoot, with faded blue yoga pants on her lower half. ‘I was just about to make some coffee if you’d like one?’

‘Only if it’s no bother.’

Paula goes to the kitchen and returns with two large cups. ‘Thank you,’ Tia says.

‘I remember you from the inquest.’

‘I saw you there too.’ Tia looks at two tropical fish in a tank by the television, biting one another, wrestling violently.

Paula notices. ‘They’re fighting fish. They don’t like to share their water.’

‘Right.’ She tears her eyes away.

The two women are perched on either end of a three-seater sofa in the main space of Paula’s small flat. The dining table seems to double as a work-from-home desk with two computer monitors turned inward. Tia’s phone beeps.

‘Excuse me,’ she says, going into her bag to silence it. There’s a new text from Jess:

Someone just made an anonymous donation to my trauma survivors’ charity. In the description they wrote: ‘Special only to each other. Sorry.’ Should I be worried?

Tia thinks of her conversation with Hannah Spector on the boat. She replies to Jess: Was the sum about the same as your blackmail payments to Hannah?

Immediately, Jess responds: Actually, yes …

‘Sorry,’ Tia says to Paula, smiling to herself. She puts the phone away and gives her attention back to the woman in front of her.

‘I’m glad you called,’ Paula says. When Tia phoned, Paula said she didn’t know anything about the hostages being harassed. She had not heard about the death of Andrew Ward. She knew who Tia was and said she was happy to help. ‘All these years later and I still think that I should have got in touch with police before, maybe MI5 or something,’ she’s saying now, placing her coffee mug on the floor.

‘What do you mean?’ Tia opens her notepad on her knee.

‘About Harrison’s nephew, Asher. I think about whether I could have prevented the siege. If I’d called the police about him, back then, would they have taken me seriously?’

‘Did you know something about what the group was planning?’

‘No, but he was always a very strange kid, the whole time I knew him,’ Paula says, leaning back against an oversized cushion. ‘Ranting about overpopulation, humans being cockroaches. He made my skin crawl. But I could never say anything to Harrison. He was so blind to his weirdness. Asher would click his fingers and Harrison would come running. Because the kid didn’t have a father. We’d be in the middle of dinner and if that boy called needing a lift somewhere, Harrison would practically run out of the restaurant to pick him up.’ Paula reaches down for her coffee cup and spills some of the brown liquid on the carpet. ‘Shit.’ She tries to rub it out with a bare toe. ‘I think about this every day, and I’m sure now that he knew about the plan to take hostages.’

‘Do you have any evidence, Paula?’

‘No,’ she sighs. ‘I replay every interaction I ever had with him while Harrison and I were together, and I’m certain. If there’s something going on with the survivors, you should be looking at Asher.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Tia asks.

‘Because I know him,’ Paula says, exasperated. ‘Someone should do something about him.’

‘I’m looking into him,’ Tia says to reassure her. Paula covers her mouth with her hand and nods. She’s not behind the hostages’ harassment. Tia trusts her ability to recognise genuine concern for other people. ‘I should let you go for now,’ Tia says. ‘Thanks for your time.’ She reaches into her bag for a business card. She hands the card to Paula, who fumbles it and it drops onto Tia’s notebook.

‘What’s that?’ Paula says, pointing to something on the open page. ‘Licence plate BAI?’

‘It’s the final three letters of a car I’m trying to find,’ Tia says.

‘That’s his car. What Asher drives. I know because it used to belong to Harrison.’

28.

Tia

Then

‘Alright,’ Ben says. Tia shifts her weight to her knees. She can stand quicker this way if she needs to. Ben looks around the circle, his face suddenly composed. Tia doesn’t know what Dominic is getting at. She’s read something about this historical scandal he’s talking about, the then twenty-one-year-old prime minister playing spin the bottle at university parties with very underage girls. She’s trying to catch Ben’s eye. Dominic wants him to say a name, so he should just say hers. Ben glances down at his hand, encased in Hannah’s. He pulls it back toward him until Hannah’s fingers drop away.

‘Hannah,’ Ben’s voice gurgles.

‘That’s your choice?’ the gunman says.

‘Yes,’ he says louder, clearer.

‘Ben! NO!’ Hannah cries out, disgusted. ‘Ben!’ They work together. They seem like friends.

‘Up you get, Hannah.’ The gunman’s free hand clamps around her upper arm. He lifts her to standing. ‘You’re the sacrificial meal.’

He won’t go through with this. Tia won’t let him. ‘Dominic, no.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Ben runs both hands over his head.

‘Dom. STOP,’ Storm shouts.

‘Stand in the window so the prime minister can get a good view.’ Dominic flicks the gun to the glass to indicate where Hannah should go. When she doesn’t move, he pushes her with a closed fist. Hannah trips forward.

‘Dominic,’ Tia says, on her feet. She follows Hannah, gets between her and him. Dominic points the weapon at Tia’s centre. ‘This won’t help you,’ she says. ‘It’s not too late to make your point about the climate.’ Behind her, Hannah’s chest is heaving.

Police won’t stand back when someone is about to be executed. A negotiator is never told mid-operation when Command has given up on them and decided to send in armed police to resolve things by force. At the training course, they said if the negotiator knows tactical intervention is imminent, the fear is they’ll accidentally tip off the gunman. Alert them to it with some subtle change in their voice and therefore give the gunman time to prepare. In reality, though, it’s hard to keep the negotiator in the dark. It becomes obvious to them what’s coming when they’re told to somehow convince the hostage-taker to move or stand in a certain spot. Your job at that point isn’t to control the surrender. It’s to isolate them for a clean shot. Police Command can’t communicate with Tia but she knows this is what they’d want from her now. She needs to separate him from the hostages.

‘I’ll stay in the window,’ Tia says. Hannah is tight behind her. ‘Hannah can go and sit down with the others.’

‘No,’ Dominic says.

His phone goes off.

‘Dominic,’ Bill through the loudhailer. ‘Real net zero. You have the prime minister’s attention. We’re listening. Pick up the phone.’ Tia can feel Hannah press up against her. On her arms, Harrison’s blood has dried into a crust.

‘Dominic,’ Tia says. ‘You said you wanted real net zero for your sister. The only way you can achieve that is by talking to Bill. By answering the phone.’ She has to keep his sister in the forefront of his mind.

‘He’ll call me after I do this.’ He raises the gun higher. It skims Tia’s nose. When the police came to the flat she shared with two other university students, Tia thought she’d die. A death message is when an officer tells you your family member is gone. As soon as they said ‘Delia’, she thought the words would strangle her. Enter through her ears and close over her throat. They offered to wait until her parents arrived. It took them three hours to drive there. She couldn’t believe she was still alive when they walked through the door.

‘Can I ask when your sister died?’ she says to Dominic. His hook. She will tease this out of him.

The gun scratches the end of her nose. He stares and she looks back, does not blink. What’s the point now in being afraid? ‘Nine years ago,’ he says. His much younger sister died, and this caused him to drop out of his PhD, the beginning of his spiral? No, that doesn’t work. He can’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six, and nine years ago he would have been in secondary school, probably doing his GCSEs. She has to figure out precisely what drove him to today.

‘Would you tell me what happened?’ Tia says. He says nothing. ‘Tell me and then you can go ahead with what you’re doing here. You know I can’t stop you.’

‘She had really bad asthma and we lived along a busy, very polluted road. Sometimes she’d need to go to hospital to be admitted, when it got so bad that she couldn’t breathe. We lived in a council flat, so it wasn’t like we had any choice in where we lived and could just move somewhere healthier.’

‘You and your parents?’

‘Just my mother,’ he says. Tia nods. ‘Then, one day when she was six, wheezing so badly, my mother called an ambulance and she was rushed to the hospital. She never came back.’

‘I’m so sorry, Dominic.’ He didn’t really want to kill any of the hostages today. She still believes this. No one else has to die.

‘My mother was determined to get the council, the government, to accept blame. She wanted it acknowledged that the road’s pollution, the extreme level of emissions, killed my sister. She wanted it official, on her death certificate. So she campaigned. Did media, lobbied members of parliament, the EU, wrote to the World Health Organisation. Her whole life revolved around it. The stress of it caused her to have a stroke and then she couldn’t work, and we had even less money. We had nothing, really.’

‘How old were you then?’ Tia asks.

‘Fifteen, sixteen,’ he says. How did he go from there to dropping out of a PhD programme at university much later?

‘That must have been really very difficult.’

‘The coroner eventually agreed to put “pollution” on my sister’s death certificate. I thought finally my mother had achieved what she wanted to. Her health seemed better; I thought she’d try and go back to work and we’d have enough food around the house again.’ He swallows. She sees something loosen in his throat. ‘But she’d been out of work for a while and she couldn’t seem to find anything.’

Tia doesn’t want to manoeuvre him for firearms. She can’t do it. He deserves another chance at life. ‘I’m so sorry that happened to you, Dominic.’ She doesn’t believe he meant to kill anyone in the museum. He came here in absolute despair. She can’t bear to watch him die.

‘I failed my GCSEs. About a year after that she had a second stroke and needed full-time care. She went into a home. Then I had no one,’ he says. ‘I was sofa-surfing with mates. People get sick of you quickly.’

‘Then what happened at university, Dominic?’ Tia doesn’t know what went wrong at university for Delia. She was too self-involved that year to notice. Too busy trying to be someone new.

‘I never got there! I just told you!’ The words spray into her face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Tia says, confused.

‘I had nothing. I had to try and get a job. I don’t even have any GCSEs! All I wanted to do was become a biologist. But I was just trying to survive and then it was too late to try and get to university. It is. It is too late.’ His hand flies through the air. She braces herself for a smack to the face. It’s his own leg he’s hitting with the gun. ‘I’d have to finish school first, and I can’t go back now and sit in a classroom with people ten years younger than me. It’s humiliating. They think I was a PhD student,’ he points to Asher and Storm. ‘But I was just hanging around the university, sneaking in to some large lectures where no one would notice me.’

‘I am really sorry, Dominic,’ Tia says. It’s dangerous to feel too much for him. But now she has an opening. ‘It’s not too late for you to become a biologist.’

‘I told you, I don’t even have my GCSEs!’ The hand with the gun punches into his thigh. He leans forward into Tia’s face. ‘Do you think I can kill you both with the same bullet?’ A thud. Behind her, Hannah has dropped to the ground. Her breaths sound like squeals as she gets back to her feet.

Dominic shoves Tia to the side. He is face-to-face with Hannah. Dominic spins the rucksack around to his front. Unzips the main compartment. One hand dives in. The other flips the gun around his finger. The barrel is pointing into his own chest now. He holds it at that end.

The handle is outstretched to Hannah.

Tia freezes.

‘Don’t you want to get revenge on Ben?’ Every fibre in Hannah’s body seems to shake.

‘Take it,’ Dominic says. ‘He named you out of everyone. He wanted you to die. Shoot him. Go on.’

Hannah looks at Tia. This is a trick. She searches Tia’s face, but she has no answers. Hannah swoops on the gun. Standing, her legs quake. Both hands are around the pistol. Her arms go poker-straight. She’s pointing it at Dominic.

He laughs. ‘Not at me. Ben. Shoot him. I didn’t nominate you to die.’ Dominic’s bag is at his chest and both hands are inside it now. ‘Shoot him or I press this and blow us all up.’

29.

Asher

Now

Finally, Asher is offered a work placement opportunity. The woman who phones promises good experience and a solid employer reference for his otherwise blank CV. On Tuesdays and Thursdays for the next month he is invited to join a local community group filling dangerous road potholes in the area. The council doesn’t have the resources to deal with the holes themselves, so these sorts of roadworks are now often done by a band of volunteers. Participants are drawn from all sections of the community, the organiser assures him, so Asher won’t only be mixing with fellow ex-prisoners, unlike some other schemes which sound like an extension of jail. Apart from the group leader, no one will be aware of Asher’s background. They will only know whatever he chooses to tell them about himself. He’d rather be planting trees, sorting recycling somewhere or even picking up rubbish. The main casualty of potholes is people, though he supposes they can also kill animals who are being transported by road. Lorries carry supermarket products and if one of those crashes, that’s wasted plastic and oil derivatives, and spoiled food, so in a way, fixing the roads is environmental, he admits.

He needs money. Until Asher gets a cash injection, he’s only treading water, sitting in the back row of his new group meetings and nodding along. He’ll do this volunteer programme for a couple of months and then land a real, paying position. By the new year, he’s hoping to have saved enough to fund what he needs to do.

Asher parks his mother’s car out the front of the council building and walks to the classroom. She insisted he drive today even though it meant an inconvenient bus trip to her work. She is so excited for him, offered a position after all this time. She was up at dawn this morning making scrambled tofu with mushrooms and avocado, telling him he needed a proper cooked breakfast before a day of manual labour. Because of her enthusiasm, Asher finds himself actually looking forward to today despite his nerves.

‘Welcome, take a seat,’ a smiling blonde woman instructs from the front of the room. As he enters, it looks as though the others have already introduced themselves and fallen into groups. It’s Fresher’s Fair all over again. ‘Welcome to the Community Road Warden Training Programme,’ she says, arms outstretched. Asher drops himself into a chair at the side of the room. There’s about a dozen volunteers altogether. ‘This morning we’ll spend ninety minutes going over road safety, and then we’ll go outside and get stuck into the practical.’ The woman is incredibly smiley and for the rest of the morning Asher aims his eyes to just above her head so her grin doesn’t swallow him whole.

After the introductory session, there is a coffee and tea break. Asher is about to say hello to the man stood next to him at the urn, but he loses courage and escapes to the toilets. Inside a cubicle, he pulls all the frayed bits of himself together. He rejoins the group in the corridor and they follow the instructor outside to the council carpark. ‘Okay, everyone,’ the woman says, gathering the volunteers into a circle. ‘This is our practice tarmac.’ She hands out fluorescent orange safety vests.

‘Don’t look directly at it, you might go blind,’ a man says next to Asher. ‘I’m Maynard.’ He holds out his hand for Asher to shake.

‘I’m Asher.’

‘I retired last month,’ Maynard says. ‘I was a taxi driver. Spent thirty years cursing unfilled potholes, so I thought now that I have the time, I should do something about them.’

‘Congratulations on your retirement.’

‘What brings you here?’

He wants his mother to stop worrying about him, for one. The main reason is because you can’t do anything in this world without money. ‘I just want to make a difference,’ Asher says.

‘It’s nice to be working with you,’ Maynard says. They pair up and over the next hour manage to fill the training pothole with the sticky black substance. He tells Asher about his grandchildren and the rescue greyhound he’s recently adopted. Asher talks about his mum.

The group leader comes over to inspect their bit of road. ‘Well done to you both, this is an excellent job,’ she says.

‘He did most of it,’ Asher says.

‘Nonsense, he’s a natural,’ Maynard says, and Asher wonders if maybe he really could be good at this. Then, the instructor calls everyone over to regroup. She uses their pothole as an example to demonstrate the correct way to smooth over the surface of the tarmac. All twelve people huddle around with Maynard and Asher at the centre. It’s then that he sees her coming across the carpark. He recognises her hair, styled exactly the same as in court, and the way she wore it in the museum that day. The flawless ballerina bun of someone who thinks they’ve never done anything wrong.

Tia West is headed straight for Asher in her police uniform. He wants to fall through the gravel and disappear under the earth. How does she even know he’s here? She must be following him. His fingers go weak and he drops the shovel in his hand. He tries to work this out, but his thoughts are splitting apart. None of this makes sense.

Tia keeps walking and now everyone has noticed the approaching police officer. The group leader stops talking and turns to her. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m sorry to disturb. I’d like to speak to Asher Russell for a moment.’

Maynard looks at him. Everyone looks at him. A uniformed police officer wouldn’t pluck someone from their workplace unless they’d done something very bad. Tia West came here to humiliate Asher, and she’s succeeded. Asher walks away and Tia follows. He can hear whispers behind him and imagines the group leader revealing to everyone his troubled past, titillating them with news that he’s recently out of jail. When he’s halfway across the carpark, Asher stops and turns to Tia. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I’m sorry to just show up, but I’ve been trying to speak to you for quite some time.’

‘I’m allowed to be here,’ Asher says. ‘I’m not even under curfew anymore. Ask my probation officer. You can’t stop me from being here.’

‘I know. I only want to talk,’ Tia says. ‘I’ve called your mum several times. That’s the only phone number I have for you. I’ve left messages. I’ve come to your house. She won’t let me speak to you.’ He thought all of those knocks at the door were tabloid journalists. He tries to wipe the surprise from his face.

‘Speak to me about what?’ Asher is outside in the open air and that’s the only thing keeping the museum walls from pressing into him, squashing him into a human pancake.

‘Are you aware Andrew Ward killed himself?’

Asher looks back at the group of roadworks volunteers, exchanging shovels and trowels and getting on with their morning without him. ‘Asher, are you listening?’ She steps closer, takes over his personal space. No, no, no. This isn’t happening. He fumbles the phone from his pocket, the mobile number Tia West does not have, and dials his mother. She’s at work but picks up on the third ring.

‘What’s wrong, love, how’s your group going?’

‘Tia West is here,’ Asher blurts.

‘Asher, I only want to talk,’ Tia says, holding out her hands as though she’s innocent.

‘She turned up in her police uniform,’ Asher continues to his mother. ‘She says she’s been calling you and coming to the house and I don’t understand what’s going on.’

‘Listen to me, Ash,’ Yvette says. ‘Stay calm. Walk away from her. You’re free now. You aren’t doing anything wrong. Look at her uniform again. It belongs to a private company. She isn’t a real police officer. She can’t do anything to you. Ignore her. Just get in the car and drive home.’

‘Asher, five minutes,’ Tia tries to get his attention. ‘Please.’

‘Are you okay to drive home?’ Yvette asks.

Asher knows he sounds panicked. ‘Yeah.’

‘Call or text to let me know that you’re there safe,’ his mother says.

‘Okay.’ He hangs up and walks in the direction of the car.

‘Asher, wait.’ Tia West is running after him. ‘Can we go somewhere, sit down and have a proper conversation?’ He starts jogging, getting the keys ready. He thinks of the inquest report and everything this woman did wrong that day. People were killed because of her. His uncle.

‘Listen. Asher. The surviving hostages are being stalked by someone. Harassed. Some of them are getting death threats. It’s very serious. Andrew killed himself because of them. I need to ask you a few questions.’

Asher is the one being stalked. Finally, he gets a job after months and months of applying, it isn’t even a paid job, and she comes here and ruins it for him. He is the one harassed. The hostages won’t stop talking about him. Jess Anand’s book is about to come out. There are countless websites and newspaper articles. His name and his face, and his mother’s too. He’s recognised out in public and this will follow him forever and he will never have a life, a proper life, ever again. All he can do now is get in the car. Get home to his mother. She’s all he has.

Asher remembers he’s still wearing the fluoro orange safety vest. He pulls it off as he runs and tosses it to the ground. Only a few more steps now. In the vehicle next to his he sees a blanket and a dog leash on the backseat: Maynard’s car. This is it for Asher. He can’t come back.

‘Asher, please.’

He’s in the driver’s seat and Tia West is standing right in front of him, her body inches from the bonnet. She’s trying to stop him from driving away. She’s not a real police officer. She can’t send him back to prison. Asher turns the key to start the engine and at the last moment, she moves aside. ‘Come on, Asher, please. Give me five minutes,’ he hears through the sealed car window.

He speeds out of the carpark, both hands sweaty around the steering wheel. He has to do this now, he realises. Left with no choice. He can’t wait until he gets a job and slowly saves money. Asher must find a way to get the cash he needs, fast. When he’s certain Tia West isn’t following him, he slows down. He tries to calculate the minimum amount. He can probably manage with as little as two thousand pounds.

At home, Asher texts Yvette as promised and ensures the front door is locked tight. He has bits of gravel and tarmac stuck to the backs of his hands. He rolls up his sleeves to wash in the sink and sees his bare wrist. That’s what he’ll do. In his bedroom, he gets the box from his dresser and takes it into his mother’s study. A whole group of his uncle’s friends clubbed together to pay for this watch and it’s special enough that Harrison only wore it a few times a year. It has to be worth something substantial. He searches online for a dealer. Asher simply cannot waste any more time. Once he has an address for a company that looks suitable, he puts the watch in his pocket and heads out for the train.

The shop is closing soon for the day, but Asher gets to Marylebone with half an hour to spare. He places Harrison’s watch onto a leather mat and waits for his appraisal. Asher wanders around the shop looking at silver rings and gold bracelets, some bulky, others fine; the plain and the ostentatious. Is everything in here from the deceased? Prised off dead fingers and ice-cold wrists? Asher doesn’t feel guilty. He isn’t sad. If Uncle Harrison understood, if he really knew the state of the earth and the animals and the ecosystem, he’d support Asher in what he’s about to do.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ the dealer calls him back over. ‘I can offer you £3100.’ Asher knows he shouldn’t accept the first quote he’s given, but this isn’t about money. He cares only about the planet and he isn’t like other people. Asher only takes what he needs; not more, more, more.

‘Okay, thank you,’ he says. ‘Cash please.’ Asher walks out of the shop with a thick envelope and nothing standing in his way.

30.

Tia

Now

Tia’s thoughts are tumbled, as though she’s waking in a strange hotel bed that’s orientated the wrong way. From across the other side of her room, the alarm is blaring but she makes no move to turn it off. Her hands go stiff into claws. This is definitely her room. Her bed is positioned as it always is. But on the wall in front of her there’s a painting. Her usually bare wall. Tia didn’t put it there.

She must have. She’s forgotten because she’s been so tired lately with everything that’s going on. The alarm is drilling into her head. She is staring at the painting but she needs to get to the device to turn it off. Her fingers tremble against the buttons. She turns the phone off completely and drops it. Silence. Now she’ll be able to think.

Tia moves to the wall. The painting doesn’t disappear. She steps closer and reaches to touch it. Solid. Four fingers run along the length of the paper.

It’s real.

She looks at her hand.

She checks that’s real.

She knows this painting. She’s seen it before. It’s exactly like the one she admired in the Bennett Museum, minutes before she was confronted with Dominic.

The painting is from her imagination, not the museum. None of this is actually happening. Tia is still asleep. This is a nightmare. The one where she’s in the room of the siege, notices the unlocked door and runs, leaving the other hostages to be slaughtered. She reaches for the print again, hoping it will dissolve in the air. She feels smooth paper. The corner is sharp against her thumb. No. No. No. She pulls it from the wall in one swift motion and watches it settle on the floor. There are two sticky dots on the back. Double-sided tape. Someone has been in here. They came into her bedroom and hung this painting overnight. She’s touched it now. She’s potentially rubbed off their fingerprints, but what difference does it make? All that matters is someone broke in here while she slept.

In front of her eyes, the colours in the painting start to bleed and dance into the room as she fights her panic and tells herself to stay quiet. The bedroom door is slightly ajar. How she left it last night? She can’t be sure. Tia takes three careful steps and puts her ear to the wood.

The hum of the fridge.

The tick of the kitchen clock.

No footsteps.

Nobody breathing.

Tia scans her room for something she can use. The bottom drawer. She opens it slowly and takes out a pair of scissors. During the inquest, Tia was asked what brought her to the museum that day and what she’d done there before she noticed Dominic with the gun. She described the painting. Someone listened and went out and bought a print. Someone who might still be in the house.

Tia tightens her right hand around the scissors and walks to the kitchen. Two bowls soak in the sink. Everything appears as she left it last night. She keeps the scissors by her side and creeps through the living room. Nothing looks different. She steadies herself to enter the bathroom. Her left hand grips the doorknob and she yanks it back. The window above the bath is yawning wide open. Her eyes lock onto a shampoo bottle. Usually stood on the ledge by the tap, it’s lying on its side by the drain, kicked from its place.

Whoever was here is gone now. She tosses the scissors onto the mat and drops to the edge of the bath, getting her breath back. She hasn’t felt fear like this since the siege. The tub is cold underneath her bare knees and she is in her house, she reminds herself. She is safe. Tia reaches down to pick up the scissors from the bath mat, accidentally collecting a loose thread. This colour. The woolly green loops in the bathmat are the same shade as the carpet in the museum. This is not her bath mat. She pulls her knees to her chest, lifting her feet off the fabric as though it’s on fire. She’s never seen this mat before. Since the siege, she would never own anything that colour. The thread drops from her hand and floats down to the tiles. It’s white. It changed colour right in front of her. Tia looks back at the mat. It’s white too. There’s no green. She’s okay.

Tia has been wondering why the person harassing the hostages has not come after her. That’s the part of this whole thing which has made the least sense. Asher Russell’s probation officer tips her off about his roadworks community group and the day after she goes there and tries to speak to him, this happens. Retaliation. Tia thinks about his reaction to seeing her in the carpark. The anger bobbing just below his surface. She was polite, wasn’t she? She didn’t accuse him of anything. She only asked him for five minutes of his time and he ran so aggressively back to his car – she even thought for a moment he was going to run her over. This has to be him.

Tia finds her phone and switches it back on. There is a message from Hannah, replying to her earlier text. Tia was worried about her in the wake of Jess’s break-in, wondering who this person would come after next.

Yes, I’m fine, thanks, Hannah writes.

She sent a second message, at a little after midnight last night: Why me? Do you know, Tia? I can’t live normally, I can’t leave the boat and stop the drifting and the running until I know.

Hannah is still dealing with her survivor’s guilt.

There’s a third message, sent ten minutes later: We knew each other. Not really well, but we worked together. I thought we were sort-of friends. Everyone else in the room was a complete stranger to him. Now he’s gone and I can never ask him. That’s why I can’t go back to my life. Why me? Why did Ben pick me?

Tia sinks back onto the bed. Delia says: look at what you’ve done. Ben Wing was in that impossible position because of Tia. Hannah survived but has to somehow live the rest of her life knowing that someone who knew her, chose her to die.

Then Delia tells Tia to stop putting words in her mouth. Delia loved her sister. This is not her talking. It never has been. She wouldn’t torment Tia like this. Water and salt presses behind Tia’s eyes, but she won’t give in to it.

Now she has to get out of the house.

Tia dresses and drives to the cemetery. After finding a place to park, she walks to the section where Delia is. First, Tia unpacks her dustpan and rag, and cleans away the dirt and grime from the headstone. Then, she places her miniature bottles of Tia Maria on the grave. Neither Delia nor Tia particularly liked the taste of it, but they forced themselves to drink the coffee liqueur each year on Tia’s birthday, a tradition forged when they had their first drink together at thirteen and fifteen. Not recognising any of the labels in their parents’ drinks cabinet, they chose that bottle because how bad could it be when it shared Tia’s name? This must have been where their parents got ‘Tia’ from, they decided. They couldn’t possibly wait until they were eighteen to try the drink she was named after.

Each time Tia comes to the cemetery, she remembers a different anecdote from their childhood and analyses it for clues. Today she’s thinking about when they were eleven and thirteen. It was the first year their parents had finally allowed them to stay home all day in an empty house during school holidays without any supervision or adult checking in. The girls went to the supermarket for crisps one morning and forgot their key and found themselves locked out. To avoid a grilling from their dad, they climbed in through the roof, crawling through a skylight. On their bellies, the two girls shimmied through the roof space, getting disorientated and disgusted by the cobwebs. They opened what they thought was the door to the attic but which was actually a storage space, untouched for several decades. Inside was a stash of four Halloween costumes which must have belonged to the previous owners of the house. Intricate witch and wizard costumes, handmade in velvet, back when people could sew and put real time and effort into creating their own clothes. They took the costumes down and each wore one for Halloween that October. The girls got so many compliments, particularly from adults who blushed at the pound-shop plastic capes their own children were in, and they had to say they’d simply got lucky at a market stall to avoid admitting the caper to their parents. And that was it: they had a nice time that Halloween; they felt magical, special. One harmless little secret among countless others shared between siblings, worth remembering only because it’s the smallest details, the pleasant and inconsequential days, which make a life. Tia flips the whole thing over in her mind, goes back into the crawlspace of the roof, the feel of the costume, how Delia looked in her witch’s hat. She is searching for hints, something telling her what to say seven years later when she is needed to convince her little sister to stay alive. If there is a clue, once again, she misses it.

Tia says goodbye to Delia and drives home. On the way, she passes the bridge, a local suicide spot. Somewhere she’d be called to, possibly several times a year, if she were working as a negotiator. Tia looks closely as it disappears over her shoulder. The huge silver bolts tarnished by the weather, the steel that needs repainting. She wonders how many people have jumped from there but pushes the question away before she lands on a number.

As she pulls up out the front of her house, she imagines Asher Russell here last night, parking his car in this very spot, stalking around the back to the bathroom window. He’s going to hurt one of the hostages and she has to stop him. Tia’s not afraid of him. He’s only alive because of her. The Asher Russell who got out of jail and skipped his curfew and started threatening the siege survivors: she made him. This campaign has to be his doing. He knows she’s onto him and that’s why he broke in here last night: to try and scare her off. But what proper, concrete evidence does Tia have? His car out the front of Jess’s place. The malfunctioning ankle tag provided him with opportunity, but that isn’t proof of anything. She still doesn’t know who he’s working with or who he might have hired to harass Enoch and Andrew while he was still in prison. Tia needs to go to the real police and somehow convince them to help her investigate Asher before it’s too late.

31.

Tia

Then

Hannah has the gun. Both of Dominic’s hands are inside the bag twisted to his chest. ‘Shoot Ben or I press this and blow us all up.’

She’s pointing the weapon at him. Hannah’s arms drop down an inch, tiring, probably throbbing. She catches herself and lifts the gun higher. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Ben tried to have you killed.’

‘No,’ Hannah says. It’s unconvincing. She chews on both lips.

‘You can study biology online, Dominic,’ Tia says. He lets go of the gun. Now Tia needs him to give up the bag. ‘You don’t have to sit in a classroom with teenagers.’

Dominic ignores Tia. ‘Do you think the ants, or any animals on this planet, allow themselves to be eaten and do nothing about it?’ Leaning into Hannah, he makes the tip of the barrel press into the bag, the bomb. ‘Do you think they don’t try to fight back?’ He’s whispering now. Taunting her. Hannah shuts her eyes. Her fingers go bloodless around the gun. ‘Shoot him.’ Tia watches Hannah’s eyes pop open. They land on Ben.

‘Dominic,’ Tia says. ‘You can find a way. People will help you. I will help you.’ Tia has to get him visualising himself in the future. Imagining a plan. ‘Bill can get a university advisor on the phone. We’ll find someone.’ She can see him walking out of here alive. Eventually, being released from prison. Studying. Having some kind of life.

Hannah is squinting to see through her watery eyes. The gun has dipped to waist-height.

‘A university would never take me,’ Dominic says. ‘I asked. Once I went to an open day and they said it would never happen. I’d need A-levels. It would take years.’

‘That’s only one university,’ Tia says. He’s listening to her. She can get him to do this. ‘There are options. I promise you. Many more than you realise.’

Dominic steps away from Hannah and walks to the window. Breathing hard, Hannah follows him with the gun. She won’t fire it. Tia’s sure. First she’ll get the bag from him. Then she’ll worry about the pistol.

‘A proper university advisor can tell you about everything that’s possible. We’ll get someone on the phone now, okay?’

He’s silent.

Tia’s confidence deserts her.

Bill and the other police outside must be dumbstruck. Shaking their heads in disbelief because she has made such a mess of this. This guy should just blow up Tia West, they’re all thinking. Put her out of her misery.

‘I want to do my GCSEs, then A-levels, then a Bachelor of Science degree from jail.’ Dominic says it so quietly she wonders if it was a hallucination. Butterflies arrive in Tia’s stomach.

‘We can arrange that,’ she says. ‘You’ll have a chance to study.’ He’s still relatively young. He can live another life. She believes that. ‘Let’s work out how we’re going to do this.’ He will place his bag on the ground for bomb-disposal, and then this is all over.

‘Alright.’

Delia says: don’t breathe. If you breathe, sister, you might choke. ‘We can let everyone go. I’ll stay here with you. You put the bag on the floor, over there,’ Tia points to a spot on the carpet. ‘You and I sit together and we’ll wait for the police to come up. What do you think?’

‘They’re going to try and shoot me.’

‘They won’t. If we put the bag on the ground over there, we sit together and wait, they won’t fire. No one will get shot.’

One hand leaves the bag and scratches his head. Dominic pulls on an ear. She tells herself to be patient. Ignore the butterflies. Forget she is a body in this room. Even so close to the finish line, she can’t hurry him.

‘I’ll go to jail tonight?’

‘You will.’ It won’t help to lie to him.

‘But tomorrow I can start studying. There will be options for me to redo my GCSEs?’

‘I’m sure you can start the process straight away,’ Tia says. ‘You’ll have a solicitor and it’s something you can talk to them about as well.’

A light seems to turn on in his eyes. ‘I want to set up a scholarship. For people who don’t have A-levels. To help them get to university.’

‘That sounds like a really nice idea,’ Tia says.

Dominic lowers himself to the floor. The bag is still strapped to his front, but his hand is moving there. He shakes it from his shoulders. The rucksack drops to his lap. She did this. Tia got him here. She knew she could.

‘Dominic, can I have the keycard for the door so we can open it and let the others out?’

Fingers roam his pocket. Already she can hear the hostages behind her push to the nearest exit.

‘This scholarship,’ he’s saying, ‘should be for people who don’t even have their GCSEs.’

‘I’m sure you could set up a scholarship,’ Tia says. ‘And you could have it in the name of your sister. In memory of her.’ He nods and holds the keycard out for her. Tia reaches for it. ‘And your mum,’ she smiles. ‘You could name it after her too.’

‘My mother?’ Dominic’s hand snaps back. His fist closes around the key. ‘She’s the reason I have nothing. That I am nothing.’ He rises to his feet. No. No. He barges into Tia. He’s holding the bag to his middle. One hand goes deep inside it. She staggers back. Racing to make sense of what just happened. ‘The minute my sister was born, my mother ignored me. I never even existed!’ His mother is a trigger. She’s angered him. Her heartbeat climbs.

‘I’m sorry, Dominic, I didn’t mean to—’

‘I visited her this morning for breakfast and she didn’t react. This is what she does! Like I’m a ghost in the room. She can’t even give me a tiny smile.’

‘I’m sorry, Dominic, I—’

‘The nurse comes in and says, “Why don’t you cut up the banana for her?” And I didn’t plan it. I didn’t go there expecting to do it. But the second that nurse left Mum’s room, I thought: what I have to cut up is her.’

Tia’s legs feel unsteady. His mother. The blood Andrew saw on his arms. That’s who he killed this morning. She can see new energy coursing through him. Tia’s light-headed. Concentrate. She can’t collapse now.

‘Can we sit back on the ground? The two of us?’ she says.

Dominic notices the hostages huddled at the door. ‘Anyone touches that handle and I blow us all up before you’ve even turned it a millimetre.’ They all move away. Tia tries to calculate how many steps it would take her to get to Hannah. Tia has to get the gun. One shot to the head before he can press the trigger. It’s a risk. It could be the only way.

‘I’m sorry, Dominic, for mentioning your mother,’ she says. ‘I know that must be painful.’ Tia edges towards Hannah.

‘I told her I was leaving. I told her last week and she didn’t react. She didn’t believe me! So this morning I packed up everything I own. I took it to her care home.’ One hand emerges from the bag and now both grip the handles. He shakes it. ‘Look, Mum, it’s all HERE. Everything that matters to me. I’m going!’ His possessions are in there. Dominic is saying that is what’s inside the bag. ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Twenty-five and your life can fit into one rucksack.’

There is no bomb. He never mentioned it. Tia saw the wires. She thought she saw wires. She said he had an explosive device and Dominic just went along with it.

‘You were going somewhere this morning, Dominic?’ Tia takes a larger step toward Hannah. She turns. Readies her hand to grab it. ‘And this is your bag of things you were taking with you?’ Colour drains from his face. He realises his error. ‘Are you saying there’s no bomb in there?’

His mouth hangs open.

Dominic says nothing.

He’s heard something.

She hears it too.

The rush of boots on the stairs.

32.

Asher

Now

In his mother’s kitchen, he replicates the vegan meals he had in prison: chickpea paella, aubergine moussaka, pea-and-lentil patties. Rice fit for a serial killer. Legumes good enough for a homemade-bomb maker. It goes cold quickly and he only ever eats half of his plate. Today, Yvette leaves him a note saying she’ll do the cooking tonight. While she’s at work, Asher pulls on jeans and a shirt, then his hoodie and Harrison’s oversized specs, before heading to the library. The weather is too warm for the fleecy top but he can tolerate it for a few hours a day, with the hood pulled up and over his head, skimming the top of the glasses. Behind there, he feels safe. As he walks, Asher mentally goes down the list of hostages and pictures what each of them is doing this morning. Jobs and croissants and text messages from friends. How nice for them. To be both normal and special at the same time.

Inside the library, Asher chooses the computer on the far left of the row, the same machine he uses every day now. He logs in using the generic guest reader credentials he was given on his first visit. A droplet of sweat slips down the back of his neck. The world is blurry through Harrison’s prescription and that’s how Asher appears to everyone too: a smear not worth remembering. He sits there for three hours, until he can no longer tolerate the heat under the hoodie.

Yvette is already home when he arrives. Something simmers on the hob, above a blue flame barely alive. ‘Hi, love.’ Abruptly, she switches it off.

‘Is it ready?’ he asks.

‘No.’ She clings to him then, like she’s a toddler and he’s the one who’s the mother: the child’s whole world. They stand like this for a few minutes before Yvette turns the stove back on and finishes cooking their meal. It is his uncle’s birthday and Asher cannot chew. He cannot swallow. He is not able to taste anything. Harrison should be forty-six years old.

‘Come on, Ash,’ his mother pleads when they sit down together. ‘You have to eat something. You haven’t had a full meal in a week.’

‘Sorry,’ is all he says. Then, long before lockup time, prisoner B3846HK goes to bed.

In the morning, Asher finalises his shopping list. A large rucksack is essential. It should be good quality, one middle-class people buy when they go to Mount Everest and attempt to climb to base camp. He is going to a camping gear and a hardware shop for the very first time and he is determined to appear comfortable and confident around the sales assistants. Everything he gets should be high quality, professional and inconspicuous. Asher writes this all down. He will purchase a flashlight, a good one, reliable and not too heavy. Maybe he’ll even buy a second for back-up. He will need some rope. Strong, several lengths of it. A knife, obviously. Swiss Army is a knife you can buy without attracting much attention and he will choose the biggest there is. Asher will also get himself a good pair of shoes. He will be on his feet for a long time, with no opportunity to take them off, so they must be comfortable. He will wear them with thick woollen socks, which he will also get from the camping place. Asher folds his list into a neat square and buries it in his pocket.

The blinking light of a security camera follows him from aisle to aisle. As Asher selects a blade from the cabinet, he’s so hot inside the hoodie he might spontaneously combust. ‘I’ll take two of those,’ he says to the shop assistant, as he thinks about being instantly cremated, rendered into a single puff of smoke. He imagines flames licking upwards from his feet while he pays.

Asher drops his supplies at home and goes straight to the library without eating lunch. He enjoys the feeling of carrying around an unsatisfied stomach: aching, deflated. Harrison’s reading glasses rest on his nose, hiding his eyes and the tops of his cheeks. His computer is free. He logs in and navigates to the search. Asher opens tab after tab of NGO and government websites. The thick jargon slows his reading pace. He jots down notes on a piece of paper with pencil, easily erased and hidden if it becomes necessary. Moths and other winged creatures flap inside him, eager to break out and fly away. ‘Do you need some more paper?’ A librarian is standing close. One of the four who works here on rotation.

‘No thanks.’ Asher doesn’t shift his eyes from the screen. He refuses to smile back at her; he doesn’t want to encourage interaction. She retreats and he resumes his checking and cross-checking of the key maps and satellite images. Everything is fine for a few minutes. He is able to focus and fully concentrate on the screen. Then Asher feels heat on his neck. It spreads to the side of his face. A girl is staring at him, looking over his shoulder from the neighbouring computer. Asher juts out his chin and glares right back at her. He makes his eyes go as wide as possible. People assume moles are entirely blind or don’t have eyes at all, but actually they are very good at detecting light. She’s still staring at him. She won’t understand what she’s looking at, but she has definitely seen what’s on his computer and he can’t allow that. Asher lifts his hands from the keyboard, displays his mole-claws to the girl and hisses until she scurries away.

There is no changing his mind now. He must go forward and not think about what lies behind. Asher wonders what his mother is doing right now at work and he hopes that someone is saying “thank you” or trying to make her laugh. In his rucksack, in his bedroom, Asher has everything he needs. This is the last time he’ll be coming here. He logs out of the library computer, skids his chair back and leaves.

An hour before sunset, he boards the bus. A man alights at the same stop and Asher lets him walk ahead, waiting for him to pass through the entrance gates first. Robins scatter from the path and settle in the closest tree. A birch sways in the wind, one of the branches waving at Asher to go away. But he will not. He has every right to be here. From his bag, Asher takes the folded funeral booklet and rereads the directions. It should be down here and to the right. He hasn’t been to a cemetery in so long, not since his grandmother died, when he was only seven, and so he never really knew her properly. Most of the graves Asher passes now are bare, but some have fresh flowers leaning in jars or bundled with string. An oversized birthday card has gone soggy in the weather. A blue teddy bear gives Asher a vacant, stupid smile. He will not allow his own body to be buried. He will be fish food, thrown to cockroaches, or cut up into pieces small enough for a carnivorous plant. Up ahead, a woman is walking a chubby shorthair dog, but otherwise he has the area to himself. He pushes the hood back from his face and removes his uncle’s glasses. Asher misses him so much. Especially this past week, he feels the loss of him like a limb chopped from his body. Asher crouches then drops to the dirt, folding his legs. How close are they right now? He places both hands flat on the ground. How deep do they bury people? Maybe Asher could punch his hand through this dirt and reach the coffin. If only they could talk. Have a conversation for even half an hour, about anything, nothing at all. He made Asher feel as though he was worth something and he knows no one else in this world will give him that apart from his mother.

When he is sure no one is watching: ‘Hey,’ he says. Silly, talking to a grave. ‘Hey,’ he says it again, and this time it gives him a burst of energy. ‘I’m here.’ He scoots closer to the headstone. He wants to touch it. That’s okay, isn’t it? He doesn’t think it’s disrespectful. Asher looks over his shoulder and confirms he has privacy. Green moss sprouts along the edges of the stone, furry under his palm. He licks two fingers and wipes away the dirt, scrubbing where the letters are. He scratches away bits of leaves and debris with his nails until it’s fully legible:

Dominic Brown.

The woman with the dog is coming back down this row and heading straight for Asher. He gets to his feet, takes a large step to the left and dips his head down, pretending to pray in front of a stranger’s grave. When Dom was first buried, and while Asher was in prison, his grave was graffitied by vandals. One of the prison officers told Asher about it just to wind him up. Well, mean prison officer, he’s here now paying his respects; it’s lovely and quiet and there are squirrels running along the fence, and he thinks Dom would like it here very much. He looks again at Dom’s funeral booklet, bought from an eBay seller in Scotland who promised discretion and a discount on their other listed items previously owned by Harold Shipman and Fred West. ‘It’s tomorrow, Dom,’ Asher says. ‘I’m doing it for you too.’ He listens to the wind whistle through the cemetery until it’s dark.

Asher goes to bed in his clothes but he doesn’t sleep. He lies on top of the duvet like a rotting log waiting until it’s time. His bag is packed. Everything is ready. His shoes are patient by the door. He has set an alarm, on vibrate only, just in case he does fall asleep, and he holds the phone in his hand all night. Very early, halfway between the devil’s hour and dawn, the phone shakes in his palm. He tiptoes across the room and rolls socks onto both feet. Shoes laced, and new rucksack on his back, Asher walks to the kitchen.

He has his pen and piece of paper ready. On the wall clock: the minute hand is ticking and he can’t afford to hesitate. This is the part of the plan which he hasn’t fully rehearsed. His mother deserves so much more than a few words on a piece of paper, but what else can he give her? Just marks on a page. That’s all he has. His innards, his soul, if he still has one, or ever did. He is sorry for her, so sorry, that her one child in this life is him. On the pile of post, he places a leaflet showing the environmental damage, the threatened species, the ones already extinct, the hopelessness. He’ll leave his note on top. Asher’s fingers curl around the pen. He closes his eyes and opens them again. He begins to write.

33.

Asher

Then

The room is lit up by powerful white light and Asher thinks the museum has been struck by lightning. There is noise too, a heavy thudding sound coming from the floor, as though the storm is already inside the building. He drops to the ground and his knees press into his chest. Thunder clouds are moving all around, and over him, as they roar and screech into his ears. He feels a hand on his arm and clouds are not supposed to have hands, but he cannot open his eyes to see what is happening. Asher shakes it away and makes his body into the shape of a U. He stays very still. The noise is so loud, he decides the roof of the museum must have lifted clean off. No. Now he understands what is going on. The storm has not come down into the building – Asher has gone up there. He is in the clouds, where the lightning also is, and where the raindrops wait to be called to earth – because he has died. His eyes will not open to look. Maybe they don’t come with you once you’re dead. He feels hands again, but different this time. A force is bearing down on him, lifting him up so that the tips of Asher’s toes are skating along the carpet. He is not moving his legs himself but someone else is walking him, marching him down a set of stairs. Tall bodies in dark clothing spread everywhere. Dozens of men, or multiple copies of the same man. A cold thing goes around his wrists, like the door handle of the fridge. He notices that he cannot prise apart his hands.

Wind hits Asher in the face, a fist on each cheek. He can see the sky. Too many human voices invade his ears and his name is being called. Hands around his arms, hands everywhere, he is being marched again and now Asher sees his mother. There are rows and rows of cars and Asher realises he is out the front of the museum. Yvette is looking right at him with her face scrambled, everything in the wrong place. His voice doesn’t work, and so he cannot say anything to his mother before he is pushed into a car. It drives away and into something like a garage. Asher is walked again into a building and made to sit in a small room filled with yesterday’s air. After everything in the museum, it feels safe to be in a small room with no windows.

There is a table in front of Asher and two men sit across from him. Time operates differently in here and he cannot tell if he has been in here for five minutes or five hours. Their questions sound like statements which feel like tricks. He is so tired and thirsty. The men ask him about Dom. His mouth is filled with talcum powder. He desperately needs to sleep. Asher drops his forehead to the table and shuts his eyes but they shake him. Now someone is pushing him back into his chair. Different men are coming into the room, and a woman too.

‘Would you like something to eat?’ one of them asks. He is starving, so unbelievably hungry.

‘Yes.’ Soon, a paper bag is brought in. Inside is a box and a paper cup filled with yellow fizzy drink. It’s from KFC.

‘I’m vegan,’ Asher says. The oily smell of the fried chicken shrinks his stomach and he asks them to remove the bag. They don’t apologise and no alternative meal is offered. He can go without. Hunger keeps you alert. He must stay awake and concentrate.

‘I need to speak to my mother,’ Asher says. Before they tell her the wrong thing, he has to be able to explain everything to her. She must hear it from him.

‘Why is that?’ one of the men asks. Asher guesses he’s supposed to ask for a lawyer like on TV. All he wants is his mother. His uncle is gone. Dom is dead. His mum is all he has left and he needs to find a way for her to forgive him, or else he’ll lose her too.

‘Because Uncle Harrison died,’ he says. Asher knows that’s his fault, and he will never try to claim otherwise. ‘And I can’t survive.’ He looks towards the blue door, to the world beyond it. ‘I can’t go back out there without him.’

‘In that case, I have some good news for you,’ a woman says.

‘You won’t be going “back out there”,’ the man finishes. Asher thinks of the messages he exchanged with Dom on Telegram, and he knows how they must look. The police won’t understand. He realises he won’t be able to make these people see things from his point of view. But maybe Yvette. As long as Asher has her.

‘I absolutely have to phone my mum, please.’

He is ignored and a new man enters the room. ‘I’m the duty solicitor,’ he says through very thin lips. When they’re left alone, this man explains his role. He works for Asher. He will do his best to secure him bail eventually, but what’s absolutely certain is that Asher will not be going home tonight. A dull ache radiates from his middle. Suddenly, he sees this room for what it really is: a shoebox to contain a mouse, a cage to hold a rodent, a pest. Asher blinks and there’s the KFC: the repulsive chicken is still on the table. Leg bones plucked of their meat, tossed by people into animal enclosures, just enough food to keep them alive. Asher shuts his eyes and when he reopens them it’s all gone, and there’s only a cup of water in front of him.

The solicitor talks about his rights and what’s about to happen, but Asher cannot get a firm grip on the words. His eyes land on his jeans. There’s a dark red dot on his lap which he hadn’t noticed before. One nail tries to scratch at it, but it won’t budge. It’s a stain. Hard and dry – it’s been there for hours. Blood. From his uncle Harrison. Asher screams and jumps to his feet.

‘Calm down,’ his lawyer says, but Asher is struggling to remove his jeans.

‘Jesus. Stop it.’ Two police come back in and push him down.

‘I have to get these off. Now. Get them off me!’ It isn’t only a dot: the fabric is completely soaked through. Pints and pints of his uncle’s hot and sticky blood.

They pin him to the chair. He is too tired to fight them. Salty tears drip into his mouth. Why did Asher survive today?

For hours, the questions keep coming. All Asher can think about is how he wishes he hadn’t brought that textbook with him today, or hadn’t left it in his uncle’s car, or hadn’t asked him for a lift, or hadn’t gone to Fresher’s, or hadn’t applied to university, or hadn’t ever been born.

‘And what about Storm?’ a detective asks. ‘What does she believe?’

‘Go back to that first meeting,’ the woman says. ‘What exactly did she say?’ They talk about Storm in the present tense. She’s still alive.

It was Storm’s group he signed up to at Fresher’s Fair. It was one of her recruits who smiled at Asher from across the trestle table and drew him in. Storm chaired the meetings. She was supposed to be in charge of today. Storm and Dom didn’t even really like each other. Her useless protests and petitions is what made Dom feel he had to do something like this. She tried to wrestle the gun from him, but it wasn’t her who paid the price. So much of this goes back to Storm, but what has she lost?

‘Storm was the leader,’ Asher says. He feels a little better. Asher can’t bring his uncle back, but he can do this. ‘I knew they were planning something more than they were telling me, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t think it was this. Storm was in charge.’ Why couldn’t she have died instead of Dom?

34.

Yvette

Now

Yvette leaves the ward at eight in the morning and rushes to her locker to check her phone. There’s still no message from Asher. She has just come off a twelve-hour shift. At ten o’clock last night, she managed to find a couple of minutes to sneak in here and send him a just-checking-in text saying goodnight. At seven o’clock this morning, on a toilet break, she wrote another message telling him she’ll be home soon. He hasn’t replied to either. The lack of acknowledgement is unlike her son. He can’t have been asleep this whole time. She hooks her bag over her shoulder and speed-walks out of the hospital to the bus stop. Asher is a grown man now and she doesn’t want to smother him, but Yvette knows he needs more from her than other boys his age. Her son hasn’t been sleeping well lately and worse, he hasn’t complained, because he never complains. She is worried he is quietly suffering about a lot of things. It’s the silent people we should all be looking out for, she thinks – they are the ones who really get battered by this world. She sees it in hospitals all the time. ‘The squeaky wheel gets the oil,’ the nurses say to one another. You have to watch out for the patients who give you a timid smile and don’t say anything other than ‘thank you’. Afraid to bother you with a request for more morphine even when they’re dying in agonising pain.

On the bus ride home, Yvette rings Asher’s mobile but finds it switched off. She hasn’t bothered to have a landline in the house for years. She could try to call one of the neighbours but there’s no point – she’ll be home in twenty minutes. He is catching up on lost sleep. Asher has always been a light sleeper. He is using the opportunity of Yvette being out of the house to switch off his phone and have a marathon snooze, undisturbed by his mother getting up to use the toilet twice a night. That sick feeling she has, the vinegar taste in her mouth, is because he’s dreaming. At this very moment her son is having a nightmare and because she’s connected with him, her body experiences it too and that’s why she doesn’t feel right. In twenty minutes she will walk through the front door and wake him up from his otherworldly terrors. She’ll have a few hours’ sleep herself and then they’ll spend the afternoon together and she will forget all about this panicked bus ride.

The flow of traffic is stalled by machinery up ahead. Council workers are resurfacing the road. The bus veers to change lanes and Yvette thinks of Asher’s roadworks group and his struggle to find something to do since he’s been out of jail; somewhere to fit. The fabric seat underneath her is as hard as wood but this does not stop Yvette from driving her nails in deep. Pain spreads from her fingers up to her shoulder and she holds her breath. If Yvette opens her mouth, the air released would be as fierce as a tornado, throwing every passenger on this bus to the windows, shattering their skulls against the glass. We fill our lives with stories these days, she realises; podcasts and TV shows, one after another, and they’re all about people going on a journey, learning something, changing. But when someone makes a mistake in real life, we rarely give out second chances. How is it that people can empathise so readily with fictional characters but not someone who’s real? Yvette was never a Pollyanna but she had quite a positive view of humanity before the museum. Maybe this was because of her work. Illness or injury is humbling and most people are on their best behaviour in hospitals, aware that nurses are often the barrier between them and death. Kindness, generosity, compassion – now she knows these are not in human beings’ nature. When these qualities do appear, like in Asher, the world serves up punishment, and tries to stamp them out.

Yvette checks her phone: still nothing back from Asher. Yvette’s been in the same room as people with burns to 90% of their bodies, with kneecaps facing the wrong way and rows of teeth slicing horizontally through opened lips, and none of that pain compares to the feeling of not being able to protect your child, she’s certain. She closes her eyes and folds her hands into her lap. As soon as she gets home, she’ll tell Asher about the money she’s been saving, and they can buy plane tickets and go.

Yvette enters the house, calling out, ‘Asher? I’m home!’ before she has even shut the door behind her. There’s no response. Down the hall, his bedroom door is open a crack. He never leaves it like that when he’s sleeping. She goes straight in and finds the bed made. ‘Ash?’ she calls out louder this time. ‘I’m home!’ Back in the hall, she heads to the kitchen. It’s spotless. She notices the sink is bone dry as though it hasn’t been used since she left for work yesterday. ‘Ash?’ He must be here somewhere. There is something on the kitchen table, on top of the post. A loose sheet of paper. A note.

Mum. Sorry. I can’t be here any longer. This is what I need to do. I know it’s selfish. Sorry for everything, A

Yvette’s pupils are skidding all over the place. She is reading the words in the wrong order.

Sorry. Can’t be here. Selfish. Those are what lift from the page.

One of the first things student nurses and doctors are taught is the importance of maintaining a neutral facial expression no matter what is going on with the patient in front of you. The worst gaping wound you’ve ever seen, the most disgusting sore, a totally repulsive body mangled in a car crash – your face must never change. So this is what Yvette does as she rereads the note from her son. She reads it backwards. She looks for the missing words. She turns over the page but there is nothing on the back. If she can control her face, she can control everything. But now there is hot lava boiling up, spilling inside of her, threatening to flood her system and flush out everything that is calm and good and civilised. Then Yvette remembers Asher’s creative writing class in prison. He enjoyed it, and there was the possibility of him pursuing it further, in real life. She feels pleased with herself for thinking of this. It’s a writing exercise; that’s what this note is! He did not really leave it for her. It is not – she cannot even say the next words. It is not that kind of note. Not possible.

‘Ash, please come out now.’ She will not let her voice wobble. Yvette swallows the poison in her mouth. She is not afraid of whatever this is. Because nightmares aren’t real. She’s dreaming. She’s tired; she just came off night shift. Her mind still thinks it’s yesterday. This is not happening.

She moves through her home. ‘Asher! Asher!’ Yvette is yelling. She didn’t know her voice could be so loud. She rampages through the house, tossing aside chairs and bags, shoes, all kinds of furniture that is in her path. ‘ASHER!’ In her son’s bedroom, she opens the wardrobe doors but he is not inside. He is not in the bed, underneath the mattress, behind the picture frames on the wall, or under the television, or between books on the shelf, inside the cabinet that houses the boiler, or the shed in the garden, or anywhere. His new shoes are gone. So is the mug with the talking cow that he’s always using, absent from its usual spot on his dresser.

999. She dials the number and screams: ‘Police. Police!’ The person on the other end of the phone is trying to speak to Yvette, but she talks over them. ‘My son’s missing. He’s done something. He’s hurt himself, I know he has.’ She gives her address then repeats it even though they don’t ask her to.

Yvette fails to comprehend what the operator is saying to her. All she hears is “local police station”. Then: “question”. “Information”.

‘He’s not a happy boy,’ Yvette says, inadequately. Then she hangs up because she knows this is wasting precious time. She scrolls through her contacts and phones Asher’s old probation officer. It’s a mobile number. It rings. It rings out. ‘Fuck!’ she shouts to no one, to herself. She searches for the general number for the probation service and it picks up. She tries to explain to the man. She does everything she can to convey the urgency of the situation.

‘Is your son currently on probation?’ he says, entirely missing the point.

‘ASHER RUSSELL.’ Yvette can hear computer keys being tapped. She is transferred twice.

‘Hello? Mrs Russell?’ A new person.

‘Hello!’ Yvette shouts. ‘I remember you. Your voice! I recognise it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ this man is hesitant, ‘I can’t recall an Asher Russell.’ His tone. She knows he’s lying.

‘You worked with him. I’m certain.’ Yvette never forgets a voice. ‘We spoke before. You know my son.’

‘I don’t think so.’ There’s panic in her voice and this man just doesn’t want to get involved.

‘You have to help me, please,’ Yvette says.

‘Is he currently in custody?’

‘No. He’s missing. I think he’s hurt himself. He left a note. I need help. I don’t know what to do.’

‘I can try and transfer you to your local police station …’

She hangs up. She is running out of time. Maybe he really doesn’t remember Asher. The world is ready to forget almost anyone.

Yvette calls Asher’s phone once more. Switched off. Think. Where would he go? The lava inside her. It scorches every inch of her soft tissue, and now it’s starting to eat through the bones. The bridge. Oh no. She must get to the bridge.

Her car keys are by the front door and Yvette snatches them up on her way outside but she can’t seem to coordinate her arms and legs properly. Can she physically drive? She has to try.

She tears out onto the road and within a couple of minutes she has knocked over two rubbish bins and accidentally mounted the kerb. She goes through a set of red lights because she does not care about anything, or anyone else, other than Asher. It seems unbelievable to her in this moment that she is a nurse, that she ever thought that anyone besides her son mattered. She has hit something, run over a small object and now the car is feeling sluggish even though her foot is heavy on the pedal. One of the tyres might have a puncture. Yvette is about two more minutes away from the bridge. She’ll make it. She has to.

When she arrives, Yvette doesn’t turn off the engine properly, she just puts the car in neutral, takes the first-aid kit from the boot and runs the rest of the way. ‘ASHER!’ She can’t see him. She can’t see anyone. He must be here. ‘ASHER! IT’S ME!’ She looks down over the side into the dark water underneath. She drops the kit and climbs up onto the railing. ‘ASH! PLEASE! IT’S OKAY.’

Behind her, cars are slowing and coming to a stop. People speak to her in fragile tones. It’s nine o’clock in the morning: the area is busy with workers on their way to office jobs. They are afraid she is about to jump. It almost makes her laugh. But isn’t that what she came here for? If Asher wasn’t here ready to be scooped up into her arms, hasn’t she known from the moment she picked up the note that this is what she’d do?

Yvette looks down at the black water below, cold and hungry; it beckons her. It already has Asher, and now it wants her too. Why doesn’t it pull down Tia West? That’s who the river should drink.

Yvette staggers back from the edge. ‘Get out of my way,’ she snarls at the people crowding around. They don’t dare touch her. She’ll be back here soon enough, but there’s something she needs to do first.

35.

Tia

Now

Tia’s phone lights up with a call. It’s her brother.

‘Hi, Rory,’ she says. When did she last speak to him? Four, five months ago? This lack of contact has to stop. They’re not close but why shouldn’t that change?

‘How are you?’

‘I’m okay. What’s up?’ she says. ‘How are things?’

‘I went to the cemetery this morning and I saw your flowers. You fixed it all up. Cleaned the grave much better than my usual spit and polish job.’

‘I’m glad it still looks alright.’

‘I’d give you a nine out of ten.’

‘That’s pretty good,’ she laughs. She wants to ask him if there’s a specific reason for this conversation, but that might suggest he shouldn’t call just to say hello, which is what she’d like, actually. For them to start doing exactly that.

‘I saw your company in the newspaper the other day. Brilliant Bobbies. A photo of two officers showing off their Saturday-night haul. They found a dozen knives hidden in planters and street furniture in Central London. They said gang members hide knives around the city so they’re there when they need them, but if they’re stopped and searched by police, they don’t have any weapons on their person, so they’re fine. Clever, really.’

‘I found one recently,’ Tia says. ‘Hidden in a flower pot at a train station. The knife was green, even the handle. It had obviously come from a fashionable kitchen set in all different colours. This one was almost the same shade as the plant itself, camouflaged very well. You have to admire these gangs’ ingenuity.’

‘You’d almost feel bad for confiscating it.’

‘Exactly.’ Now they’re both laughing.

‘Anyway,’ Rory says. ‘How are you?’ They’ve already asked each other this.

‘I’m okay,’ she says. ‘How’s everyone, how’s the family?’

‘They want to know when you’re coming round for dinner.’

‘I’d like that.’ Tia hasn’t seen her niece since her last birthday party. She turned four.

‘Next time we should go to the cemetery together,’ Rory says.

‘I’d like that too,’ Tia says. ‘Next week I’m on day shift, so my evenings are free for dinner. You could take your pick.’

‘Let me check the calendar tonight and I’ll text you.’

‘Great.’

‘I also saw something in the newspaper about the siege inquest,’ he says, tentative, as though retreating from his own words.

‘I read some of those articles,’ Tia says. ‘But sometimes I see the headline and I just don’t want to know anymore.’

‘Actually, I saw quite a lot,’ Rory says. ‘I saw that you were courageous and did what you could to protect the hostages and get information out to the police. Things might have been much worse for the hostages if you weren’t there.’

‘Who said that?’ She keeps her voice level. He’s only being kind.

‘The inquest report. It was published this morning. Most of the papers are reporting on it. I assumed you knew.’

‘I didn’t know it was today exactly, but I knew it was coming.’ It almost feels like a relief now; finally the thing she’s been dreading is here. Delia says nothing.

‘It’s hard not to think of Mum’s coroner’s report,’ Rory says. She waits for him to say more. ‘Remember Dad trying to tell us not to read it?’

‘Yeah,’ she says, unsure where he’s going with this. ‘Well, I never believed it anyway,’ Tia says, immediately regretting it. She doesn’t want to upset Rory. She wants to see him more often. She wants to hang out with her niece and have dinner with her sister-in-law.

‘Believed what?’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ Tia says.

‘Of course it was an accident.’

‘Mum went up to that cliff because of Delia.’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘And Delia was my fault. She couldn’t look at me after that.’

‘She went up to that cliff to get my bag; if it’s anyone’s fault it’s mine,’ Rory says. ‘I used to go to that cliff spot every Friday night to drink with some mates. The week after she died, I accidentally left my rucksack up there. Normally it wouldn’t matter but I had something in there of Delia’s, a stupid baseball cap. I really wanted it back. I confessed to Mum that’s where I’d been going on Friday nights and she told me to stay at home and that she’d go and get it. She slipped. She wasn’t careful. She hadn’t been sleeping.’

Tia wants him to say all of that again because she is mixing everything up. Rory’s words went up to a satellite, or a phone tower, and by the time they arrived in her phone just then, they were backward.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Don’t you remember that bag? You must. Dad would have mentioned it.’ Did he? She can’t recall. That year of Delia’s death and then their mother’s felt like a long-ago blur even while she was living it. But the baseball cap. She knows exactly the one he’s talking about. She looked for it at their parents’ house after Delia died, in their old shared bedroom, but she never found it. She blamed herself for thirteen years. Tia thought he loathed her. Their father, their mother – her whole family. She thought they wanted her gone. She wants to scream. She wants to throw the phone against the wall, the house, the whole world. The hostages. Tia thought they blamed her, too. But when she met them all these past couple of months, it was clear it wasn’t true. All of this was her fault – her lack of relationship with her brother, her wasted career, not letting herself move on – but not in the way she thought. Tia made assumptions. She decided what was real, and she never asked anyone if she was right.

‘Rory—’ Now her voice is sad and small.

‘I can’t believe you thought she killed herself,’ he talks over her. ‘Have you for all this time?’

‘It was the only explanation.’

‘I was sure you knew about the bag.’

‘I don’t know what I think now,’ Tia says.

‘Come over for dinner and we’ll talk,’ he says.

‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘I’m sorry it took us so long to have this conversation.’

‘Wait, Rory.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s not your fault. That much I know.’

They hang up and Tia heads to West London to do an overnight shift with Brilliant Bobbies. She thinks about calling Al. She’ll wait until she sees her brother first and they say everything they never said. One person at a time. First, she needs to deal with Asher Russell. She has an appointment at the police station at eight in the morning where she’ll tell detectives what’s been going on.

At five o’clock in the afternoon it’s still warm outside with a long pink scratch across the sky. In the staff kitchen of Brilliant Bobbies, Tia makes an extra-strong coffee to get her through the evening. Pat is here.

‘Hey, I haven’t seen you around all week,’ she says.

‘I’ve been on a very important case,’ Pat says.

‘Really?’

‘The stolen flower investigation.’

‘Oh yes, I heard about that.’

‘Did you know rare orchids can be worth thousands of pounds?’

‘My mind’s been opened.’

‘You coming to the Mayor’s community policing awards dinner thing on Friday?’

‘I don’t know.’ She wasn’t sure she was invited.

‘Come on. I need backup. It’ll be fun.’

‘Maybe I will,’ Tia says. ‘I’ll let you know.’

‘It can double as my farewell. I’ve decided to go back to the Metropolitan Police,’ Pat says.

‘Oh wow.’ This is a shock. She didn’t know going back was possible. She was sure the human resources traffic between the Met and private policing only flowed one way.

‘I miss it,’ Pat says.

‘You’re not joking?’

He shakes his head. He looks around the kitchen as though to check for anyone listening. ‘You’re too young for this,’ Pat says. ‘You should go back too. You had this interlude here after the siege. I’m sure it did you good. It was the right thing. But now maybe it’s time to go back. Anyway, I’ve got to go start my shift. I’ll leave the dinner invitation here.’ He holds up a piece of paper and drops it on the kitchen worktop. ‘Let me know if you can come.’

‘I will.’ Tia finishes her coffee. She’s pleased for Pat if going back is what he wants, but she’ll miss him. They weren’t paired up on the same shift nearly often enough. She turns over the dinner invitation to check the RSVP details and she sees it. Pat left this for her. Underneath the invitation is another piece of paper, a flyer: The College of Policing’s ‘Crisis and Hostage Negotiators National Course’. Details for the next course in Manchester in two months’ time. She takes the dinner invitation with her and climbs the stairs to the ground floor. Tia places her personal things in a locker and puts on a stab vest. A minute before she is due to meet her colleague in the carpark, she runs back upstairs to the kitchen. It’s still there. She picks up the course flyer and folds it into her bag.

After her shift, Tia sees a message from police asking her to come in at noon to discuss Asher Russell and the hostages instead of first thing this morning. She doesn’t want to hang around Central London for that long, so she decides to go home and sleep for a couple of hours. Exhausted, Tia lumbers out of the car, and inside the house she goes straight to bed.

At some point, Tia wakes to the unmistakeable clack of the back door. The lock that sounds like a horseshoe elegantly tapping against the road. She is on her feet now and stepping through her bedroom doorway. What was that? The creak of a hinge. They’re back. She reinforced the lock on the bathroom window, so now they’re breaking her door. As she passes the side table, Tia’s left hand wraps around a crystal vase. Asher Russell. She’s not afraid of him.

It’s dark, Tia realises. Oh God. No. She forgot to put on her alarm. It must be late afternoon and she slept through her appointment at the police station. Tia steels herself to confront Asher. Something reaches her nose. Dark, woody. It smells sweet. What is that? She raises the vase as she edges closer to the kitchen. There’s a shadow. Tall and slender. That’s him. Tia’s eyes are adjusting to the lack of light and she’s wondering why Asher isn’t moving. He’s just standing there. Waiting for her.

‘What are you doing?’ Tia says into the dark.

Then, she’s hit in the face. Something gets into her mouth and eyes – she’s wet. He’s thrown a liquid at her. Something corrosive?

Acid or—

No. Her face is not burning.

She’s alright.

Now yellow light floods the room. Tia tries to rub the sting from her eyes.

She lurches forward with the vase. It isn’t Asher.

It’s a woman. His mother.

‘Yvette,’ Tia says. For a moment she forgets this woman has found her address somehow and has just broken into her home. ‘Are you alright?’ Yvette Russell probably knows what her son’s been doing. She’s afraid of him. She feels trapped.

In one hand Yvette has a metal can. The other holds a large lighter for a gas stove or barbeque.

The liquid all over Tia. It’s petrol.

‘Put the vase down or I let this go,’ Yvette says.

Tia is soaked in it. She looks at the fuel underneath her, spreading through the kitchen and all the way to Yvette five or six yards away. Yvette is crouched, her hand with the lighter hovering over the start of the puddle. ‘If you make any move, I light it and you’ll be in flames within seconds.’ Tia believes her. She lowers the vase to the floor and shows her empty palms.

‘Yvette,’ she says, slowly. She will stay relaxed and that’s how she will negotiate Yvette Russell out of this. ‘What are you doing?’

This woman is controlled by her son. He’s in her house and she can’t get away from him. Dominic killed his mother, and Yvette probably thinks Asher will go after her, too.

Now Tia gets a proper look at her face. Yvette is also wet, but not from petrol. Her cheeks are lashed with tears and her features are flat, as though she’s a cartoon character who has walked into a wall.

‘Asher is gone,’ she says. It’s the way she says “gone” that makes it clear what she means. ‘He left a note this morning. I came home and I was too late. Just too late.’ Tia shouldn’t have gone to the council roadworks group. That only served to tip Asher off and now he’s fled before she could have him arrested.

‘I’m sure he’s fine, Yvette,’ Tia says, her voice as smooth as she can manage. She needs to keep this woman calm. He’s gone into hiding most likely, but his mother has jumped to the conclusion that he’s killed himself. ‘Did you call the police?’

She shakes her head. ‘They’re not looking for him. They don’t care.’

‘You and I can go out,’ Tia says. ‘We’ll look for him.’ Positive energy. That’s what Yvette needs. That’s what will keep them both from suffering third-degree burns. ‘Now. Let’s go.’

Yvette jerks her head from left to right. ‘He’s gone to the bridge. I know it. I know I’m too late.’

‘There are other areas we can look. Where would he go? You know him. Where are his places?’ A drop of petrol has lodged itself in the corner of Tia’s mouth.

‘He doesn’t have places,’ Yvette shouts. ‘He’s been in jail! For three years. Then, on licence, and now he has no job, nothing apart from me! You saved my son in the museum back then, but now you’ve destroyed him. You did this. You pushed him to this with your phone calls and coming to the house. Finally, finally he gets one tiny piece of good news, a scrap of a thing, a volunteer position fixing the roads. And you couldn’t let him have that for even one day. You had to go there and take it from him.’ Yvette is still crouched, her hand inches from the surface of the puddle. Her thumb flicks the lighter on and off, the orange flame growing and receding, licking the air just above the petrol.

‘We can find him, Yvette,’ Tia says. ‘We can.’ Asher was making death threats and breaking into houses – what else could she have done? She had to pursue him. But she doesn’t want Asher to have killed himself. Around Tia, someone always dies.

‘My brother and now my son,’ Yvette says. This woman is out for revenge.

‘Yvette.’ Tia’s eyes are on the lighter. ‘This is very dangerous. One slip of that and we’ll both burn.’

Yvette’s thumb summons the flame. ‘That’s the idea.’

Tia crouches, leaning back against the kitchen cupboards. Her hands go up in a surrender. ‘I never wanted Asher to hurt himself,’ Tia says. ‘I’m so sorry, Yvette.’ All she can do is beg. Pleading for her own life doesn’t seem right. Words can’t fix this. A young man has killed himself and she should have prevented it, but she didn’t. Had she resolved the siege he might not have even gone to jail.

‘He was sending death threats,’ Tia says. ‘I really thought he was going to hurt one of the hostages. You wouldn’t have wanted that, either. That would have sent him back to prison for a very long time. I was trying to help.’ Yvette comes closer, working the flame on and off, calling up the final courage to set Tia alight. Tia watches the hot blue centre.

‘You don’t want to do this. It’s not too late to just walk out of here and go home. You can simply walk away. I don’t care that you’ve broken in, or any of this. Just go home. Be there when your son comes back.’ There is a blank expression on Yvette’s face. She is convinced her son isn’t coming back and what she wants is vengeance. Negotiation only works if the other person is trying to get something worth bargaining for. Yvette doesn’t even want to live. Tia can see it in her eyes. At the Hostage and Crisis Negotiation assessment centre, they explained that in terrorist situations where the offenders see themselves as martyrs and have no intention of coming out alive, the process is utterly useless. The only thing the negotiator can do is bait the gunmen. Reverse their usual tactics and try to anger the offender, provoke them. The idea is to coax them into a direct gun fight with specialist officers who can neutralise them as quickly as possible. People will be killed. Things will not end peacefully. Yvette has come here to finish her, and so someone has to die.

‘I was so excited about Ash getting out of jail,’ Yvette says, paying no attention to what Tia is saying. ‘Finally we were given a date and I just couldn’t wait to see him. But when I went to pick him up, I looked at the building from the carpark, as though for the first time, and I wasn’t thinking about how my son had survived in this horrible place, but what was going to happen to him now, on the outside. I realised he was physically getting out of jail, but mentally, in here,’ her hand free of the lighter makes a fist and pummels her chest, ‘his sentence would go on forever. Not because of the prison or the courts. But because of the hostages. Writing newspaper editorials, doing TV interviews, publishing a book and doing everything they could to make sure he never has a second chance.’

‘Yvette, no.’ Tia shakes her head, trying to understand the meaning of what this woman just said.

‘Do you have any idea how hard it is to get up in the morning, shower, put on shoes, look yourself in the mirror and go to work when you’re overflowing with absolute rage?’ Every tendon and joint in Tia’s back collapses against the wood of the cupboard. Yvette. The car. Her brother’s car. She knew of Dominic’s rant about the ant species – she would have been privy to that information during the investigation, and her son’s trial. None of it was Asher. ‘Asher was the one true victim in all of this. Groomed by Dominic Brown. Andrew Ward could have stopped the siege and didn’t. He and Enoch Black left knowing Asher and Harrison could be killed. His uncle, who he loves more than anyone, is murdered right in front of him. Jess Anand used the siege to reinvent herself, to actually improve her life. My son had his whole world taken away from him. And he’s the one they put in prison.’

From behind her back, Tia’s right hand slips inside the cupboard. ‘What did they say at the inquest about the bullets that went into Dominic?’ Yvette says. Tia’s fingers are in the rectangular space under the oven where she keeps metal skewers for the grill and sushi knives she rarely uses.

‘I remember now. Eleven bullets,’ Yvette continues. A fist around a handle. ‘So many they’re not even sure exactly which police officers managed to hit him. But Dominic got his due. Now you have to get yours.’

‘What about you, Yvette?’ Tia says. ‘They said in court you were in the Animal Liberation Front when Asher was born. Did you hurt anyone? I bet you did. But did you even save any animals? Or were you as useless as an activist as your son was?’ Tia whips the knife to the front of her body and charges forward.

36.

Asher

Now

Asher is surprised to learn it’s properly hot here. Twenty-eight degrees Celsius, according to the digital thermometer on the dashboard. The car’s windows are sealed tight and A/C pumps through the vents. Through the glass, everything is somehow nothing like he pictured and exactly what he hoped for. His taxi drives for over forty minutes until finally Asher is where he is supposed to be.

Asher meets his fellow volunteers and there is a welcome meal of mushroom and aubergine stew. As the sun falls, the air cools rapidly and stars begin to switch on in the sky. He follows the instructions of the group leader and assembles his tent next to a patch of fire-engine-red flowers. He unfurls the rope from his rucksack, cuts a three-yard piece with his Swiss army knife, and uses it to secure the structure. He places his two flashlights by the opening of his tent where he’ll easily find them in the dark if he needs to go to the outdoor “loo”. Asher pulls off his new boots and crawls into his sleeping bag, grateful they told him to buy proper woollen socks. If only his uncle could see him manage a tent by himself.

In the morning, the group is given an introductory tour of this remote national park. The leader points out the nearest bothy – a stone structure just visible over the hill. Their job, for the next eight weeks, is to care for the habitat of the local wild beaver population, recently reintroduced to this part of the Scottish Highlands. Asher and the others will dig, weed, carry out maintenance on fences and clear the tracks. They will stay out of the way of the beavers who are building dams and making their own ponds and homes of hollow logs and tree roots. Everyone in the group is friendly and Asher likes them all. When he looks at his fellow volunteers, he does not see cancer cells and undiagnosed diseases slowly emptying them out. The wild beavers, he thinks, are quite similar to the moles in his mother’s garden. But these animals also live above ground where they can enjoy the sun and swim in deep water. Their mole-bodies are covered in very dense fur and they have iron in the enamel on their teeth, allowing them to gnaw through wood. Reintroduced into various parts of the UK after being near-extinct for 400 years, this is a good news story, Asher’s group leader reminds everyone. A demonstration of nature fighting against hopelessness, persisting and overcoming what seemed like insurmountable odds, because now, as their volunteer group T-shirts all say: The beavers are back!

Phone reception out here is poor so Asher leaves his switched off, and this helps him to forget about his old life and the rest of the world. He misses his mother, but she’ll be doing fine without him. She knows where he is from the leaflet and has the information about their camping spot and the lack of phone coverage. When the volunteers have a day off, he hitches a ride to the nearest village and goes inside a tourist shop selling shortbread and tartan-clad plush toys. Asher buys two copies of the same postcard with a picture of a unicorn. I’m okay, he writes on the first. I don’t know when I’m coming back but I want you to know that I’m better and I hope you are too. He mails it to his mother. The second postcard he addresses to his father in Thailand. I’m planning to come to Thailand next year to volunteer at an elephant sanctuary. I don’t need anything, it would just be great to see you. Then he goes back to the shop and buys another postcard, this one with a photograph of two Scottish wildcats snuggling. Dear Uncle Harrison, he writes, I miss you. He leaves the address field blank and puts the card into the post box. A lorry driver drops him back at the camp site. As Asher approaches his tent, he sees a brown creature with its nose in the scrub. He edges closer and sees a stocky body, short legs and webbed hind feet. A wild beaver. The first one he’s seen at this close distance. Asher steps backwards so as not to scare the creature and in that moment he is not thinking about dying quickly or slowly, or at all.

37.

Now

The needle flicks past the maximum speed limit. Her hands make two claws around the wheel. In the rear-view mirror, she keeps expecting to see the other woman stealing up behind her. There’s no one there. The smell of petrol. She smells of petrol, but she’s okay. Her heart still beats, her lungs continue to fill with air. She is alive. So close to death, but not there yet. Now in her lane there is a bus approaching. Ignore it, she tells herself. They’re not going to get in her way. Nothing will slow her down or stop her from getting there. She watches the road in front and keeps driving, the needle moving further to the right. A lorry thunders past. The vibrations travel up her legs and rattle her skull. Now it’s starting to rain. Quickly, it turns hard. A forceful diagonal rain pummels the windscreen, reducing her visibility. She may as well be driving into the void. But she doesn’t have to see because she knows exactly where to go. The bridge. As fast as she can. All she needs to do is get to him.

The driver’s side window is partly open and notes of rain are coming inside. She thinks of Asher getting damp, soaking wet. She’s coming. Wait for her. She’s so, so sorry. An orange light flashes, irritated, on the dash. No. No. Not now. The car needs fuel. The tank is almost empty, and there’s no way of knowing if she’ll make it all the way to the bridge. She’ll have to stop. Shit. She checks the boot for a spare canister, but there’s nothing, so she keeps driving. Five minutes later, long, slow minutes, she passes a petrol station. At the machine, she fills the car with only ten pounds’ worth, just enough to get her there.

After she pays, Yvette gets back into Tia West’s vehicle. As she sits, her arms fall to her sides, and pain from both limbs runs down the length of her body. Some of Tia’s slashes went quite deep and the wounds on her right arm are still bleeding heavily enough to make her dizzy. Some of it is soaking in to the driver’s seat. She left her own car with the punctured tyre at the woman’s house. When they find her body, it occurs to Yvette now, they’ll see Tia West’s abandoned Toyota and assume it’s her in the water. Some friend or relative will be called to the morgue to identify her body. The immense relief they’ll feel when they see the face of the bloated corpse: not Tia, but Yvette. A stranger. Only to later discover what happened to Tia West might actually be worse.

In the morgue, Yvette supposes she will be Jane Doe. She has no one left alive and no one to report her missing. Not a proper person now, definitely not a full human, they might decide she doesn’t warrant a full name. A single letter will do. G. That’s who she is now, for the last few minutes of her life. G for gone.

The bridge is in sight now and Yvette readies herself to pull over. She looks in the mirror. There’s no one there. She is utterly, forever alone. Yvette, who is now G, leaves Tia West’s car and walks along the side of the road. She moves in a steady rhythm, ignoring the occasional car that beeps as it passes her. With purpose, she walks towards the bridge, goes straight to the structure, and climbs up. She looks down at the water below and her thoughts travel back to Asher’s first day at university, to Fresher’s Week, and this is where the next hour goes, to that day three and a half years ago, to the feel of his cheek as she planted on him a kiss goodbye. All she wanted for her son was peace. Happiness. Contentment. Yvette would have done anything to give him that. Instead, she made him prey. She caused her brother’s death, and the suicide of another. There is darkness all around and her mind blocks the sounds of car horns and speeding engines. Yvette’s not sure how long she’s been standing here, but it’s time to go. She’ll find him, wherever he is. She takes one more step closer to the edge.

‘Hello.’ A male voice from behind her. She does not turn around. ‘Hello there,’ the voice says louder this time. ‘I’m with the police. I want to help you. I’m a negotiator.’

Acknowledgements

It was about ten years ago when I first sat down with a former police negotiator with a view to writing something about their profession, so this book has been quite a long time coming. Thanks to Belinda Neil for meeting a curious but clueless playwright in Cronulla, Sydney, all those years ago.

When this book was a very rough draft, Katie Greenstreet and Melissa Pimentel of Paper Literary helped me whip the idea and characters into shape with endless enthusiasm, acuity and passion. Thanks so much for your generous ideas, belief and vision throughout the redrafting process. Big thanks to Catherine Cho for running the best literary agency in town. My appreciation also to Luke Speed for everything you do.

At Harvill Secker, I couldn’t have done it without plot queen Katie Ellis-Brown’s genius. Liz Foley and Sania Riaz: you were both invaluable and made the book so much better.

Once again, my razor-sharp copy-editor Hayley Shepherd did a fabulous job. Thank you.

Thank you to managing editor Graeme Hall for your seamless professionalism, and Sabeehah Saleq.

It was a real honour and pleasure to chat to Superintendent Pete Sparks about his career as a negotiator. Thanks for your candour and generosity, Pete, and to Lyndon Smith for organising our conversation. I’ve obviously taken many liberties in the novel, which does not try to reflect how London police would react if such a terrible incident were ever to take place.

At Vintage Books I’d like to thank Hannah Telfer and Mia Quibell-Smith for your support. Gratitude also to Malissa Mistry, Nathaniel Breakwell, Caitlin Knight, Rohan Hope, Jade Perez, Justin Ward-Turner, Erica Conway, Charlotte Owens and Sophie Ramage.

Thank you to Lucy Upton in marketing and Anna Baggaley for your digital insights. Dan Mogford knocked it out of the park with the eye-catching cover.

This book was redrafted at Yaddo in beautiful upstate New York. My thanks to the Yaddo Corporation for an unforgettable month. I hope you’ll have me back sometime.

Thanks to everyone who picked up The Interpreter and made a point of contacting me. I may not have said so, but you definitely made my day.

Credits

Vintage would like to thank everyone who worked on the publication of THE NEGOTIATOR

Agent

Katie Greenstreet

Editor

Katie Ellis-Brown

Editorial

Sania Riaz

Elizabeth Foley

Copy-editor

Hayley Shepherd

Proofreader

Hugh Davis

Managing Editorial

Graeme Hall

Sabeehah Saleq

Contracts

Emma D’Cruz

Gemma Avery

Ceri Cooper

Rebecca Smith

Anne Porter

Rita Omoro

Hayley Morgan

Design

Dan Mogford

Audio

Nile Faure-Bryan

Inventory

Nadine Hart

Publicity

Mia Quibell-Smith

Amritpal Bhullar

Finance

Ed Grande

Lee Tuck

Jerome Davies

Samuel Uwague

Marketing

Lucy Upton

Amelia Rushen

Yazmeen Akhtar

Production

Konrad Kirkham

Polly Dorner

Digital

Anna Baggaley

Claire Dolan

Brydie Scott

Sales

Nathaniel Breakwell

Malissa Mistry

Caitlin Knight

Rohan Hope

Jade Perez

Neil Green

Amanda Dean

Andy Taylor

David Atkinson

David Devaney

Helen Evans

Lewis Cain

Phoebe Edwards

Justin Ward-Turner

Erica Conway

Charlotte Owens

Rights

Jane Kirby

Lucie Deacon

Lucy Beresford-Knox

Rachael Sharples

Beth Wood

Maddie Stephenson

Agnes Watters

Thank you to our group companies and our sales teams around the world

Praise for The Interpreter

‘Compelling and ingenious, this thriller explores the lengths people go to to protect others’

Prima

‘I raced through it. Brilliant writing, properly tense and a fascinating perspective on criminal trials with an interpreter protagonist’

Harriet Tyce, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Blood Orange

‘An ingenious premise, cleverly executed, The Interpreter is multi-layered and intriguing, gripping from beginning to end’

Sabine Durrant, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Lie With Me

‘Fresh, exciting and original’

Heat

‘Brutally honest about the trauma of adoption, and yet still written with affection about a woman who is desperate for justice, it is no surprise that it has already been bought by Hollywood’

Daily Mail

‘Brilliantly crafted and deliciously dark, The Interpreter is a propulsive and heartfelt page-turner’

Erica Katz, author of The Boys’ Club and Fake

Read on for an extract
from The Interpreter

Prologue

One good push releases the handle, and the brass tongue withdraws into the lock.

‘I’m sorry, we’re actually closed.’ A young woman is fussing behind the counter.

Entering, I peruse the shelves closest to the door.

‘Victorian fittings – it never locks properly unless I use the key. Sorry.’ Her words travel towards me; I swat them away.

There’s a blackboard sign by my feet with the shop’s opening hours announced in pink and emerald chalk. Upcoming events are listed, author talks and playgroup sessions. Stickers in the shape of lions and elephants dot the clean white walls.

‘We open at nine. If you’d like to come back tomorrow?’ She’s speaking loudly now, all wide mouth and heavy vowels in case I am deaf or don’t understand English. My fingers dance across the merchandise as my heels strike the hardwood floor.

The lights at the shop’s entrance have been switched off; only after another step forward is my face fully lit. I take my time. I move past the fabric books for babies and linger over a puzzle display. The girl has emerged from behind the counter and fiddles with a string of coloured flags which droop from the ceiling.

‘I only get paid ’til six and I’ve already closed down the system,’ she says. ‘So I can’t sell you anything.’

I cannot come into a children’s bookshop during business hours, not when there would be parents and children inside. A few weeks ago I ordered a gardening book online. When the delivery came I prised it open on my doorstep and saw a rectangle peeking out from behind the front cover. It was a promotional bookmark: Give your child the gift of reading this Christmas. Underneath the text, images of the five top-selling children’s titles this year printed in a single column. It felt like the rubber band I wore on my wrist as a girl; the au pair would snap it when she caught me biting my nails. Snap. Standing outside my front door, the bookmark dropped from my fingers, into a puddle of the previous day’s rain. It’s still there, three weeks later. I close my eyes and step over it to leave the house each morning. Give your child the gift of reading this Christmas. I only took one brief look at it but that was enough.

All day today I’ve been thinking about the time I read to him from James and the Giant Peach, a favourite from my own childhood. It was summer so we lounged in the garden, a stone plate of sliced white peaches sat between us. Has anyone read to him since me? That’s what I keep wondering. I think I know the answer, but the question keeps on tunnelling. Christmas is coming. How am I supposed to survive until the new year?

‘I only get paid ’til six?’ the girl says again.

It is twenty minutes past six. I extract a single note from my handbag, the new £50 with Alan Turing, and hold it out until she comes.

‘Is this …’ she says, taking it.

‘Overtime.’

‘Wow. I guess I could turn the computer back on.’ She looks lovingly into Turing’s flat, red eyes.

‘He died of cyanide poisoning,’ I tell her, scanning the books filed under the letter K. ‘It’s a profoundly slow and painful death. Your whole body convulses. Then there’s a flood of blood, vomit, bile – until eventually, you run out of oxygen. But only after you beg for it to end.’

She steps backwards and almost crashes into a giant Where’s Wally? cut-out. I tilt my head to examine the picture books: one about a wombat, another with an alligator on the cover. My thumb presses their flimsy spines, so easily snapped.

‘Were you looking for anything in particular?’ she asks, voice cracking on the final syllable.

There’s a famous comic where the villain is trying to build an acoustic weapon. ‘The Calculus Affair,’ I say. ‘It’s a Tintin book.’

‘Let me see if we have it.’ The girl scoots behind the counter. ‘I know we have Tintin in Tibet and one of the hardback collections.’

Sound is a wave which can move through air, liquids, solid human bodies, building up pressure. It’s been calculated that 240 decibels is required to make a human head explode. If I had one wish, this is how I would like to kill you.

‘No, sorry,’ she says, disappointed, wondering, no doubt, if this means she’ll have to return the money. ‘I can order it in for you. Can you wait a week?’

The wish would grant me an evil scientist with crazed hair who would be glad to do it. One word is all it would take. Special headphones over your ears pumping at a 240-decibel volume, not music but speech; one word, repeated over and over until you died. Just one word.

‘That won’t do,’ I say, turning for the exit. ‘I’ll find it somewhere else.’ When I reach the door: ‘Keep the money.’

One wrong word in the right place can be enough to kill.

But you already know that, don’t you?

1.

I don’t always jump when the phone rings, but today ELLIOT SCHOOL flashing on the screen sends my unsipped coffee to the floor. I do my best with a fistful of serviettes as I answer the call.

‘Elliot’s alright, but you need to collect him, he’s not feeling well.’ The barista’s machine gasps and splutters and I step out of the café in order to hear. ‘How soon can you come?’ The voice belongs to the school receptionist.

‘He was happy when I left him an hour ago. I don’t understand how he could feel poorly so quickly.’ It is Elliot’s first day of year two. He doesn’t love school, but he went today without too much complaint.

‘I’m sorry, Revelle,’ the receptionist says, her tone suggesting she means it. ‘I know this is probably inconvenient. Are you at work?’

‘I was about to walk in.’

‘It’s the policy, in case he’s infectious, you know?’

From outside I wave an apology to the waiter for the mess. ‘I’m coming,’ I say, and speed-walk down Fleet Street to flag a black cab. Inside, I give the address for Elliot’s school. He has changed primaries three times already, according to the social worker, Lydia, a fresh classroom of unfamiliar faces with each new foster family. I could have asked her for permission to move him to the school local to me, but I decided to wait until the adoption is confirmed, to not be presumptuous, to not tempt fate. Once the adoption is settled I won’t need to ask Lydia for permission to change schools or for anything at all.

Inside the car, I rush through my phone’s contact list looking for someone who isn’t in the office on a Monday morning. Other people would call their partner to see if they could work from home for the day, then they’d try the grandparents. I have no plan B.

When we arrive at Greenwich, I ask the driver to keep the meter running. Elliot and the receptionist stand waiting, my son with his sleeves rolled up and a school rucksack on his back. My son. The words arrive of their own accord; not forced, for once not strange. I can’t help but smile. ‘Hey, Batman, you’re not feeling well?’ I crouch in front of him.

‘My throat’s a bit sore.’ Elliot twists around my leg.

‘Honestly, he was fine this morning,’ I say, remembering his summer cold last month, but he’s been well since then. ‘Weren’t you, love?’

Elliot shrugs and plucks his Draggie-the-never-washed-dragon toy from his bag – a crutch he’s probably too old for. Should I insist on washing it? Is that what parents do? I don’t have time to think about that as I bundle him into the car. 9:27am.

Elliot loves black cabs. He wants to sit in the front seat, and I try to explain why it’s unsafe without going into gory details about car accidents and what could happen, horrible accompanying images smashing through my mind. Beside me, his eyes are fixed on the window, and I do another scroll through my contacts.

‘Gherkin tower. Draggie will beat the Gherkin!’

I reach L then M then all the way to T with still no idea as to who could take Elliot.

‘He sure will.’ There is no one, absolutely no one I could call.

9:53am. The car turns onto Newgate Street. Paused at traffic lights, the driver’s hand finds the radio button and, three words in, it’s obvious what the announcers are discussing.

‘Sorry, would you mind switching off the sound?’ I don’t want to hear any commentary or opinion on the matter immediately before court. Not this case, it’s too depressing.

The driver eyes me in the rear-view mirror and presses the button with a grunt. The trial is in London’s ether. Its molecules have edged out the lorry fumes and usual pollution so that, this month, it’s all anyone is breathing in.

‘Batman,’ I gently pull him back from the window. ‘Would you like to come with me to work today?’

He’s uncertain.

‘Oh look over there, it’s a block of firds,’ I say, pointing.

Elliot snorts. ‘Flock of birds!’

‘You’re too good at this.’ We ran out of time this morning for my pre-rehearsed game of spoonerisms over breakfast.

‘Are you …’ my jaw drops in mock disgust. ‘Are you nicking your pose?’

‘I am not picking my nose,’ he laughs.

Three months ago, I bought a book of kids’ jokes the weekend before he came to me. I memorised as many as I could but then, neglecting to ration, used them all up by the end of our first forty-eight hours together. Maybe it was just as well. Children can tell when you’re trying too hard.

As we approach the Old Bailey, the cab crawls through puddles of people spread onto the road. ‘Bloody circus,’ the driver says. ‘You’ll have to get out here.’

Groups of press, onlookers, cameras, TV vans and tents smother the entrance to Central Criminal Court. When the cab door opens, the roar from the crowd pushes inside.

Why did you catch a bug today of all days? I think to myself, guiding a curl behind Elliot’s ear. 9:57am. The defence team will be looking for me. Elliot’s palm burrows in mine as we walk towards the door.

Four witness service volunteers loiter at the entrance. All hands on deck for the final days of a fraught proceeding. ‘I’m the interpreter,’ I tell one of them. ‘Court thirteen.’

‘There’s a juror caught in traffic,’ she says. ‘We’re on Old Bailey time, as usual, so you’ve about another ten minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘Is this your son?’

‘Normally at school on a Monday.’ Could she mind him while I’m inside the courtroom? Between soothing jittery witnesses – no, that won’t work. ‘Don’t worry, he won’t be coming in with me.’

‘Bit young for work experience.’

I summon a laugh.

Her voice changes gear. ‘Children can’t enter the building.’

‘I know. I have someone coming. They’ll wait outside together,’ I say. She nods, approving, while I feel increasingly shaky. ‘A friend.’ I gesture to my mobile phone as though it is proof, as though the received calls are not all from Elliot’s doctor and his school; the text messages more personal than automated alerts from my bank. What am I going to do with him?

Two minutes until the trial starts. I thought this would happen one day, but not on my first court booking since fostering Elliot, not on such a significant case. A case which, if I don’t go inside, could be adjourned. This crime that has the nation gripped with its themes of class and privilege, a luxury car and a dead baby. They need the best interpreter. They need me.

I look at my phone again in case a miracle might occur, his teacher calling to apologise for the confusion, she’ll be here to whisk him back to school any second now.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say to the volunteer.

‘Your friend isn’t here?’

‘I should be in there already. But my son was sent home from school.’ My pleading tone tells her the friend was never coming.

‘Good morning, stranger.’ I hear a familiar voice from behind.

‘Arkam,’ I say, turning around. ‘Hello.’ He’s one of the few courthouse security guards whose name I know.

‘Multi-tasking this morning, eh?’ He grins into Elliot’s face.

‘I’m trying but …’

‘No children inside,’ he says gently.

‘Exactly.’

‘I can watch him for a bit. Don’t tell anyone,’ Arkam winks.

Right before Elliot, I worked here on a three-month murder trial. Interpreting almost feels, briefly, like a normal job on those lengthy cases; going to the same place each day, seeing the same people.

‘Thank you. You’re saving my life.’

‘No problem.’

‘I don’t know what I would have done. This is Elliot. He has some things in his rucksack to keep him occupied.’ I slip my mobile into his pocket.

‘A cupcake after this, I promise,’ I tell Elliot. Then, in a more serious tone: ‘Be good, yeah?’ The parental need to set boundaries and teach manners, when all I really want is to get him to like me. ‘Love you.’

‘Love you,’ Elliot replies. I try to forget a previous foster parent taught him to say it by rote while I walk towards the wooden doors.

The jury looks exhausted. In the public gallery, the grief-stricken, groups of law students and the plain nosey sit staring straight ahead, at the floor or at the ceiling. This is a rare place on earth that does not allow the distraction of mobile phones. In summer, even the new courts can be sweaty and oppressive, sometimes unbearably so. Now sighs and sniffles of the alleged victim’s family members spread through the room before we fall into silence.

The day begins. It’s a complex dangerous-driving case. Immediately, my eyes occupy themselves with the defence barrister’s hands. Back straight, chin raised, he limits his hand movements to open, relaxed gestures. ‘How would you describe what you saw that evening?’ Everything about him expresses authority, honesty.

Seated next to the smartly dressed witness, I inhale the room’s stale leather and stagnant air as I wait for my turn to speak.

‘Who made the call to emergency services?’

The thirty-something woman answers the barrister’s questions succinctly and it’s no trouble interpreting her Italian into English. She can understand English well enough and doesn’t really need me to repeat the questions into her native tongue.

‘How would you describe the sound?’

As I interpret the questions and answers from Italian to English, English to Italian, I keep my eyes on the barrister’s palms, his clean pink flesh without one trace of sweat.

The woman I’m interpreting for, a tourist visiting London last June, attended the opera on the night of the alleged crime. Out of sheer bad luck she saw the incident take place and is here to provide evidence, summoned by the defence.

‘And what did you see when you stepped closer?’

After Madame Butterfly, my witness returned to her rental car in the opera house carpark and saw the defendant reverse her £150,000 Mercedes SUV, hitting a member of the catering staff. Then the defendant drove off. The charges include dangerous driving, failing to stop at the scene of an accident, and child destruction – the victim survived, but her five-month unborn baby did not. The witness statement from the Italian tourist apparently supports the defence claim that from inside her very large car, the accused was not aware that she had hit anyone, much less someone who was pregnant. Ignorance, it seems, is the best defence when the charge is failing to stop. The press, titillated by this case and its glamorous fifty-year-old accused, heiress to an energy company and a Knightsbridge resident, is predicting an acquittal on the gravest charge of child destruction. Legally speaking, it is almost impossible to prove; rarely is anyone convicted of killing an unborn child. I let my eyes rest on the defendant. She is in a dark navy suit with tiny earrings which reflect the light when her head turns. I could not stand to listen to the radio in the cab this morning because I knew they were going to say she’ll go free.

Some cases I work on, I really can’t tell which way the jury or judge is likely to go. Today, my being here seems futile. The defence team appear so assured – my guess is they hardly need this witness to bolster their case. And now in the final days of the trial, the prosecution barrister is visibly struggling to hide his gloom. But you never know when things might turn around. My witness could fluff one of her answers, wobble off course and do more harm to the defence than good. Though that probably won’t happen.

‘At what point did you notice the woman was pregnant?’ I repeat the question in Italian with complete accuracy. Then the answer into English. To me, the words must all taste the same. I will say whatever is demanded of me. In this room, I have no personal morals of my own. I am not really here. That’s what I have to tell myself. Some days, during some assignments, I need reminding, until the reality of my job really sinks in. I bet the accused gets away with everything except for the dangerous-driving charge. But I am not allowed to care.

It’s now twenty minutes since I left Elliot.

The questions keep coming. Twenty-five minutes since I left Elliot. He has my phone, and knows how to use it, but who would he call? I recall the earlier scroll through my contacts list and mentally pause on the letter D: these days, it’s blank. But there’s no use dwelling on what-ifs.

Should the prosecution question the witness for even half as long as the defence, I’ll be stuck in court for almost an hour. What if Arkam has to leave his post? Someone may have already called social services about the boy dumped in the Old Bailey with the world’s filthiest soft toy.

Cross-examination begins and I rush my sentences, the Italian words colliding, saving a few seconds of time.

‘No further questions, my Lord,’ the barrister says. ‘The witness is dismissed.’

My pumps skid along the floor.

Recess. The court spills into the foyer, everyone desperate for the loo, a drink of water or a surreptitious Walnut Whip. Through the crush I head for the building exit.

‘Where did you learn Italian? Your accent is very good.’ The witness has inserted herself into my eyeline.

‘Thank you.’ I avoid eye contact. I need to go outside. I have to find him.

‘Have you been to Vomero, in Naples?’ The woman beams. ‘My home town.’

‘No.’

‘The pizza is the best in the country.’

I crane my neck to see past the woman’s middle. Through the doorway I can see a group of people right by the exit, but no sign of Elliot.

‘You should visit,’ the woman says. ‘They’ll think you’re Italian.’

‘Excuse me.’ I dart past her, push through tight circles of onlookers and officials until I reach the spot where I left Elliot and Arkam.

They’re gone.

Read Boldly. Think Differently.

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First published by Harvill Secker in 2024

Copyright © Brooke Robinson, 2024

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Cover design: Dan Mogford
Cover photograph © Miguel Sobreira / Trevillion Images

ISBN: 978-1-529-92435-0

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