This Is What Happened

Informationen zum Autor Mick Herron was born in Newcastle and has a degree in English from Balliol College, Oxford. He is the author of ten other novels, Slow Horses , Dead Lions , Nobody Walks , Real Tigers , Spook Street , Down Cemetery Road , The Last Voice You Hear , Why We Die , Smoke and Whispers , and Reconstruction , as well as the novella The List . His work has won the CWA Gold Dagger for Best Crime Novel, the Steel Dagger for Best Thriller, and the Ellery Queen Readers Award, and been nominated for the Macavity, Barry, Shamus, and Theakstons Novel of the Year Awards. Leseprobe 1   The longer she sat there, the colder she became. With her back to the cistern, and her feet drawn up beneath her, Maggie perched on the closed lid of the toilet, and concentrated on being as still as possible. An hour earlier, a spasm in her leg had caused the overhead lights to switch on. Their electric hum had startled her more than the glare. Someone would hear it, she thought, and come investigate. But nobody arrived, and the spasm subsided, and a few minutes later the lights turned themselves off again.      “How long do I have to hide in the toilets?” she had asked Harvey.       “Until twelve. At least.”       “The guard patrols all night long.”       “But there’s only one of him. And he can’t be on every floor at once.”      She had an urge to confirm that the flash drive was still in her pocket, but any movement would bring the lights to life, and besides, she had checked three times already.      Alone in the dark Maggie squeezed her eyes shut, tried not to shiver, and made herself invisible.     Quilp House was twenty-seven storeys high, each spreading out from a central lobby area where the lifts were, and around which the stairwells ran. In the lower half of the building the floors were open-plan, with rows of desks divided into three or four work-stations apiece. During the day a kind of electricity filled the air, which was not so much the ambient excitement caused by communion with the world’s markets as much as it was the repressed emotions of people forced to work in close proximity, and thus hold in their baser reactions, their bodily rumblings.      From the twentieth level, the building changed character. Here, people worked behind closed doors, in progressively larger offices. Views became spectacular. The higher up you were, the further off you could see the weather.      On these floors cameras blinked at corridors’ ends, little red lights above their lenses signalling vigilance. Occasionally they swivelled, redirecting their meerkat gaze.     “What about the CCTV?”       “There are two guards on the night shift,” Harvey had explained. He was patient with her. Without having to be told, she knew he understood what it was to step across the lines that bordered daily behaviour. “One to patrol, and the other to watch the screens. The TV monitors. Do you know how many of these there are?”      She had a vision of a wall built of pixels, boasting as many views of corridors as there were satellite channels screening sport.       “There are six,” he said. “And they alternate from camera to camera. Which means the odds are against your showing up on screen at any given time.”       “So they don’t automatically detect motion?”       “Maggie.” He had reached across the table and put his hand on hers. Around them had been the usual clatter of young mums and earnest hipsters: like most of their conversations, this had taken place in the café where they first met. Where he had first approached her. “It’s fine to be scared. It’s fine not to want to do this.”       “I do want to do it.”       “And I wouldn’t ask if I could see any other way of getting the job done. If you knew—”      He broke off while a young woman squeezed past with a...

Product details

• Authors: Mick Herron
• Publisher: Soho Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• EAN: 9781641295000
• ISBN: 978-1-64129-500-0
• No. of pages: 304