Suzanne ushered a group of them into DB1 where they could speak privately. She addressed them all – Patrick, Carmella, Mike, Sergeant Hardy and five of the PCs from the PSU, as Fraser stood a little way away, the phone glued to one ear, his finger jammed in the other one to block out their voices.

‘I don’t need to spell this out,’ she said, ‘but our priority is to get those children out safely. Second, we need Koppler and Fredericks out of there alive. We have no knowledge of whether Koppler would carry out his threat, or if he even does have a gun. But we know from what happened to little Isabel that they are capable of murder.’

‘Plus she tried to steal a baby from hospital, didn’t she?’ Mike said, referencing the crime for which Sharon had been put away. ‘She’s nuts.’

The look Suzanne gave him could have turned him to stone. ‘That’s not helpful, sergeant. Except, yes, we do know that she has a history of instability. And Koppler attacked one of our own officers this afternoon.’ She rubbed a hand across her face and shot a sympathetic look at Patrick, whose head throbbed in acknowledgement. ‘Sergeant Hardy, can you brief us on the situation with your unit?’

‘Yes. We’ve evacuated this whole end of the street and the houses directly behind Koppler’s. We have ten armed officers here on street level, plus four to the rear of the house, concealed in the back gardens. We also have two rifle officers upstairs in the house behind us with long-range rifles trained on number 20.’

All through this talk, Patrick felt uneasy and fidgety, his head still pounding. He didn’t like the silence, the lack of action.

‘Shouldn’t we be doing something right now? Why are we sitting around waiting? Koppler was highly agitated when I saw him. He must have thought I’d be knocked out for longer – enough time to get home and get Sharon and the children out. But we’ve got him trapped and he’s going to be panicking. They could be in there killing the kids, and themselves, right now. They might have already done it.’

‘Detective,’ Hardy said with a smile, ‘in my experience, that’s very rarely the way it plays out.’

‘And you’ve handled situations exactly like this one before, have you?’

The smile vanished. ‘No two situations are exactly alike.’

‘Precisely. These people are desperate. That’s why they took the children in the first place. I don’t think we should be out here waiting for them to make a move. We need to get in there. Now.’

Hardy turned to Suzanne. ‘That would be a mistake. We need to wait, re-establish contact. We’re not going to go barging straight in there. This isn’t the movies.’