The Deal

by M.J. Arlidge, Andy Maslen

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

IN THE VIDEO, YOUR DAUGHTER IS DEAD. BUT UPSTAIRS, TUCKED IN BED, SHE'S VERY MUCH ALIVE...

Things have been difficult for Annie since her husband left; her teenage daughter, Isla, has become a ghost of her former self. Annie's terrified that Isla might hurt herself, and she'll lose her, too. So when Annie receives a video of her crying at her daughter's funeral, she's immediately sick to her stomach.

Confused and horrified, Annie races upstairs to check on Isla, who is perfectly alive and well. The video has been faked. But who sent it and what do they want?

Only one thing is perfectly clear: Isla will die for real if Annie doesn't give the sender exactly what they're looking for.

The Deal is a thrilling and unputdownable novel that asks you how far you'd go to protect the ones you love. Perfect for fans of Adrian McKinty and Steve Cavanagh.

Release date: January 16, 2025

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 304

Reader says this book is...: emotionally riveting (1) realistic characters (1) unexpected twists (1) unputdownable (1)

Sample

Annie’s stomach lurched as her daughter’s funeral began.

She was weeping uncontrollably. Face blotched and red. Tears streaming from her eyes, leaching her make-up down in parallel black rivers over her cheeks. Grief distorted her mouth, the cords of her neck standing out like wires. The hem of her black dress snapped at her legs in the sharp breeze.

Distraught, she stared at the hearse. A long-faced man in tail coat, top hat and grey-striped trousers stood beside it, head bowed. A floral tribute leaned against the side of the simple pine coffin. White carnations, roses and lilies:

I S L A

She was so close to the flowers, she could almost smell their cloying scent through the glass.

Annie’s best friend looked stricken as she hugged her tight. Other friends, too. All black-clad. Clutching each other, weeping, pushing crumpled tissues against their eyes, noses, mouths. It was windy, and their hair blew around their faces, lashing their cheeks, flicking into their eyes. She leaned into her friend’s embrace and wept again, her shoulders jerking spasmodically.

A crow swooped low over the mourners. Then stopped in mid-air.

A tear hung suspended halfway between Annie’s left eye and the ground.

The pallbearers froze in the act of lifting Isla’s coffin onto their shoulders.

Heart pounding, Annie released her grip on her mouse, having just paused the video. On the screen in front of her, an impossible funeral. In the real world, a world that had suddenly slewed off its axis as if hit by a meteorite, she shoved the laptop across the kitchen table, her heart hammering against her ribs.

She’d been working late on the next quarter’s marketing plan, struggling to focus, eyelids drooping, when the alarm bell alert for an incoming email had jerked her fully awake. As she took in the brief but horrible subject line, her stomach churned and cold fear uncoiled in the pit of her belly. With a trembling finger, she opened the email. How could she not when it mentioned her daughter?

Condolences on Isla’s passing

There’d been no meme. No text. No ‘haha’ payoff. Just a link. A string of random letters, numbers and symbols. A link leading to this disgusting, terrifying video.

Shaken, Annie stared at the screen, desperate but unable to look away. Sweat had broken out on her face, her neck, her back. She felt cold and clammy. Nauseous. Who had done this to her? Who? And why?

Seized with irrational terror, she shoved her chair back, hard enough to send it clattering to the stone-flagged kitchen floor, and ran upstairs.

Outside Isla’s door, Annie paused with her knuckles raised, for maybe half a second.

The rule was clear. Not written down, but understood by both parties as if drafted by a lawyer. You knocked. You waited. No answer, no admittance. You went downstairs and maybe you fumed, but you absolutely, definitely, one hundred per cent, did not just go in uninvited.

Annie burst in.

Isla was wearing a pair of baggy white trousers and an old grey Hello Kitty T-shirt. She was leaning back, fists clenched, kicking out with her right foot.

She whirled round, off-balance, and stumbled against the bed.

‘Mum! What the hell? I’m doing my taekwondo practice.’

Annie grabbed her fifteen-year-old daughter in a fierce hug.

‘Oh, thank God. You’re OK.’

Isla wriggled free and pushed Annie back.

‘Of course I’m OK! Jesus, what is wrong with you?’

‘Sorry, lovey. Sorry, I …’

The sentence died, unfinished, in her throat.

Isla’s face had paled, red spots on her cheeks, a reliable sign of an impending storm.

‘This is literally the only place in the world where I get any privacy, and you just barge in here acting all weird. Can you go, please? I need to finish my pattern.’

Free now of the irrational fear that something had actually happened to Isla, Annie retreated.

‘Yes, of course. I’m … I’m sorry. I was just … I just wanted to check you were OK.’

She closed the door quietly behind her, desperately wishing there was a way she could reach Isla. Lockdown had pushed her once-happy daughter into constant low-level anxiety. And when she and Grant had told her they were separating, her condition had worsened and she’d started having panic attacks. Once again, Annie felt a sickening sense of guilt wash over her. Isla’s anxiety was all her fault.

The doctor had prescribed mild tranquillisers. They’d made Isla’s skin break out and given her nightmares. Annie returned them to the pharmacist. Then there had been that dreadful day when she’d found Isla watching a video about suicide on TikTok.

Isla had assured her it didn’t mean anything, but Annie had been terrified. First thing the following morning, she’d taken Isla to the Oaks, a private clinic in Harborne specialising in mental health in teenagers and young adults, and arranged for her to see a psychologist. Ekaterini managed to form an instant connection with her, and Isla appeared happier over the next few weeks. But Annie still found sleep elusive, waking at 3 a.m., her heart pounding, stealing along the hallway and peeping through a crack in Isla’s door to check she was still alive.

Back in the kitchen, she poured herself a large glass of Merlot from an open bottle on the kitchen counter and gulped down half. It did nothing to calm the jangling nerves that were making her feel lightheaded and scared.

In a sudden panic that Isla might somehow see the video and spiral into another anxiety attack, she spun her laptop round and stabbed a couple of keys to delete the email and the hateful video along with it. She emptied the trash, too, and reset her cache for good measure. Her glass was shaking so much she needed both hands to steady it enough to take another mouthful of the wine.

Was this someone’s idea of a sick joke? Because Annie wasn’t laughing. Who could have done such a thing? A bully from Isla’s school? Surely not. A friend pranking her? Unlikely. Then the answer came to her. The man Isla was always so quick to defend.

Grant.

After the divorce had been finalised, in Merlot-and-sympathy sessions with girlfriends, Annie had referred to her and Grant’s post-separation relationship as ‘toxic’. But only because she couldn’t find a stronger word. Think box jellyfish crossed with a funnel-web spider then gene-spliced into a black mamba and you’d be about halfway there.

Never mind the financial settlement. The real source of enmity between them had been the terms Annie had insisted on relating to Isla. Grant had wanted joint custody, with Isla living with him half the week. Annie had instructed her lawyer to resist that at all costs. Reason one, Grant’s nomadic lifestyle. Reason two, his general unreliability and fecklessness. Reason three, and why she was prepared to fight him until her funds were exhausted, his infidelity.

Grant’s cheating had started in the third trimester of her pregnancy, when she’d been laid up with extreme morning sickness. His ultimate betrayal was a brief but apparently passionate affair with another school mum. Until that point, Annie had thought of Vicky Hill as a friend. When she found out, the news left her shaking, so overwhelmed she dropped the mug of coffee she was holding. It exploded on the polished stone floor, scattering dozens of razor-sharp pieces.

According to one of Annie’s real friends, Vicky had been the instigator of the affair. Her masterstroke, if you could call it that, was tucking a piece of paper in Grant’s pocket she said she’d seen him drop. It turned out to bear her number. Plus a message most women would dismiss as obvious and cheap, but which Grant had apparently found seductive and irresistible.

Dismayingly, the school-run posse had picked sides, not all siding with Annie. One particularly vicious bit of gossip, shared at a volume she couldn’t possibly ignore, revealed that Vicky had demanded she and Grant ‘christen’ his marital bed. ‘More than once, apparently,’ the woman added, giving Annie the side-eye. Humiliated, devastated and angry, Annie had stripped the bed that evening and burned the sheets in the garden, coughing in the smoke until she broke down in tears. When she’d confronted Grant about it, his reasoning was so petty it left her speechless.

‘You were working late again and I had to go to the parents’ evening instead of working on my new burrito recipe. She was there and she looked a little lost, like me. So I said hello and things, you know, snowballed.’

Vicky Hill had been the last of many straws. You could have thatched a roof with them. It hadn’t lasted, of course. A friend had told her Grant had recently taken up with a woman half his age. Melissa.

And now he was taking some kind of twisted revenge because Annie hadn’t given in to his demands for joint custody. Well, he’d gone too far. Way too far.

Feeling that crushing humiliation all over again as if it had happened that very evening, she grabbed her keys and headed out into the night.

She was going to make him pay.

His grief had flayed him. Every nerve ending was exposed, raw.

It didn’t take much to set him off. The mention of her name. A glimpse of her face in a photo. Her perfume lingering on a sweater she’d borrowed. The dark waters of his grief would close over his head again, drowning him.

Michael drained the tumbler of scotch by his elbow and sloshed more in, spilling some on the bank statement beneath the glass. Another long, dark night mired in Lucy’s accounts, both business and personal, trying to untangle her finances.

In life, before she got ill, she’d run a small but very successful chain of hair salons. She’d called it Locks. A play on the hair she and her team cut, coloured and styled, and the locks that divided up the city’s canals.

She had shops in Harborne, in Edgbaston and in Birmingham city centre. Her clients had loved her. They confided their secrets, their traumas, their infidelities, even. Lucy had never shared so much as a single detail with him.

‘I’m a walking safety deposit box of other people’s secrets,’ she’d said once, an unusually poetic phrase he’d never forgotten.

As well as running his own business making bespoke wooden kitchens and bedrooms, Michael was now trying – well, struggling would be a better word – to keep Locks afloat.

He rubbed at his eyes, which felt gritty with fatigue. Took a slug of the whisky, which burned on the way down.

He swallowed, hard, against a lump in his throat, and leafed back through the bank statements. The doorbell pealed, startling him. He looked up and around. What the hell? The ceiling and walls were strobing with blue light. Fear kicked in hard. An ambulance? A fire? The police? Aaron! Oh God, was he OK? Had he been in an accident?

He raced downstairs, careful even in his panic not to look at the black and white photos of him, Lucy and Aaron in happier days. He didn’t have the courage to take them down. Or to face them head-on. Maybe he was in denial after all. If he didn’t look at her, he wouldn’t have to admit she was really gone.

He opened the front door, and frowned.

A burly six-foot police officer was standing a couple of feet back from the door. Then Aaron stepped out of the shadows. Eyes downcast, arms folded. Behind them, a marked police car, lights flashing, engine idling. In the driver’s seat, a female officer, the deep red of her hijab glowing in the light from the street lamp overhead. She offered what might have been a sympathetic smile.

‘Michael Taylor?’ the burly cop asked, though clearly he knew the answer. The police didn’t make a habit of returning surly teenagers to the wrong house.

‘Yes. Is everything all right? Aaron, mate, what happened? Were you attacked?’

‘Your son was observed vandalising a bus stop on Hagley Road,’ the cop said, laying a hand the size of a baseball catcher’s mitt on Aaron’s skinny shoulder. It sagged slightly under the weight. ‘No permanent damage, but obviously still a crime.’

Michael’s temper flared before he had a chance to control it.

‘For God’s sake! Aaron, is this true? What the hell were you doing?’

Aaron looked up at him from under the mop of loose curls he’d been growing out since the funeral. The school had emailed Michael about it. They’d explained, in a mealy-mouthed way, that while they could make a temporary allowance in view of Aaron’s ‘difficult personal circumstances’, the dress code was there for a reason – esprit de corps, school values and image, etc. etc. – and he needed to get it cut. He’d ignored them.

‘We were just kicking the window. It’s not even glass! Just plastic,’ Aaron protested. ‘God, talk about an overreaction.’

‘He was with three other lads,’ the cop said. ‘Faster on their feet than Aaron here. Look, we’re not charging him, or even giving him a caution, so there’s no record, nothing like that to worry about. But I have offered him some words of advice. Maybe you’d have a talk with him, too? He told me about his mum, and obviously that’s sad. But we can’t have him taking out his feelings on public property.’

Michael was shaking his head as the policeman concluded his speech. Thank Christ they didn’t have to worry about a bloody court case on top of everything else.

‘No … yes … I mean, of course, Officer. Thank you. I’ll speak to him.’ He turned to the eighteen-year-old package of resentment, anger and grief standing in the giant cop’s shadow. ‘Inside. Now.’

On the far side of the street, curtains were twitching. Great. Michael gave it two minutes more before the local WhatsApp group lit up with speculation about ‘that mixed-race boy’.

Giving them a hard stare, and an imaginary middle finger, he went back inside. With a sinking feeling, he mounted the stairs.

He knocked. ‘Aaron?’

Silence.

On a normal day, if any day they spent together counted as normal any more, he’d have left it at that. But this wasn’t a normal day, was it? He’d finally found the headspace to try and tackle Lucy’s personal affairs, only to be interrupted in the middle of it by the police.

He knocked again, louder this time.

‘Aaron!’

‘What?’ came the answering bellow.

Michael took that as permission to enter. Aaron’s room reeked of teenaged hormones, Davidoff Cool Water and, beneath it all, a sweetish aroma Michael told himself was just incense. Hoodies, T-shirts and jeans were scattered across the room, even on vertical surfaces. How did he do that? Some kind of adolescent Jedi mind-trick?

Aaron lay back on the bed, headphones clamped over his ears, scowling like he’d won Olympic gold for it.

Again, not going to wash.

Michael gestured at his own ears. ‘Off.’

With a sullen glare, Aaron pulled the headphones free and held them in his fist.

‘What?’

‘What do you think? The police, Aaron? Seriously? I’ve got enough on my plate without you being arrested for criminal damage.’

‘OK, well, one, they didn’t arrest me. Two, it wasn’t criminal damage. What were they going to charge me with? Doing rubbish karate?’

Michael stared at his son in disbelief.

‘You’re grounded. For a week.’

Aaron shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

Michael’s pulse was clanging in his ears. He’d wanted to be mature. Considered. The adult in the room.

‘Two weeks!’

Aaron glared at him, those deep brown eyes boring into him.

‘You love this, don’t you? Acting like you’re my father. Jesus, it’s pathetic.’

‘I am your father, Aaron.’

‘Adoptive, Michael. Don’t forget the key word. A-dop-tive.’

Christ, why was this so hard? Even before Lucy had died, Michael had been walking on eggshells around Aaron. He didn’t know if he’d traced his biological dad or had just been chatting online with other adopted kids. But after his mum’s death, he seemed full of rage at Michael. The GP had recommended therapy, which Michael took him to gladly. But it was slow going.

‘Yeah, well, your adoptive dad is grounding you for the rest of the month. Enjoy.’

He left the room, congratulating himself for not slamming the door. Behind him, silence. In his own youth, which had been punctuated by spells of bad behaviour, mainly fighting at school, Michael would have retaliated by playing a heavy rock album at full belt. Nothing like Metallica turned up to eleven to rile the parents. But the kids these days lived in their heads. Headphones on and let the world go to hell.

Sighing, he paused midway along the hallway and half turned, wishing he could find the words to reconnect with Aaron, to help him deal with his anger. But he knew it was too late for tonight. Maybe he could try in the morning.

Michael had been to see a grief counsellor himself in the early days. They’d given him a leaflet at the hospital. He’d sat opposite her in her cramped consulting room, which smelled faintly of cats, while she told him about the five stages of mourning. Anger was one. Denial was another, apparently. Bargaining? Maybe. He couldn’t remember the others. But he felt, on mature reflection, that the counsellor had missed out the big one. Paperwork.

Shaking his head, he returned to the office. However grief made you feel – angry, sad, anguished, baffled, resentful, depressed – nothing stood in the way of the grim logistics of death.

Two hours later, he turned over another sheet in the thick pile of bank statements. Just one more, then he’d call it a night. His eye caught on a debit halfway down the page. A thousand pounds to a bank in the Caymans. By standing order, too. What on earth for?

Shocked at the amount, and the destination, he flipped back and found another. And another. Ten minutes later, he had twenty-three statements all showing the same amount sent to the Caymans.

He read and reread the statements, desperate to make sense of something so completely baffling. His wife, who he’d thought of as his soulmate, had been keeping secrets. And not just the guilty kind – loving seventies disco or binge-watching Love Island – the real kind. The dirty little kind, a nasty, sly-sounding voice whispered in his ear.

He stood suddenly and had to grip the edge of his desk as the world wobbled and stars sparked inside his eyes.

How was this possible? What had Lucy been involved in?

Had he really known his wife at all?

Wiping his damp palms on the stained fabric of his army surplus jacket, John Varney crouched behind a dustbin, watching the two children through the window of the front room.

They looked so happy. Bouncing on the sofa cushions like usual. Wearing those beautiful innocent smiles you only saw on the faces of children before the pain of the world settled over them like a shroud.

The faces of other children – screaming, blood-spattered – flashed in front of him. He shook his head, blinked them away.

She was there, of course. Laughing like she didn’t have a care in the world. Dolled up in a dress. She never used to wear dresses. And then he came into view. Oh, and wasn’t he enjoying himself? Playing the big man with a ready-made family.

Vanessa hadn’t even had the decency to wait a couple of years before moving her boyfriend in. John out, Alex in. Standard operating procedure, apparently.

Rain started. Big fat drops out of nowhere. Ice-cold shrapnel whacking the top of his head and trickling down inside his collar, making him shiver. Anxiety lanced through him, but he fought it down. His face was still sore from the fight over a can of extra-strength cider with one of his so-called mates the previous night. The bruise over his left eye had spread down to his cheekbone. He sucked his lower lip, split now and swollen. Tasted the coppery tang of blood. Not for the first time.

Inside, Ruby was holding her arms up. And that smug bastard lifted her and whirled her around. Benji didn’t want to be left out of the fun either. Benji! His son. His! Clinging on to Alex’s legs.

How was this fair? When Sergeant John Varney had been watching his mates get blown to pieces by the Taliban, what had Alex been doing? Selling saunas and hot tubs, for Christ’s sake! Hot? Nothing got hotter than Helmand on a nice sunny August afternoon. Bullets whining like the world’s angriest hornets, all intent on giving you the biggest bloody sting of your life.

Filled with rage so fierce it felt like the sides of his skull were melting, John marched up to the front door and stuck a blunt fingertip against the bellpush. Held it there. He heard footsteps on the hard wooden hall floor and readied himself.

The door swung inwards.

‘Daddy!’

He looked down and smiled.

‘Benji!’

He crouched and accepted his son’s fierce hug. This was how it was meant to be.

‘Have you missed me, buddy?’

‘I want you to come home, Daddy.’

‘I want to as well, buddy.’

A shadow threw them both into darkness.

‘Benji. Go back to the game. Alex and Ruby are waiting. Now!’

John looked up, into his ex-wife’s contemptuous stare. She folded her arms across her chest and glowered at him. He stood, took a step forward, but she barred the way. Keeping him out in the rain.

She wrinkled her nose, like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten.

‘What the hell happened to your face?’

‘Nothing. I came to see Ruby. And Benji. It’s his birthday in a couple of days.’

‘It was his birthday yesterday,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘You missed it. Again.’

‘Then let me come in and see them.’

She shook her head. ‘Not going to happen. You need to go.’

‘They’re my kids, too, Ness,’ he said, feeling desperate and hating himself for it. Then her. ‘You can’t stop me.’

‘I could take out a restraining order if you like. How about that? Would that stop you?’

‘Let me in, Ness,’ he said, dropping his voice, feeling the bones in his hands cracking as he tightened his fists.

‘No.’

Alex appeared behind her.

‘Everything OK, love? Oh. Hello, John.’

John ignored him. Stayed focused on Vanessa, trying to speak without baring his mangled teeth. ‘I want to see my kids.’

Alex squared his shoulders. Basic move.

‘Yeah, not going to happen. You heard Vanessa. Just piss off before we call the police.’

That was it. The trigger. John’s brain fizzled with pre-combat adrenaline. Nobody talked to him like that. He picked his target: the soft spot in the throat. Prepared to strike.

And then the words of the prosecuting officer at the court martial floated back to him.

‘… evidence he failed to control his men, or himself … unnecessary civilian casualties …’

It was all lies. The army had cooked up the whole thing to protect itself. Ops went wrong all the time. Nobody had meant to kill those people. Fog of war. But they’d binned him anyway: dishonourable discharge. No pension, no self-respect, no prospects in civvy street. Just PTSD, and his addictions to keep his demons at bay.

Ness despised him. Alex, too, obviously. They all did. But he still had some shreds of honour left. Of self-control. He turned away. Thrust his hands into the sagging pockets of the camouflage jacket.

‘Get some help, John,’ Vanessa called after him. Then the door slammed shut.

Lightning flashed. So bright it turned the world white. Thunder crashed overhead. His heart pounding, he clenched his fists, wanting to scream his defiance at the bruise-coloured sky.

The anger had never been far from the surface, ever since he’d held Corporal Heather Jones in his a. . .