Rolling over in bed at 2am, I answered my trilling phone.
After listening carefully to what crisis I was needed for, I hung up.
‘Gotta go,’ I told my wife Jules.
‘Good luck,’ she said, going straight back to sleep.
Jules was used to me vanishing at all hours of the night.
It came with my job as a hostage and crisis negotiator coordinator.
And this particular morning in August 2014, my team was needed to talk a man in his 20s down from his precarious perch 30ft up a tree.
He’d been caught burgling a branch of Currys.
Legged it from police, scaled the tree.
Only the branch he was balancing on hung right across one of
