by Rob McCarthy
What if Idris dies? That had been the question in his head on the drive back from Marigold House, and on the way to the station that morning. He wondered which of the circled capital letters Fairweather was selecting as the fall guy: Noble, Quinn, the kid from Trojan who’d fired the shots?
‘So Solomon was breathing through the oxygen mask?’
Harry found it interesting that Fairweather used Idris’s first name. It stank of politics, but maybe he was being cynical. Maybe the detective had kids himself.
‘Yeah.’
‘And you were talking?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about?’
‘He said he was doing it all for someone called Keisha. That they had killed her, and the police didn’t care.’
‘Keisha?’ said Fairweather. ‘Did he give you any more details?’
‘No. He wanted to talk to the lawyer about her, not to me. He thought I was one of you. I got the impression he didn’t much care for the police.’
‘How did he seem?’
Harry thought back to the shivering teenager, hand curling around the barrel of the gun, chicken bones in a box on the table.
‘Like a man at the end of the road. He had a look in his eyes, like he had no way out.’
Harry recalled Tammas’s words from the night before. We each have a deep hollow inside us. The hollow inside Solomon Idris had appeared right there and then, and everything that had previously filled it had spilled out onto the floor.
‘What happened next?’
‘I tried to get him to tell me the story, but he insisted on waiting. And I was trying to persuade him to let me take him to hospital.’
‘Had he agreed?’
‘Almost. But then there was that shot from outside. I threw myself to the floor. Trojan charged in, and the first one through the door shot him.’
DC Kepler spoke for the first time in the interview.
‘Hang on there, Doc – you heard a gunshot. How did you know it was from outside?’
Harry turned and made a point of delivering his answer straight to Fairweather.
‘Because there was only one gun in that room and I was looking at it. And it didn’t go off.’
‘So where were you when the police officers entered the shop?’ Kepler said.
‘On the floor.’
Fairweather resumed the questioning.
‘Did you say anything?’
The memories came back, as did the pain on the right side of his chest. He took a deep breath.
‘I shouted something. Something like, Don’t shoot him!’
Fairweather nodded and Kepler wrote, and added quotation marks and a capital letter with a circle. Harry couldn’t quite make out which letter he’d been assigned.
‘W22, the officer who first entered the building, reported you shouting, Shoot him!’ Fairweather said. His glare was unrelenting now, the headmaster facing his student. Harry wasn’t even a full-time employee of the Met; he could be replaced by practically any other doctor with a bit of spare time and the ability to take blood. Of course he’d make a great scapegoat.
‘That wasn’t a question,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Fairweather. ‘We’re not in court.’
Harry shook his head, and eventually stopped resisting the reply.
‘I definitely didn’t say that. I said, Don’t shoot him! because I knew that Idris hadn’t fired the gun and didn’t pose a threat. I’d also like it on the record that the officer fired almost simultaneously with me speaking, so he did not fire after hearing what I said, but either just before or as I said it.’
‘Which was it – before or simultaneously?’ Fairweather said.
‘I can’t remember,’ Harry said. ‘What are you saying, this guy’s story is that he burst in, I yelled Shoot him, so he goes and drops the poor bastard on my orders? Bullshit.’
The silence in the room was disrupted only by the humming of the tape recorder. Fairweather exhaled and smiled and leant backwards. The therapist had returned.
‘Dr Kent, I understand this has been an emotional incident, but we’d appreciate it if you’d keep your language clean. I should inform you that there were other officers who reported you saying Don’t shoot! or something similar.’
Harry made eye contact with Fairweather and held it for too long.
‘When you entered the restaurant for the second time,’ Fairweather continued, ‘where did you put the oxygen cylinder?’
‘On the table with my medical bag.’
‘Where was that in relation to the gun?’
‘It was in front of it. Between the front door and the gun.’
‘So could it have occluded the view of the gun from someone standing at the front of the room?’
Fairweather smiled. Harry thought hard.
‘Possibly,’ he said.
He clenched his fists under the table. He could see the scenario building. The oxygen cylinder blocking the officer’s line of sight, him shouting at the man to shoot. A reasonable police officer would have pulled the trigger, and that was all they needed to prove.
‘After the shooting, what did you do?’
Harry detailed the medical attention he had given Idris, everything up to the point at which they loaded him into the ambulance. He remembered asking Quinn why the police had opened fire and Quinn saying that Idris had fired first, and one of the Trojan officers asking whether Idris was dead. Fairweather didn’t push him further on either of those. Kepler shuffled together his papers, and Harry began to relax.
‘One final thing,’ said Fairweather, stopping Kepler from switching off the recorder. ‘How did you feel about DI Noble’s decision to send you in to negotiate?’
‘She was the Silver Commander. I was acting on her directions.’
‘Some of the officers present have indicated that you were initially uncomfortable with the idea.’
Harry leant forward and raised his voice a little. ‘If I hadn’t been comfortable with it, I wouldn’t have gone in.’
‘Do you think it was the right decision?’ said Fairweather.
Fuck you, Harry thought. At least when the bastard had been trying to scapegoat him, he’d been subtle about it.
‘It got three hostages released,’ said Harry. ‘So, yes. But I’m not trained to make decisions like that. I have no authority to comment.’
‘Thanks, Dr Kent. Interview concluded, 08.06.’
Kepler reached across and flicked off the recorder. Harry drained his coffee cup, by now long cold.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What happened?’
Kepler looked over at Fairweather, who nodded slightly.
‘We examined the gun recovered at the scene,’ Kepler said. ‘It was an old revolver, a converted starting pistol. Ballistics said if Idris had pulled the trigger, there’s a fifty-fifty chance nothing would have happened. The only weapon we recovered that had been fired was the MP5 assigned to W22, the officer who shot Solomon.’
Fairweather looked particularly uncomfortable and shifted position on his chair.
‘So what about the gunshot?’ Harry asked. ‘The one which caused you lot to charge in? A mystery?’
‘Well, the Evidence Recovery Unit did a sweep of the area,’ Kepler continued. ‘There’s an alleyway on the Wyndham Court housing estate that runs right alongside the Chicken Hut. We found firearms residue and a shell casing there, and a nine-millimetre bullet was found inside a recycling bin.’
‘A police bullet?’
‘No,’ Fairweather cut in. ‘It was a full-metal jacket round. Trojan use hollow-points. Ballistics are having a good look at it as we speak.’
‘Wow,’ Harry said. ‘That’s convenient for you.’
It meant someone had fired a shot in the alleyway behind the buildings, which had been deserted at the time. There were two scenarios in his head: the ridiculous coincidence that another crime involving gunfire had been happening at the same time as the crisis in the restaurant, or that someone had deliberatel
y discharged a gun in the hope that it would provoke the police into shooting Idris.
‘Dr Kent,’ Fairweather said, leaning forward. ‘I can assure you there has been no planting of evidence. Our team is following up several leads, and a suspect was seen running away from Wyndham Road while the police were securing the restaurant. Trust me on this, we’re going to find out what happened.’
He got to his feet.
‘Detective Constable Kepler will show you out.’
DI Noble was leaning against the rear wall of the police station, opposite Harry’s car, one hand pulling her chequered coat close to keep the warmth in, the other holding a cigarette.
‘Dirty habit,’ Harry said.
‘You’ve been spending too much time with Fairweather,’ said Noble. ‘Honestly, that fucker gets into your head. You don’t strike me as one of the clean-living brigade.’
‘You’ve pegged me,’ said Harry, palms up. ‘Were you waiting for me?’
‘I saw the car, twigged you were here. And I heard rumours that Fairweather and our friends from Professional Standards had you in their sights.’
Harry shook his head. ‘I can’t believe it. You guys mess up, a kid gets shot, and I’m the first guy they go for.’
‘Don’t underestimate him,’ Noble said. ‘As far as scapegoats go, you’re perfect. New to the game, no supporting faction in the Met, not attached to internal politics. No one’s gonna stick up for you for sentimental reasons.’
She stubbed the cigarette out with the tip of her boot. Black Doc Martens, Harry observed.
‘No offence,’ she said.
Harry felt the fury rising, tempted to burst back into the station, find the detective chief inspector and slam his bald, shiny head into a wall.
‘Do you know what he told me? When Trojan came in the door, apparently I yelled for them to shoot Idris. That’s what’s been said, anyway.’
‘Ignore him; he’s a bastard,’ Noble said. ‘He’s just riding the trends, and at the moment the trend is that half the Met is either racist or selling everything they know to Rupert Murdoch. And if Fairweather’s hunting bent coppers, then his career will keep on rising until someone realises that he’s so fucking crooked himself that he sleeps on a spiral staircase. But by then he’ll be too high up, too well connected to get rid of.’
Harry leaned in closer to her, lowering his voice.
‘Well, you should watch out yourself, too,’ he said. ‘Fairweather also heard that I appeared uncomfortable with your strategy, apparently. It might not just be me they’re stitching up.’
‘Fuck’s sake,’ Noble muttered. Her cigarette end still glowed orange on the tarmac, and she put a zealous amount of effort into grinding it out. ‘Thanks for the heads-up.’
‘No problem.’
‘Was Tony Kepler in there with him?’ said Noble.
Harry nodded.
‘Kepler’s a safe pair of hands,’ Noble said. ‘We go way back; we were DCs together. He’ll give me a decent warning if he reckons Fairweather’s coming after me. Which wouldn’t be unlikely. We’ve got history.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Those pricks have nailed me once already. I used to work in the Central Task Force, up at the Yard. Me and my husband Jack – he was the lead officer – we ran undercover teams all over the city. After Jack died, I took over his job. Acting DCI, of course, ’cause there’s no money these days to promote anyone. First big case we had went nasty, we had to let some bad people go on a technicality. They brought in Fairweather’s lot to sort out the mess. He got me suspended and wanted me kicked out, too, said I’d “overestimated my capabilities” and the whole fuck-up was my fault. The tribunal said he was full of shit, but they had to make an example of someone, so here I am working CID in fucking Peck’nam.’
She pronounced the ‘nam’ like Vietnam, an idiom which had started with the gang members on the local sink estates and been quickly adopted by the coppers going after them. He absorbed the history and said nothing, wondering how many DCIs called Jack had died in the past couple of years, now completely sure that he’d met Noble before the inner cordon on Camberwell Road. If she remembered him, she wasn’t letting on. It had to be an unpleasant lifestyle, constantly watching your back to see if your own organisation was going to start ripping your career apart. The NHS did it, too, but in a somewhat more insipid, palatable way. Harry’d only been with the police for six months, but even so, he’d come to appreciate its dysfunction. An organisation where the whole was far less than the sum of its parts.
‘So, why were you waiting for me?’ he said.
‘Are you going to see Idris now?’ said Noble. ‘’Cause I’d like to come with you.’
‘Sure.’
‘There’s no chance of him waking up this morning, is there?’
He might not wake up at all, Harry thought but didn’t say. ‘No way. The operation we did last night was only so we could stop the bleeding and stabilise him. He’ll go for definitive surgery today, or possibly tomorrow. There’s not even a chance of us waking him up until after that. It could be weeks.’
He unlocked his car and opened the passenger door. ‘I take it you want a lift?’ he said.
‘Well, the weather’s shit, isn’t it?’
She smiled and got in. Harry pulled out onto Walworth Road and headed south, towards the hospital. The morning congestion had eased slightly.
‘You still on the case, then?’ he asked, switching off the radio.
‘Yeah. Even though it seems pretty clear cut, we’ve got to get it all together so we can hand it over to the CPS, and they can charge Idris. If he makes it. Mo’s looking at the gun, too, see if we can trace how he got hold of it.’
Harry accelerated past a broken-down 68 bus, the passengers spilling out onto the pavement, asking directions. The surroundings were familiar, but it took Harry a moment to realise they were coming up to Wyndham Road. The Chicken Hut was still closed off with crime-scene tape.
‘Keisha. He said he was doing it all for Keisha,’ Harry said. ‘Do you have any idea who that might have been?’
‘Didn’t take us long to find her,’ said Noble. ‘Keisha Best, eighteen years old. Lived in the tower block next to Idris’s on the Albany estate.’
‘She’s dead, right?’
‘As of 14 November last year. Threw herself in front of a train at Peckham Rye station.’
‘Fucking hell,’ said Harry. His stomach twisted again, Solomon Idris’s words ringing in his head. They killed her, and you feds didn’t give a shit. At medical school, he’d learned about copycat suicides – people who were depressed were more likely to end their own lives if someone close to them had recently done so, or if there had been a high-profile suicide covered in the media. The more Harry mulled them over, the more Solomon Idris’s actions at the Chicken Hut looked like a suicide attempt by proxy.
‘You looking into it?’ said Harry.
Noble rubbed her temples as she answered.
‘I’ll have a look over the file. But Fairweather and the Yard don’t give a flying fanny what was going on in that kid’s life. He’s in for it, no one else got hurt, job done. Nothing to investigate.’
An eighteen-year-old girl throws herself in front of a train, and a seventeen-year-old boy attempts suicide-by-cop, and there’s nothing to investigate. Only in this city, Harry thought. But he detected a deep resentment in Noble’s tone, and at least that might give him an option later.
‘Well, apart from us,’ he said.
They arrived at the hospital and Harry managed to find a place in the staff car park, not too far from the East Wing, the block that hosted the acute wards and theatres where Harry spent most of his time. They got out of the car, and he noticed Noble scratching at her wrist. More than ten minutes since her last smoke, he reasoned.
‘Mind?’ Noble said.
‘Go for it.’
‘You intrigue me, Harry.’ She lit up and Harry shepherded her into a corner of the car park close
to a fire exit, one of the hospital staff’s illegal smoking corners.
‘How so?’ Harry said.
‘I can’t work out why a high-flying doctor like you decided to start working for us in your spare time. Especially since, as you showed both yesterday and this morning, you hate the police with every fibre of your existence.’
Harry laughed. ‘That’s a bit of an exaggeration.’
‘I can tell,’ Noble said. ‘Where’d you grow up? Local?’
‘Bermondsey, then New Cross,’ Harry admitted. ‘I’m a Millwall fan and all, I guess that means I have to hate the filth.’
Noble laughed. ‘Cheers for warning me about Fairweather,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to do that. If it got back to him, you could lose your job. Or your contract, or whatever it is.’
Harry shrugged his shoulders. ‘Dunno. And don’t call me high flying. Most of the people who were in my year at med school are GPs or consultants now.’
‘So why aren’t you?’
‘Well, the army paid for my degree, so I had to work for them for five years. While everyone else was doing research and ticking boxes.’
‘Really,’ Noble said. ‘Get to see the world?’
‘Not really. Mostly jumping around the UK. They sent me to Birmingham and Frimley for the first and second years, then a few postings to Canada, and then I was a general duties officer for two years. They let me out but I stayed on as a reservist, working at the Ruskin, doing A&E, anaesthetics, ICU. Then my unit got rotated out to Afghanistan, so I was called up and went out there.’
‘Bloody hell. What was that like?’
‘An experience. Hairy at times.’ Harry expected the pain in his side but it didn’t come.
‘Still doesn’t explain why you decided to be one of our resident stethoscopes,’ Noble said.
Harry looked at his watch. He started at nine, so they had time. ‘I can show you, if you’d like,’ he said.
Noble fixed him with a wary stare, the smoke mixing with her breath and the drizzle, floating off into the sky. ‘OK, then.’
They headed into the main hospital building, moving through busy corridors. Harry called a lift and pushed the button for the sixth floor in the North Wing, which contained the majority of the hospital’s long-stay wards.
